The Truth

How we feel about Google’s Pen­guin update and you prob­a­bly do too.

Cyn­i­cal title, ain’t it? Frankly, I’ve been putting off writ­ing this “Pen­guin post” for 2 weeks.

Why?

Because I have a prob­lem with talk­ing about things I don’t actu­ally know about.

The unfor­tu­nate state of affairs right now is that nobody really knows much about what’s going on. Sure, there are plenty of gurus writ­ing blog posts on “how to recover after Pen­guin,” but the irony is that there are almost no blog posts called “How I Actu­ally Recov­ered After Pen­guin” (hint: link bait oppor­tu­nity, nerds. Get on it.). In other words the vast major­ity of what the gurus and pro­fes­sional SEO jour­nal­ists are say­ing is the­o­ret­i­cal fluff, much of it con­tra­dict­ing, with very few real case stud­ies behind it.

With our shared sen­ti­ments on the table, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work. My goal is to give you a glimpse into what we’re see­ing, what oth­ers are say­ing, what kind of data is out there, what it means, and what to do about it.

Edit #1: Despite the pas­sive aggres­sive head­line, it appears that the dis­cern­ing folks on Twit­ter have deemed this arti­cle help­ful. Yay.

4500 Words on Every­thing We Don’t Know About Pen­guin and What Not to Do About It truth.thehoth.com/seo/penguin/ <- A++ would read again.

— Matthew Brown (@MatthewJBrown) May 18, 2012

Finally some­thing worth read­ing about Google’s Pen­guin update (from @the_hoth): ow.ly/b0Byk

— Eppie Vojt (@eppievojt) May 18, 2012

RT @eppievojt: Finally some­thing worth read­ing about Google’s Pen­guin update (from @the_hoth): ow.ly/b0Byk

— Ross Hud­gens (@RossHudgens) May 18, 2012

High 5 for this arti­cle! — 4500 Words on Every­thing We Don’t Know About Pen­guin… truth.thehoth.com/seo/penguin/ via @The_HOTH — thx for the mention!

— pot­piegirl (@potpiegirl) May 19, 2012

4500 Words on Every­thing We Don’t Know About Pen­guin & What Not to Do About It: raven.im/JiqTFP Long but worth­while read via @the_hoth

— Raven Tools (@RavenTools) May 22, 2012

Edit #2: This post was intended to be shared with our clients only. To our sur­prise, it went pretty  huge on Twit­ter (see con­ver­sa­tion) and inbound.org. As a result, some unin­tended read­ers have brought up a con­cern that this analy­sis is biased, some­how favors our own link build­ing prod­uct, etc.

To be clear, this is not the case. This arti­cle was writ­ten for peo­ple who already bought our prod­uct. It does offer some per­spec­tive on what the update means for them, the cul­mi­na­tion of which is “there is no notice­able cor­re­la­tion” and “there are no sil­ver bul­lets,” not “buy buy buy!” 

In short, this arti­cle is not intended to sell any­body any­thing. It is intended to help our com­mu­nity, and based on the above feed­back from Twit­ter, it appears to have done just that. If you are not a user of our prod­uct and have con­cerns about it, first make sure you watch our home­page video so you actu­ally under­stand it. Next, if you still have prod­uct related ques­tions, please con­tact us.

Nei­ther I nor any mem­ber of my team will be field­ing sales ques­tions on this blog post. 

Step 1: What Are We Deal­ing With Here? (In The­ory, Anyway)

Pen­guin is the long awaited “over-optimization penalty” and rum­blings of its com­ing were appar­ent months ahead. If you watched our Panda 3.3 webi­nar, we were already advis­ing our cus­tomers to diver­sify their link pro­files heav­ily with nat­ural anchor texts (i.e. click here, more info, learn more, etc.) and naked anchor texts (i.e. <a href=“http://mysite.com”>http://mysite.com</a>).

