Link Building

Google Link Penalties, SEO Sabotage And The Great Link Conspiracy

Can you get penalized for external links? The debate gets covered on just about every marketing and SEO forum on the planet; so, what’s the verdict? In some cases, yes, but most of the time, no? Confused much? I sometimes feel as such so I’ve been slowly collecting links of interesting threads, discussions and informational tid-bits on the subject over the past 6 months. I thought it would make a good post and allow people to add to it via the comments. I’ll add the good stuff into this post as time goes on.

Our team has been getting more and more interesting emails from people suspecting that links were causing them issues. While it’s easy to think that right away, we do have to consider other factors that can come into play. There are hundreds of Google algorithm tweaks a year, your competitor’s own efforts, brand clout, user engagement, social media influence and who know what else. There is, however, a great deal of “cases” that have come up online that might suggest links are a potential threat.

The first obvious read? Our post on 10 big brands that Google has penalized for links in the past. These were all paid link penalties, I might add, and being high profile, they simply could not resist the PR stunt at their fingertips. In the end, all companies have come back out on top without a care in the world. There is also a large number of threads with people getting noticed in Webmaster tools right down to the “epic/mythic? -50 over optimization penalty”. For those who didn’t read about it or get one in their Webmaster Tools, here is the message:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.domain.com/,

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

This is something we’ve encountered a lot more as of late and it definitely has been a case of bad links 100% of the time. The usual suspects of mass forum and social 2.0 profile links, paid blog posts, link wheels and spammy article marketing efforts are almost always a factor. Heavy focus on a few anchor text phrases was also pretty typical, something a lot of people have speculated as a problem child. Regardless of what we think, let this serve as an educational reference for those pondering the same thing.

Public Cases Of GWT Unnatural Link Notices

We’ll start with this as it’s the most recent and public attempt at devaluing your link building efforts. What we’ve seen in cases where this notice pops up is that you’re most likely doing some really low quality link building. While a lot of people argue that you cannot be harmed by links, this is now a pretty good argument against that. The other argument made is that competitors could just knock you out of the SERPs with a Xrumer/Scrapebox/spam-tool-of-choice blast. We’ll take a look at that next, but for now we’ll pile on the public cases for this message.

Keep in mind I’m talking about the message for external link violations, not the one for selling links. The selling links message, however, does make the odd appearance on Google’s Webmaster Help Central, most notably this thread involving Forbes.com. The reason I don’t think we’re seeing too many public cases is because this doesn’t get served all that often. There must be certain factors at play that are determining that this website is in fact taking part in a scheme, and it’s not a competitor doing it. This is where having Majestic SEO in your tool shed comes in handy as you can see any correlation of link spikes to penalties. Ignore that piece of content that went viral and more so look for abusive link exchanges, paid footer/sidebar links and your 10,000 forum profile links.

Click on the above image to take you to that Google result for a more up-to-date look, but here are some of the most interesting cases I’ve read.

– Case involving an over link exchanged hotel http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7f9f90e1b2f54284&hl=en
– Case involving way too many blog network and directory links going after one lucrative keyword/anchor text http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=167e3f0bd50c5c49&hl=en
– Site owner claims she didn’t do the links but got the notice anyway http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=765df36e791ece35&hl=en
– affiliate site getting stomped on..my guess is someone from Warrior Forum (lol) http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=1ee9981bddf6820a&hl=en
– 100% “pure whitehat” site gets the notice…problem is a lot of people have no idea the link spamming is against TOS http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6f6d791f9fcfaf58&hl=en
– Another one bites the dust with too many targeted link exchanges http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2c8812b664c37544&hl=en

If you use that search query or Google discussions, you’ll find a lot of other people in SEO/Webmaster forums posting about it. Some threads to specifically go through is this Warrior Forum one, this v7n post and why not throw in a Digital Point thread while I’m at it. These forums are ripe with link spammers promoting their lame affiliate sites that pollute the search results.

Can Competitors Knock You Down With Bad Links?

From time to time I’ll get an email or read a thread where someone claims that this is happening. I mean, if I were building junk links to my affiliate site and got caught, I’d claim it was a competitor as well. Since it’s out of your control, it is thought that it shouldn’t be a problem or something to worry about. For the most part, I’d agree with that statement. There are a few great threads out there on forums where people are having heating debates over the topic, but I got a couple of quotes that will refute anyone’s claim if it being impossible.

First up let’s see what Google employee John Mu has to say about this;

But in practice, we have a lot of safeguards that help our algorithms to evaluate sites in useful ways. Our algorithms are pretty complex, it takes more than a handful of bad links to sway their opinion of a website. Even if Webmaster Tools shows a million links, then that’s not going to change things if those links are all ignored for ranking purposes.

– quote from http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=199d578059c28ba3&hl=en

And from the wise and ever so handsome Matt Cutts;

piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. “We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against it,” he says. “I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice.

– quote from http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/28/negative-search-google-tech-ebiz-cx_ag_0628seo.html

So it isn’t impossible after all! I, however, have never personally seen something like this actually happen to a website. Besides hearing rumors of services to knock down competitors, there are a lot of threads with people complaining about it happening. I personally think it’s just rogue outsourced SEO’s making them links they later discover to be absolute poison. We’ll just have what I found here on file for reference and personal education on the topic. Most of these topics will be from 2005 when this was a hot topic, so a lot of this is out of date.

– decent SEOmoz post with some good talk in the comments http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/help-ive-been-seo-sabotaged
– old WebProNews article on the problem of Google bowling http://www.webpronews.com/google-bowling-how-competitors-can-sabotage-you-what-google-should-do-about-it-2005-10
– spam links apparently cause this company to drop like a fly http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3964441.htm
– another WMW thread on the topic http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3677877.htm
– http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3677877.htm
– huge 10 page Warrior Forum argument turns into a link sabotage case study http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/440854-google-flawed-you-can-influence-other-sites-rankings-backlinks.html
– SEO Round Table discussion on link sabotage http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022654.html
– 500+ results of people complaining about SEO/Link sabotage on Google Webmaster Central http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+site:google.com+seo+link+sabotage
– 1400 or so inquires about the apparent mythic -50 link penalty via Google Webmaster Central
– a slightly different result set for link penalty complaints found on Google Webmaster Central http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/search.py?hl=en&forum=1&query=link+penalty+more%3Aforum
– 4800 posts about link penalties on Webmaster World http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=ubuntu&channel=fs&biw=1366&bih=649&q=+site:webmasterworld.com+-50+link+penalty
– preventing link based penalites with Rand via Whiteboard Friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/preventing-linkbased-penalties-whiteboard-friday
– high traffic site nailed by a -50 for link activity http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3375264.htm
– Great post and video with Chris Cemper talking about how to cure this nasty penalty http://www.cemper.com/seo-knowhow/google-minus-50-penalty-cure
– all the Blackhat World threads on the -50 penalty

I’m a pretty big proponent that anchor text over-optimisation is one of the biggest causes of a -50. Keep in mind, a lot of the “bionic posters” on Google’s Webmaster Central deny that any link penalties exist at all. They say that the links are only being devalued, which I totally agree with as well. There are just too many people getting dropped back 50 spots or so, and to me that’s a penalty. Even the definition of that word fits the bill:

A disadvantage or unpleasant experience suffered as the result of an action or circumstance.

