“This one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0 and we expect it to go a little bit deeper and have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin.”

For better or worse, Penguin happened. Some link spam networks were rendered inert overnight, and Google have evidently continued to improve their link spam detection, as more and more website have found themselves caught in the crossfire.

But it is still all too common to find examples of shambolic websites that rank highly for competitive keywords based purely on a backlink profile consisting largely of optimised anchor text links from questionable sources. These nefarious practices have allowed these websites to cheat death and gorge themselves on the benefits of taking the place of websites that have lost visibility due to link building often performed years ago by people they no longer have any relationship with.

Damnit Google, you’ve made zombie websites!

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM…

But it’s OK! Matt Cutts and his trusty crossbow/algorithm update have been taking this sort of website down for quite a while now. And they seem to be getting better at it.

Fearsome

Cutts clearly recognises that they have to kill the head zombie to defeat the horde (or is that vampires? Vampires are a type of zombie, right? Shut up), saying “We’re also looking at some ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers. We’ve got some nice ideas on trying to make sure that that becomes less effective and so we expect that that will roll out over the next few months as well.”

So when he says they’re planning on clamping down on link spammers “advertorials, native advertising and those sorts of things that violate our quality guidelines”, I wonder if he finally means it? The webspam team at Google have been tackling the issue for years and it still seems that every time they deal with one source, the epidemic moves elsewhere. But there’s no denying the effect that the first Penguin updates have stemmed the tide significantly, so it’s not so hard to believe that they are getting closer and closer to their goal of eliminating webspam as a viable long term strategy, if not entirely.

Better yet, Cutts tells us that “We hope in the next few months to roll out a next generation of hacked sites detection that is even more comprehensive and also try to communicate better to webmasters”. What’s more useful in a zombie epidemic than early detection and a robust communication system? Besides a pump action shotgun, obviously.

“Try to make sure you make a great site that users love, that they’ll want to tell their friends about, bookmark, come back to, visit over and over again” says Cutts. “As long as you’re working hard to show great content to your users, we’re working hard to try to show your high quality content to users as well”.

So the message, as ever, is simple – Google want to include lively, healthy websites in their results pages, not a useless, unintelligent mess that serves only to gobble up as much traffic as it can. If you can only succeed by spamming, then Cutts warns of an “eventful Summer” ahead.

The post The Ranking Dead: Could Google Penguin 2.0 End The Zombie Website Epidemic? appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

Let me tell you a story. However unlike other stories you have read, or been told, this one will not contain any lions, witches or wardrobes. I shall not weave tapestries with my words of knights in shining armour or dragons that must be slain. Which I suppose is a shame really, as I’m sure some out there would find that a far more interesting read for a Friday afternoon.

It’s as I type this second paragraph that I realise I may have taken Nichola Stott’s talk at ionSearch yesterday a bit too literally. You see one of the key takeaway points from her talk for me was that when you choose to follow the much championed “content led” model or strategy for your business, the content you produce must tell a story in some way, shape or form. As by telling a story you create engagement with your target audience, which is the key to making your strategy work.

When this little gem of wisdom was revealed to me, I asked the obvious question. “What’s a story?” Obviously it’s not what I started to write at the start of this post, even though that’s the traditional thing you think of as a story. A story nowadays, in the context of creating great content for your audience, tends to be things that measure things or are evocative or emotive. What’s great about thinking like this, which Nichola pointed out as part of her presentation, is that you can use your clients existing “stuff” to create these stories. Nichola suggested that people find out what their clients are doing currently, find their USP and look at consumer groups. If at all possible use all of this to give people “the warm fuzzy wuzzies” as part of the story.

One great example Nichola gave as part of the presentation showed how you can create something out of nothing if you dig deep enough. One client they had sold thermostats, not exactly the most evocative of markets. Yet upon digging further they found that they were selling thermostats to the NHS. The NHS was in turn using these thermostats in the production of incubators for babies. This all meant that they now had a fantastic, emotive story that they could create content around to share and gain both visibility and (hopefully) links.