Almost unan­i­mously, we’ve heard this to be the case. If your anchor text pro­files are heav­ily over opti­mized for your “money key­words” you may have got­ten slapped or the anchor text rel­e­vancy fac­tor may have merely been deval­ued. Which of the 2 it is tough to deter­mine, but since we know that neg­a­tive SEO works now, we can bet its a penalty, which is good because penal­ties are reversible.

It seems that Google is less inter­ested in par­tic­u­lar key­words, and more in their mean­ings. Applied, this means much bet­ter treat­ment of syn­onyms (this offi­cial state­ment uses the word syn­onym 20 times alone). Ide­ally this would mean that when I search for some­thing like “emer­gency room chicago,” the search engine would be smart enough to look at avail­able results for terms like “hos­pi­tal chicago,” “emer­gency care chicago,” “ambu­lance chicago” and deliver me a SERP con­sist­ing of the most qual­i­fied sites from all of them. For us as SEOs, this is a sig­nal, more than ever, that we should be diver­si­fy­ing anchor texts heav­ily, not just on 2–5 terms, but upwards of 10–30 terms in the long run. With all of this said, whether this syn­onym recog­ni­tion is actu­ally in effect is still ques­tion­able and its qual­ity even more so (more on this below).

That’s half the story any­way. Accord­ing to the won­der­ful wiz­ard of Google, aka Matt Cutts (see offi­cial state­ment), Pen­guin is also intended to devalue/penalize sites for links from irrel­e­vant pages. To be clear, the sever­ity of irrel­e­vance that Matt sug­gests they’re look­ing for is absurd. The out­right stu­pid­ity of some­one who’d build links this way is beyond my comprehension.

For your con­ve­nience, here is Matt’s exam­ple of build­ing irrel­e­vant links in 2012.

An Exam­ple of Links Com­ing from Irrel­e­vant Con­tent. Who Does This Anyway?

I’m not sure if this is a joke or not. I’ve inter­acted with over 1000 SEOs in my career and I’ve lit­er­ally never met any­one that know­ingly built links like this.

No wor­ries, Matt’s announce­ment is a full on retro party, fea­tur­ing throw­backs such as “we don’t like key­word stuff­ing,” screen­shots and all.

As I’ve pre­vi­ously described, this is what I call the world of appear­ances. It’s the song and dance Google puts on and expects us to believe. There are 3 main groups of peo­ple who believe this stuff — the media, investors and sheep. Don’t get taken to slaugh­ter. There’s a lot more here than meets the eye.

The World of Reality

Right now the SERPs are awful.

I mean, truly abysmal. I don’t mean this from an SEO’s per­spec­tive, I mean it from a search engine user’s per­spec­tive. The crap that I see pop­ping up for search terms is worse now than it was 5 years ago.

Chris Rem­pel says it fan­tas­ti­cally in his very thor­ough Pen­guin analy­sis -

Any­one with half a brain can plainly see that Google’s cur­rent SERPs, span­ning almost every ver­ti­cal, are some of the low­est qual­ity results that we’ve seen in years. Decades, even. There are lit­er­ally forum pro­files and empty blogspot/web 2.0 pages rank­ing for some of the web’s most com­pet­i­tive key­words in every major com­mer­cial market…

I’ve spent the past week pour­ing over hun­dreds SERPs, and I’m con­sis­tently see­ing low-quality, and in many cases out­right non­sense, rank­ing on Page 1 for basi­cally any high-comp key­word. Of course, there’s the nearly-guaranteed pres­ence of WikiPedia/Squidoo/eHow/YouTube/BlogSpot (and equva­lents) across the gamut – irre­spec­tive of qual­ity or even rel­e­vance. Clearly, the domain-authority fil­ter has been jacked up, way too much.

Maybe that’s the “3%” that Matt Cutts had men­tioned was affected by Pen­guin. Per­haps the other 97% of Google’s results com­prise searches like “Why do hip­pies smell?”, “Who would win in a fight Chuck Nor­ris or Moby?” and other com­pletely unprof­itable key­words that sim­ply don’t mat­ter, to anyone.