Since a drop of 50 places in the SERPS is usually accompanied by this apparent penalty, we’ll take a look at some of the causes as well as examples in the wild. We have a client that is still not able to move past the fifth page for his desired keyword for nearly 2 years. This came from buying a few hundred blog posts all gaming one anchor text. These were done before we started and we’ve been trying to remove as many as possible over the years.

To me, this is a filter put in place and we’ve seen it get lifted after a certain period of time or when those offending links were changed/removed.

– Old but good article on even internal links causing an over optimization penalty http://www.searchenginejournal.com/keyword-rich-internal-anchor-text-how-much-is-too-much/8036/
– Warrior forum post about an affiliate getting spanked pretty good http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/416353-google-over-optimisation-penalty.html
– great post via Onreact about this topic http://seo2.0.onreact.com/google-filters-exact-match-anchor-text-links-are-the-new-meta-keywords
– another WW thread with a some good talk about getting out of this filter http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4303740.htm
– http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4248479.htm chat on another person taking a hit
– a great 3 page discussion on WW http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3937683.htm
– bought links and trades cause keyword ranking filter http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3407625.htm
– another post from WW talking about getting out of the -50 filter http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3737327.htm
– great thread, again on WW, covering the problems with aggressive link building for a specific anchor text http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29269.htm

What Type Of Links Cause Penalties/Rapid Devaluation

So let’s assume either penalty or devaluing of links when I talk about some of the link building methods below. If you were building links and noticed a 5 page drop, I’d consider that a penalty of sorts and be sad. Let’s see what we can find on the web regarding certain types of link building activity that may harm you efforts. I always read in between the lines of what Google says in its blog posts, comments and forum activities. The first example I’d love to bring up was inspired by a blog post on the Google blog on how they treat comment spam.

A natural link profile looks void of schemes such as excessive link exchanges, 10 million anchor text blog comments, unrelated forum profiles, junk content marketing and all the other bad stuff. Your anchor text variation hopefully looks natural enough… I mean barely any site out there is 100% whitehat, so some manual link building is going to take place eventually. That’s why we don’t build that many targeted anchor text links and go for the more random linking approach. If your on-page SEO is sound, the links will do almost the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, there is still significant ranking power in those specific anchor text links.

Blog Comment Links – According to a Google Blog post you can can filtered/penalized for spammy, over-the-top comment abuse. I’ve never seen too much bad things happen, but if you’re only commenting with your desired anchor text and leaving a generic message, expect to take a dive one day. Affiliate marketer’s are the most notorious link abuser’s in the category thanks to software like SENuke, Scrapebox and XRumer. While I mentioned I liked to read between the lines of what Google says publicly, what do you get from this statement:

If you used this approach in the past and you want to solve this issue, you should have a look at your incoming links in Webmaster Tools. To do so, go to the Your site on the web section and click on Links to your site. If you see suspicious links coming from blogs or other platforms allowing comments, you should check these URLs. If you see a spammy link you created, try to delete it, else contact the webmaster to ask to remove the link. Once you’ve cleared the spammy inbound links you made, you can file a reconsideration request.

– SEOGadget post on how they got a page level penalty from spam comments left on his site http://seogadget.co.uk/google-page-penalty-for-comment-spam-rankings-and-traffic-drop/
– potential case of comment spam leading to keyword ranking filtering http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=0658efd70f48d677&hl=en
– another potential case for blog comments causing a -50 http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=0b754b012f15a162&hl=en
– discussion where a lot of blog comment spam links were targeted at a site in effort to take it down http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=78c716f27f683c7e&hl=en
– a post I commented on where the person had mostly spammed blog comment links that made up their link profile http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4285d9646f96d16f&hl=en
– while seo101 again calls the -50 a myth, this person is there with tons of spam blog comments http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2bdcf2fa9ac3d7d4&hl=en
– another company in the insurance space got nailed http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6dcd2428eb4fc691&hl=en

Profile Links – one of the second most used spam tactic out there are profile links from social media sites/apps/networks/wikis and forum user accounts. While it’s still debated that links can’t hurt your site (lolz), let’s see what I can find in relation to over spamming links from certain types of profiles. This is extremely rampant and a toxic practice, and you’ll see it a lot of the affiliate space. Gotta make “dem monies”! I’m sure most of you remember the Acai berry diet crazy in the past couple of years. The ranking space for those keywords were a bloody battle ground and I found this as an example in one of the top ranking sites for “acai berry diet”:

This is why you don’t leave open Wiki’s on .edu’s!

One major important thing to keep in mind is that these profiles provide no value, so they most likely won’t stay indexed for very long. This and the fact Google can most likely tell when you’ve spiked thousands of profile links in few days could results in loss of rankings. It always tends to be banishment to the 5th page:

– Warrior Forum post which talks about the negative effect of profile links http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/428022-google-penalizes-bad-backlinks.html
– a small thread on someone only having profile links done and feeling negative effects from it http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=35ef9ec63b73b3a2&hl=en
– more blackhat talk on WF about profile links http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/334567-profile-backlinks-effective-search-engine-optimization.html
– Blackhat World thread on rapid devaluation of profile links http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/310245-google-penalizes-xrumer-warning-all-avoid-xrumer-blast-services.html
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=73d7c79b23ee3c1d&hl=en another one where I commented and get knocked on for saying he triggered a filter of sorts. They say that’s hogwash, I saw not because it is only effecting a couple keywords, and the rest stayed fine.
– this post is dismissed as thin affiliate, but the keyword it dropped for is his most linked anchor text…hrmmm http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2c47db8499bfbb3c&hl=en

Let’s Hear YOUR Experience

While I’m not claiming proof of anything here, I want to open the discussion from webmasters, SEO’s and rands on what they’ve experienced. If you’re one of those claiming that external links cannot hurt your site, let’s hear a good argument. I hear this a lot onGoogle’s Webmaster Central from their top mods, yet they all think that if someone steals your content you can lose rankings for that. That backwards thinking bugs me the most because their argument is that the links are out of your control. Well, so is someone stealing your content.

We’ve personally seen rankings come back after link profiles were cleaned up after a lot of hard work. I personally believe that dropping to page 5 or worse for only a certain search term is a penalty. We’ve seen many people come to use stuck around then, not able to move until the algorithm determined it had cleaned itself up. I am open to it being one of the other hundreds of algorithm factors, but I see too much of the same going on when bad links are involved.

