The time has come for another Linklove conference here in 2012 and it looks like the lineup of speakers is nothing short of the best ever. The conference was today and I wish I could have attended but I cannot be everyone at once so I hope it was a blast! The folks at Koozai(who you should go follow all over the social world) were kind enough to put up this video to let us know who’s talking about what this year. I will without a doubt be making my way over for the next event so hopefully I’ll see you there.
Linklove 2012 Conference Preview
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March 30 | Link Building Videos | Ryan Clark
Tagged Link Building, linklove, video
8 Ways To Manage Your Guest Posting Footprint
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March 29 | Link Building | James Agate
Guest post by James Agate, founder of Skyrocket SEO – the content-led link building agency.
When I read a recent post by Ryan here on the Linkbuildr blog which talked about an individual who had received an “unnatural links” warning through Google Webmaster Tools seemingly because of his guest posting, I was pretty astonished and was certainly keen to read on and find out more details around the scenario.
Similarly to Ryan, in my opinion, the individual concerned was probably involved in some other form of link building or had been involved with something a bit greyer in the past. As much as many webmasters that post to Warrior Forum profess to be whiter than white with their links, very few actually are.
This issue aside, it inspired me to highlight some ways you can manage your guest posting footprint since if this guy actually did get an unnatural links warning because of his guest blogging then it would likely be because of the way he was doing it rather than the tactic of guest posting itself.
I am a firm supporter of guest posting being one of the best ways to proactively earn editorially relevant links in today’s web. That being said, there are some common mistakes that people make which can actually negate the positive benefits of guest posting and may even harm your search engine rankings.
1) Manage your persona(s)
There is nothing wrong with establishing a persona or multiple personas to improve the effectiveness of your guest posting campaign. In fact, in my recent study which I published on SEOmoz I proved that in most scenarios it is better to approach the website as a female persona since it generates a higher response rate.
There is something wrong however if you aren’t using your persona accounts intelligently. If you are an agency re-using the same persona across multiple client projects and industries then you are leaving one herculean footprint which could potentially de-value all the hard work you’ve put in for your clients.
If you are guest posting for your own websites then establish personas for the different niches that you wish to post within – it will be more effective since your niche-specific persona account will have a much more relevant track record but it will also ensure the whole campaign is really natural. This is particularly important if you are planning a large-scale campaign.
2) Be fluid with your site criteria
In the same way that a link profile with hundreds, thousands or even millions of low quality links looks suspicious, a link profile with only links above a certain PageRank or domain authority looks similarly manipulated. With Google coming down hard on over-optimisation, diversity can only be a good thing.
Don’t set too rigid requirements in terms of a link’s strength, guest posting to a new website in a niche or one that is really relevant and perhaps just under your “usual criteria” is likely to still have a positive impact.
Many would argue that the relevant link is a myth but I’m not convinced. I think there is tremendous value in attaining highly targeted and contextually relevant links. I will concede that perhaps the full search engine rankings benefits are yet to be felt (but Google is getting smarter) and from a marketing and visitor potential point of view, a relevant link is always going to be powerful.
3) Explore other link building tactics
At Skyrocket SEO, we offer a guest posting service (see here) which is popular with agencies and direct clients alike however we always advocate clients utilizing our other services or ensuring they are pursuing other types of links as well.
No matter how natural guest posting is, it can still make your link profile look manipulated if you only chase one kind of of link. Diversity is once again the name of the game; engaging in quality content creation, linkbaiting and digital PR are also advisable. Furthermore, for now at least, it can be effective to invest (in a strategic way) in building some lower level links such as quality directory submissions, topical article submissions etc.
4) Vary your bio
With just a moderate amount of competitor research, it can sometimes be quite easy to identify almost entire guest posting campaigns by Googling just a section of their bio in quotation marks. If it is that easy to manually unravel your campaign then you might be negating some of the benefits of your efforts. Make it more difficult for your competitors to identify where you’ve guest posted to avoid them snagging the same links in next to no time.
You’ll never be able to hide your campaign entirely from them but if you make sure to cover your tracks as best they can then at least they’ll have to wait for the next time their favourite link research tool index updates to see what you’ve been up to.
Additionally, including the same links and linking structure are two recipes for an unnatural link warning from Google. Some might argue that 2 links are better than one but in my eyes, it is vital to vary this sometimes linking only link to your homepage, other times just to a deep page and sometimes to both. If you’re publishing post after post with a link to the homepage and two deep pages then you’re potentially leaving yourself open to accusations of over-optimisation.
5) Analyse the content quality of the target website
There are a number of blogs out there that consist almost entirely of guest posts, I personally see this as a bad thing. I could be completely off the mark here but as a general rule of thumb, sites that publish practically no posts themselves start to look like they are solely for SEO purposes. Being associated with a site like this probably isn’t going to do you any favours if you are trying to develop a trusted brand online.
There is a caveat to this of course and that’s the community blog. You might find a different guest contributor being featured every day, but this is counteracted by a much higher editorial standard which helps to maintain the integrity of the website – preventing a deterioration into nothing more than a link whore’s hangout.
