Real-World Panda Optimization - Michael Cottam to Whiteboard Friday

The Panda algorithm looks for high-quality content, but what exactly is it looking for, how is it finding what it deems to be high-quality, and—perhaps most pressingly—what in the world can we do to befriend the bear?

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Michael Cottam explains what these things are, and more importantly, what we can do to be sure we get the nod from this particular bear.

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Michael Cottam. I'm an independent SEO consultant from Portland, Oregon and have been a Moz associate for many years.
Today we're going to talk about Panda optimization. We're going to talk about real world things you can do, no general hand waving. We're going to talk about specific tactics you can use. We're going to talk about first of all what does Panda measure, secondly, how might Panda actually go about measuring these factors on your site, and then lastly, what are you going to do to win based on those factors.

What does Panda measure (and what can we do about it)?

To start off, this is the list of the major factors we're going to talk about for Panda: thin or thick content; the issues around duplicate or original content; the top heavy part of the Panda algorithm; how do you come up with fabulous images and how is Panda going to measure how fabulous they are; and rich interactive experience pieces.

Thin (thick) content

First of all, thin/thick content. Certainly, a lot of sites got penalized when Panda first came out where the site design had basically broken the content out into a lot of pages with just a few sentences on it. Here we're talking about how much text is there per page? How might Panda actually go about measuring this? This is probably the easiest piece to measure of everything on here. It's very simple programmatically to strip all the HTML tags out and then just do a word count.
There was a study done -- I think it was last summer by serpIQ, and there'll be a link to that in the notes -- that showed that for reasonably competitive terms you needed 1,500 to 2,500 words on a page to rank on page 1. They average this over ten or twenty thousand different keyword searches. Stripping out the HTML tags, count the words, what do you have left? Analyze your own pages and see if you're up near that 1,500 mark.
How do we win on that? Well, this is all about size matters. At least 1,500 words, push to 2,000 or 2,500 if you can. Sometimes that may mean going through your site and condensing four or five pages of content all into one page. You might think, well, that might make a giant long page, terrible user experience. But you can solve this with tab navigation so all the content is on the page. When you click a tab, JavaScript changes the CSS style of the various tabs to make one part show versus the other part. Google's going to see everything in all those tabs when they crawl the page, because it's all in the HTML before you click.

Duplicate/original content

The second thing let's talk about is duplicate and original content. Now there's been a ton of stuff written about duplicate content and penalties and how does Google check this, that, and the other.
Lately we've seen a bunch of different blog posts from different places talking about press releases and how press releases, well, they're evil. The links don't count. Google didn't spot them all. Google is much better at it than they used to be. But still, if you do a Google search on any e-press release you've done, you generally find if you search the first sentence or so of the press release, you'll find four or five indexed pages containing that. But that's way better than it was 3 years ago when you'd get 60 pages all be indexed still with nothing else in it.
The press release piece is probably the easiest piece for Google to measure for original content, because if you think about what happens when a press release is republished, you've got the site template from whichever news site or industry site is going to run it, header/footer, maybe some sidebar and some ads, you have the press release as one contiguous chunk, and that's really it. If Google's going to do page chunking to try to pull out the template, and the header and the footer, and things like that and see what is the core content of the page, that's probably the simplest case for them to do.
If you're interweaving bits of text you got from different places with your own text, customer reviews, things like that, that aren't going to be the same as other sites, then it's much harder for Google to spot.
What might Google be doing to try to decide does this block of text on your page exist on a hundred other sites? There are various techniques like hashing, or there are ways to record a thumbprint vaguely of what the word patterns are and things like that. That's not the hard part. There's lots of talk about the thumbprint and hashing.
The difficult part is if you've got a page that's got content from 12 different places and it's not just all the manufacturer's product content or whatever, you've got you've got your own customer reviews or your own intro sentence at the top, things like that, if you interweave that, that makes it very difficult for Google to go and chunk the page up into meaningful pieces, know when the chunks start and end, and then compare that to what they found on all the other sites that happen to be selling the same product that you've got to put the product description on from your site, etc.
What do you do to win there? You really want to interweave the original content that you've created. That might be your overview, your customers' reviews, things like that, your ratings. Interweave that with the stock text and photos. Break it up a bit. What you don't want is one giant block of text that is exactly the same as that giant block of text that's on the other hundred sites that are selling the same product you're trying to sell.

