Cognitive SEO: Post Penguin Backlink Analysis Capabilities

October 27, 2012 by

With the Penguin and EMD updates you really need to understand your links.  The time when having a bunch of links that would increase your rankings (no matter where they are coming from) is long gone. After the Penguin update, Google has become much smarter and can analyze link profiles like never before. That is why link segmentation and classification is one of the best ways to understand what makes a site rank, from the links point of view. When the Penguin update rolled out, it hit a lot of websites whose backlink profiles looked unnatural. A lot of the SEO practitioners behind these website were building links through short-cuts – buying them, using black-hat tools, paying other people to build links in low quality sites, etc. They had no strategy for the link’s quality – they only cared about the link’s quantity. To keep things fair and natural in the web for people, Google rolled out the Penguin update to finally keep these unnatural linkbuilders under control. “Google Penguin” hit again last week, affecting 0,3% of the search results as Matt Cutts expressed in a tweet.   Google is focused on delivering only the best results in their search engine results page – to do that, they are cleaning out websites with bogus and low-quality links which were not really earned through their website’s value but were built using tools and/or bought using money or incentive. These are the days when unethical SEO specialists have to step up their game and play on a more even level.   First of all, we need to understand what Google “thinks” about our links. Normally, this is no easy job with so many variables going into the ranking equation.  There aren’t many tools out there that can really help you understand your link profile. In my analysis I used cognitiveSEO , a backlink checking tool that I reviewed here .   There are over 18 new features added to the backlink analysis section of their tool. The link detail is unbelievably granular, with a strong focus on simplicity, so even the basic webmasters can understand what is going on with his/her website’s backlinks. Here is a short list of some of its features, so you can get a quick feel of what it can do for you: 1. Fresh & Complete Link Data [Aggregated & De-duped] from the best link data providers. 2. Re-crawled & Classified On-Demand for You. 3. One page dashboard to rule all your links. 4. Import extra links from Google Webmaster Tools and others. 5. New Link Alerts for both your site and your competitors. 6. Anchor Text Cloud & Common Anchor Texts. 7. New Link Velocity data points. I ran a campaign on their system to see how it reports the data. In my case I needed to quickly identify the difference in link patterns between my site and my competitors. This is how a link profile comparison based on “site type” looks like: In 2 seconds I realized that all these sites are getting massive links from Blogs. Knowing this, I can make an estimated guess that they are using Content Marketing to attract links. Another interesting factor is the amount of common linking domains and IPs. A quick way to identify link networks just by looking at these commonality charts.  You can also use commonality information to gather info on where your competitors are being linked from and you aren’t. With the latest release of the Google Disavow Tool you can easily export the unnatural links found inside Cognitive SEO and import them into the Google Disavow tool . But this is not only about finding unnatural links and patterns. You can track your live/lost links and compare it with your competitors’. There is a neat feature that will send you weekly emails with the new links that you and your competitors got in the last week. I must say that I am impressed with the updates that the team at CognitiveSEO have added to their toolset, as it really helps understand and track the backlink profile much easily.

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Cognitive SEO: Post Penguin Backlink Analysis Capabilities

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Pengiun-monium: What Google’s new algorithm changes means for SEO

