All posts in link building

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On SEO forums one of the most often discussed topics are Google penalties. Webmasters seek help to determine whether and why they have been penalised by Google. They also want to know how to deal with the penalty once it’s established that they have been hit by one.

What is a Google penalty and what isn’t? There seem to be different definitions floating around.

While Google employees will tell you that many SEO issues described as penalties aren’t actually penalties, most people seem to consider sudden and unexplained ranking and/or search traffic drops as a penalty. They at least suspect they have been subjected to a penalty.

Today I’d like to assist webmasters in determining whether they have been hit by an actual Google penalty by listing common reasons for getting penalised by Google.

Some of them are simply Google filters that deal with overtly manipulative SEO techniques. Some of these aren’t penalties at all, but I list them here as well because they are often mistaken for a penalty.

So just check out this list of ways to get penalised by Google. Many of them are high risk SEO tactics considered to be black hat by some.

google +1 button

Google +1 for websites is here for a few days, and while some people are still (or again) skeptical, there are quite a lot of webmasters who have adopted the + 1 button almost immediately. The SEO industry has been especially quick to include the buttons. I am among them, while I still don’t use the Facebook like.

I’m not going to shout hooray because Google finally released a button, but nonetheless I can see that it’s the best and the hitherto most important attempt by Google at entering the social media arena. Most others failed miserably and Google has learned some lessons it seems.

The ease of use, for instance, and the quick announcement that the +1 votes will count as a ranking factor, are good signs that +1 will still be here a year from now.

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Most of traditional SEO link building is still centered around the idea of actually building the links as if on a construction site. The idea or metaphor that links are like bricks and you can use them for building has been successfully contested recently by Ross Hudgens in his essay “Please exit the link building“.

It was an excellent write up, but in the end it failed to offer a solution that is not really about building links. The alternative to link building is of course getting links.

Getting links implies that you do not manually build the links like a house in the real world, but people from outside who you may not even know link to you.

This is of course the logical way to get links, and was the way the Internet worked even before link building was considered to be part of SEO.

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With the recent “Panda” Google quality update one of the key changes was that low quality content and links within it have been discounted by Google. It means that

not only so-called content farms got hit by the Panda update, but also sites which heavily relied on content farms for inbound links.

Perhaps the most obvious casualty was article marketing. If article marketing was  one of your key link building tactics prior to the Panda update, you finally have to adapt to modern link building and link baiting techniques that still work in 2011.

 

In this list I focused on common sense, widely used techniques, of which you’ll find plenty of examples on the Web. I didn’t want to be particularly creative and spectacular. So if you are Eric Ward or Michael Martinez you might not find anything new here.

For everybody else: check the list to find out whether you use all of them or at least those fitting best in your area, niche or industry.

As the importance of SEO becomes increasingly widely recognised, millions more marketers have started churning out press releases. Unfortunately, many seem less concerned about the potential media coverage than about the optimisation benefits.

A good press release, when it’s picked up on and used by the media, can do wonders for your brand awareness and corporate authority. But it’s also great for optimisation, and if your agency is writing slapdash articles, calling them press releases and distributing them to a bunch of websites where nobody will ever read them, then you’re barely scraping the surface of your press release potential.

By creating press releases that writers and bloggers will actually use, your effort can pack a far more powerful punch both in online and offline marketing.  Here are some of my top tips for dramatically better releases.

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When it comes to link building one of the most important aspects of it is the optimisation of the actual link. Whether getting the link voluntarily or by contacting webmasters, you have to exert the utmost influence on the link itself. Unfortunately this is also a Catch 22.

When you start controlling the appearance of your link it stops being a natural link.

Thus Google can use filters on such a link to determine it’s ”manufactured”.

So there is a really volatile relationship between links being natural and useful for SEO. Most successful SEO techniques have been abused in the past by spammers so that Google tweaks its algo to curb overtly artificial link building.

In  recent weeks we have witnessed two overwhelming waves of news I’d like to call ‘news tsunamis‘. Like real tsunamis you have no choice, you can’t escape the news when you are in the nearby area. For this kind of news the whole planet is nearby.

Maybe some tribes in the Amazon jungle or a few monks in the Himalayas haven’t noticed the death of Osama Bin Laden and the royal wedding, but apart from those lucky few, we have all been drowned in these news waves.

While I was unable to escape the news, no matter how much I tried, I at least tried to reroute the hype induced into something useful: SEO.

My first urge was to catch up quickly and take advantage of the huge waves of traffic.

Instead, I decided to watch the waves of news and to follow the steps of others who have tried to use the energy of these waves to power their websites. Why? It doesn’t make much sense to get huge news traffic without planning what to do with it.

In late 2007 Google officially announced that so-called paid links are outside its webmaster guidelines, and asked webmasters to report paid links they find on the Web via a special form. Fast forward to 2011 and you’d expect that paid links are long gone, like stuffing meta keyword tags or inflating keyword density on page. They aren’t.

There is even a surge of interest in buying links after many large brands have been caught using this technique successfully to manipulate Google’s algorithm for months.

These large brands are not alone; indeed, even Google itself has been sponsoring sites that link to it without using the nofollow attribute required by the Google webmaster guidelines. So it’s no wonder that in this world where some people are more equal than others, many webmasters resort to buying links from text link brokers who are still more or less openly selling them.

Recently I noticed that the SEOptimise blog ranks at #1 for the query [seo blog] in Google.co.uk

Then it dawned on me why we rank at #1: the single most important factor to getting there was linking out.

Yes, it wasn’t link building or even getting links; it was simply linking out. You could argue that it’s lots of great content etc, but many SEO blogs from the UK have great content. Nobody is linking out like we do though.

You get penalised. You get a heap of traffic, and then get penalised.

While I am certainly no black-hat by any means, and do not advocate the techniques outlined in this post for long-term SEO projects, I love testing the theories and rumours that circulate in the SEO community about what link building works and what doesn’t. Regardless of how dodgy the rumours are,  it helps me build a bigger picture of  how Google treats link building.

 

So during the Christmas period a few months back I decided to set myself a challenge:  to see what would happen if I built a very large quantity of low quality links in a short period of time into a new domain, in order to gauge where Google draws the line with this type of link building and to understand better what pattern this kind of link building penalty might have. Call me crazy, but these things are good to test and they help you to understand what to do and what patterns to look for when something goes wrong unintentionally.

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