I am pretty certain you’ll be able to tell the difference between a community maintained blog and one that’s just publishing guest posts daily through laziness and that is exactly why we view the manual analysis of each guest post target to be so important.
6) Don’t just target the obvious ones
You are probably familiar with the unwritten rule that the harder a link is to get the more valuable it is likely to be and when it comes to guest posting, it can really pay to dig beneath the surface and identify opportunities that are less obvious.
It’s hard to believe but some bloggers and website owners still have no idea what guest posting really is, remember that the person who runs a gardening blog might be doing it purely to feed their passion, they aren’t necessarily well versed in “blogging” as a profession. Reaching out to them and proposing a guest post, guiding them through how it works and what’s in it for them can result in you getting a link that your lazy competitor couldn’t dream of.
Furthermore, if you can develop a strong relationship with that individual then you may be able to informally secure exclusivity by becoming their guest expert in your particular area of knowledge – imagine that, a link you have that your competitors will unlikely be able to get…ever.
It isn’t just about the SEO benefits either because getting close to a site owner when they are perhaps less savvy as to the protocols of blogging and online marketing means you can develop with them and possibly draw customers from their audience on a regular basis long into the future.
Just because they don’t have a “write for us” page, doesn’t mean they won’t perhaps accept a guest contribution from you or your client.
7) Don’t hit one niche too hard
This point relates once again to the importance of diversity in your link building.
Think laterally, think naturally. Guest posting on blogs outside your usual realm of influence can often make a lot of sense, not only does it increase the site theme diversity of your link profile but it can give you direct access to your clients if you can identify blogs that they read. Always be identifying crossovers between subject areas and looking for opportunities to take your content to new corners of the world wide web.
This may appear to contradict my earlier point relating to site relevance but in this case I am referring to sites that are still relevant and make sense from a user’s perspective. Let’s be honest though, in some of the more dry industries, you’ll struggle to get links from directly “relevant” websites since most of these will be your competitors. If you’re promoting a lawyer’s website and getting links regularly from other lawyers on a regular basis then you’ll have to teach me some of your Jedi mind tricks. :-)
8) Don’t overcook your anchor text
As with any kind of link building, the same warning still applies – vary your anchor text.
Ryan commented in his last post “We here at Linkbuildr are a huge proponent of NOT bothering to give two shits about anchor text anymore…”
Now, I don’t entirely agree with him just yet, I don’t think anybody can deny how effective anchor text still is when it comes to search rankings. However I will say, increasingly we have been seeing some interesting activity across the SERPs that we monitor.
Namely, websites with link profiles that consist solely of keyword anchor text links (even if these are distributed across a broad range of keyword terms) haven’t been performing as well as sites which have perhaps less keyword anchor text links BUT also branded links. I think this gives us an insight into the future of SEO which is going to be much more brand and reputation driven.
Guest Blogging Leads To Unnatural Links Detected Message?!
March 24 | Link Building | Ryan Clark
While I haven’t seen many reports for guest blogging leading to an unnatural links penalty/warning from Google, this is an interesting topic to keep an eye on. I know this topic is going to freak you out a little but let’s take a look at this bloke’s case and feel out what might be the problem if it is even guest blog links. I’m a huge fan of guest blogging so I’d be pretty choked it this were an issue now, but I suspect a couple of other things in play here. I found this thread while doing my daily forum browsing;
I went from 1k Google visitors per day to 200. I then went back up to about 400 and now I’ve tanked again to 250ish.
I figured Google was punishing me for something so I submitted a reconsideration request.
I recently received an email from G stating that:
“We’ve reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality 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.”
The thing is, I’ve never paid for a single backlink and 90% of my link building is by submitting guest posts to high quality blogs in my market. With each guest post I include an author resource box. Does Google recognize that this resource box is included with lots of my backlinks and see it as unnatural link building? How can I lift this penalty without individually contacting over 50 bloggers who host my content with a backlink? And if guest posting is no longer a viable link building strategy, then WHAT IS?
Veeerrrryyy interrreeesssting! Now we don’t know if that warrior was engaged in other link building practices, but usually most people are. If you’re buying services from affiliate marketing forums, they’re more than likely on the grey/black side of things and can lead to trouble…although everything seems to lead to trouble these days. So while the thread is young, I’ve piped in with my 2 cents and we’ll see what comes of it if anything.
What Am I Thinking?
Well lately there is a lot of guest blogging going on, and sadly I’m seeing a lot more low quality stuff taking place. Remember to take what I say with a grain of salt, I don’t claim to know all and I’m just here to get the discussion going. So if it were possible to get an unnatural links penalty for guest blogging what factors come to your mind first that might trip the filter? Think about this for a minute here and then continue reading on……
Anchor text manipulation come to mind? I imagine if you’re gaming nothing but the same anchor text over and over that’s still going to be considered trying to manipulate the SERPs. We here at Linkbuildr are a huge proponent of NOT bothering to give two shits about anchor text anymore, and more so go after site/brand anchors or whatever isn’t trying to manipulate your ranking for one or two keywords. Keeping your rankings in the long run is all about building trust folks.