June 4, 2012 by

If Panda was the new “law of the land,” Penguin is law enforcement. Google’s new algorithm update signals the beginning of the end for spammers, but it also spells trouble for honest webmasters. What Penguin does is try to better enforce the Panda filter by filtering over-optimized websites from its search results. That’s right, penalties aren’t just for blackhat sites anymore. Webmaster’s Note: This is a guest post by Peter Nevis What’s puzzling is that better enforcement of the Panda update might mean that legitimate sites get hurt in the crossfire. That’s OK, according to Google. It “levels the playing field” so that users presumably get a better experience when searching for whatever it is they’re searching for. One of the problems that webmasters have always faced is whether to write for search engines or write for users. In the past, even “White hat” sites had to struggle with this, because it was clear that Google was rewarding low-quality, spammy, websites by giving them prominence in the search results. No More SEO Now, those white knights of the Internet can go back to focusing on content. Matt Cutts has been pretty clear on this one, stating that: “And so that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the web site, uh Google Bot smarter , we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that people don’t do SEO, we handle that” Yes, Cutts is basically saying that Google doesn’t want people to do SEO. That’s going to be a hard rule to break for most people. They’re so used to trying to figure out what Google wants. Now, they’re being asked to trust Google to do its thing and let the rankings fall where they may. This focus on creating quality content means that Google clearly wants you to write for web visitors, not for the search engines. You basically have to ask yourself some key questions: Would you trust the information in the article you just wrote if you were a stranger reading it for the first time? Are you an enthusiast or expert writing about this topic? Is your article similar to other articles on your site or does it contain overlapping or outright duplicate content? Does your article contain a lot of spelling errors? Are you honestly providing substantial value to your readers? Are you being objective? If you waived your hand at Google, and put a bulls-eye on your site, would Google congratulate you or would they ban your site from the Internet? In other words, would you be ashamed of making your content public to a real human being that judges whether a site sinks or swims in a search engine? Negative SEO The side-effect of the new Penguin update is that it might have inadvertently increased the effectiveness of something called “negative SEO.” This is a strategy whereby a competitor tries to harm your site through link building or other blackhat SEO strategies. The competitor makes you look like you’re the bad guy, and your site gets caught in the algorithm and your rank suffers. Penguin looks for a few things to determine what to do with sites. First, it looks at the exact match anchor text in poor quality articles. Second, it looks at the ratio of bad links coming from unmoderated blogs. Finally, it looks at the ratio of a vacant blog. In other words, a blog with no real activity on it compared to the inbound links. If a competitor buys an SEO service with the intent of serving up poor-quality articles and spammy-looking links that point to your site, he could theoretically trip the new Penguin filter and have your site devalued. In fact, a few tests have already been done to show that this method actually works better than before the update. What can you do about it? Unfortunately, not much. The best you can do is to continue to create quality content and report any suspicious link activity you see to Google. Let it be known that you’re engaged in any nefarious link building activity. It may or may not help, but until Google comes up with a patch for this, it’s the best you can do for your organic ranking. If you’re willing to venture outside the world of organic ranking, you can try to increase your click-through traffic by doing guest blog posts, focusing more on your social media presence, and buying ads on Google’s advertising network to boost traffic.

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Pengiun-monium: What Google’s new algorithm changes means for SEO

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How to Future Proof your Linkbuilding