Although I can give exam­ples for days, here is a great one from Jen­nifer Led­bet­ter, a for­mer Google fan­girl who really used to believe all of Google’s hooplah about sites rank­ing just because they have great con­tent and struc­ture (which def­i­nitely does help, but obvi­ously isn’t enough). Below is a screen shot from Jeniffer’s analy­sis on how bad the SERPs are right now.  This is the SERP for “make money online,” an absurdly com­pet­i­tive term with lit­er­ally thou­sands of active competitors.

Out of thou­sands of qual­i­fied, active com­peti­tors, Google some­how chooses to rank this no-name blogspot blog on page 1.

Amongst some ques­tion­able results on the front page, the dodgi­est by far is a no-name Blogspot blog. But maybe we should give Google the ben­e­fit of the doubt? Maybe this blog­ger is a ris­ing star being awarded for his incred­i­ble con­tent and mete­oric rise to pop­u­lar­ity? Or not…

This site ranks on the first page for “make money online” after Pen­guin. Wow.

Yes, it is a blank Blogspot with­out so much as a sin­gle post on it that ranks for “make money online,” one of the most com­pet­i­tive terms out there. Note: if you per­form this search right now, you won’t find this rank­ing any­more, but based on the fact that folks like Chris Rem­pel and I con­tinue to see this crap over hun­dreds of SERPs, I’m pretty sure this one was a man­ual fix from the folks at Google.

This is the real­ity of the SERPs right now, and it’s not you who should be scared.

Here’s the thing, this is far more dan­ger­ous for Google than it is for SEOs.

To under­stand why, you have to under­stand the core of Google’s busi­ness model.

Google’s key asset is the qual­ity of its search results. The more peo­ple search, the more search result pages are shown, the more oppor­tu­ni­ties Google has to sell those eye­balls to adver­tis­ers. Searches are Google’s inven­tory, just as any web­site that sells ads treats its page views as inven­tory. Decreased qual­ity of search results means users (sooner or later) begin to lose faith in the search engine and begin to look else­where. As searchers, we’re already doing it with sites like Yelp for local infor­ma­tion and this scares the crap out of the folks at Google.

The One Equa­tion Google Man­age­ment Under­stands Bet­ter Than Any­thing Else

Lost Faith = Lost Eye­balls = Lost Inven­tory = Lost Rev­enues = Lost Stock Val­u­a­tions = Lost Man­age­ment Seats = #$%^&*

AdWords (aka PPC adver­tis­ing) is Google’s pri­mary rev­enue engine and always has been. To date, they have yet to cre­ate another indus­try lead­ing, mon­e­tized prod­uct. Yelp is beat­ing them in local. Groupon and Liv­ing Social are beat­ing Google Offers in daily deals. And Face­book is absolutely oblit­er­at­ing the joke known as Google Plus+. YouTube is cer­tainly not the king money maker in the build­ing (extremely rough esti­mates sug­gest 6%). Search is where it’s at for them (and con­tent net­work as well, although that has much lower margins).

Google man­age­ment is aware that search is their golden goose, and the vital­ity of their search prod­uct is vir­tu­ally syn­ony­mous with the com­pany as a whole.

Right now, search is in trouble.

While Google puts on its pretty face for the media, claim­ing that this update is a huge improve­ment in SERP qual­ity, this is the first time we’ve seen them setup a “holy s#*%! What’d you do to my site?!” form (whether you should fill out this form is dis­cussed in the “Action Items” below).

With absolutely abysmal SERPs for so many key terms, something’s gotta give. There has to be another update coming.

Our Opin­ion: Don’t Panic. Lots of Great Sites Got Hit. We Have No Clue What’s Com­ing. But Some­thing Has to be Coming.

I think invest­ing a ton of time, resources and money into chang­ing ship right now is kind of insane. The SERPs aren’t good. That’s not a sus­tain­able sit­u­a­tion for Google. Who knows where you’ll rank after the next update or what kind of dif­fer­ent strate­gic changes you’ll have to make then.

Also, based on updates com­ing out every cou­ple of weeks, its prob­a­bly safe to expect another change com­ing sooner than later. Yippee.