Another factor to consider when attracting links…ok well not consider but actual friggin do is link diversity! Relying on the same type of links is not a smart move and really will make your profile stick out like a sore thumb. So that’s all I really have to say and if you’ve had a problem with guest blog links I’d love to hear about it in the comments so don’t be shy now.
Tagged google, Link Building, unnatural links
Negative SEO On The Rise?
March 22 | Link Building | Ryan Clark
Because of all the recent woes with links causing penalties and filter trips these days, I thought we might as well bring up a very heated topic…. Negative SEO. There are a lot of people who will strongly debate whether or not you can take down a competitor with some ill gotten links. I, for one, am a believer in the fact you can take down a competitor, although it depends on a few key factors …well, from what I’ve seen anyway. There have been very few public case studies on this topic so I sought out someone who would let me test out a few things and see if we could shed some light on the topic at hand.
If you have a very well built brand that has been around for years and it has a very diverse and natural link profile, chances are that you’ll never be taken down by links. But what about a site that’s been around for a while but doesn’t have much of a link profile? Well after reading through a lot of forum posts, talking with clients and listening into Google Webmaster Central I thought the debate must go on.
With Google sending out over 700,000 WMT messages in the past few months, my bet is that the majority of those were for the dreaded unnatural links message. The fact is two large groups of people are going to be on the receiving end of this “penalty”. Affiliate marketers and unsuspecting businesses buying shit SEO services. Everyone knows, whether they admit it publicly or not, that spamming links will get you to the top in no time, some just do it better than others and stay in the game longer. It’s too hard to resist making the fast cash and that’s why so many niches top 10 results flip flop (almost) more than Mitt Romney.
So are we going to see a rise in negative SEO services? Despite what’s already being tested by black hats in the background, I think we’ll see more public companies coming out of the woodwork. I’ve already started seeing posts from businesses complaining that a competitor spammed their site with links and now they’re stuck with a -50 and a message in WMT. Their bionic posters are mostly saying this is impossible and doesn’t happen, but how is Google supposed to know who did it? They’re penalizing thousands of websites already feeling the hurt after receiving their notice of unnatural links. I got a huge kick out of seeing this website pop up today and I’m highly amused and intrigued… I damn near want to try it out, even though I can just go to Fiverr and order all the spam I need.
My hat’s off to “Damian” as he’ll most likely have a ton of newbies from Warrior Forum, Traffic Planet, Digital Point, etc. come flocking in. I know some of you might be ready to comment flame for for linking to this service but they bring up a bloody good point on their about us page:
Now, I’ve always known that you could get a site in trouble by simply pointing links at it. But Google has made this easier than ever. To top it off, they have validated what I always knew. Now a days; they send out emails notifications letting people know they have done by building ‘bad links’ and will suffer the consequences.
The catch is, there is no trial, no jury, and no one to appeal to. Just a Kafka-ish faceless corporation. If you didn’t build the bad links, good luck fixing the problem.
Can A Competitor Knock You Out?
If you’re a well established brand with a solid link profile then there’s almost zero chance you’re going to budge. I imagine you’re only going to give them a boost to their already dominating SERP positions and you’ve just wasted time and money. For a smaller business in a not so competitive niche, well then I have to say that it is more than possible to get them slapped. Again, I might provoke an onslaught of comments not in my favour, so let’s hear what you have to say below.
A lot of you SEO nerds may remember this 2007 Forbes article on negative SEO where Matt Cutts says a couple of interesting things on the subject. First he says “piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult.” and then “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.”
So that’s where I agree and say it’ll be damn near impossible to take down a “big brand”. The smaller folks out there trying to compete without cheating, well you might be out of luck in some cases. It’s so bloody hard to know if a client knowingly bought into a link scheme, or their SEO did it without them knowing or if it was really a competitor up to nefarious tactics.
Other Great Reads On The Topic
– http://www.affhelper.com/negative-seo-on-the-rise-white-hat-seos-soon-out-of-jobs/
– http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4325206.htm
– http://www.seomoz.org/q/negative-seo-2
–http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014057.html
– http://www.distilled.net/blog/reputation-monitor/negative-seo-nightmares-come-true/
– http://trafficplanet.com/topic/1966-case-study-negative-seo/
– http://www.seowizz.net/2009/06/i-can-sabotage-your-google-ranking-using-negative-seo.html
– http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3964441.htm
Negative SEO Case Study Time
Put up or shut up right?
I have a real good friend and Realtor based out of Whistler BC and we frequently get in heated battles over SEO and links. He was so sure that I couldn’t blow him out that he offered to let me try and bowl his site out of the SERPs and into no traffic land. His current site ranks in the top 10 for a few choice Whistler real estate keywords without much of a link profile. The website isn’t that heavily marketed and he doesn’t generate a lot of leads from the site so it seemed to be a good fit. The site currently had less than 100 links and all of them come from him getting awards, commenting on local blogs and being linked from various local resources.