May 21, 2012 by

Google is constantly changing and improving. It’s obviously not the same as what it was when it started a handful of years ago. The recent Penguin update has changed the way we look at linkbuilding . It used to be about quantity and quality. Right now, linkbuilding is shifting away from quantity – giving a much higher emphasis and importance on link quality and link naturality. Link Quality – This pertains to how powerful the link is in terms of bringing you PageRank juice. It includes factors such as Link host Relevance, PageRank, Authority, Anchor text, Anchor Title, etc… Link Naturality – This is the measurement of how natural your link profile and pattern is. The less your link naturality, the more prone you are to the Penguin’s beak pecking your rankings away. SEO Hacker was not hit, in any way, by Penguin. Want to know why? Because we practice Future-Proof Linkbuilding. We make sure that Google does not hit slap us – not now, not ever. And if you want to Future-proof your linkbuilding, here’s how you can start: Link host quality Is the link host a website that brings in value to its visitors? How many outbound links does it have? Does it have thick, meaty content all over? Does it sell links? Having a high quality Link host is very important. It immediately spells out your link as a quality link. A valid link. It triggers a natural link signal because, chances are, the linking host links out naturally. Therefore, each and every link that goes out from that link host is considered a natural, quality link. Linking Patterns Does your website garner links in a logical pattern? Perhaps 20 links in a month? 40 links a month? 200 links a month? Are you getting links from only one kind of website? Blogs? Directories? Forums? Are you doing link exchange? Are most of your links coming from the footer? Do they have the same anchor text? A linking pattern specifically says that you are linkbuilding . Consequently, it does not give your website a good leverage in your link naturality profile. Don’t link in a pattern. A linking pattern easily detectable even by freely available backlink checking tools! Make sure that if you are doing linkbuilding, do it in such a way that no pattern can be easily seen. Don’t allow Google to connect the dots with your backlinks. Social Signal Balance No one’s Liking your stuff in Facebook, retweeting it in Twitter or giving it a +1 in Google Plus but you’ve got a lot of links coming in to your page? Hmmm… “How come so many people are linking to you but no one wants to share your stuff?”  It’s a very simple question that should have a very simple answer: Linkbuilding. Remember that linkbuilding should be done naturally – meaning, people should be linking to you not because you’re asking them to or paying them to. It’s because you provide great value that should be worth sharing. Social Signals can be a very powerful way to measure your link naturality. If you don’t have that much social engagement going in your pages that have high amounts of links, your link naturality will score very low. High amount of links should almost always amount to high amount of social engagement. Anchor Text Variation Links are made by people and the anchor text they want to put in depend on what they prefer. So how come 100 different websites with 100 different webmasters put in the same anchor text to your page? That’s pretty weird. And the chances of that happening naturally are very slim. Having a highly concentrated amount of the same anchor text to your backlinks immediately spell out a very low link naturality. Almost every SEO specialists agree that high amounts of exact match anchor text is the problem behind websites hit by the Penguin update. I agree. It’s not the only factor behind the Penguin penalty, but it is a big factor nonetheless. We always make sure that we have a lot of phrase match anchor text here in SEO Hacker to keep our link naturality score high. PageRank Distribution PageRank distribution is vital to each and every website especially as the search engines are moving forward in their algorithm development and changes. Having a webpage with highly concentrated PageRank might signal artificial linkbuilding to that specific page – considering all factors I’ve discussed earlier. Consequently, this will tell the search engines of the link naturality for this webpage – and it might just affect the whole website’s link naturality too. Having a good interlinking strategy between your pages will eliminate high PageRank concentration. Make sure to assign a handful of phrase-match anchor text in your interlinking to signal a higher link naturality score to the search engines. Content Thickness I know that Panda has rolled out and is almost done in the havoc it created with the SERPs but I just can’t stop reiterating the importance of content. Great, real, Future-proof SEO starts will great, solid, quality content that provide value to people. This is where it all starts! This is where we started and this is still what we are doing here in SEO hacker and even with all our clients! Content Thickness does not deal with the number of characters or words. It deals with how great your content is regardless of the number of words. Great content will ALWAYS attract natural links – of course, you have to promote it and market it out for it to attract attention. But as soon as it does attract buzz, believe me, the links will just come pouring in – naturally. Most of those links are quality links that will indisputably increase your link naturality score. Knowing all this, what’s the best Future-Proof Linkbuilding Technique? If you ask me, it’s still going to be Linkbaiting. It’s really the way to go. Linbaiting allows you to avoid outright manipulation of garnering links. Rather, you tap into people’s emotions and logic to drive them to link to you. If you’ve read my linkbaiting entries here in SEO Hacker , I’ve always repeatedly stressed that this is my favorite linkbuilding method. It still is. How does getting high quality, one-way links in a natural way sound like? Linkbaiting allows you to do just that. It is the most natural way of attaining links – consequently boosting your link naturality altogether. Linkbaiting is not easy. You need to have a lot of creativity, research, and authority and put in a lot of marketing effort to make it work. But it pays off. And when it does, it does so BIG-TIME. Tips for Keeps: Start thinking of your own linkbait now. Push through with that experiment and try it out for yourself – perhaps starting out with a news linkbait or a tutorial linkbait will work for you.

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How to Future Proof your Linkbuilding

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