But What About Over-optimization, Sites Are Being Penal­ized For That, Right?

Yeah, but hon­estly, the data is a lot mud­dier than you’d think. There are a TON of “over opti­mized” sites that show per­fectly fine rank­ings and no penalization.

The folks at MicrositeMas­ters, a rank track­ing com­pany, put together their before-and-after Pen­guin data for thou­sands of sites they track rank­ings for to make sense of this. To date, it is the most insight­ful dataset we’ve seen come out about the Pen­guin update. With this said it has some seri­ous flaws, which I’ll explain below.

First of all, we see that there is a decent dis­tri­b­u­tion of sites of all lev­els of anchor text opti­miza­tion, from 0% to 100% “money terms,” amongst those that did not get penal­ized.

Amongst sites that did not get penal­ized, there is a sur­pris­ingly even dis­tri­b­u­tion of anchor text optimization.

In order to con­clude that sites with less anchor opti­miza­tion were safer, we’d expect to see a down­ward slop­ing trend, with the high­est level of sur­vivors at 0% and the low­est level at 100%. We don’t see that here at all. Like­wise, why the 0% and 5% columns are empty is unclear. In gen­eral, there are no con­clu­sions to be drawn from this graph.

Around 65% anchor text opti­miza­tion for money terms, we begin to see sites get­ting penal­ized. With that said, the more pre­dictable penal­ties only seem to kick in around 90%.

This data is a bit more insight­ful. Amongst the sites that did get penal­ized, we see a thresh­old of about 65% anchor text opti­miza­tion before penal­ties begin to hap­pen. Even so, it seems to be a fairly small per­cent­age of sites. It’s only at 90%-100% that we see pretty con­sis­tent penal­ties. Again, due to issues with this data that I’ll explain below, I’m reluc­tant to state either of these casual obser­va­tions as con­clu­sive claims. With that said, it’s prob­a­bly smart to keep your anchor text opti­miza­tion at 60% or below (shame­less plug: HOTH users can eas­ily do this by sub­mit­ting 2 or more natural/naked anchors for any URL targeted).

This chart shows that sites with branded anchors and naked anchors (e.g. URLs as anchors) sta­tis­ti­cally were less likely to be penal­ized than those with­out any.

This chart con­firms what we told peo­ple back in our Panda 3.3 webi­nar, use branded, nat­ural and naked anchors to stay on the Google’s good side. It makes your anchor text pro­file look nat­ural. And Google likes natural.

So yeah, clearly more sites are get­ting penal­ized for over opti­miz­ing than not, but there’s still a huge per­cent­age of over-optimized sites sit­ting pretty. Like­wise, count­less content-leaders in their cat­e­gory have had their rank­ings absolutely smashed. There clearly are a ton of con­found­ing fac­tors here, based on how many 100% anchor text opti­mized sur­vivors there are alone.

In Chris Rempel’s words -

many salt-of-the-earth pub­lish­ers (like AskTheBuilder.com, Dani­Web, and count­less oth­ers) were severely affected by Pen­guin. Sites that are in some cases over a decade old, com­prised of thou­sands of pages of qual­ity, unique con­tent, and plenty of social/brand sig­nals – and they’re tank­ing, hard. These are sites that pro­vide an awe­some user experience.

Google claims that they are reward­ing high qual­ity sites. Their SERPs make it clear that they are reward­ing scrap­ers, irrel­e­vant, out­dated web 2.0 pages, generic “slightly rel­e­vant” domains, and YouTube.

The Other Sup­posed Piece of Puz­zle — Irrel­e­vant Links

Based on their dataset, Microsite Mas­ters con­cluded that hav­ing links from irrel­e­vant sites is actu­ally a big­ger pre­dic­tor of whether a site would be penal­ized by Pen­guin or not.

Unfor­tu­nately, I view this as a total mis­read of the data.

Tons of non-penalized sites have 0% links from rel­e­vant sites. This data sug­gests that hav­ing a higher per­cent­age of links from rel­e­vant sites doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily keep your site safer.