Now while all of these great hints and tips were shared with us all at ionSearch, and in turn I have now shared with you, I couldn’t help but notice something. A lot of what Nichola had been talking about sounded to me like traditional PR work. Now this does go hand in hand with the way I believe offsite SEO to have been heading for the past two years, and the way I have been working here at PushOn, but it does lead me to wonder if PR’s and SEO’s can continue to cling to their love/hate relationship. Or will it cause them harm as the few who can let go and just love each other tear ahead of the competition. Simon has shared his own opinion on the matter here at the wallblog, which seemed to cause quite the ruckus, and it’s well worth reading both the piece and the comments to form your own opinion if you haven’t formed one yet.

Hm, I think I can see my next story to tell you on the horizon.

If you want to read a general overview of ionSearch day one, there’s a fantastic one here, written by my colleague Jonny.

Images courtesy of the BBC and me.

The post ionSearch – Let Me Tell You A Story appeared first on PushON Ltd.

We’ll save the write ups of the other two for another blog post, but I’ve just been experimenting with the search by images feature in Google Images, and noticed a couple of ways it could be used for link building. Hat tip to Clarke Duncan on Twitter who first inspired me to have a better look at the advantages this feature could have.

Claiming What’s Yours

There’s a handy link building tip that I came across some time ago on SEOmoz (can’t find the link at the moment), where you look for images that are hosted on your domain, but are being used on other people’s websites. This was good as it would allow you to contact them to ask them to credit you with a link, but unfortunately the Google Images query that let you do this no longer appears to work (please let me know if you have a working one).

Based on this principle is the link building technique of finding people who use your images and getting them to link to you, which is exactly what Google’s new search by image feature lets you do.

Firslty, if you head over to Google Images you should now see the ability to search by images, as shown below:

You can search by image by doing any of the following:

• Enter an image URL
• Upload an image
• Drag an image into the search box

Once you do so, you’ll be presented with search results based on Google’s interpretation of the image. For this example, I’ll use Kellogg’s:

As shown in the above example, there are two key areas of the search results we want to be focussing on: the Visually similar images, and the Pages that include matching images.

Visually Similar Images

Clicking the Visually Similar Images option within Google’s returned results allows you to view a set of images that Google believes are similar to the initial one you entered. Although there are likely going to be a number of images that simply aren’t relevant, there should be enough exact matches and variants for you to work from (providing the image you entered is well recognised/used).

Going through these results allows you to see which domain each of them is on, and to investigate the page a little further for link building opportunities. If a website has used your brand’s logo then there’s a strong chance they’re actually talking about you for whatever reason, and this could provide you with a nice target list of web pages to potentially get links from.

Pages That Include Matching Images

Moving on to the next option in the search results, the Pages That Include Matching Images feature provides a number of results where Google has found your image (or a close match) on – which again could provide a number of good link building opportunities. Using Kellogg’s example, one of the results on the first page is a case study on IGD.com, which talks positively about Kellogg’s but yet doesn’t link back to their website = link building target.

Expanding the Opportunities

The above example of link building using Google’s search by image feature is done so simply by using the brand/company logo, but this can obviously be expanded for a whole manner of other opportunities. If you create your own images and use them online, then finding instances of people using them allows you to gain links as credit for doing so. Similarly, if you have created any visual graphs or other representations of data, this too can be a good opportunity to gain credit for your work.

The above isn’t just useful for link building of course, you can get people to remove your images if they are breaching copyright as Clarke suggests, or if they are using your images inappropiately.

I should also note that the above process could probably be streamlined quite nicely by scraping all of the results for a set image, then checking whether they are linking to you automatically.

The post Link Building with Google's Search by Image Feature appeared first on PushON Ltd.

SES London

We discussed how State of Search have been live blogging SES London where some of the highlights included:

Keynote from Jeffrey Hayzlett from Kodak talking about the challenges of transforming the company, an update on the Bing and Yahoo search alliance and going beyond the numbers to judge the success of an SEO campaign.

There were many people talking about the event and one of the round-up blogs that we thought was particularly interesting was from Wordtracker called “130 takeaways from SES”.