Top-heaviness

Let's talk about top heavy, a pretty important part of the Panda algorithm. Mostly when people talk about the top heavy algorithm, the example they give is ads above the fold. But if you actually read what Google said about it when they launched it, the description of what they're trying to solve, it's not really just about ads above the fold. It's about anything that's not content above the fold and your structure of your website pushing that content down, so that when the user lands on your page, they can't get anything useful without scrolling. That's what it's really about.
How might Google be going about measuring whether your site or your page is top heavy? Certainly, if you look at the tools that are built into the Chrome developer tools, Firefox developer tools has similar sorts of things where they can render the whole page there and give you the dimensions and highlight that on top of the page for you. So certainly it's very easy for them to go and render the whole page.
They're not going to read through the HTML and assume the first X number of words is above the fold. No sites render that way any more. So they're going to have to be rendering it to determine above the fold. There's just too much CSS positioning happening today.
So render and measure the pixels. Then how do you know whether it's ads or template or content? Now with a lot of the stuff I'm saying here we don't know absolutely what Google is doing to measure these things, but we can guess and infer based on how we see it behave, what ranks and doesn't, and also just knowing how parsers are written, how crawlers are written, things like that, what's possible.
The simplest way, if I were Google Panda, the way I would decide whether something was content or not is I would see if it was clickable. It's very easy to tell whether a given element there is linked to anything else. This is not going to be a foolproof thing, but your menus are going to be clickable, ads are going to be clickable for sure, navigation buttons are going to be clickable.
There are going to be some false positives with things like photo carousels that may be clickable to advance and things like that. But in general, if you're trying to do a quick and dirty analysis and say what above the fold is content, if you wipe out everything that's clickable and wipe out everything that's white space, you should be left with various blocks around the screen which is probably going to be content. That's probably what they're doing. I pretty much bet on that.
How do you win? First of all, minimize your header. If your header has a lot of white space and things are stacked, that's going to push the content down further on every single page on your site. Look at: Does the width of your main menu bar really have to have that much space above and below it? Has your logo got a lot of white space before the top of the page? Are you putting your share buttons down in a way that pushes everything down? Look for those sorts of things, because a little bit of win there moves a lot of content up the page above the fold on every page of your site.
Another question might be: Okay, so what's above the fold? Obviously, we don't know for sure, but we can guess since the vast majority of people are running browsers that are better than 1280 by 1000, that's probably a good benchmark. If you're analyzing your own site, look at it with 1280 by 1000, and that's most likely about the kind of dimensions that Google's looking at for above the fold.

Image fabulosity

Images are certainly rich content. Everybody loves images rather than text. It makes a much more engaging experience. How is Google going to go and measure how fabulous your images are?
If you've got great, fabulous original images, then that's probably great content to show the user. If you've got the same product photos that the other hundred websites all have, then not so much.
What's Google likely to be doing? First of all, if you've never played with Google reverse image search, give it a shot. It's incredibly powerful. I do a lot of work in the travel industry, and the problem with the travel industry is if you're brochuring hotels on your site, really your only source for hotel photos, unless you travel to all the destinations and shoot them yourselves, very expensive of course, is you're going to get the hotel's image library.
You could take those images. Maybe they show up as 5 mg photos in TIFF format. You can change them to JPEG. You can shrink them down to maybe 1000 pixels wide from the original 5000. You can do a little sharpening. You can convert the formats. You might change the contrast. You might even overlay some text, save it with a different file name. Google will still spot those.
If you do a reverse image search on a hotel photo from pick any site you want, you'll find hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other sites that all have the exact same photo. They're all named differently. They have different dimensions. Some are JPEG, some are PNG files, etc.
Google reverse image search is really good. To think that Panda isn't using that to decide whether you have original images I think is crazy. If they're not doing it, they'll be doing it next week. Don't think that just because you renamed a file or cropped it or resized it a little, that you now have an original image. You do not.
Image dimensions are undoubtedly another factor that Google's going to be looking at. Nobody really wants to decide to go to overwater bungalows in Bora-Bora by looking at little tiny, postage stamp size thumbnails. If you've got big thousand pixel wide pictures of these things, that's fabulous content. You've got to expect Panda is going to like that because users are going to like that. Size and originality.
How do you win? Go big. Be original. Okay, you say, "But how do I be original? I've got X number of hundred or thousand products on the site. It all comes from manufacturers. I can't shoot my own photos."
Consider for your major search targets, like category pages, so not necessarily individual product pages but category pages, make up an image that's a collage of some of those other images. Take those pieces, glue them together, use whatever Photoshop kind of software you want, but make up a new image that consists of images that are from the manufacturers of the products in that category, and that can be your new image header for that page. Make that category page, which is probably a better search target for you anyway, rank better.