Like the pre­vi­ous graph that showed a huge num­ber of 100% anchor text opti­mized sites rank­ing just fine after Pen­guin, this one shows that plenty of sites with 0% links from rel­e­vant sites are rank­ing fine as well. The dis­tri­b­u­tion above and below 50% link rel­e­vance looks vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal. Based on this data, we can­not con­clude that more links from rel­e­vant sites means addi­tional safety from Penguin.

Finally, it seems we can con­clude that the less links you have from rel­e­vant sites, the more likely you are to get penal­ized by Pen­guin. Unfor­tu­nately, this data doesn’t say that. Expla­na­tion below.

If you’re like me, upon look­ing at this graph, you think “look, pages with 0% links from rel­e­vant sites obvi­ously get penal­ized, and there’s a height­ened prob­a­bil­ity of get­ting penal­ized until you reach 30%!” Unfor­tu­nately, you can­not arrive at this con­clu­sion from this data.

Warn­ing: $#*% is about to get mathy.

In order to make a com­par­i­son like “sites that have 20% of links com­ing from rel­e­vant sites are 3x more likely to get penal­ized than sites with 30% of links com­ing from rel­e­vant sites,” we’d have to know what per­cent­age of sites at the 20% level got penal­ized and what per­cent­age at the 30% level got penal­ized. THIS DATA SET DOES NOT TELL US THIS. Instead it tells us what per­cent­age of all penal­ized sites in this sam­ple had 20% rel­e­vant links and what per­cent­age had 30% rel­e­vant links. This does not allow us to make any com­par­a­tive claims regard­ing like­li­hood of get­ting penalized.

Ok. I prob­a­bly just con­fused the crap out of you. Here’s a sim­ple metaphor to clarify.

Imag­ine I have 50 very short bas­ket­ball play­ers and 5 very tall bas­ket­ball play­ers. I have each player attempt a slam dunk. Of the 50 short play­ers, 25 can do it. Of the 5 tall play­ers, all 5 can do it. We can make a com­par­a­tive claim here (sam­ple sizes aside) that since short play­ers can dunk 50% of the time and tall play­ers can dunk 100% of the time, tall play­ers are twice as likely to dunk than short play­ers. If we treated this data the way Microsite Mas­ters treated theirs, we’d report that 83% of suc­cess­ful dunkers were short, while 16% were tall. While this is fac­tu­ally accu­rate, it tells us noth­ing about the like­li­hood of a tall player dunk­ing com­pared to a short one. So when you see that huge bar at 0%, that tells you noth­ing about it’s actual like­li­hood of get­ting a site penal­ized in com­par­i­son to higher lev­els. Sucks, huh?

I know what you’re think­ing right now.

“Ugh! Sci­ence is so annoy­ing! I’m obvi­ously look­ing at a com­pelling graph. Can’t I make some conclusion?”

For the most part, no. But let’s humor our­selves and pre­tend like we are look­ing at data that can speak some­what prob­a­bilis­ti­cally (note: the only rea­son it would is if we invented this con­ve­nient rea­son­ing). The chart for penal­ized sites shows us that as long as you have 10% rel­e­vant links, your like­li­hood of get­ting penal­ized is way less than if you have 0% (which is weird because, again, 0% is the cat­e­gory of high­est sur­vivors as well). Any­thing more than 10% of rel­e­vant links only pro­duces a mar­gin­ally bet­ter chance of not get­ting penal­ized. Like­wise, we see no short­age of sites at 50–90% rel­e­vant links, which most peo­ple would call “squeaky clean,” still get­ting slammed.

Ultra Unsci­en­tific Con­clu­sion: Get At Least 10% Of Your Links from Rel­e­vant Sites.