I will start buying tons of targeted anchor text to 3 pages only and I’m aiming to generate about 10,000 links within a week, for 4-6 weeks non stop. I’m going to be buying xrumer blasts, scrapebox, forum spam, blog comment spam, “private” blog network links, article marketing and Wiki link spam. This should be more than enough to either rank him better or eventually get him knocked down a peg or 10.
This will be full disclosure if I can knock his site out of the SERPs, you have my word on that. If it’s possible I’ll get him to reveal his domain name and the stats from his Google WMT. I have no idea what to expect so it should be fun and interesting and quite possibly a really scary outcome. While his niche isn’t nearly as competitive as something like “car insurance”, he still makes a fine living selling some of the best ski real estate the world has to offer. So subscribe to this post and keep your eyes peeled for the update post that’ll be coming in a few weeks.
Negative SEO Results
I’ll link you folks up here once we’re done in a couple months so stay tuned. In the mean time, feel free to express your thoughts below or let me hear about your experiences. Would you take out a competitor or 5 if you could?
Tagged Black Hat, link penatly, negative seo
A Review of Link Prospector
March 20 | Link Building Tools | Andrew Breen
Andrew Breen runs Outshine Online – a Halifax SEO company that is an Adwords Certified Partner. Connect with him on Twitter @breenandrew.
When I saw Darren Shaw of Whitespark was involved with a newly-released link building tool, Link Prospector, I knew I had to give it a shot. If you don’t know Darren, he’s a super nice guy and a whiz at local SEO.
Plus he’s a fellow Canadian SEO, and I love a good Canadian success story. Now that I think of it, the Linkbuildr blog is Canadian too. I guess there is advantages to the long, cold winters we have here – it’s easier to spend more time inside grinding away at link building.
Anyways, Link Prospector is a joint venture from Whitespark and Citation Labs. If you work in SEO have never read their blog you’re doing yourself a disservice. It’s got a ton of killer link building content.
SO WHAT IS LINK PROSPECTOR?
Well, true to its name, Link Prospector helps you find new link opportunities. It’s essentially an automated way to do all those search operators you do now to find links (like “recommended sites” keyword or keyword guest blogger wanted).
Link Prospector uses preset searches to go out and find potential sources of links for your client. What those exact searches consist of is part of their “secret sauce.”
You can use up to 5 keywords per report, and designate specific regions, search depth, TLDs, date ranges or search scopes.
Once you’ve given Link Prospector the parameters, it scrapes the web and pulls together a report. Reports can take a few hours, but you’re emailed when it’s ready.
RUNNING YOUR FIRST CAMPAIGN
Log in and create your first campaign. You can try it out for free, so take a whirl and sign up now.
Once you’ve created the campaign, select the type of link report you want to run. There are a whopping 13 preselected reports to run, or you can choose your own research phrases and run a custom report. The reports you can choose from are:
Guest Posting – Discover blogs who allow guest posts and offer your writing services.
Links Pages – Find the resource and links pages that will add a link to your site.
Content Promoters – Find writers who are likely to cover your story, or repost your infographics and articles.
Reviews – Look for people who review products or services in your space.
Giveaways – Offer goods and services in exchange for coverage.
Donations – Be charitable and earn links through sponsorship opportunities.
Commenting – Find the posts relevant to your key phrases. Join the conversation, and link to your site.
Expert Interviews – Identify domain experts you can interview, or pitch your own expertise.
Directories – Identify quality directories to help you get your site listed quickly.
Forums – Add value to the conversation and build brand equity.
Topical Blogs – Pinpoint the blogs that cover your industry, and are likely to post about your site.
Professional Organizations – Locate trades and professional organizations you can join.
Research: Content – Find top tips for writing great content.
Custom – Use any amount of research phrases you like.
I ran an Expert Interview report and hit submit. About 30 minutes later I got an email notification that the report was ready.
I log in and see the report has given me 4267 paths from 1769 domains. I choose to export the paths, instead of just the domains. I like to analyse specific pages instead of domains when looking at link opportunities – I feel like the metrics of the page where your link may end up is far more important than the homepage metrics.
The export opens an Excel document with the URL, TLD, and Link Target Score (LTS) of the link. I grab the URL list and dump it into ScrapeBox so I can get the Page Rank values of the pages.
Why do I grab PageRank to judge the value of the links instead of using LTS – Link Prospector’s proprietary link scoring measure? A few reasons:
- When you’re evaluating links across different tools and prospect sources, it’s nice to have a consistent score you’re using. PageRank isn’t perfect but it’s easy to get for any site, and most people understand it.
- I don’t know much about LTS.
Check out the LTS scores for some sites the tool found for one of my clients:
| URL | LTS | PageRank | Page MozRank |
| www.retread.org/general/recommended_links.asp |
180 |
4 |
4.83 |
| www.epa.gov/nrmrl/lcaccess/resources.html |
57 |
6 |
4.08 |
| www.betiresmart.ca/resources/kit.html |
38 |
5 |
4.78 |
| www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/maintain.shtml |
2 |
7 |
5.77 |
If I’m going to make decisions on what links to pursue and what to skip over based on a score, I have to be confident that the measure I’m using is accurate. And you can see that at this point, the LTS doesn’t seem to jive with PageRank or MozRank.