Interactive experience

Certainly, a more engaging page is one where there's a video to play, or a map you can zoom in on and browse around and see where the hotels are and click on and things like that. Undoubtedly, part of what Panda's doing is measuring your site to say how much fun is there here to play with for the user.
How's Google going to measure that? Well, this is an interesting issue, because if you look at how YouTube videos are embedded, by default it's with an iframe. If you look at how a lot of the mapping tools are embedded by default, it's with an iframe.
Why is that bad? Let's think about how Google has considered iframe content in the past in terms of links and on page content and things like that. If you iframe it in, Google has been considering it as belonging to the page it was iframed in, not the page that is embedding that content. So the risk you have here is if you're using iframes to embed maps or videos, things like that, not sure that Panda's going to be able to spot that and realize you've got embedded rich content.
Chances are with YouTube, Wistia, Vimeo, and a few like that Google's probably done a little bit of work to try to spot iframed in videos. But you know what? There's a better solution there. With Wistia, you've got the SEO embed type that creates an embed object, not an iframe. YouTube, there's the little checkbox, after you click Share Embed, that says "use old embed code." So you can do that.
The other thing you can consider is where you don't have a video already and you want to add rich content, make an introductory video for a category, for your company, for a product. It can be the same stuff that you've already written as content for that category or about your company, about us, that sort of stuff. Just talk to the camera and do a 30 second introductory video for that category, that product, or read your review out basically from a whiteboard behind the camera. Then use the transcript of that video as that extra text content on the page.
When we talk about maps, I really prefer to use the Google Maps API. It's a JavaScript API. You might have some questions. Can Google follow the JavaScript? Well, I think in the case of maps it's their own product, and certainly Google's interested in knowing whether a page has a map embedded.
If you screenshot a map and then turn it into a JPEG, well that's nice. It's another big image, and it's probably original now or looks original to Google, but it's not that extra rich interactive content that a map is.
My advice is use the Google Maps API. I think they're on Version 3.0. It's actually a lot easier to use, once you've seen an example, than you might think. That seems to work very well for producing that other piece of interactive content.
I've talked a lot here. How much does this work? Links are still very important for ranking. Two or three years ago, I would say links were 80%, 90% of what it took to get something to rank. Panda has changed that in an insane way.
Here's the test example. Go to Google and do a search for best time to visit Tahiti. You'll find my little site, Visual Itineraries, up there at number one for that, ahead of TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, USA Today, all these other sites. These other sites have between 10,000 and 250,000 domains linking to them. My site has under 100. I rank number one for that.
Now, in case you think okay, yeah, it's internal link anchor text or page title match, things like that, here's the other proof. Do a Google search for "when should I go to French Polynesia." The only word in that that matches the page title or any anchor text is the word "to." It's a stop word, that's not going to count. I'm still like number three or number four on page one, up with all these other guys that have tens or hundreds of thousands of domains linking.
Please click through to my site, because I don't want bounce rate stuff happening, and actually have a look and see what I've done. See the thin header I've got at the top. Have a look at the images I've got in there. Some of them I created by screenshotting Excel charts. I've got embedded video. I've got an embedded Google Map.

There we go. Thanks everybody, and take care.

What Is Internet Marketing?

With each passing year the online business world grows exponentially and there are an increasing number of people who want to get into internet marketing. But most people don’t really even know what that means or what it takes. There are so many things that go under the overall internet marketing umbrella that if you spoke to 100 different “internet marketers” and asked them what they do, you would probably get 100 different answers. Most of us have a hard time even trying to explain what it is we do to inquiring minds.