Why I Think The Rel­e­vant Site Fil­ter Can’t Be Right

As one com­menter in the MicroSite Mas­ters arti­cle pointed out, an “irrel­e­vant sites” fil­ter would effec­tively value a New York Times link less than some blog roll from any indus­try friend. Log­i­cally, this is kind of nuts and I don’t think Google would want to do this. Often, non-subject mat­ter spe­cific sites (aka “irrel­e­vant sites” or at least “not par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant sites”) are the most influ­en­tial and inde­pen­dent. If links from irrel­e­vant sites really do pro­duce a rank­ing drop after Pen­guin (which, again, based on the data, we have lit­tle rea­son to believe), I’m fairly con­fi­dent it will either be rolled back or heav­ily toned down in the long run.

The other sacred cow that Google would be slay­ing if it did intro­duce an irrel­e­vant sites filter/penalty is that of viral­ity. Matt Cutts has said “just cre­ate great con­tent and peo­ple will link to it!” so many times it makes my ears bleed when I hear it. But that’s just the thing. Pages, as they become more and more pop­u­lar, increas­ingly get more and more irrel­e­vant links. Like­wise, if you’ve ever got­ten a link from Huff­in­g­ton Post, Tech Crunch, Wall­street Jour­nal or any other huge pub­li­ca­tion, you know that its going to be syn­di­cated by hun­dreds of sites. These sites, are likely “irrel­e­vant” as well. Are we sup­posed to believe that there is a Wall­street Jour­nal penalty? Per­son­ally, I think that sounds totally nuts.

What Does This All Mean For The HOTH & Our Users?

(Dis­claimer: I’m going to speak about The HOTH prod­uct in this sec­tion. As such, it may be biased, but my goal is to be as hon­est as pos­si­ble and address our cus­tomers’ con­cerns.)

To date, we’ve worked on over 4000 cam­paigns, and roughly 8000 web­sites. If I told you that not a sin­gle site we’ve worked on was affected by Pen­guin, I’d be lying through my teeth. Like­wise, for you to have that expec­ta­tion would be a bit unrea­son­able as well. With that said, it’s with some relief that we have not heard a unan­i­mous cry from our cus­tomers that their sites have been penal­ized. Some cer­tainly have, but noth­ing above indus­try aver­age, which is the best any of us can ask for when even the squeaki­est of clean sites are get­ting hit.

In short, we don’t see any cor­re­la­tion between HOTH link build­ing and penalization.

As far as diver­si­fy­ing your anchors, The HOTH is kind of the per­fect tool to do that with. We give you 5 key­word slots per URL and you can sub­mit nat­u­ral­ized anchors (i.e. click here, more info, learn more, etc.) or naked anchors (i.e. http://brandname.com, brandname.com, brand-name, etc.) in them. This means you can use The HOTH to nat­u­ral­ize your anchor text distribution.

We’ve heard dif­fer­ent the­o­ries, but there seems to be a con­sen­sus that you should have 50%+ non-optimized anchors.

Like­wise, from the per­spec­tive of rel­e­vant pages, all of the pages that link to you from The HOTH are rel­e­vant. Lit­er­ally, every last one has cus­tom writ­ten con­tent that is rel­e­vant to your sub­ject mat­ter. The top-level prop­er­ties are specif­i­cally on sub­do­mains opti­mized for your sub­ject mat­ter, mean­ing they have site-wide rel­e­vance. Mean­while, the rest of the links, fol­low­ing from our viral link struc­ture, mimic the kinds of links you’d get as a result of a Huff­in­g­ton Post arti­cle being syn­di­cated. Again, the the viral­ity con­cept is one of the most sacred cows for the search algo­rithm. To penal­ize sites that have got­ten links as a result of some sort of viral dis­tri­b­u­tion or syn­di­ca­tion would effec­tively cre­ate a Wall­street Jour­nal Penalty. But clearly, that’s not happening.

We’re keep­ing our foot­print squeaky clean while we move towards bet­ter ver­ti­cal­iza­tion of our links. Like­wise, with HOTH Plus+, you can now have con­tent writ­ten by 100% US edu­cated, tal­ented writ­ers who pro­duce SEO copy to the high­est stan­dards of read­abil­ity. All of this means that you can con­tinue using The HOTH confidently.