So my stance? Links can cause issues, some call them penalties and others call it devaluation. In the end you’re losing out on business, and that’s not a positive thing!

Tagged google, Link Building, link penalty, unnatural linking

Distilled Conference Taste Test!

1 Comments

September 8 | Link Building Videos | Ryan Clark

The crew over at Distilled is well known for not only their great content or their highly respected marketing services, but for their conferences as well. The most innovative minds in our industry speak at these conferences on the more advanced and cutting edge topics. They sell these now on their website, and I could not be more happy to recommend that you buy these without hesitation. You’ll see from this taster video what you’re in for and some of the brilliant minds who are sharing invaluable knowledge. I also recommend checking out their Youtube profile for a whole bunch of great videos that are really worth the watch!

Tagged conference, Link Building

Guest Blogging Link Building Strategies & Tactics

6 Comments

September 7 | Link Building | Ryan Clark

We’ve recently launched our guest blogging link building service after getting a little bit more in our groove. While we’ve always incorporated the tactic into our campaigns, there’s now enough to go on to create a campaign based on just straight guest blogging. Keep in mind we don’t recommend guest blogging as your sole link building strategy, but it definitely is in heavy rotation for our established clients and in heavy demand for our potential clients. If you’re in a competitive niche then guest blogging can be a huge help in ranking for those hard to rank keywords. It’s also a great way to splash in targeted anchor text links(don’t over do it) that are in content – my favorite!

Like I mentioned, there is a lot of work involved in guest blogging, especially if you’re doing it right. There are so many things we factor in to ensure that the utmost quality is being applied to every guest blogging venture. So that means not only finding great blogs to get involved with, it means taking the time to create awesome content. A lot of the guest blogging taking place these days is really on the junk end of things. I want to steer clear of that and make sure it doesn’t become a baron wasteland like article marketing has become. The cliché is a cliché because it’s true. The quality of the content should always be paramount.

I’ll be covering not only a variety of ways to land guest blogging gigs, but also which content is going to fair well on which blogs. Keep in mind that if you score a really influential blog, you best not be bringing boring content to the table. A really great piece of content on the right blog can produce some serious link juice, and a lot of that is going to funnel your way! On the other hand, a fluff piece will establish you as somebody who writes fluff pieces with everybody who reads the article. There are hundreds of guest blogging opportunities just waiting for your touch out there so pay attention and learn something new.

Guest Blogging Services:

We’ll start with the easy bit first because there are a few guest blogging services out there that can make life a little easier. If I could give any advice/wisdom about this form of discovery, it would be to be very careful. With ease comes great lack of quality in a lot of cases, and you have to keep a sharp eye to get your work in the best spots. I tend to notice a lot of the blogs have too lax of a policy and a lot of garbage content is spewed out. Lazy webmasters are too easily swayed by free content, even if it is sub par.

MyBlogGuest.com – This is by far the best option for quick and good access to a bunch of different types of blogs. While there are still a lot of low quality blogs I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole, the good outweighs the bad for sure. It’s a great community as well and it makes the whole process a lot more easy to handle. A pro account is $20 and simply requires that you submit articles into a pool; it is honestly the easiest way to get content published on blogs that you don’t run. The free accounts don’t let you release articles into the pool, but making connections with other members is still a very good way to get your content published.

Guest Blogging Network – I’ll be honest and say I had never heard of or seen this service prior to writing this post. It looks like they connect you with writers when they have a match in their network. Sadly, I wish I could say more but you’ll just have to check it out yourself and see if anything good comes of it. We’ll be doing the same in the coming months.

Web Traffic Control – This is another guest blogging network that connects writers and webmasters for guest blogging ease. It’s also a service we’ve never tried so if you have, let us all know in the comments below! I’ll be signing up today and Geoff is going to let me know whether it’s worth your time. He’s currently doing a big guest blogging campaign for a client so he was pleased to find this out.

Linknami Guest Blog Network – Linknami has an extensive guest blogging network that you can join for free! We’ve been checking it out for a while now and, while there are quite a few low quality blogs involved, there are some gems worth sniffing out for serious topical links. It’s growing rapidly as well so I’d definitely recommend checking out Linknami.

BlogSynergy.com – Believe it or not, this is yet another service that helps connect writers and blog owners to get their guest posting on! (I told you guest blogging was popular). I’ve yet to use this service as well, so once again I’m sorry for the lack of hard data here. You can however go check out some of the sites in the network to get an idea of what’s there. As usual, a lot of lower quality blogs where owners just want content to be wrapped with their Adsense.

The Guest Blogger @ LinkedIn – This is a private LinkedIn group that I’d recommend joining for the networking. There are just about 500 group members and the ratio of bloggers to webmasters is pretty good. Like the other sources though, there is still a good deal of junk in there so I’d only expect to find a few gems!

Hunting Down Prime Blog Targets:

This is by far the best method for a multitude of reasons. Going after blogs that don’t usually allow guest bloggers is always going to be the better link. I like to target the biggest blogs in the target vertical first, for not only the link, but for the branding and social media push. Riding off the coat tails of the established site is really going to give your content a huge push. That’s a nice set of extra features and will save you some time.

Like any good link building, this is all about building relationships with those influential people in your industry. I’m going to have to beat that into a lot of people’s brains, so I apologize if you’re getting sick of hearing it. These relationships will net the best links and make it really hard for your competition to keep up. While they’re doing the usual lame link building, you’re out there building your brand, which will last for years to come… not just the next 6 months.

Google Queries – There are a bunch of queries you can use to find guest blogging opportunities and I’ll run down a few of them. For the most part, just see who’s ranking in your industry and follow them socially, email them personally and even see if you can get a phone/Skype conversation out of them. Anything to make them connect with you and open up their world of connections. These search queries should get you going and lead you down a whole new path:

– intitle:write for us + “keyword/location”
– intitle:submit guest post + “keyword/location”
– intitle:guest blog for us + “keyword/location”
– intitle:submit blog post + “keyword/location”
– intitle:guest blogging opportunity + “keyword/location”

Twitter – I will state time and time again, Twitter is a great tool for building relationships that lead to links. All you can do here is reTweet your targets content, talk with them and get on their radar. If you email them later about writing for his/her blog, you can mention your past interaction: “hey, it’s so-and-so from Twitter”. I find that doing something for them before asking anything of them is a good strategy. If you notice anything that might make them more money or save them time, drop them a hint.

Bring Your Content A-Game:

Why would you waste your and the webmaster’s time with boring old content? So you land a writing chance on the biggest blog in your vertical, what kind of content are you thinking about? It better be viral/link bait in nature or I’m going to come down to your office and smack you good and hard! Since this blog is going to have an amazing reach to just about every corner of your niche, you’ll want to make sure your content gets that full potential.