So, what is internet marketing? Here are just some of the things a day in the life of an internet marketer entails…

* Keyword Research – When you are going to launch a new website, information product, write a new post, or just about anything else, you need to know if there is a market out there for it. Otherwise you could be wasting a lot of time on something that nobody cares about and will never make you any money. In order to that it is important to do keyword research ahead of time. This is something that a lot of people either forget or intentionally skip over for some reason, and it can often lead to total failure.

Researching a market can be a very lengthy and detailed process. You often need to check search volume, competition level, trends, demographics, whether the target audience has money to spend and are willing to pay, and many other things. It should be done carefully and without assumptions based on what you want to happen. As an internet marketer, you might spend an entire day (or longer) just doing keyword research.

* Web Design – In order to market anything on the internet or build an online business, you need to have a website of some sort. There are plenty of tools and resources available (such as WordPress) that will help build a site for you. However, it still takes time to learn how to use those tools and actually get a site built the way you want it. Even the most newbie friendly content management systems have a learning curve and take time to set up. Then, you must learn some coding in order to make changes in certain places and customize your site beyond the basic themes/templates that site builders and CMS solutions include.

And let’s not forget about domain registrations, DNS settings, system installs, settings tweaks, content uploads, and so on. Those things also take time to do and require you to learn how to do them. There’s a lot that goes into building a website and it’s just one part of being an internet marketing professional.

* Writing Content – This is something that takes up a LOT of time in the regular routine of just about every internet marketer. Content is king in the world of online marketing. You need it for almost everything you do. Whether you are building a static website, updating your blog, marketing your sites, writing press releases and articles, responding to emails, replying to comments, sending out your newsletter, creating an information product, copywriting, participating in forums, keeping up your social media accounts, and so on… You will be writing and writing some more. It’s all about content in the online world so get ready to wear out many keyboards on your computer!

* Blogging – The world of websites has no doubt shifted towards blogs in recent years and will likely continue to do so until they are the predominant force in the online world. Blogging is a very important part of internet marketing in many ways. Depending on your business model, it can actually be absolutely vital to online success. It is great for making a name for yourself, getting your content out to the world, helping to spread the word about your brand, building up a following, or even making money from your blog itself. Some internet marketers even earn their entire incomes from blogging. Although, in that case, they are typically called bloggers, but the two professions overlap in many ways.

* Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This part of the video could be an entire course all in itself. In fact, there are hundreds of books, courses, seminars, blogs, and websites dedicated solely to SEO training. My business partner and I are even in the process of writing a new ebook about this subject, which will actually be four ebooks and somewhere around 200 pages of information. It is also a part of online marketing  that can be an entire business or full time job by itself, and often is. So, with that being said, I am not going to get into a lot of details or specifics in this video about what it is or how to do it. There’s simply too much to cover.

I’ll just say that it’s extremely important and a huge part of what most internet marketing specialists do in their regular routine. There are thousands of internet marketers who spend day after day doing search engine optimization and almost nothing else. It takes a very long time to master the process and perfect the techniques. Plus, it is always changing, so staying on top of it all can be exhausting. Take me for example, my main specialty has been SEO for the past 10 years and I still learn something new almost every day.

* Social Media Marketing (SMM) – I’m sure you probably have profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Pinterest, and maybe even a few others. If you don’t then you certainly know someone close to you who does. Well, a typical internet marketer like me will have all of those profiles plus another 10 or 20 or more accounts on other social media sites that we have to manage.

Think about how much time you spend on those sites every day. It’s easy to pass an hour or two without even noticing it. And you are probably just using them to keep up with friends, family, and what’s happening around your area. Us internet marketers do all of that plus use them to network with business associates and prospects, keep up on our industry, spread the word about our content, and for other marketing reasons.

Being a social media consultant and doing all the social media marketing and updating for companies is something many people do as a full time business. It is that time consuming. But internet marketing specialists have to fit it into our daily schedule along with about a million other things.

* Pay Per Click (PPC) – When you search something on Google you will notice there are usually some ads at the top above the organic rankings and a tower of them on the right side next to the organic results. They look a lot like the regular results but are slightly different. These are paid ads through a program called Google Adwords. When someone says pay per click ads this is usually what they are referring to, even though there are technically many different forms of PPC. A business owner bids on certain keywords in order to get their ad to show there and they pay for every click generated.