As always, we advise that you use it as a tool in your tool­box and not as a sil­ver bul­let. In SEO, there are no sil­ver bul­lets, and with time, as the algo­rithm becomes increas­ingly more com­plex, there will be fewer still. Use us as a fan­tas­tic tool, but if the Microsite Mas­ters data tells us any­thing, those 10% of links from relevant/authority sites that are the biggest dif­fer­ence between penal­ized sites and safe sites are still on you.

Action­able Items

1. Keep calm. Don’t panic. Change will come again, prob­a­bly soon.
2. Rough rules of thumb (based on Microsite Mas­ters’ data analy­sis above): Keep 10% of your of your link pro­file from rel­e­vant sites and and at least 35% of your anchor texts natural/not-optimized.
3. Ana­lyze your actual SERPs. Use Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, and Majes­tic SEO to ana­lyze who is rank­ing in your niche. Do you see any trends for sites that are rank­ing? What is their anchor dis­tri­b­u­tion like? See what you can learn about what Google is actu­ally favor­ing in your SERPs by ana­lyz­ing the win­ners and adjust your SEO strat­egy accordingly.
4. Use a well rounded link build­ing strat­egy, such as the one we taught in our Link Build­ing Pyra­mid webi­nar ear­lier this year (full webi­nar unfor­tu­nately not avail­able due to cor­rupt record­ing, but here is a con­densed ver­sion via Pub­Con). Don’t put all your eggs in 1 bas­ket. Like any invest­ment, build­ing all the same kind of links is not sound.
5. Max­i­mize the value out of every vis­i­tor that comes to your site. STOP SQUANDERING YOUR TRAFFIC. If you don’t already live the age-old adver­tis­ing adage “the money is in the list,” now is the time to start. This means you should be retar­get­ing your vis­i­tors with ser­vices like AdRoll, split test­ing the liv­ing crap out of your site, and doing every­thing you can to get vis­i­tors on your mail­ing list (whether they buy or not). So many mar­keters squan­der their traf­fic by only giv­ing them­selves 1 shot with vis­i­tors. Find ways to turn a visit into a rela­tion­ship that may yield many touch points and many pos­si­ble sales down the road, not just 1. I know for a fact we’ve got­ten some of our biggest cus­tomers because they vis­ited us once, saw us all over the inter­net for a while thanks to retar­get­ing and finally became curi­ous enough to give us a shot. If the only part of the fun­nel you’re inter­ested is the mouth (i.e. traf­fic gen­er­a­tion) you will find your­self extremely frus­trated over time and ultra sus­cep­ti­ble to quirks that come up with dif­fer­ent traf­fic sources. In my opin­ion, under­stand­ing, build­ing and opti­miz­ing sales fun­nels ver­sus merely get­ting traf­fic is the defin­i­tive dif­fer­ence between a bonafide inter­net mar­keter and an SEO tech­ni­cian. There is noth­ing wrong with either, but the prior has a career even if Google gets nuked tomorrow.
6. Look for guest post­ing and press oppor­tu­ni­ties. There are a bil­lion arti­cles writ­ten about the art of guest post­ing so I won’t waste your time beat­ing a dead horse. Just do it. This will get you really solid author­i­ta­tive links and, if your guest posts are at least decent, you’ll get great qual­i­fied traf­fic back to your site. In many cases, the mar­ket value of a guest post can eas­ily be hun­dreds or thou­sands of dol­lars, while the return may be higher than any ban­ner ad. The only thing it costs is brain­power and time. Like­wise, press is eas­ier than ever with ser­vices like HARO that will send you emails every day packed with requests from jour­nal­ists for qual­i­fied sources. Pitch the ones that you feel you’re qual­i­fied for and you may get some press. Again, this is super smart because it dri­ves qual­i­fied traf­fic, builds rep­u­ta­tional assets, and depend­ing on the qual­ity of the sites you get pub­lished on, will likely result in a ton more syn­di­cated links from else­where. Don’t have time to reply to HARO? No prob­lem. There’s an app for that.
7. Watch our Panda 3.3 webi­nar. We basi­cally called all the warn­ing signs of Pen­guin, over a month before its release and adjusted our prod­uct accord­ingly. Many of those ideas are shad­owed in this arti­cle, but you can get more depth on what’s been going on with Google over the past few months, what we’re doing about it and what you can too.
8. A huge por­tion of SERPs now con­tain results linked to a spe­cific author. Whether this is causal or cor­rel­a­tive is hard to tell, but its pretty safe to say that Google is going to give more credit to con­tent asso­ci­ated with trusted author accounts over time. Now seems like a good time to set yours up. Here are the offi­cial Google instruc­tion on how to setup your author pro­file.
9. Stay curi­ous. In the words of Chris Rem­pel, “the fat lady has not sung.” Pay atten­tion to the SERPs. Ana­lyze your com­peti­tors. Notice changes. And give your­self the ben­e­fit of the doubt that it’s not nec­es­sar­ily you who is screw­ing up, but Google (at least some­times). This will keep you sane, but more impor­tantly, it will give you the per­spec­tive not to ditch every­thing you know every time there’s a bump in road and over-invest into appeas­ing Google’s lat­est tem­per tantrum. This update has lit­er­ally been out for 3 weeks now. Our stan­dard advice to any­one doing any kind of SEO work is to watch for changes in the SERPs for 3–6 weeks from the time of the ini­tial change — even for some­thing as sim­ple as link build­ing. For some­thing as major as this, I’d def­i­nitely rec­om­mend the same.
10. Evolve.  As you look at the serps, you may find many new oppor­tu­ni­ties to exper­i­ment with.  Right now, large web 2.0 sites (i.e. tum­blr, blogspot, word­press, youtube) seem to be rank­ing abnor­mally high.  If you have the band­width, move quick and exploit these oppor­tu­ni­ties. If you don’t, don’t fret. This prob­a­bly isn’t some­thing that’ll make or break you in the future.