SEO Latest

The latest in SEO included a blog from Wiep on 10 years of link building, Patrick Altoft’s post about overstocked.com being penalised, SEO Moz showing us how to turn rankings into traffic and 3 articles from Search Engine Journal on Google’s latest algorithm updates:

• New Google PageRank Algorithm Debunked

• Google Updates algorithm around content farms – there is a lot of talk around this subject and many people in the industry have their view on it. Undoubtedly it will clean up the internet in terms of what people are searching for, however many people will have to think differently now that these changes have come into effect.

• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business – after the recent JC Penney penalisation Google has been continuing their clamp down on paid links. 2 more large companies have been caught up in the controversy.

Social Media Latest

The most interesting articles we saw this week that affect the future of social media were:

• A great piece on The 3 Phases of Social Media Strategy

And

• Search Engine Land reporting on “Bing Integrates Facebook Likes Further into Its Search Results”.

“The 3 phases of social media strategy” article was particularly interesting and if you take elements from it into your own campaign and make it work for you then you won’t be far off a successful social media strategy.

Any other Business

Does your Press Release pass the “Who Cares?” test?

Apple rumoured to be holding an event on March 2 to announce the iPad 2

How to use QR codes for event marketing

SEO strategies for Google News

We owe the internet for changing the world. Now let’s learn how to turn off

If you noticed anything we didn’t spot or find anything from here useful then get in touch, we love to hear from you. We’ll be back next week with another round-up. Thanks for reading!

The post SEO Weekly Round-up from PushON appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Some of the information from the slides can be found below.

What is Link Building?

The process of improving the number of external links to a given website, from relevant and authoritative domains.

Links are seen in the eyes of the search engines as ‘votes’ – the better the links you have, the bigger the opportunity for a website to gain increased search engine visibility (dependant on other factors).

Link building usually accounts for the majority of work carried out on an on-going search marketing campaign (along with CRO, reporting/analysis and on-page optimisation).

Links represent around 67% of what drives search engine rankings.
(2010 SEOmoz survey)

Why Links Matter

Although not ideal, it is one of the many contributing factors that is difficult for people to exploit (effectively) – bar some time-consuming exceptions such as content networks.

Establishing a link on a relevant and popular page could mean more than just search engine benefit, as it is likely to send potentially converting traffic to your website.

Having great content is useless if it isn’t being found in search, so external links can be an effective means of improving indexation and visibility for pages which may struggle to perform without.

What Makes a Good Link?

• Non-Existance of Nofollow Attribute
• Relevance of Linking Domain/Page
• Age of Linking Domain
• TLD of Linking Domain(.ac.uk <> .tk)
• Authority of Linking Page
• Destination URL (inc canonicalisation)
• Anchor Text
• Link Positioning (on page)
• Google PageRank
• Potential Traffic Gained

If you have any suggestions on how this could be improved then please feel free to add them in the comments.

The post Internal Link Building Presentation appeared first on PushON Ltd.

If you have been tasked with the link building for a website, you don’t necessarily have to look far from home to improve things. Google Analytics has its many uses, and with a little help it can get even better. To improve the value of existing links with Analytics, here are is a very useful custom filter.

Discovering the Full Referral URL

This feature should be available by default in Analytics, but even after all this time it isn’t. When looking at the referring traffic on a website you are only provided with the domain view as opposed to the specific page in which the referral came from. To see the full referral URL in Google Analytics an advanced custom filter is needed – and here’s how: (credit to Sebastien Page for posting this).

1. Log in to Analytics and click ‘Edit’ on the profile
2. Scroll down to the filters and chose ‘Add Filter’
3. Name the filter (eg ‘Full Referral URL’) then use the following options:

Filter Type: Custom Filter

Advanced

Field A -> Extract A:         Referral               (.*)

Field B -> Extract B:         blank

Output To -> Constructor:            User Defined     $A1

Field A Required               Yes

Field B Required               No

Override Output Field    Yes

Case Sensitive   No

4. Save the changes

The custom filter won’t work retroactively, but after it has been applied you will be able to view the full referral by going to the ‘Visitors’ option in the navigation menu of the profile, and selecting ‘User Defined’.