That said, the tool is super new and I suspect the LTS is a work in progress. And frankly, the appeal of Link Prospector is in the link finding itself, not the link scoring.
Conclusion
Link Prospector kicks ass. Why? Because it helps you automate one more step in your link building process. The more automated your link building process becomes, the more scalable and repeatable it becomes.
For me, it saves having to train someone to use different search queries to find link opportunities. Plus, it’s a more user-friendly alternative to using ScrapeBox for link prospecting.
If you do a lot of link building, you own it to yourself to check out this tool. It’s super easy to use, cheap, and can unearth some awesome link opportunities you missed.
One thing I’d love to see in Link Prospector is a local citations report. Darren Shaw, who I mentioned earlier as one of the developers of Link Prospector, has a local citation finding tool already. It would be awesome to see him integrate it into this project.
Private Blog Networks Getting Deindexed?
March 13 | Link Building | Ryan Clark
The word on the “digital streets” in February was that blog networks were getting heavily deindexed by Google. There have been a lot of these private blog networks popping up on the market and a lot of people got stung on the 7-9th and 18-21st of February. Within the last year, webmasters and SEO’s have been debating whether or not external links could hurt your rankings. Now, we can confirm it’s a sure thing as a lot of them are now getting notices in their WMT. For the most part, these warnings and penalties came for blatant and excessive link exchanges. There have always been, and will be private blog networks out there for SEO use, but the amount of paid “private” ones have flooded the market.
It’s no surprise, either, as the ranking rewards from a blast on a few of these networks was, and still is, netting people great results. The problem? Your SERPs are getting bombarded by thin affiliate sites that most likely should have no business ranking where they do. We all know by now that Google’s algorithm was built on links and that there is no shortage of places to buy obscene amounts of them.
The fact is that just about every big player in their niche is going to be buying links in some way or another. The difference amongst those players being whether they get caught or not. I’ve seen my fair share of extremely elaborate private blog networks in my time and I’ve recently seen nothing but endless low quality blog network services popping up. I’m not going to pretend I’m above having links from a private blog network, but the quality I’ve seen coming forth is atrocious. While participating in a private blog network for links is clearly a link scheme and against Google’s TOS, a lot of companies still don’t mind the risk.
I personally couldn’t sleep well at night if my company’s rankings relied on a flimsy blog network or three. With that being said, what happens when, either that blog network your relying on gets the boot, or your site gets dropped? The blog network’s users are more likely the most detrimental factor, not the owners. After their spun content goes up, you can be sure that a dosing of spammy links will be splattered all over these blogs. It’s a recipe for disaster, and by the looks of February, this caused a lot of problems.
A lot of companies are not aware of what they’re getting themselves into as well when buying a link blast on a private blog network. What’s even worse is when a business hires an SEO company and they get back a bunch of links that are really just going to be trouble in the long run. On the other end of the spectrum, big companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars on a well sorted private blog network. These sites are well thought out and don’t consist of spun content and thousands of scrapebox and Xrumer links. All I’m saying is be smart and careful, especially if you stumbled onto this post while making a decision for your business. This commercial, for example, is well produced and makes sense, but to the unsuspecting business owner who doesn’t know much about Google’s TOS conditions or what will eventually happen to these networks, it could spell disaster.
Many Google Algorithm Changes In February
By now I’m sure you’ve read this blog post from Google talking about 40 changes to their algorithm in February. The bit in that article about links has raised a lot of eyebrows within the community. We can only speculate on what that change was and how much of a real impact it has on your rankings. What does this have to do with private blog network links? Well, for one, blog networks are easy to detect and Google can sniff out a pattern in no time. Secondly, I think Google is just going after people who are too greedy in their anchor text distribution. It’s really very easy for Google to detect, seeing as we give them all our data (not that they really need help determining what constitutes as a quality link). This should really make you rethink your link building strategy if you’re relying on blog networks as a big part of the game plan.
We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
You’ll still see tons of spammy websites ranking across the board, and that hasn’t changed much. I do, however, think that if you’re using these techniques, your chances for longevity are now in the toilet and those methods are not going to work for a real business. This is why it pays to do things right and reap the benefits once you establish your business as a leader in its vertical. This is why, as a brand, you should be doing amazing things that stand out. This will attract links, social buzz and all the right signals that get you to that level of authority. If you’ve already decided you’re going to eventually dable in a blog network or two, then perhaps wait until you’ve reached that status….it does work better and since your brand is established, it seems you can get away with a lot more *hint hint*.
So Who Got Deindexed?
