All posts by Matthew Taylor

Matthew is one of the most experienced members of the SEOptimise team and works on a number of large clients. With a background in web design, Matthew is also responsible for the SEOptimise website as well as specialist content production, including infographics. He is also the comment moderator on our blog.

Since the introduction of the Penguin update and what some SEOs like to call the BLOOPER algorithm (Back Link Over Optimisation Penalty Exterminates Rankings), it has become more important than ever to ensure your site has as clean a link profile as possible. Historically, most sites would have at least a few dodgy links, but some may have more than others. This has meant that, sadly, a lot of businesses have been caught in the crossfire with Penguin updates. Part of the update appears to look at the type of sites linking to yours, the anchor text diversity of your profile, and the type of links. For example, an over optimised link profile biased to a number of links for certain anchors could trigger a penalty, so could a number of blog-roll links.

This means that the SEO industry needs to make sure it has an up-to-date link removal strategy in case disaster strikes. Below is outlined a brief strategy to get you started on this process. It will get you to consider the different levels of information you should be looking at, show you how to acquire the information you don’t have, and give you a few tips on some removal strategies and reconsideration requests.

Getting Started

The first thing to do is run an extract from all your available sources, such as:

It would be fair to say that pretty much every major change to the online environment is greeted with the same two questions by the vast majority of the SEO community –

  1. What is it?
  2. How can I use it to boost my SEO campaigns?

So with adoption of the next major evolution of HTML becoming more common, and having a growing feeling that it was about to come up in more client meetings, I decided it would be a good time to check how I can potentially make the most of HTML5.

I won’t go into a whole explanation of what HTML5 is now – I will leave that for the web design blogs – but the highlights as I understand them are:

  • A more descriptive set of markup tags; for example, nav, article, aside and footer
  • The introduction of Canvas element could be used for rendering graphs or images dynamically without the need for browser plugins

It is apparent from this list that there are some pretty big changes between HTML4 and HTML5. For example, I’m guessing that every SEO will spot the third bullet point – video without the need for Flash – and realise the obvious content indexing benefit this will offer as a result.

Last year, during a chat with one of the @seoptimise twitter followers, they mentioned a post on SEJ about how it is a myth that bad links can get your site penalised (a position that the author later changed after feedback) and asked my opinion on it. The strange thing was that a few months earlier I had to sort out the exact issue for one of our clients. So I thought it would be an idea to write a post it.

The background

We had been working with our client for about a year and, through a sensible link building campaign, had just managed to achieve decent rankings for some of the most competitive and highest converting terms in their industry. Then within a week their previously consistent bottom of page one/top of page two rankings (doesn’t sound great until you see their competitors) dropped to page three and four, at the same time as their link count experiencing a large and very unnatural spike.

Upon investigation of their back links we identified over 80 sites each linking back from ten different pages with exactly the same title tags (which were the same as some pages on our client site), random URLs and the same anchor text. They were remarkably easy to spot.

When we checked the sites it appeared some were adult or other spammy sites, but most of the sites were hacked WordPress sites. They had ten or so pages added that used the HTML code and content from our clients’ site. To make matters worse they had replaced some of the content with links to Viagra, casino and adult sites – not really neighbourhoods we wanted them to be associated with.

So the scale of our problem was 800+ pages linking multiple times to our client, as well as various low quality/spammy/malware sites, using large parts of our clients’ content, effectively creating duplicate content issues.

So if you have a similar problem here is what I suggest doing next…

Step 1 – Identify you have a problem

This is probably step minus one, and it is usually quite easy, but you have to be looking (if you don’t check your own backlinks regularly you should). You do not want your client to find out before you!

Just to show you how easy it can be sometimes, check out the anchor text report for one of our clients competitors – anyone would think they were an online pharmacy!

Anchor Text Screenshot

As a side note – if you have a forum or profile pages make sure they are moderated!!

Typing cat*
2011 has been another very busy year on the SEOptimise blog, with nearly 400 posts generating over 400,000 visits and well in excess of half a million pageviews (oh and one best blog award).

With the year drawing to a close, and Christmas just round the corner, I thought it would be a great opportunity to try and summarise the best and most popular posts of the year, and hopefully give you a few early SEO Christmas gifts. While I am personally not a fan of list posts, judging by the most popular posts a lot of you are. So ever eager to please, here is a list of the 58 best/most popular posts of the year.

Our 10 most popular posts

What better place to start than the most popular posts of the year? Between them, the posts below generated almost 100,000 pageviews. So, working on the basis that 100,000 people (ok, maybe not people) can’t be wrong, there must be some awesome SEO gems contained within them.

  1. 30​ Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011 – the first post of the year is also the most popular, with Tad’s post about what was going to happen to search and social in 2011 receiving over 17,000 pageviews. As you would expect, there were a few predications that didn’t come true, but a fair few that did.