Infographics – Put yourself in the blog owner’s shoes. If you got offered a custom infographic for your blog would you turn it down? I think not! This is a sure fire way of not only score a link from their blog, but the viral nature of the post should fire a lot of link juice you way. Not only that, you’ll get some much needed brand recognition. If you provide an embed code, make sure to include a link first to the host blog and a provided by link to yours and score some extra link action (booyah)!

The Ever So Popular List – Lists have always done well and they’re not quite done yet. Just take a look around your niche to see what’s popped on other social media sites and start gathering ideas. Obviously you cannot just copy another idea, so see where there’s a gap and start writing away. Picture and video lists really do well and they’re entertaining enough for the low attention span generation that we all know and love.

Cover An Event Or News – There’s always something going on in an industry so take note and see what’s doable. We’ve helped clients cover a conference and write about it for an industry blog which lead to a lot of positive results. Hot news can also be a “Godsend” if you can play down an angle and get people talking. The more controversial the subject the better!

Do Whatever…. – Everyone else is NOT doing! Amazing content that stands out from the norm is the best advice I can give. Research, research, research! There’s so much rehashed content being covered in every industry that it’s getting quite ridiculous(just look at 90% of the SEO blogs out there).

Resources:

There are a ton of guest blogging resources out there so I of course want to hear what you got in our comments. I’ve rounded up some of the posts I’ve bookmarked over the years, so hopefully you find a bunch of useful tips and tricks, so get guest blogging!

– http://www.verticalmeasures.com/guest-blogging/25-guest-blogging-resources-2010/
– http://weblogs.about.com/b/2008/07/21/what-is-guest-blogging.htm
– http://www.viperchill.com/guest-blogging/
– http://www.seo.com/blog/guest-blogging-efforts/
– http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-guest-blogging-is-getting-huge/24818/

Tagged guest blogging, Link Building

Why We Don’t Rely On Google For Clients

1 Comments

September 2 | Link Building | Ryan Clark

I’m a huge fan of the saying, “don’t keep all your eggs in one basket”, and that is sound advice for every business. There are so many companies out there relying solely on free Google traffic, and this is a scary thing. I’d like to talk a little about why we don’t care too much about search engine traffic for leads. Hopefully this wakes some of you up to start thinking about a better business plan.

I’m taking a break from writing a post on B2B marketing strategies because I’d like to vent a little. Google’s SERPs for anything worth ranking for is still being dominated by nefarious link building tactics, and I haven’t seen much change in 5 years. They tell you to write great content to obtain links, while this does work, it’s a big fat joke if you actually want to make any money.

Let’s take our company for example. We’d ideally want a top 10 ranking for the keyword “link building service”, but a quick look at the top 10 shows nothing but paid links and link spam ranking almost everyone. Everything from low quality linking services to paid link building companies are showing up here. Only one legit and respectable SEO firm stands in the top 10 which is shocking. Half of the other sites ranking there have been there for years on paid links and spammed anchor text links. I’m not going to name names, but it’s pretty lame of Google.

The results will be a little bit different for everyone, but this is the current outlook of “link building service” in Google;

This is a shame because it will only lead to more companies blindly signing up and paying for lousy link marketing tactics. I hate this! So many companies are going to be putting their business at risk without even knowing it. While I know this won’t last forever, you should be well aware of the coming link valuation changes to Google in the next year.

I know a lot of our readers are seeing the same thing for their SERPs and are sitting on the fence about going with a different hat, and I don’t blame them. Hell, I’ve even thought about dipping into the grey areas to get more bang for my Google buck. Thankfully our networking, online relationships and branding keeps bringing in the clients.

So to sum things up, this is why building relationships online should be your key focus. Becoming a leader in your niche/industry will keep your business thriving, so keep fighting the good fight. Great content does attract links but it’s a harder thing to do these days, and it isn’t cheap to do properly. Keep being creative, don’t copy what others are doing and network in your industry as if you business relied on it(because it does).

Tagged Link Building

Interview With Jason Acidre

3 Comments

September 1 | Interviews | Ryan Clark

It’s been a while since I’ve had an interview on here so it’s my pleasure to have one of my favorite bloggers join us on here. Jason Acidre is no stranger to the SEO world and you’ve no doubt read one of his excellent content pieces in the past month. I figured our readers could use a good break from my rants and take in some knowledge from another great mind in this industry.

1) Background info and a little bit about yourself

I’m Jason Acidre, an SEO based in Manila, Philippines. I’ve been working as a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama and Traffic Travis for over a year now. I manage their search marketing and link development campaigns, and sometimes, my tasks there also include implementation on areas like product development and quality assurance.

Before I entered the Search industry, I first started as a Professional Counterstrike Gamer – for 6 long years. Currently, I’m in the process of establishing my own SEO agency, wherein I have invested most of my time in training people extensively and in developing other side projects (test/money websites).

2) What’s your mentality/mantra/method for building links

My campaigns’ are mostly focused on acquiring links that have multiple capabilities, links that are not just focused on improving search rankings and in building the brand’s authority, but also have the ability to generate leads to the site (through highly visible and contextual links), which often require time and effort in building opportunities.

With this perspective in mind, my SEO strategies – for any form of industry – usually come down to two chains of actions:

If I want to build links and aim to rank for a certain keyword, I will need to create a content that strictly pertains to the targeted keyword, have high potentials of attracting people to voluntarily link to or socially share it, and a content that will have higher response and approval rates when presented in sending out link requests, as this type of content will have higher chances of ranking naturally on search engines. This can also serve as a strong support page when internally linked to the site’s landing page(s). And if I wanted more high-value links and more results from the campaign, I will need to create more content that can develop the brand’s reputation in their industry and eventually attract and acquire more links and leads to the site.
If I want to build scalable link opportunities that will improve the site’s reputation/popularity/authority, then I will need to build connections within the community by targeting specific individuals within the field and leverage these connections through externally distributed content, as these connections will help disseminate the site’s web presence and probably allow the site to draw more natural links.

3) What are the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to building links

I guess the most obvious mistake that others do when it comes to link building is focusing most of their efforts on building one-sided links, links that are solely built and created to manipulate search engine results, and not utilizing those link acquisitions’ fullest potentials, like brand emphasis through branded anchor text links and/or links that encourage visitor click-throughs, particularly from distributed content that can constantly generate organic traffic (like from topically relevant guest blogs, slide presentations, forum threads, etc…).

There are also some who centers their campaign’s objectives to only aim to rank for exact-match keywords, which usually result to force link building (in terms of speed, variation and quantity), wherein the exact match keyword links that they’ll be able to build will appear too manipulative to search engines – I personally prefer highly-descriptive anchors as these will look more natural and they do have high CTR, more often than not.

4) What are some link building methods you stay away from and why

· Automated link building (using tools/software) – as Google will never stop in hunting these links down.
· Article marketing – I would rather invest on content to be created and distributed for guest blogging.