Well I don’t actually use private blog networks for our clients so I don’t have any hard data myself. I am, however, very active on most of the webmaster forums and definitely noticed the brewhaha in February. I’ve never seen so many unnatural link warning messages go out. I also saw more speculation threads about blog networks getting deindexed although, I didn’t happen to see anyone admitting it outright. We’ll go over actual threads I’ve been keeping my eye on and dig a little deeper into what’s going on in the world of black hattery!
Like I mentioned before, there are dozens of public “private” blog networks currently on the market. I’ve had my team try their hand at most of them with certain niche sites we own. We knew from the get go that just about every single one of them (BuildMyRank, ALN, LAN, DiamondLinks etc etc etc) would provide us low quality content on sites that had nothing to do with our vertical. Every single one of these networks was easy to spot and the content wrapped around yours was not my idea of a delicious sandwich. We don’t use services like these for our clients EVER, however, I see why there is such a raging market for them. It’s hard to build links and if you’re rocking a thin affiliate site, the chances of getting hundreds of natural links isn’t going to come easy. There’s too much money to be made out there and if people can exploit something easily, then it cannot be stopped. Just remember that if you’d like to have a thriving business that benefits from free organic Google traffic, take the slow and steady road.
While the public blog networks are easy to pick apart, so are a lot of amateur SEO’s private for-their-use-only networks. An example of how a Warrior Forum member Mark spoke out about how his private network was sniffed out by Google and completely deindexed.
Yesterday my network of 165 blogs was nearly completely de-indexed by Google. I’m not complaining about this as, hands up, I was posting spun content and selling links. The point of this post is rather to let others know how I think they uncovered my whole network.
I was posting spun (paragraphs spins to 60% uniqueness and 20 spun titles) articles to a random selection of 40-75 of the blogs in the network. That spun content was the only thing linking the blogs together.
None of them had Webmaster Tools, Adsense, etc. installed. None of them were linked to each other. Nearly all of them were hosted on different IP addresses. The only 2 sites not to get de-indexed were 2 that had been hacked a few days earlier and so the content on those couldn’t be found via a Google search.
Goes to show that, even though you may be hosting them on different IP’s, low quality networks are easily caught by Google and that you have to be smarter than your average bear these days if you want to play dirty. While we won’t usually see another private blog network owner come out and admit they got dropped, we can look at the mayhem PBN users saw in February. We’ll start by looking at BuildMyRank.com because they’re one of the biggest and most well known networks. They happened to close their doors on the 19th which, also happened to be a day of major ranking loss for thousands of websites across the IM world. I’m not, however, saying this was the reason they closed their doors; they clearly state they grew too fast and needed to grow some more. Regardless, they’re on Google’s radar for sure and will eventually get their users smacked down in the rankings.
Blog Network Woes
BuildMyRank(BMR) is perhaps the most well known and largest network that was open to the public. They offered thousand of low quality, high (artificially inflated) PR blogs for your link whoring and it came at a cheap enough price. While you cannot get an example of what a site looks like before you buy, they do offer this tidbit of information from their FAQ (sadly, it doesn’t mention that this service is against Google’s TOS):
To protect the integrity of our network, we do not release domain info to the public. However, once you begin using our network, you’ll find your links easily enough with tools such as Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, or Ahrefs.
So how much do you want to bet Google has an account on there? There were easily over 100 threads across the popular webmaster forums all speculating that a huge chunk of BMR sites took a dive and dropped off the map. A lot of users experienced a huge drop in rankings while some others did not. I’ve tried my best to put together the most discussed threads on the topic here:
- http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/549949-your-bmr-sites-aln-sites-drop.html
- http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/459920-sites-using-bmr-just-dropped.html (while thread OP calls his 30+ pages of unique content site an “authority” LOL)
- http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing–ranking/VZFyNPZLMCk
There are tons of other public networks that I’ve mentioned here, but I’ll just mush together all the threads that had a good discussion and may interest you folks here. I’m also open to hearing what you have to say so don’t be shy and let us know what you think below. In the mean time, however, here is some reading that should keep your busy for the better half of your morning.
- http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/403152-blog-networks-getting-deindexed.html?highlight=deindexed
- http://linkvanareviews.com/why-high-pr-networks-are-getting-murdered-by-google
- http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/403152-blog-networks-getting-deindexed.html
- http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/557763-seonitro-seolinkmonster-kill-your-sites.html
- http://trafficplanet.com/topic/1706-are-people-getting-penalized-from-deindexed-aln-bmr-links/
- http://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-content/147703-massive-serp-drop-across-nearly-all-my-sites.html
- http://trafficplanet.com/topic/1885-aln-lost-5297-domains-in-1-week/
Lessons Learned and the Future
There will always be people gaming Google’s algorithm in the link department, so I don’t expect to see a drop in private blog networks. There will still be, and are currently, dozens of open-to-the-public networks to blast thousands of links on. While it does work well, Google is quickly learning how to spot these and, even quicker, how to devalue your link juice. If you’re a legit and serious business, stay as far away from blog networks as you can. If you must dabble, then prepare to eventually get stung in the long run and you’ll be right back to square one.
