Posts About ‘Penguin Update’

The Link Building Approach Triangle: Create, Align & Optimize

link-building-approach-triangle

On Saturday I had the great opportunity to speak at Congreso Web (one of the top Spanish online marketing conferences), where I presented about link building, more specifically how to build “Penguin free” links (if you speak Spanish you can take a look at the slides here).

In slide #96 of my presentation I shared a graphic showing how to establish an effective link building action plan for any site it was important to first, make the most out of already existing assets and then according to that and the initial optimization, link and ranking status, along with the competition level, there was going to be a mix of the following: (more…)

Does Flagged E-Consultancy Link Indicate Where Penguin is Going?

guestroom

Several weeks ago I decided to close guest posts on State of Search for the time being. Many thought it was just because I was getting so many bad requests for guest posts. It was however much more than that. In my view guest posting had become the newest link building tactic and not in a good way, it has become the equivalent of link exchange request.

And sooner or later things would go ‘wrong’ there. As I said a month ago: “The low quality content is hurting sites, and will be penalised by Google in the end I’m sure.”. It looks like that time is coming sooner than later. Though it isn’t directly low quality content which draws the attention, it’s the links.

Two signals point to that, first Matt Cutts who started tweeting about a new Penguin Update (‘Penguin 2.0′) and made a video (below) about what to expect in the next few months in terms of SEO in which he points at the upcoming update, which probably will hurt a lot of sites. Most likely this is the update Cutts talked about in San Francisco last year when he said “You don’t want the next Penguin update, the engineers have been working hard”.

That Penguin Update is coming and might just be focussing on guest posts a lot. A signal of that seems to come from E-Consultancy in the past few days. According to a tweet that went out towards Matt Cutts “author links in guest blog bios on Econsultancy have been flagged by Google.”. It turned out this was about a link on which E-Consultancy themselves reported before. (more…)

The importance of a link clean up before it’s too late

header

While the SEO world is holding its breath waiting for the “next generation Penguin update” or “Penguin 4″, I want to put the spotlight on the importance of a thorough link clean up. Not after you get the warning from Google but in good time before you do. Cleaning up your link profile might save you from a lot of work and lost business when the big update rolls out. (more…)

Google did De-Index Digg, but by Mistake. Digg is back now

digg-no-index

Update:

Digg is now back in the search results after Google explained what happened. Matt Cutts from Google explains it had to do with a spammer attack:

“We were tackling a spammer and inadvertently took action on the root page of digg.com.”

He also stresses this has nothing to with Google Reader, which was suggested on Social Media since Digg announced it would build their own version of it.

He also said:

“we’ll be looking into what protections or process improvements would make this less likely to happen in the future.”

The official response from Google is:

“We’re sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We’re correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly.”

Original story:

There was a time when Digg.com was the hottest site on the web. Even hotter than Google, believe it or not. Those times have passed and its founder, Kevin Rose, has actually jumped ship to Google.

But still Digg is a force to reckon with. Quantcast last year estimated Digg’s monthly U.S. unique visits at 3.8 million, and that is US only. And a lot of that traffic still comes through Google.

Today however Digg disappeared from Google from a short time. Matt Sawyer of Datadial tweeted out earlier today that the site seems to have disappeared from Google. And he seems to be right. It had  (more…)

Google Disavow Tool, For Everyone Who Did Something Wrong

dissavow-links-2

“Finally” and “About time” were amongst the remarks of many reactions yesterday when Google officially announced their “disavow links” tool at Pubcon. The tool is a way to let as a site owner Google know which links pointing at your site you think should be ignored by Google.

The tool was already expected by many SEOs because Google had been testing it out amongst several SEOs in the past few weeks and Bing already launched its own tool back in June. The tool can be seen as a direct response to Penguin updates: sites with a lot of bad links need to clean up their act. With this tool Google makes that a bit easier. But not just for the site owners, for themselves as well. (more…)

SMX East 2012 New York – Day 1 #SMX

smx-logo-screen

This was my first time to attend SMX East and I was really pleased to attend the SEO and link building sessions. The sessions were Keyword Research and Copywriting, Surviving Penguins, Pandas and Other SEO Beasts, SEO is an investment and SEO Beware: Black Hat Tactics To Avoid and Be Wary of.

Here is summary of each of the four from the first day of SMX East.. (more…)

Google Penguin – 2.0 or 1.2?

penguin-screen

During SES a couple of weeks ago, Matt Cutts warned of a significant update to Penguin in the not too distant future – something which drew a mixed response across the industry. Given the impact of Penguin on launch, one would have to suggest that those types of words would spread fear across the industry, it seems that this has been meant with more of a sense of gentle caution.

One of the words I have seen used was the words “propaganda” following Matts quote last week, something both Huomah founder, David Harry and fellow State of Search Editor Sam Noble were keen to suggest otherwise – and suggested that for many in the industry have been expecting this for a while. I think for many of us, now familiar with the iterative updates of Panda, a similar approach to Penguin is certainly not unexpected, and looking at a lot of the crap still in the SERPs there is obvious work for Googles algorithms still to do. (more…)

What The Penguin?

Google is releasing animals this year. First Panda’s now Penguins. But what does that all mean? And how can we protect ourselves from these animals who seem to be eating away traffic from many sites. The answer seems simple: improve your meals. They seem to be eating only ‘bad food’.

The latest update is the Penguin Update. Ewebmarketing decided to take different elements from that update and put them in an infographic, so for this Friday’s infographic it’s Penguin time. And let us know what you think of this infographic! It’s different to the one we posted before! Also be sure to take a look at Bryan’ts post 10 Post Penguin Link Building Tips.

via Ewebmarketing

10 Post Penguin Link Building Tips

Google-penguin

So Penguin has come and gone, and you are still wondering what do I do. You may be unsure where to target your link building efforts, as you are afraid that any links you may build can make your situation worse. I’ll be honest, I had a client see a drop on two of their sites, and while it was not my fault (BAD LINKBUILDER!), it requires immediate attention. So I started at the top, working through our link builders years of work to see just how far off of google’s mark we were. Here are 10 of the maxims for her to use in future link-building efforts, and I hope they are of use to you and your webmaster! (more…)

Breaking Free of Panda/Penguin

Peter Young and Neil Walker at SAScon

The next SAScon session I chose to attend is called ‘Breaking Free of Panda/Penguin’ and features my good friend Peter Young from Mediacom and Holistic Search, and the original SEO rapper and Jason Statham lookalike Neil ‘SEOmad‘ Walker.

Cause and Effect

Peter kicks off by listing the issues Google is looking out for in web spam, such as cloaking, malware, sneaky redirects, link wheels, paid links, and many more of such tactics that Google disapproves of. Temporal spikes – i.e. link velocity – is also a big warning signal for Google’s web spam fighters.

Neil asks who in the audience has been hit by Panda or Penguin, and who’s received bad link warnings in GWT. The most hands go up when asked about Penguin, indicating the severity of this latest update. (more…)

Page 1 of 212