What NOT To Do

1. DO NOT file a re-inclusion request unless you’ve been de-indexed. This seems to be a pop­u­lar move amongst pan­ick­ers. If you can type in your sites URL into the Google search bar and it finds your site, you haven’t been de-indexed. In this case, fill­ing out a rein­clu­sion request makes about as much sense as fill­ing out your death cer­tifi­cate when you have the flu.
2. DO NOT assist Google on its cru­sade. Google has cre­ated a page for you to assist them in screw­ing over sites. The rea­sons why you shouldn’t do this are end­less. First there is the karmic fac­tor. You can bet its a mat­ter of time before some­one does the same to you. Then there is the fact that just because Google slaps one of your com­peti­tors doesn’t mean you will nec­es­sar­ily rank any higher. Gen­er­ally, this is a huge waste of time and only invites greater scrutiny into your par­tic­u­lar SERPs, which is some­thing that almost never ben­e­fits anyone.
3. This one is not a strict “do not,” but I per­son­ally wouldn’t fill out Google’s Pen­guin Feed­back Form (aka “AHHH! WHAT’D YOU DO TO MY SITE?!?!?!?!” form). First of all, as a rule of thumb, any time you ask for a man­ual review, you are usu­ally ask­ing for trou­ble. Review­ers are not inter­ested in help­ing you. Just because you requested it doesn’t mean they’re mag­i­cally on your side. And more impor­tantly, I just haven’t heard of it help­ing any­one yet, so it seems like a waste of time. Pro­ceed at your own risk.

Today, we’re extremely excited to announce the  The HOTH 3, our most effec­tive, safest and most con­sis­tent seo link build­ing solu­tion to date.

The HOTH 2 was an impor­tant phase in the product’s evo­lu­tion. It served over 3000 cam­paigns. In that time, we acquired almost 1000 of the world’s top SEOs as our clients. We’ve kept our ear to the ground, stayed hum­ble and lis­tened to your feed­back. Like­wise, we’ve paid close atten­tion to the changes in the search engines and adapted to stay sev­eral steps ahead.

The HOTH 3 includes over 50 indi­vid­ual
improve­ments, based on your feedback.

Here are the 7 that you need to know about.