I know a lot of you are going to be thinking that anyone who got caught up in Google’s algorithm smacking in February must have been foolish and only relied on PBN’s for links. Either that or they got too greedy and didn’t diversify their links, whether it be the anchor text or a multitude of links to internal pages. In the end, it doesn’t really matter when you’re spamming for blog comments, forum/user profiles, wikis, article sites and the like.
Keep in mind that damn near every form of link building goes against Google’s TOS.
Tagged blog networks, Link Building, Paid Links
POF.com Removes Viewed Me Feature = Lessons In Branding IRT
March 12 | Brand Building | Ryan Clark
So a trending topic today today was how pof.com (Plenty of Fish) removed a free featured and has taken into their paid member only section. I wanted to mention it because there are businesses thinking about doing something like this right now, and there will be more in the future. So what happens to a brand when they try and take something which they offered for free, separated them from their competitors and was most likely a key ingredient to their success? While they say the move is to help cover the costs of removing banner advertisements, it seems a good chunk of their users would rather have the ads back.
Since this literally just happened over the weekend we’ll be able to see how this all plays out for the Vancouver based company. There is potential for a large enough sway from their users to get the feature back and settle for an ad based revenue stream. Either way they swing it I think it’ll at least do a great job of getting them in the news which means links and social buzz galore. The POF forum has been lit up with non stop threads complaining about their decision to remove the viewed me feature. As you can see from the picture below, their support staff will be quite busy fielding complaints from there, social media, emails and their support phone number.
Tagged branding, marketing, plenty of fish, pof, pof.com
How To Tackle Your Guest Blogging Campaign
March 5 | Link Building | Ryan Clark
In the face of online marketing today, reaching out to bloggers for a guest post is one of the hardest yet most effective ways of getting your site noticed. Whether it is for link building or for landing a guest blog to an authority site, that simple link towards your desired page will get that necessary traffic to make your website known. Many SEOs, internet marketers, and link builders are doing guest posting wrong though.
Whether your guest post will be published is, of course, up to the blog owner. You can’t just randomly send an article or tell them “I want to guest post on your site. Please publish this.” Else you’d get slapped back with an unfavorable reply. Proper courtesy and a mini-strategy on each website you send a guest post e-mail to will raise your chances of getting a reply.
Fortunately, there are many ways to reach out to a blog owner/webmaster if you are guest posting. Even newbies to online marketing will be able to assimilate certain styles and get an increase in their e-mail outreach conversion rate. Of course, remember that each website has a different status that will need a different outreach each time.
Here are some sure fire tips on how to make your chances of landing a guest post higher.
Site Prospecting Tips
Let’s start off with looking for sites you’d want to send a guest post to. I wouldn’t want to actually go through this step by step, since I assume that by reading this, you already know how to gather websites for possible guest blogging. There are many ways to do prospecting: using tools (such as Garret French’s Citationlabs link prospecting tool) or by manually searching websites on Google. Just remember the following when looking for guest post prospects:
- Know your client/your peg – Probably the most important part in link prospecting. You should always truly know who you are working for, since you can’t prospect if you don’t know what they do in the first place. You should know their related industries, products, background, etc. It’s hard to craft an e-mail (and reply to e-mail as well!) if you don’t know who they are or why the heck you are working for them. You are part of their team, so start knowing your clients right.
- Targeted search queries – One does not simply post anywhere. You wouldn’t be able to get the traffic that actually matter if you just post on random websites. Know which search queries you should use when looking for sites possible for guest posting.
- Use Google to your advantage – Google has several advanced search operators that might help you look for websites in your industry. Here’s a broken down list of those search operators I personally use to find certain types of websites (put the keyword of your choice in place of the <specific query> part, of course):
– inurl:<specific query
– Site:<specific>
– Intitle:<specific query>
– Allintitle:<specific query>
– Allinanchor:<specific query>
– Related:<specific query>
Jon Cooper of PointblankSEO wrote a post about 9 search query combos that will help you find more targeted prospects.
E-mail Outreach
Now we’re done with prospecting. Now comes the hard part: checking out the site and sending them an e-mail outreach for a guest blog request. As I said earlier, there are many ways to approach a blogger if you want to guest post on their site, but that is if you know how to engage them in a proper conversation. You wouldn’t want these bloggers to think that you are a spammer, right?
By the way, all of these outreach ideas revolve around the idea of Relationship Building. You participate in their communities, leave a chunk of good comments on their posts, and share their posts on your social networks. By doing this, you are helping the promotion of your prospect’s site, and you will be seen as a credible person when you ask them a favor of writing a guest post for them.
There are two simple types of site status that everyone should know when doing e-mail outreach: Active or Outdated.
Active Blogs
The standard issue, regularly updated blogs you find over the web. These sites have webmasters/blog owners who find time to update their blogs despite their busy schedules. Here is where you would want to dedicate a week or two in interacting with them to build your Trust Value. (My style involves a little humor as well, maybe you would like to try it out!)
Outreach Move #1: Specify what you want
– Be direct to the point that you would want something. People that are going to read your e-mail are busy. Don’t provide them with a weird looking outreach that looks like a template for every person you send an outreach to. Be direct that you want to do a guest post on their site.
