Search Love – How To Get Out of the Google Penalty – Paul Madden

Paul Madden, one of the founders of LinkRisk gave a great presentation at Search Love about Removing Spammy links.  This was particularly useful to those who have had a Google penalty.

Paul started the presentation by taking the audience through his history and how started his career in link building, from building scraper sites, to working in affiliates and now helping companies remove links.

Pre 2012 – links either counted or they didn’t. So people used to throw as many  links as they could to see their rankings improve.

Post 2012 – Google changed their stance. This was a major change and increased the pressure on link builders.

Google adopts very quickly and link builders have to as well.  Google introduced Penguin last year which was directly aimed at those who do SEO.  They introduced link penalties. So Paul and his team needed to change. As a result, Paul helps companies who have been affected by the Google updates and now have a penalty.

Paul Madden Search Love

 

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September Update in SEO – Google Hummingbird and 100% Not Provided

September was a very busy month, which is why I have been delayed in posting this month’s round up.  Google celebrated their 15th birthday with two major changes, it introduced in the last week of September:

1- 100% not provided

2- Hummingbird

What a birthday present it shared with all of us – encrypting search query data, which means rolling out 100% not provided over the next couple of months.  The change comes as no surprise as the monopoly of Google has grown from strength to strength.  As they see the power of GA  as a great free analytics tool take shape, Google want to change the boundaries.  This encryption of all searches has come earlier than anticipated but is not really a surprise to the SEO industry who seem to always be severely impacted by the Google updates.

What does this 100% not provided mean for those in SEO? I wrote a detailed explanation on the iProspect blog, here is a summary:

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August Update in SEO – Link Building

Despite August being the holiday/vacation time, a lot has happened this month.

For this month’s round up on SEO Jo Blogs, I am going to focus on link building. The post to kick this off is the one by Julie Joyce on Search Engine Watching, giving the Link Building A – Z Guide Definition Terms.  If you have questions about link building before you read this, you certainly won’t after.

Guest Posting when done correctly is good for SEO

Grant Draper from VibeTech Media wrote an interesting post on searchenginepeople earlier this month about how to get the benefit of guest posting with Google’s blessing.  With the recent algo updates, webmasters may be scared about accepting guest posts.  But they should not be if the content is relevant to the site and it has not been written just for the sake of it, with a link back.  It is more important to have relevant content rather than getting a link from a high PR page (which used to help sites rank). If you are having guest posts on your site, make sure you set the guidelines, such as the length, the number of links within the body, the rights to the images and ask writers reply to comments.

Webmasters should also be outreaching to those who already writing about their products/services but not linking to them.

 

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July Update in SEO – Monthly New Blasts

There is so much going on in the industry, how do you know where to begin reading the news and know exactly what to take on board? Here are some of the news from this past month which I found interesting and what I wanted to share with you. (This does not mean the posts I didn’t mention were not interesting – I just can’t write them all down). I am planning on writing a summary of some of the most interesting news in search monthly, so if there is something I have missed, please let me know.

Penguin 2.0

I particularly liked RustyBrick’s post earlier this month about Penguin.  In the post it featured one webmaster who thought he had been hit by Penguin 2.0, as he had a sudden drop in traffic and therefore he wrote to Google.  Google responded to the webmaster and they said it was just normal fluctuations even though it was not usual for the webmaster to see these changes in traffic.

Summary: Google are as clear as mud about their updates.

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June 25th Google Update

We only just had the Penguin 2.0 update at the end of May and then we have been hit by another update from our friends at Google in June.  For sites that are in .com.au, it may be hard to see whether the Penguin 2.0 had an impact on their site or if it was the latter update considering the fact the updates do not always impact non .com domains straight away.

There was a great post on MozCon about the June 25th update and which queries and sites were affected.   I suggest for those interested to know about exactly how their client may be affected by this last update, please read.  I thought it was an interesting post, but it also made me start questioning the fact that we all know that there are over 200 updates from Google a year and they announce just a handful of them, so why does everyone always go crazy when these announcements are made? Does Google think we are just sitting around waiting for these updates to then change our SEO strategy?

Sitting Around

 

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How To Recover from An Unnatural Link Penalty

In my last post I talked about how to React to Penguin 2.0, keep calm and don’t chase the algorithm. I mentioned Search Engine Journal’s post about how to recover from an unnatural link penalty.  I will now explain in more detail how to do this.

Please note that an unnatural link penalty is different to Penguin and Panda, it is not indication that you have been affected by Panda.  Marie Haynes goes into detail about this on SEOmoz blog.

In short, Penguin was released on April 24, 2012 and was designed to fight webspam which involved keyword stuffing and buying links.. Panda was released in February 2011 (worldwide April 2011)  and then on September 18, 2012, a Penda refresh was rolled out. It targeted sites with duplicate and thin content and aimed to lower the rank of these lower quality sites. The change affected rankings of almost 12% of search results.

Once Bitten Twice Shy

 

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How To React to Penguin 2.0 – Be Calm and Don’t Chase The Algorithm

Penguin 2.0 was rolled out on Wednesday US time, meaning it affected UK Wednesday evening and Australia/Asia Thursday morning. How many of your clients have been affected or have been asking about Penguin 2.0?  I wanted to share with you some of the best posts I have found on Penguin 2.0 and how you should react to this latest algorithm update.

Internet Marketing Ninjas

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Link Building, Authors, Panda, Penguins, Tools and More

This was a great session by Jim Boykin, the founder of Internet Marketing Ninjas.   Jim started off by getting to the point.  He said a lot people feel that they did not wrong.  People thought that their sites were doing well, they were ranking from a few paid links and they thought they were safe and they were then banned.

How do you know if you have been hit by Panda?  One clear sign is that traffic to your site has decreased.  Some people are just waiting it out, hoping they will soon get their traffic without changing their sites.  But you need to act if you want to see your online visibility increase.

Internet Marketing Ninjas

 

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Interview with Laura Roth and Anna Lee Organisers of SES Conference

Being an event organiser of Search London,  I appreciate a lot of work goes into organising big conferences such as the one I recently attended – SES NY.  I met Laura Roth and Anna Lee while I was over in New York and wanted to ask them a few questions on what it is like running one of the largest search marketing conferences in the industry, SES.

SES Content Gals

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SEO in the Boardroom – SES NY

One of the interesting sessions from SES New York was how to show the value of SEO to the board of directors.  This was in the “SEO in the Boardroom” session, moderated by Simon Heseltine,  For all those in SEO, we have heard too often the question “What is the value of SEO”?, and “Why should I pay for this “free” traffic?

Seth Besmertnik, the CEO of Conductor Inc, was the first to present in this session.

Simon SEO Boardroom

 

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