Tim Grice shares insight and expert advice on link building and SEO. Taking into account recent algorithm changes and the need to make links natural and of editorial value.
5. Advanced Link Building Workshop
Google’s On-going Clean Up
• Toolbar PageRank Launched
2000
• Florida Update - The Death of Keyword Stuffing
2003 • Cassandra – Death to Hidden Links and co-owned domains
• Austin Update – Hidden Text and Meta Tag Stuffing
2004
• Jagger Update – Devaluation of low quality links (reciprocal links & link farms)
2005 • Nofollow to control outbound links
• Vince – The Brand Update
2009 • Rel Canonical – Duplicate Clean Up
• Bing & Google Confirm Social Signals are used in Algorithm
2010 • May Day Update – Sites with low quality thin content seemed to affected
• PANDA!!
2011
• Unnatural Links / Penguin / Blog Networks
2012
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SEO Changed
• Low quality content is actively being penalised
• Unnatural links are been devalued and causing penalties
• Anchor text manipulation is being actively penalised
Google are getting better at detecting quality and removing spam
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Slight Difference
• Penalty Applied 2 – 3 weeks after the message
Message 1
• Links have to be removed and Reconsideration submitted
• Less serious, may see slight drops in key terms
Message 2 • Should endeavour to remove links and monitor rankings
• Consider reconsideration if rankings/traffic don’t recover
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Penguin
• The Over Optimisation Algorithm
• 3% of queries affected
• Aggressive anchor text
• Unnatural link patterns/signals
• Aggressive on page tactics
• Keyword stuffing
• Hidden text
• Manipulative redirects
• Cloaking
• Manipulative Content
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Combating Unnatural Links
• Look for low quality follow links in your profile that pass weight
and/or anchor text
• Unnatural Links 1 – All links to be removed and reconsideration to
be sent via Webmaster Tools
• Unnatural Links 2 – Identify spam links, remove, apply
reconsideration only if you have seen negative impact
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Unnatural Links Hit
• Rankings relying on low quality links will all drop
• Most severe penalties hit with the first batch of messages
• Removing links + Reconsideration is the only way to recover
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Additional Considerations
• Build high value editorial links with brand anchor text
• Use branded email address if possible
• Use pseudonym email address for particularly spammy sites,
as a social/PR backlash is possible
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Penguin – Link Spam Algorithm
• Targets web spam tactics that have been against Google’s guidelines for years
• Looks for unusual linking patterns
• Links in spun or scraped content
• Aggressive anchor text strategies
• Devalues rankings for keywords that have been aggressively targeted
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Penguin Hit
• Specific keywords lose rankings
• Anchor text manipulation is a significant factor
• Remove links and wait for algorithm to update
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Reconsideration Advice
• Only submit when you have removed 80% of identified links or more
• Attach Google doc that displays the effort made to clean links up
• Attach challenging email exchanges
• Show evidence of contact e.g. email addresses
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301 Redirect?
• Will help recover in the short term
• If links aren’t removed penalty will pass 3 – 4 months later
• May consider 404ing redirecting problem pages away from the domain
• Always last resort
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Comment
Spam
Article Content
Marketing Spinning
SEO
Text
Strategy Fake
Link Ads Reviews
Blog Forum
Networks Profiles If this is your strategy, YES!
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Locations Optimisation
Video Optimisation Outreach
Schema Content Strategy
Blogging
SEO
Authorship
Strategy
Image Optimisation Technical SEO
Social Google +
Editorial Link Building
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Link Profile Architecture
• Building links with editorial value
• Perform outreach to facilitate content/social strategy
• Remove poor links
• Balance anchor text with keyword variation
• Actively build brand links
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Advice From Google
• They see a slightly different version of webmaster tools
• Links can take months to be re-crawled and ‘neutralised’
• All requests are manually reviewed
• Google work on a sample of links (you have to remove from this sample)
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Google Webmaster Hangouts
https://sites.google.com/site/we
bmasterhelpforum/en/office-
hours
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Summary
• Remove duplicate/low quality content
• Remove spam links from your profile
• Send in reconsideration if you have been negatively affected
• Adopt an editorial link building strategy with a high editorial threshold
• Clean up anchor text manipulation and balance profile with brand signals
• Adopt a more holistic strategy incorporating all search products
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Link strategy
The only way to future-proof your link strategy is to make links a natural
by-product of your normal marketing strategy
As you might expect, this isn’t easy. How many links does your marketing
strategy deliver every month at the moment?