Outreach Move #2: Be ready with interesting topic ideas you would want to write about
– Topics must be related to their site. And don’t forget to ask if they have something in mind as well. This helps them know what you would like to write about, not wasting both of your time in exchanging e-mails on figuring out a topic for your post.
“Outdated” Blogs
You found a prospect website that hasn’t been updated for quite awhile (WAIT. Quite a while means 2 weeks at most and 1 month at max, not a whole year.) You should do a bit of background research on these people and look if they are still using Twitter or any other social media sites. Chances are, these are real people that are really busy, and they don’t have the time to put a blog post on their site.
Outreach Move: Short and Sweet
– Make it as short as possible, but the essence of what you would want to write about will be still there. Remind the person that he/she hasn’t been updating the blog for quite awhile, and that the number of people on his/her community may dwindle if the blog won’t be updated anytime soon.
Outreach Move #2: Try knowing the reason why they don’t update their blog
– This is quite hard to explain, since there are tons of reasons why a blog isn’t updated anymore. So I will just put an example. Let’s say your prospect is an affiliate site’s blog, and you see that they haven’t touched the blog for a long time. Maybe it’s their cash cow site. On your outreach e-mail, you might want to include tips on how they could improve their status as an affiliate site. There are tons of software, tools (such as Affilorama’s affiliate marketing tools), and affiliate blog ideas that affiliate marketers might want to try out to get more traffic for them. It also makes your pitch on a guest blogging much easier, since you provided them with something that would help their site boost sales.
Crafting your Article
After doing in-depth research on your host and audience, it’s time to get your hands busy. Creating an article is an experience itself. If you’re lucky, writing will come to you naturally. Words run from your brain, down to your fingers and straight unto your keyboard until you finish the whole thing. There are times, though, that you’ll find yourself lost for words, trying to tie different ideas together in a single paragraph. Feel like your brain is stuck in a hole with trying to find something to write about? Maybe you’d want to check out social media trends to get an awesome idea for your article.
Remember that the main idea is to keep your audience reading. So don’t just write and write and type and type. Mind your words, your sentence structures and your delivery. In short, write compelling articles. Move your readers, make them think, and show them why you are worthy of the spot in that blog.
But how do you write a compelling article? Here are seven quick tips:
- Grab your reader’s attention using powerful words. Be sure that it’s enough to grab people’s attention but not too much that it looks like the idea is sensationalized. The idea is to catch them with your title and make them click and read on.
- Draw them in through your introduction. Enticing them with promising content.
- Deliver your promise. Give them the content and information you said you will in a way that still keeps them reading.
- Fight with their attention span. Internet users are notoriously easily bored. With the speed of information running around the Web, your audience can only spare so much time reading your post. Make sure that you give them what they want within that limited time that you have their attention.
- Converse with your readers in their language. Write in a way that they can best relate to. Note how the blog owner writes his/her own posts and try to write content in that manner without losing your own voice.
- Prettify, prettify, prettify. Engulf your readers’ senses by adding rich(?) media into your guest post. As sexy as words may be, don’t underestimate the power of images or videos to further complement your textual content.
- Never forget to proofread. Check for spelling, grammar or factual errors. Remember, this is not just your name on the line. You are guest blogging for someone else. Save him/her the time by fixing all the kinks in your article.
Now you could pass your article to your prospect. If you took in the advice above, it should land you a perfect and well written guest post that will help you boost your site’s ranks and traffic into a new level. I just read Michael King’s post on the “Anatomy of an awful blog post” and maybe you would want to refer to this post for what NOT to do when guest posting.
BONUS STAGE!
Post-submission and publication
But wait, there’s more. Your job as a guest blogger does not end at that mere fact that your post was published. It goes beyond that. You should do the following as well:
Thank the blogger who published your article. Duh. This is common courtesy guys. You don’t just snob the site after they willingly made your article live.
Help with the article’s promotion. Even if it’s not your site, promote it, it’s your article in the first place. Boost their traffic, and in turn, you get a hefty boost on the traffic you receive as well.
Continue your communication with the blogger/webmaster every once in awhile. Exchange tweets, send them an e-mail, and continue to participate on commenting on their site every once in awhile. This is to show them that you didn’t just guest post just to get their traffic, but to make their sites better. Continue to share their articles as well.
Do a Linker Outreach. This will help the exposure of your article to the next step. Explaining this step is an article itself, and Jason Acidre made this wonderful guide on how to do Linker Outreach.
These steps might be hard to practice at first, but once you get the hang of it, you will speed up your guest blogging like Sonic on steroids. Always remember, in the world of online marketing, it’s all about equivalent exchange. You need to give up something (a part of your time) if you want to obtain something (a part of a site’s traffic). You can’t breach that law, unless you’re this guy.
So what other things do you think guest bloggers must know?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Abrena is part of the online marketing team of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing portal. They provide affiliate marketing education for beginning and advance affiliates. Follow him on twitter, @johnabrena.