Improving the Value of Links

Once you are able to see the full referring URL you have the ability to explore those links in more detail and improve the value (in some cases). Here are some instances in which you may wish to change how a link is being directed to a website:

• The link is pointing to a non-primary URL (for example the non-www copy of the site)
• The anchor text is irrelevant (or untargeted)
• The link would be better suited to another page on the website
• The link has the ‘nofollow’ attribute applied to it
• The link is positioned around irrelevant content, such as headings that say “Sponsored Links”

Contacting a website owner to request a change to a link isn’t a difficult task, and you will find that most of the time they are willing to do so. It’s a quick and easy job for them, and if you could also offer them a bit of free link advice for themselves to sweeten the deal!

The post Improving the Value of Links with Google Analytics appeared first on PushON Ltd.

The perfect link-profile is the imperfect link-profile

Any link-builder will tell you that the perfect link is one from domain x, appearing in the body there, with this anchor text, and the page title, heading and x, y and z this, this and this. But a whole link-profile that replicates this would be hugely unnatural and as a result you might be overly optimising – missing out on some real superstar wins.

• Quality link-building is less about being correct and more about measured mistakes.
• Boolean search engine algorithms are old school; topic semantics and naturalist styles are the way forward.

The temptations in link-building…

Nepotism, link-buying and using your own portfolio of sites to build links provides a big temptation to those that partake in this activity to drop links onto those sites using highly optimised short-tail terms.

If, indeed you do have control of over the anchor text, the link title and location of the link…why not mix things up? Throw in some ultra long-tail, some URLs, some domain name links, short-tail, some random tail, etc, etc…it’s for the greater SEO good, trust me!

Are patterns natural?

I carried out a site review recently, and approximately 45% of the site’s link-profile was made up of 4 very close variations on a very short-tail term, across 1,000’s of links. This is not natural, and flagged excessive keyword targeting in the link-building activity in a a huge industry, when really they should be optimising for a broader range of terms.

More often than not, you will see the domain name or the URL as the link for the site, not an overly imposing handful of short-tail terms. In this instance, those links also sat on unrelated pages and sites with blogrolls including ‘Replica Rolex watches’ and ‘Cialis’ links, et al…not exactly the ideal online neighbourhood to be associated with.

All it would take is for a search engine to flag this irregularity, have a human moderator review that link-profile and devalue those links – causing a massive shift in the site’s visibility. This is quite obviously not good SEO service.

Empirical Methodological Naturalism

Methodological naturalism, or the testing of causes and events in our surroundings to support or reject our hypothesis, is a great way of developing our understanding in SEO. I for one follow the mantra that it is possible to over-optimise. A contradiction of terms? Well no, I don’t think so.

Experience and some understanding of search engine algorithms tells me that as much as search engines want to provide the exact match, the best and most relevant result, it has to resolve two things…it must satisfy queries with unspecified searcher intent and in doing this, it must filter search engine spam.

A generic search for “DVD”, could have the intent to make a purchase, rent a DVD, informational research, get news, view latest trailers, get an image, etc, etc…It therefore must piece together the most relevant result using a variety of metrics, looking at things like historic searches, possibly behavioural metrics (e.g. frequency or % of returning visitors to a website), etc…As a result you need to optimise for intent as much as you do a keyword.

Optimising for “DVD” might therefore be very unhelpful but optimising for “DVD rental” or “DVD shop” communicates to the search engines that you are online with a commercial intent and therefore the search engine can look to provide the most relevant visitors at the least effort. For this reason, although it’s important to specify your intention, it’s good to mix things up. For this reason you need a healthy list of modifying terms at your disposal.

Variety is the spice of life!

Nofollow, stop words, miscellaneous words, various lengths of anchor text, semantic variations, modifiers, typos, synonyms, IP… these all make the naturalness of the links that much more natural. A site can obviously take quite a number of these ‘perfect links’ but I wouldn’t want to ever suggest that you

The search engines have more data than is possible to imagine – so be mindful of that next time you want to buy a sack full of links and dump them on your link-profile; how natural is that going to look over time?!! Any link profile can of course absorb quite a number of perfect links in a natural way but be mindful of how this occurs and at what rate. A search engines link-graph consists of masses of data so anomalies can stand-out a mile (check-out Majestic SEO for some insights on previous link-profile activity).