5) What are some tools you love/like and would recommend
I’m not really a big fan of tools, though there are some that I couldn’t work without, particularly in link prospecting:

Google search – I mostly do my link research through using advanced search queries or search operators on Google search, I also use other international Google extensions when doing extensive link search.
SEOQuake – this tool makes my link prospecting process a lot easier, as it shows some of the most vital metrics I use in determining if a site is of high quality (like number of incoming links to the page/site, number of indexed pages on Google and search engine traffic price). This tool also shows these stats instantly on Google’s SERP display and on Yahoo Site Explorer, which makes it easier to skim pages shown on the results.
Mozbar – also shows up instantly on SERP display, and allows me to see important page and domain-level metrics such as MozRank, Page Authority and Domain Authority.
Opensiteexplorer.org – very useful in collecting link data from competitors, particularly in monitoring their anchor text distribution and the list of linking external pages that can be downloaded in excel format.
Google Analytics – allows me to track the best performing links I’ve built by identifying referring sites that are constantly sending traffic that have low bounce rates, staying longer on the page or clicking through other pages of the site and driving unique visitors. This in turn allows the campaign to create a pattern in terms of the placements of links and on which type of sites it should be built.
Stumbleupon – this is one of the most useful tools that I’ve been using in finding link opportunities recently, as it is capable of returning exceptional content from both authority and emerging influential sites from any industry.
Traffic Travis pro version – the features that I mostly use in this tool for link building is its keyword suggest feature, as it helps me expand my list of search queries when finding for more link opportunities. I also enjoy its link finder feature – when I don’t feel like searching for links manually.

6) Links are definitely being valued differently these days. Where do you see the link game going into the near future
My perceptions on Search were entirely derived from the concept of building trust to both users and search engines. I’ve always believed that the more search engines trust your site, is the more that they’ll reward your site with better search rankings, and certainly make your inner pages show up more prominently on their result pages.

In my opinion, the future of link building will revolve around “trust”, on how people really see your site, which can be measured through authentic recommendations, citations and participation. The strongest form of link that any site can get – in the past, today and probably in the future – is a link that was voluntarily given by a satisfied user, and that’s where we should all be focusing on.

These past 8 months, I have been a persistent advocate of branded link building, as I have somehow anticipated that it will be the new era of online marketing – and evidently, it’s the most sustainable way to build a robust following base on the web as well as the best way to exemplify authoritativeness to search engines.

In this case, I see the link game shifting back to the less complex formula of optimizing a website, wherein artificially created links may only be used in improving web authority/popularity, whereas the keyword game might be completely up to the on-page relevance of the content and the authentic, highly descriptive and contextual links that it will get (search engines will certainly find their way in filtering this kind of link in the future or perhaps I’m just crazy lol).

7) Where can people find you online

You can follow me on my SEO blog – Kaiserthesage, on Twitter @jasonacidre and on Google+. I’m also a contributor at Affilorama’s blog, SEO-Hacker, Traffic Travis’ blog and Technorati’s Business Channel.

Tagged interviews, Link Building

Local Link Building Strategies

3 Comments

August 31 | Local Business Marketing | Ryan Clark

Local links for businesses are a coveted item and fulfilling an effective local link building campaign can be a daunting task but it doesn’t have to be. Since we do a lot of real estate SEO, we spend a lot of time in the local netherworlds and have a few great ways to generate some link gold (awwwwww yeaaaaaa). The great thing is that you can absolutely dominate your local niche if you do a few things right. Our ideas should absolutely be expanded upon and hopefully they help you find your local link gems with little effort. The basis though, as should be true of all campaigns, is about building relationships with those that matter!

Local link building also shouldn’t take up a huge amount of your time, something that’s quite refreshing; It’s not like you’re going after the keyword “credit cards” or something insane. If you’re in the bigger cities, then you do have an obvious challenge ahead, but that also means that there are more link targets to snipe! We’ll also make sure to take a look at the link bait options as well as what you can do to build links yourself straight away. I know Google doesn’t like the latter but you gotta do what you gotta do!

The local link building game is, in my humble opinion, about three different types of links. This mix involves hitting up all the usual suspects such as:

1) Regular nofollow/followed links
2) Social media links eg. bit.ly
3) Citations even if it’s only a business name or the url typed out without it being “hyper”

This is all natural “web doings” for any business, so we shouldn’t have a problem here. I’ll also talk about what we see trend-wise in the local link building arena and talk about how other local businesses can do most of your link building for you – Yes you did read that correctly!

Sniffing For Backlinks:

After 6 years of viewing link profiles in local markets, I can tell you two things that are still dominating for rankings. These two are pretty obvious and in the end, pretty sad:

1) Local business directories work well
2) Links from local bloggers are awesome

There are, however, two positives that come from these two things: You can take better tactics and build WAY BETTER links than those. The other positive? Building those links is relatively easy and you can make a lot of headway in just a few months time. I know a lot of local businesses don’t have a lot of spare time to market themselves, let alone build a few dozen links. So, for the first month you go at it all you’ll need to arm yourself with is a link analysis tool.

It’s pretty obvious I’m going to tell you to pull the links of every competitor in your vertical, true! But there’s more! You’re in a local market and there are tons of other places you’ll be able to get a link from. So sit down, break out a pen and pad (what’s that?) or your laptop, and write down a dozen other local business categories. I’ll bite and give a few examples such as plumbers, lawyers, mortgage brokers, local webmasters and even local SEO consultants. Sniffing their links out will always lead to other local link finds, I guarantee it!

Local Directories:

This is the easiest and first place you should look for links, even though I’m slightly embarrassed to be recommending directories in this day and age. The truth is, in the local scene they’re an asset. You also have a plethora of options to rock out with and it can keep your link building fingers going for a while. There are always the hyper local directories that have been around for years. As well, there are plenty of the big guys that serve the local market. I’ll only provide a small sample of links because everyone and their mother has lists for this already.

Hyper Local Link Directories:

– $cityname business directory
– $cityname web directory
– $cityname directory
– $cityname local business links

“Big Boy” Local Link Directories:

– Yelp.com
– Local.BOTW.org
– Google Places
– Bing Local business
– MerchantCircle.com
– MyCity.com
– YellowPages.com
– http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/10322/The-Ultimate-List-50-Local-Business-Directories.aspx

Because You’re a Business:

Since you’re a business there are a good amount of other link building opportunities to take advantage of. We’ll kick off the thought process for you, but you’ll really need to take what you learn here and dig deeper. The rabbit hole sometimes goes way down and you’ll really have to work at it.

Chamber Of Commerce – This can always lead to a really strong link and definitely comes with a fee… well usually anyway. You’ll also find that if you get linked here, other websites will use that data to fill out their link pages or if they happen to write about your market. It really can lead to good things!

Business Associations – Becoming a member of a local organisation is not only essential for a local business, it can provide one helluva link. Memberships usually come with a fee, but for the networking alone I’d recommend it. In fact, I demand you do it! (Good)Links are all about relationships and I almost can’t think of a better way to do it in a local market.

