A Cautionary Tale of Aggressive SEO

Transcription

1 A Cautionary Tale of Aggressive SEO How to Avoid Penalties and Fix Things When They Go Wrong Tweet with hashtag #jwc13 to participate on Twitter.

2 A Cautionary Tale of Aggressive SEO Techniques and tools that will help your website gain rankings in the search engines, how to avoid crushing penalties from overoptimization, and how to recover when things go wrong.

3 Hello, My Name is Scott Not a Web Developer any more An Internet Marketer Google Analytics & Adwords Certified Partner at Orion Group President of Meetupery Husband to Stephanie Owned by Squiggles, a Great Dane

4 First... A Little About Search Engines Most%People%Use%Google% Most Searchers Use Google

5 Being on Page One of Google is Important Most searchers stay on the first page Some might look at the 2nd or 3rd page of search results

6 Top Ranking Factors Keyword Use Anywhere in <title> Tag Keyword Use in Page Content Keyword-Focused Anchor Text from External Links

7 Top Ranking Factors External Link Popularity & Diversity of Source (quantity and quality of external links) Trustworthiness of Domain (based on distance from trusted domains)

8 One thing to Keep in Mind Search Engines Constantly Evolve Algorithm changes leave many webmasters wondering what they can do to ensure their websites remain visible in the search engines.

9 My Black Friday Story Tweet with hashtag #jwc13 to participate on Twitter.

10 My Black Friday Story Seeing an interesting niche and recognizing an opportunity to make a lot of money I created ThanksgivingBlackFridayAds.com

11 My Black Friday Story The site gives visitors early intel on the Door-busters and early-bird sales and get a sneak peek at the Black Friday ads before they are printed in the Thanksgiving Day newspaper

12 My Black Friday Story I wanted to be #1 in the search engines. After my first successful season, I knew I could do better and so... I set off on a quest to gain backlinks for my most important keywords

13 My Black Friday Story

14 Google Analytics (November 2011)

15 5.9 million pages to 413,458 visitors Between November 1st-30th, Served up to 590 concurrent users 900 pages per minute.

16 Adsense Earnings (November 2011)

17 Unnatural Inbound Links Detected ThanksgivingBlackFridayAds.com received a penalty

18 How to Troubleshoot Tweet with hashtag #jwc13 to participate on Twitter.

19 How to Troubleshoot Confirm the date you got hit Was it really a penalty or was it just an algorithm update? Review Google Webmaster Tool data Was a Manual Action taken?

20 How to Troubleshoot Confirm if it is site-wide or a page-specific problem Review Google Analytics data

21 There s a Difference Between An Algorithm Update and a Penalty Tweet with hashtag #jwc13 to participate on Twitter.

22 Google Penguin Updates Over-optimization of anchor text is bad Low-quality off-topic links are bad Keyword stuffing is bad

23 Google Panda Updates Many content farms, article directories, sites with high adto-content ratios were hit and are no longer as highly-visible in the search engines.

24 Who Gets Hit By Penalties? Tweet with hashtag #jwc13 to participate on Twitter.

25 Who Gets Hit By Penalties? Websites found to be in violation of a search engines Terms of Service Websites with an unbalanced backlink profile

26 Who Gets Hit By Penalties? Websites with backlinks from lowquality sites or sites containing overoptimized, exact-match anchor text But was it really a penalty or was it just an update to Google s algorithm?

27 My Black Friday Story, Continued Tweet with hashtag #jwc13 to participate on Twitter.

28 My Black Friday Story, Continued Started in 2009 on a shared Godaddy server, it couldn t handle the load, so the website went offline on Thursday evening, the night before black Friday. Started link-building through article marketing, and leaving relevant comments on various blogs.

29 My Black Friday Story, Continued In 2010, I created forum signatures, performed profile creation and distributed press releases In 2011, article marketing, spam comments, forum signatures, profile creation, paid link placement in blogrolls (sidebars) of sites that had high PageRank In July 2012, received an Unnatural inbound links warning via Google Webmaster Tools

30 My Black Friday Story, Continued Organic traffic was down 95% over last year due to the penalty received by Google.

31 My Black Friday Story, Continued Apologized for being spammy Requested webmasters to remove bad links Uploaded a disavow list to Google Webmaster Tools

32 My Black Friday Story, Continued Removed more spammy links that I had control over Resubmitted the site for reconsideration to Google Webmaster Tools

33 My Black Friday Story, Continued Google wouldn t budge and wouldn t tell me how to fix the problem.

34 My Black Friday Story, Continued I needed to figure out what to do. Transfer the content to a new domain name and start building rankings again? Continue removing more bad links to the existing site? Give up altogether?

35 My Black Friday Story, Continued So, I changed the domain name From: ThanksgivingBlackFridayAds.com To: ThanksgivingBlackFriday.com

36 My Black Friday Story, Continued

37 Tools for Diagnosing SEO Issues Tweet with hashtag #jwc13 to participate on Twitter.

38 Tools for Diagnosing SEO Issues Google Webmaster Tools Moz.com OpenSiteExplorer.org

39 Other Tools For Competitor Research Google Analytics Keyword Performance Bounce Rates & Pageviews Visitor Segmentation Moz.org Link Analysis Ranking Reports Keyword Research Open Site Explorer Anchor Text External Links Domain Authority Google Trends Industry Insights Top Related Searches Geographic Hotspots

40 How to Avoid or Recover From a Penalty Tweet with hashtag #jwc13 to participate on Twitter.

41 Avoiding or Recovering From a Penalty Vary the anchor text of links that point to your site.

42 Diversify Your Backlink Profile Naked URLs Branded Anchor Text Orion Group, LLC Joomla World Conference

43 Diversify Your Backlink Profile Brand / Keyword Hybrid Anchor Text SEO Blog at Search Engine Journal Search Engine Journal, a blog about search Universal Anchor Text click here visit this website

44 Diversify Your Backlink Profile If you are a roofing company in Boston, instead of using Boston roofing company as your backlink s anchor text, try using: a roofing company in the Boston area or something like: Apex, LLC ~ Roofing Contractor in Boston

45 Any questions? Tweet and use hashtag #jwc13 to say hello.