More Reading

OK, so maybe ‘sabotaging your link-profile’ is a slight exaggeration but it’s massively important for longevity of results in my opinion. If it’s a topic that’s new to you, make sure you do a load more reading…

There’s loads of stuff out there, but a couple of my favourites that inspired this post will provide you with plenty of reading, include Marie-Claire Jenkins post on Huomah and Shaun Anderson’s over at Hobo << really cool stuff.

What are your thoughts?

Does anchor text density play a major part in your link-building activity?

About Guest Poster, Ben McKay

Ben is a SEO Manager at Mediaedge:cia, and writes about SEO consulting over at Just Me and My and more recently Greensplash Design, SEO Scoop and Search Engine Journal.

Ben’s a huge fan of some of the geekiest SEO blogs around, and has a number of favourite SEO blogs, and hates writing in the third person! He’s a sociable chap so make sure you say hello to Ben on Twitter.

The post Sabotage your Link-Profile for Optimised Longevity appeared first on PushON Ltd.

In many ways the praises of deep links go unsung but in fact play an integral part in SEO. When building a campaign we want to build both the domain authority and individual page strengths. Deep links tie in to page strength as we need to in some way to tell Google (and other search engines) that our sites also have excellent content on pages other than that of the home page. To do this we employ a number of internal and external link development tactics.

I will now outline some quick and easy ways to gain deep links.

Link Bait

This is something that i don’t play with nearly enough but i certainly have a great appreciation for it. Link baiting is essentially where you create a piece of content that preferably goes viral to help develop links. It’s something that people would look naturally want to link to. You could literally write several books on this topic but i would recommend checking out SEO Shark’s blog. One of my favourite examples of link bait is the search engine smackdown game. Work of genius. All I will say is that link bait is a kind of art and the pay off can be significant.

link baiting Vs viral search success

Article Submissions

Article marketing has come under some heavy scrutiny in the SEO field over the last few years but it still remains an effective tool for creating one way links. Creating a well written article with links pointing to several pages in your site can help develop your number of links however the strength of these links can be fairly low. At least they are on topic and relevant. Some of the more popular articles sites include:

EzineArticles
Go Articles
Article Base

Directories

I think directories still have there place in SEO and they can be a nice way to build deep links to your site. You will find many directories offer one link pointing to the home page with an additional 5 links pointing towards your inner pages. One that offer deep links are often paid. I have found this particular tactic to be extremely effective in getting inner pages to rank well in the past.

Social Media

The number of social media sites is growing all the time and many of them are now offering do follow links. It’s a nice and simple tactic but its worth spending the time developing profiles properly. I personally like Squidoo as you build the pages up and develop reasonably strong page ranked links.

Internal Linking

This is without doubt the easiest method to build deep links and is proven to be extremely effective. Pointing internal links to key pages not only helps develop there status but also points users to your key content. It’s important to not over do it and review your site structure and content first. Don’t forget to use that anchor text wisely.

There are of course many ways to build deep links and i have mentioned some of the main ones above. Another key one for example could be guest blog posts. My final bit of advice is to review your sites structure and content first and devise a focused strategy.

Happy Hunting……

The post The Easy Way To Build Deep Links appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Although there are many factors that influence where your website will be ranked in the SERP some factors are more important than others. After taking a look at Bing for a few days now and carrying out some analysis it has become apparent that Bing uses a very different algorithm to Google. A good example that shows this clearly is searching for SEO Manchester in both Google and Bing.

The two SERPs looks very different, only one of the top ten results are the same and many big SEO agencies in Manchester are missing from the Bing SERP. You’ll also notice that the Bing Local Listings are not very competitive at all with only one agency being listed.

So which factors should you focus on to rank well in Bing?

• A mixture of inbound links including a good number with good keyword rich anchor text (see this great article on Link Building Secrets by Patrick Atloft).
• Make sure you write keyword rich, unique meta data which is also human readable.

If you have any other ideas on which factors are most important to rank in Bing please leave a comment and let us know!

The post Bing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – What is most important? appeared first on PushON Ltd.

I’m a little apprehensive at the thought of opening the floodgates, but what we give out in link love, we hope to gain in contributions to the conversation.

Has anyone had experience – good or bad?

The post Moving to 'Do-Follow'? appeared first on PushON Ltd.