Meetup.com – I’m a huge fan of this social networking site and running an event not only leads to a great link, it leads to business. If you’re speaking at your event or have a guest speaker, the chances are good that you’ll get attendees blogging about it and linking away.

Local Event Listings – If your business can put on a function, you best be making sure you’re getting links for it. For an example, my hometown’s local business site lists events and links to the homepage for whomever is putting it on. You can also list to the big event sites like Eventful.com for some great exposure as well as a link! Check out our old post on event link building for way more awesomness.

Company Directories – While these may not be local sites, they’re usually good because they’re listed by Country and area. Sites like Manta.com and Company.com are great business directories to get into. There are also a lot more sites out there like them so check that link and do some snooping of your own.

Local Media Networking:

Getting a mention in the local media requires not only some skill, but something worthy of a link/mention/citation. Getting mentioned the easy way requires you to do something horrific that they just can’t refuse talking about. Perhaps that’s not the best route, however. Getting links from this area requires networking, time and patience. If you’re not doing anything exceptional in business, then skip this part and move along.

Finding Your Connections:

It’s easier than ever to connect with people via social media so there’s no excuse not to try reaching out to local media influencers. This works the same for the local blogger as well as your newscaster. There are three obvious places to start and, while I’m reluctant to reiterate, I might as well for the increased word count.

Twitter – This is an obvious one and all you need to do is follow and get noticed. Start retweeting, asking questions and being interested in your targets. Make sure to utilise sites like WeFollow.com to easily find the most influential people in your area. I also like to check for the local new’s twitter account to scout of followers and lists they’re involved with. This always leads to finding the key people I need to associate with.

Facebook – Almost every news site has a Facebook page and it can be a great place to start networking. You also don’t want to come off as a spammer, so don’t sign up to just post your latest blog link. You’re going to have to be crafty, participate and perhaps find a way to cover a hot news topic on your blog.

LinkedIn – Here’s a great way to connect with local media types and build some trust levels up. You’re golden if they accept a friend request so just make sure your profile is professional, clear and appealing. I’d also check out any groups that person is in as it opens a door. Perhaps there’s even a local media group worth checking out.

Bloggers – All I an say about this is either try and get interviewed from a local business blog or podcast. If you can’t initially, why don’t you interview someone more prominent with your area who can push social followers your way? They’re going to promote the interview to their fans and this can only do good things for your marketing efforts.

Press Release Strategy:

Make a list of all the local news sites and see which ones are picking up on press releases, especially ones with links in them. While dupe PR may not be the best of links, you still might as well get all you can out of it. You’re going to have to whip out your backlink analyzer of choice and reverse engineer the press releases. I like to have every little bit of information so I can try and game my clients release getting on that news site. It’s not hard, just look for what service it was launched with. See if they have geo-targeting options and even what tags they used with the release.

Those in larger cities will have better luck with this. To give you all an example, The Miami Herald has an area for press releases and they do provide links within the release. Sometimes going this route is much easier and quicker than building connections up, but do both or I’ll be upset with you as a marketer!

Getting Legit .Gov/.EDU Links:

Everyone and their mother wants these links but most of you folks pay some shady link broker to sneak them in. When it comes to the local market it doesn’t require any money to snag these links, just good content, time and a little creativity. There are a few easy ways to score some local .edu and .gov links and I’ll drop a few methods. After that, you’ll have to scour their websites to see what they’re linking out to and how you can create linkable content. They’re definitely some of the hardest links to obtain, so don’t give up and do the best you can.

Links For Jobs – This is a great way to score some natural links from either your local government or university. A lot of .edu’s have local job boards and hiring local students to do work is great for everybody involved. Government sites tend to also have job boards so do your best to sniff things out. You’ll have to watch out for https job postings and weakly linked job pages that don’t index well. Also keep an eye out for job/career fairs because they usually provide links to the participants.

Guest Speaking @ School – This has worked for me personally and it’s a great way to not only score some links, but become a local business leader. Connect with the department heads that relate to your business and offer yourself out. You never know what’ll come of it!

Reciprocal Linking:

Yea I said it, so what? Google’s quite clear that recip linking for the purpose of passing PageRank is a no-no, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. A well designed, uniquely named links/resources page for your area can really do you some good and provide users with a piece of useful content. I’m talking about only one or two dozen links on the page backed with unique content, but most importantly, never game any anchor text.

A lot of people think that reciprocal linking is a waste of time and are dead wrong when it comes to ranking locally. I’m coming from years of experience as well and we have clients surviving and thriving thanks to this link profile diversification. Like any tactic, you don’t want to rely solely on it, you don’t want to game anchor text and you want to link to and from quality related sites only.

While I might get some flack for what I’m about to say, I’d even recommend buying links on related, local businesses resource pages. If you just stick to getting a site/brand name link, mix some up with nofollow and pick really quality sites, you’ll do just fine. Sometimes you’ve got to get your hands dirty and if you do, be damn sneaky about it! There’s no way Google’s going to be able to tell it’s a paid link unless the webmaster rats you out. But even in that case, nothing is likely to happen because they might get penalized for selling links. As long as your link profile is diverse, clean and not too spammy, you’ll be fine. If worse comes to worst, Google just devalues those links.

Guest Blogging & Blog Commenting:

Local blogs are a great place to build relationships, get some links and build up your brands awareness. This can be done by guest blogging, commenting like a boss on a really good post or doing an interview on your blog with someone influential. I recommend doing all of those tactics because they work great and add a good link diversity to your profile. Not only that but you start to really build your brand within the community, make friends and have fun all at the same time.

Do’s:

– link to other local influential bloggers a lot
– write as much as you can and contribute somthing to the discussion when commenting
– use link bait such as infographics and widgets to score links from local blogs
– blog about local hot topics to attract social traffic
– build a good local Twitter and Google+ follower set to influence the SERPs
– do crowdsourced content locally when possible

Do Not:

– use keyword anchor text for your “name” when commenting
– steal copyrighted images for your posts
– slander another business as this never works out well
– comment on lousy obvious spam blog posts
– syndicate content from other sources in your area

Build It And They Will Come:

This is some of the best web advice out there! Keep blogging, networking and inspiring and the links will follow along with the business. These core tactics and fundamentals should be enough to dominate any local marketing effort within 6-12 months. Don’t give up and once you find your groove, there’s no stopping you; Only you can get in the way at that point. If anyone has any specific local link building tips then you know what to do, drop them in the comments below!

Tagged Link Building, local link building, local marketing, local seo

10 Big Brands That Google Has Penalized For Paid Links

13 Comments

August 25 | Paid Links | Ryan Clark

Over the years, Google has applied some high profile penalties and they’ve always been a fun read. I thought I’d round-up all the big ones I could find and present them for your amusement (and education). All the companies in this post had been caught with their hands in the paid links cookie jar. Whether they were selling or buying, Google came down hard on them for a bit but, as you can see, they’re all back and doing fine now. I won’t name names, but one of these ten below is still blatantly selling links on their high profile site.