For anyone who missed it yesterday, Google announced on their Blog that they would be “protecting personalized search results” by encrypting search queries made whilst signed into your Google account. Which, they go on to explain, means that “websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query”.

For SEOs this means that within Google Analytics (and in fact ALL analytics programs) you will no longer be able to see the referring keyword for a certain percentage of your traffic, and will instead get a variation of the “(not set)” which is used for PPC traffic (I think I remember seeing it will be “(not provided)”). This will obviously create issues for SEOs, who will be unable to fully track campaign performance, as it will also have a knock-on effect on conversion tracking and ROI calculations. Google have mentioned that “an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to a site for each of the past 30 days” will be available through Webmaster Tools, but will this suffice for even medium size sites that may be getting traffic from thousands of queries?

not provided analytics

So what are the likely solutions for SEOs…
• Are we going to have to give more weight to less worthwhile metrics such as rankings?
• Are we going to have to spend more time fiddling and combining data from WMT and analytics?
• Are we going to have work on assumptions that traffic to certain pages will have come from certain keywords?

There are a few interesting subplots to this announcement. Firstly, clicks on PPC ads will still send information on the query to “enable advertisers to measure effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve ads and offers they present to you”; obviously Google doesn’t care as much who sees what paid advertising you click on or the information advertisers can use to manipulate your online experience! Secondly, a lot of people are already speculating this is linked to paid Analytics. What are the odds that Google will give this data out to people who cough up for a subscription?

If you have worked in SEO for any period of time, I’m sure you will be familiar with a number of the better known tools around, tools such as SEOmoz Pro Tools, Majestic SEO and the Google Keyword Tool. For a lot of SEOs and situations these tools can provide all the help you need, but there are a number of awesome low profile tools that can take SEO campaigns and agencies to the next level.

Tool: Linkdex
Use it for: Competitor analysis, back link analysis, on-page keyword analysis, rank checking…
Price: from $49

Linkdex is probably one of our favourite new tools in the SEOptimise office as it offers visual analysis of back link profiles as well as anchor text reports, rank checking and on-page keyword analysis (among a host of other things).

By far its most useful feature is the ability to analyse the type of links in your profile as well of those in your competitors’ profiles (powered by a quality filtered version of the Majestic SEO index), and it even has the capability to add a time dimension to the analysis. Basically, if you want to know why you’re being outranked and what type of links to build to beat the competition, it’s all laid out in bar chart form. That’s a pretty epic tool to start with, right? Well in addition to this, if you click on any of the bars to see a list of the links (which you can sort by “influence”), you can then explore them and add them to your “to build” list. And finally, you can hit a tick box and see what links have been built recently, effectively giving you a sneaky peek at your competitors’ SEO efforts.

linkdex screenshot

It’s still pretty new and there is some stuff that needs work, but it’s still a great tool that gives you loads of actionable stuff and they are constantly updating it.

If you want a more detailed write up check out this Linkdex review from Sam Stratton at Koozai.

Ethics and SEO


By On August 31, 2011 In seo With 15 Comments

Anyone who attended Brighton SEO earlier in the year (and didn’t succumb to the lure of the pub before the last session) would have sat and listened, with varying levels of interest, to the panel debate on ‘is there such a thing as ethical SEO’.  While I sat and took in the tennis-like back and forth discussion of a topic never likely to be fully covered in 45 minutes, I began to ponder my own views on both ethics and where they sit with SEO.

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Ethics for SEO agencies

Working for an SEO agency, you end up working for a multitude of different clients, in a whole myriad of sectors, using an array of different techniques. By the very nature of doing so, you effectively become an extension of your client’s own company. So, as an agency, are you actually able to set your own ethics or do you end up adhering to those of your clients?

I have been working as a full time SEO Exec for just about a year now and a few things have become apparent in that time, most notably that SEOs love tools and are always on the lookout for that elusive competitive advantage to give them a ranking edge. So it strikes me as odd that every agency already has access to a free tool that will (amongst other things) get them high quality links, improve their keyword research, increase their PPC CTRs and conversion rates and keep their clients happy and informed. But they very rarely use it to its full potential.

A couple of months ago Kevin sent an email round the SEOptimise office looking for a volunteer/guinea pig to check out the Site Visibility Premium Podcast. As one of the newest members of the SEOptimise team I thought it would be a good opportunity to increase my knowledge and plus it would make a good subject for my first company blog post (so be nice).

I should probably admit to something first, while I absolutely love learning new stuff I do tend to have the attention span of a small child while reading things, which is a slight problem in an industry where there is loads to learn and lots of it can come from blog posts, so I am always up for different ways of learning.

With that little confession out of the way – on to the review.