If you sit back and wait for links to arrive you won’t get enough to rank
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Relationships
Most agency/client link building relationships work like this
Corporate
Comms Linkbuilding
Media
Public Affairs
Relations
Agency
Client PR Onsite Keyword
SEO
Strategy Optimisation Research
Strategy
Internal
Blog Outreach
Comms
Other SEO
Crisis Comms Social Media projects
Client does some great stuff over here Agency does some other stuff over there
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It should work something like this
Marketing
Media Blog Social Crisis Internal Public
Corporate Comms SEO
Relations Outreach Media Comms Comms Affairs
SEO
Links Links Links Keywords Links Links Links
Training
Technical Reputation
SEO Management
Every marketing task can be performed by the client or the agency – usually an agile agency will
fill the gaps where the client doesn’t have in-house resource
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Editorial Discretion
“I would draw a little bit of daylight between paid directories that
exercise no editorial discretion and those like Yahoo, who have a
high editorial threshold.”
Matt Cutts - Feb 2012
We need to be focusing on building links that very few people can get,
links that clearly show editorial discretion has taken place.
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Doesn’t matter if links are paid, it
matters how they appear.
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Sharing Links
• Good content always gets more shares than links
• Social shares should be built at the same time as creating links
• Links acquired should be shared
• If a piece of content doesn’t warrant a share, it doesn’t warrant a link
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Outreach Process
Create Begin
Niche
Mutual Outreach Evaluate
Profiling
Benefit Campaign
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Breaking Down A Niche
Example – Film and movie bloggers:
• Film news
• Independent film
• Horror
• Action
• Film reviews
• Film making
A single generic approach simply wont cut it across all of these niches, we
need to tailor our outreach to each mini-niche
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Shared & Linked To Articles
Why do we need this?
The most important element of the profile
If we know what articles are shared and linked to – we can tailor our content
and outreach hooks around this
There are a few ways this can be done for different budget sizes…
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Turn into a table and sort by social metrics or link metrics – note down both
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SearchMetrics
These are the top, socially visible posts
Great indication as to the content that the niche wants
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BuzzStream
Store contacts and send emails through BuzzStream
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Possible Template
Hi [name],
I hope all is well.
I am currently representing [client x] who are [client info].
We’re actually a big fan of your blog over here, and we saw that [post x] was a real winner for you guys last year
with almost [x shares] on [SM platform], we liked it so much that we wrote a follow up piece to see if it could get
close to [post x] in terms of popularity on [SM platform], which would give you guys some great exposure in
that platform.
Let me know if you’d be interested and we can send it over for you to have a read through.
Many thanks,
Joe Griffiths
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A More Generic Approach
Hi [First Name],
I hope this email finds you well. I came across [primary website] and I really love it!
I manage [client x’s] blogger relations where we’re looking to connect with key figures in the [niche] blogosphere, a
community that is very important to us.
So much so that we’re hosting an exclusive, invite only Google+ Hangout [event description] We would love to extend
this invite to you and ask for you to cover this on [site name] where we will supply you with a video of the Hangout
and ask you to share your experiences with your readers.
Please RSVP back to me and I can get you booked in
Hope to hear from you soon!
Best regards,
[Name]
Blogger relations
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Are they worth it?
• Use as part of a brand anchor text strategy
• Push out in line with other outreach activity
• Only publish content that is genuinely news worthy
• There are better ways to spend cash (consider cision point)
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Link Wheel… With a Twist
Guest
post
Guest Guest
Post post
Authority
Publisher Target Website
Guest Guest
Post Post
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Newspapers Penalised?
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/why-did-my-pagerank-go-down/#comments
• If below a PR the site is likely penalised
• Check quality of sponsored/advertorial type content
• Ensure your content is high quality and links naturally
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Infogr.am
Create an Infographic in minutes
You could offer to visualise posts that were popular
in the niche by using the social data from the profiles
If that doesn’t work data is also freely available at
lots of governmental websites
Keep links natural/brand
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Examples
• Bingo – Mummy Blogger Awards
• Trailers from Cinema Chain
• Expert opinion – financial spread betting
• Data trends from diamond retailer
• Backup Plugin for Wordpress
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Low Budget SEO
• Have to move away from focussing on quantity
• Bi monthly outreach / link building (you don’t have to do it all in 1 month)
• Make use of white hat networks
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Guest Post Friendly?
Have guest posts been posted previously? If no, it indicates they aren’t open to receiving
articles and a different approach (or awesome outreach) is needed
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Authority Publisher
Brainstorm Publish on Seed out to Monitor
Get Buy In
Ideas Authority Site Bloggers Alerts/Links
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Our news strategy
Base content around current
events
Comment and react to industry
changes and news
Incorporate your social
activities into you content
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Summary
• Bad links have to be removed
• A natural link profile should be crafted
• Link building should be a bi-product of wider marketing activity
• Links acquired should have editorial value
• Find something to leverage
• Low budget white hat SEO is possible
• Invest in the right tools
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Questions?
Tim.grice@branded3.com
http://www.branded3.com/
http://www.seowizz.net/
@tim_grice
Editor's Notes
After we’ve selected the niche
Possibly even quote the shares of previous articles to get buy in
Once in Excel, filter down to pages with more than 1 link to them