In my younger days, I woke up one morning to find my biggest money making affiliate site with a big fat -50 slap in the face. I was doing everything from buying links, to heavily targeting certain anchor text. At the time I didn’t care, knew the risks and the money I was making was down right ridiculous. I moved onto the next domain and was eventually back making my monies. The ability to shrug it off is lost on a big brand. Everything they do in marketing has to be for the long term and getting slapped by a Google penalty can be a major problem for just about the whole operation. The penalties put on one of the companies below cost them just over $4 million in losses… ouch!

While tons of websites are quietly put in the penalty box for paid links, link schemes and other shenanigans, the big boys are the most interesting. This should also be a lesson to those up and coming, take over the world companies that might be considering partaking in link schemes. It’s a mess to clean up and it can take many months to recover from, if you ever do recover…

If you’re still wanting to buy links, and by all means buy away, learn how to do it properly for Pete’s sake! The reality is, big brands are still buying although they are getting sneakier and sneakier. Mark my words, almost every competitive SERPs top 10 results are going to have a lot of paid links. What I’m seeing lately is just the right balance of paid links, careful anchor text use and a good mix of where those links are pointing. It can be done, but let’s see what impact Google has had in the past.

*I imagine most of you remember the paid links war drum started banging hard around 2006-2007 *

Before we get into the main bulk of the content I’d like to mention that I want comments on the big brands I did miss out on. If you want to see the everyday website getting stung on a weekly basis, come join me on Google’s Webmaster Help. Since Panda started rolling out it seems that paid links are causing webmasters a lot of problems.

1) Google.co.jp

Yes, you are reading that right and this is not a typo! Apparently Google Japan didn’t get the memo on buying links; Either that or they forgot to send it in Japanese. Matt Cutts publicly stated via Twitter that the PageRank drop for their .co.jp search homepage was in fact because of some naughty link buying. They were getting reviews for a widget by paying bloggers and using a pay per post service. To me, this would be a prime link bait tactic for Google to use, except for the fact that they have no real need to be doing that in the first place.

I don’t have a problem with bloggers in a niche reviewing a product or service, whether or not it was paid for; That is just good marketing in my books. If you are really paranoid, ask for a nofollow link. It’s not much different that submitting a press release about a new product launch. Keep in mind, though, that the reason I would do this is not for the link, that’s just the icing on the cake.

2) Forbes.com

Perhaps one of the most well known publications in the world, Forbes Magazine was caught not once, but twice for selling links in a multitude of areas online. By the looks of it, they were making a pretty penny doing it and despite being a very large company, Google still dropped the ban hammer on their website. You can see the original Google Webmaster Help thread which even had Matt Cutts himself provide the best answer. That’s the kind of attention big brands get. I’ve rarely ever seen him pipe in on any other topic in that forum.

Now I wonder how much of a clue Forbes had in the first place. It was online marketing firm Conductor Inc who was the link broker for them and many other large sites that may have been penalized. They were at the very least selling links to other big brands that were closely related in business. A really rather smart idea. If you are going to buy links, then they were doing it the best possible way but it obviously didn’t pan out as they had initially anticipated. Still, there are ways of buying links that Google will NEVER catch on to, so remember that you have to be sneaky if you’re going to risk it all.

3) 1-800-Flowers

1800Flowers.com is perhaps the best known flower chain in North America. Heck, I’ve even used them a handful of times. I did, however, forget to give them paid link advice. They entered a very competitive market both online and off and to boost their rankings they dabbled in the dark side. Needless to say, it eventually caught up to them. The penalties were a major sting to their sales for a little while before Google let them back into the game – something that’s typical after the storm calms down and the penalized site starts playing by the rules.

What kind of links caused it? Well, they denied it but they had links on sites that were quite obviously selling paid links and they were targeting “Mother’s Day Flowers” keywords galore. Like I mentioned above, if you search for Mother’s Day Flowers now you’ll find them at the number one spot and if you check that page’s links, you’ll see how they are still ranking. Regardless of linking methods, that’s a company I’d expect to see in the top 3 spots. The NY Times called them out on it and made it a big story, but at least they got some really juicy links out of it.

So, the lesson learned? Getting caught is a great way to drive links to your site!

4) Newsday.com

Well, we’re not really all that surprised to see yet another publication getting “slapped in da face” for selling links. I understand, times are tough for print media publications and trying to make a buck or two on paid links can bring in some serious dough. This website is for the Long Island area of New York, and is owned by the Tribune group. Newsday.com was the only website in their portfolio that got a slap, so it makes me wonder how many websites they own got away with it.

If you take a look at some of their articles, you might notice some links that may be considered “paid” but in the end, who knows. The links are always related to the post’s topic so it could be just good linking. I know online newspapers have a big network of sites and interlinking them for legitimate purposes is something that is going to happen. You can read the original Google Groups posting here about it and see how it was all handled. Make not of the fact that it took a few months to get their PageRank back to normal levels.

5) GoCompare Insurance

GoCompare is a car insurance quote company and if you know anything about competitive markets, you’ll know that anything insurance is tough as nails. Go look at the top 10 ranking sites for the term car insurance and you’ll find paid links in at least 80% of the sites ranking there. The sad truth is, those big terms are all completely dominated by paid links. The difference? Most of them have a really good link profile in addition to the paid links. You’ll find diverse backlink profiles usually make it so that people get away with paid links for longer, if not forever.

GoCompare was buying a lot of links on a lot of crappy sites, which is still evident in their link profile to this day. I imagine those links are now just devalued and not doing much for their rankings. They’re not in the top 20 search results for the ‘car insurance’ keyword anymore so perhaps they got stuck in a link building rut since. If you folks are reading this, give us a shout because I have some great ideas for link bait in your niche!

6) Beat That Quote

This is the site that Google bought in March of 2011 and was quick to penalize for buying links. I’ll throw out the link bait card again because the site didn’t do too well for a lot of terms and this is a great way to get links if you’re Google. Looking at their Alexa ranking, it didn’t do them a whole lot of good in the long run. To me, this is the type of site that should have been hit by Panda pretty hard but I imagine they somehow made it past the filter.

Keep in mind my earlier mention about the insurance SERPs being some of the toughest out there. I’d put money on the fact that the majority of companies are still buying links to this day. When competition is that rough and tough, the paid links usually play a large part of the overall rankings.

7) GoHealthInsurance.com

Here we go again. Those insurance companies sure do love their paid links! I’ll continue to stick by my quotes on the insurance game being completely dominated by paid links and other naughty link schemes. There are few companies in this arena doing things legitimately and ranking hard for it. A newcomer into this industry better have some incredibly smart marketers working for them if they’re going to even stand a chance for a top 20 spot. Not only that, you’re going to be under heavy watch due to the competitive nature of those SERPs.

I found the Google Webmaster Help thread directly from the company trying to figure out what was going on with their rankings in Google. GoHealthInsurance.com had a 3rd party company buy links as part of their SEO strategy until Google took notice. They had the company email and remove all those links but were finding that the rankings weren’t coming back. Well no duh! You’re going to need some good quality link loving to get back up for those keywords. Keep in mind that it can also take a few months to come back after you’ve been filtered for a certain keyword or removed entirely.

8) GourmetGiftBaskets.com

From my affiliate marketing days I’m quite aware that the gift basket niche is a big one and a tough one to crack at that! While they have an amazing exact match domain as well as beer baskets, I have no idea why the paid links were necessary! How are beer baskets not link bait alone? (mmmmm beer) Back in 2008, right before the holidays, it was reported that GourmetGiftBaskets.com was dropped from the Google index. This is a nightmare of the worst kind for any company and the fact that it was right before the holidays is a killer. How killer? They reported a $4 million dollar loss in sales.

Eventually, things got back to normal, however, if anyone from the company is reading this, your partners page and articles section is something I’d be worried about Panda going after. By the looks of it, they may have already. Other than that, I still see a lot of sketchy links in their profile. Overall, their strategy has been focused on getting national news coverage. They also have tons of links from the biggest sites on the web and with an EMD like that you’re in for a win!

9) JC Penny

The JC Penny debacle was perhaps the most talked about penalty of the year. They hired a 3rd party company, which is okay, don’t get me wrong, but I would have thought they had a good in-house team. Like a lot of 3rd party low life SEO companies, they’ll buy links to quickly inflate the rankings for their client. The worst part? They won’t even tell them they’re doing it. We’ve even had to clean messes like this up for companies before. I have no idea if they knew or not, but they had no reason to buy such terrible links on unrelated blogs. Their budget could have paid for the best link bait, the best reviews and if they wanted to go for paid links, they could have been sneaky as a fox.

JC Penny does have one thing going for them – they’re one of the biggest retailers in the world. They were able to clear up their issues quite quickly and were back to ranking in no time, even for the gamed keywords. In addition, when you spend that much on Adwords, you must have some serious clout within the Google hive! Either way, it works as great link bait and JC Penny got all the links they’d need from the biggest sites in the world. Bravo folks!

10) Overstock.com

Overstock was the other contender for biggest brand banned in 2011 and it’s an interesting case to me. I’ve got links for clients on .edu’s offering discounts, but there was one difference in our tactic. We didn’t game anchor text and just got a natural site/brand name link and as a result, never felt any sort of a penalty. We didn’t expect to rank to all high heavens either, it was just another part of the link profile to add some diversity. To this day, those clients have not felt any ill effects from those links. BRB while I go knock on some wood!

The whole issue got blown out by the WSJ Online edition and thanks to them, Overstock got a truckload of awesome links for it. Their company has some of the best in-house SEO’s in the world, so they’re still going strong. However, a lot of the keywords they were targeting in that campaign still elude them to this day. Regardless, they’re still doing great in the SERPs and traffic looks to be rising up this year for them and they’ll no doubt continue to see that rise.

So, if you’ve learned anything from the big guys going down in Google’s books, it is “play by the rules”. If you haven’t been, ask for help and work to fix the problem. If you do need to buy links, and it will always be a part of a diverse link portfolio, do it very sneakily and make sure that you’re not gaming the SERPs. With any sort of luck, you’ll be back ranking for your old keywords in no time. That is, if you have enough clout.

Tagged Link Building, link buying, link schemes, link selling, Paid Links

Link Wheel Links Cause Possible Penalty?

7 Comments

August 18 | Link Building | Ryan Clark

Can you get penalized for building a link wheel? Well that’s something that’s debated quite a bit these days and I’m on the side of them being a method you should most likely steer clear of. Why do I state that? Well it is clearly a link scheme defined by Google’s linking guidelines because they’re used to inflate your rankings. The other problem is that 99% of the link wheels created out there are being done with spun low quality content, and then blasted with Xrumer, Scrapebox and whatever other spam tool out there. I’m not one to judge at all here, for those doing it clearly know it works well and is making people money.

When it comes to building links the legit way for a business you plan on keeping high in the SERPs, then this isn’t a method you want to dabble with. I’ve written about the Pros & Cons of the Link Wheel before, but we’re certainly a company that won’t ever be offering this service any time soon. While I’ll agree link wheels form naturally in the wild through the magic of social media, the obvious ones will be easily sniped by Google.

I’ve constantly stated that you can find me helping out in Google’s Webmaster Help, and I’m running across more and more link wheel related issues on the boards. As you can see in the video above, SEO firms are offering this service to a more business oriented crowd, and this could potentially lead to disaster. I’d recommend at least offering a warning about these methods to clients before blindly leading them down that path.

So clearly link wheels work well, and I’ve personally seen a few that were done so professionally that I don’t think Google would ever have caught on. The site it was ranking for was within the finance niche and has been ranking top 5 for nearly two years now on nothing but a giant elaborate link wheel. While that’s all good and dandy, I’d still have a hard time sleeping at night, wondering if Google will have caught on and sent my site into it’s -50 black hole.

Now I’ve been in many verbal web arguments over whether link wheels are a spam link building tactic. Looking at Google’s TOS it is an obvious YES YES YES. I don’t care what else you have to say about it, you’re never going to be right in saying otherwise. I’ve said this before, but link schemes are considered a no-no, and by looking at the picture below, do you not see something that could be defined as a scheme?

Live Cases Of People Being Penalized?

So let’s get into the examples where people are talking about real world examples of sites getting in trouble, people talking about whether it’s spam or not and whatever else. The Google Crawling, Indexing and Ranking section of their webmaster help is full of those examples and I highly recommend you read through these to further ease your mind. With that being said, feel free to post up if you’ve had a problem or want to vent why you think they shouldn’t be considered a black hat tactic.

– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5d58a7d8d4202170&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7a00668e8f6aec39&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6de8a41394ea9df2&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4041e919ec2611ad&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=3e8893966e432139&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=75617ba48a9a6518&hl=en
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=50788bc7fcbb9c8c&hl=en

These are just some of the posts that are popping up lately over there and I’d expect to be seeing more. I know I’m not the only one who’s been seeing different behaviour towards links right around the time of Panda. It makes sense as well because Google is having a really hard time locking down the link spam that takes place. It is still quite evident that links will rank you just fine still, even if you have down right crap content. While it may not last for more than 2 weeks, there are keywords out there that make enough money to make it worth building another site for the next two weeks.

I’m just trying to define some sort of line because a lot of businesses out there are using link services out there and have no idea what they’re getting. You may also have nothing but great results from a proper link wheel, but do you really want to risk waking up one day to a bunch of devalued links?

Tagged Link Building, link wheel, link wheels