This is very popular among internet marketers and anyone other businesses with products or services they sell online. The keyword research, set up, and management takes a lot of time, effort and skill. You can waste a lot of money if you just throw up your ad and let it go. Top PPC guru’s can spend years learning, testing, and tweaking their systems in order to master Adwords and make their campaigns profitable.

* Email Marketing – This is basically building up a list of email subscribers, cultivating a trusting relationship with them so they become your raving fans, sending them useful content and resources, keeping them updated on the latest news in the niche they are interested in or about your business, and sending all sorts of other information. One popular saying in the IM world is, “the money is in the list” and there is a lot of truth to that. But it’s not easy to build a profitable list and as an online marketer you will spend a lot of time mastering this particular skill.

* Product Creation – Another huge thing that online marketer’s do is create information products such as ebooks, along with membership sites, business services, SEO and marketing tools, plugins, themes, and so on. Those things take days, weeks, or even months to create depending on what it is. Almost every website or web based service you use, or ebook you read, were created by some sort of digital marketing expert in one way or another.

* Videos – A huge part of internet marketing nowadays is video production. When I started my business back in 2003 this wasn’t really a big deal at all. There were very few people doing them in those days. But video marketing has exploded in the past few years and will only continue to grow into the future. These can be educational, instructive, funny with the intent of going viral, or created for marketing purposes. Whatever the reasons for videos, the fact is they are a part of running an internet business now and they take a lot of work to do.

This point is actually quite easy to get across because you are watching an internet marketing video right now. It took me a lot of time to bring together all of this information, condense it, write out points I wanted to discuss, record the video, and upload it. Then, I will do it over and over again with more marketing videos for years to come. And this is just a basic video sitting here talking to you. Imagine how much work goes into a big production like the ones we, here at Be Always Marketing, do for our clients!

Okay that pretty much covers it for now but, as I said, those are just SOME of the main things you will be doing regularly. There’s a lot more that you will surely be doing on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. I’ve really only scratched the surface of what being an internet marketing specialist fully entails. I didn’t even get into phone calls, client servicing, meetings, media buying, webinars, seminars, forums, support, training, and so on. It virtually never ends!

So, it’s definitely not all fun and games relaxing on the beach like many people think. Internet marketing is a real business and there is a lot of work involved to build it, grow it, and maintain it. But if you are up for the challenge and willing to put in the time and effort, it can be a very rewarding way to make a living!

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14 EffectiveLink Building Strategies In The Post Panda/Penguin

Google is renowned for its update in algorithm in order to try and prevent the gaming of the search engine rankings. This has caused a swirl in the world of the webmasters. In February 2011, there is the introduction of the Panda update that has changed the complete scenario of the search results. It has altered more than one out of every 10 searches. The Panda and Penguin updates have made some serious changes which have forced the webmasters to modify their strategy in order to optimize their website.

It is quite visible that search engines are getting smarter and therefore, it is essential to redefine the link building strategy. With the introduction of the Panda updates, webmasters were looking for new tactics which can help them to establish their goals and to skyrocket in SERPs. In the April of 2012, it was found that Penguin update has hit 3% of the search results by knocking out the sites that comes with link profiles which appears to be suspicious.

Adopt A Unique Strategy…

The truth in case of link building is that you can implement either some rarely used strategy or the wide spread strategy, but your strategy may prove to be a golden egg for one website whereas for another it can turn out to be rotten egg. Unless you know the accurate steps that need to be followed for earning links, you would be looking for the webmaster that can sympathize with you and can put your links on their website. Therefore, it is highly essential that you stay updated with the latest strategies that can help you in proper link building process.

Strategies That Help You Make A Smarter Move…

In the event of the Panda and Penguin updates, it is important to dig deep into the matter to find out the common patterns that have contributed in the list of the rankings of websites. There are some of the strategies that you need to keep in mind in order to make your efforts flawless.

#1.      Recognize the Feasible Links

The adoption of the shotgun approach will not help you survive long in the market and therefore, you need to focus on finding the link opportunities. You need to check the relevance of the link and authority. It is significant to focus on the domains that are related to the niche and approach these opportunities strategically. Ask yourself if at all it is possible to build the link from the targeted site that will make sense to the visitors.If the visitors are not there, then it’s useless to waste your time. You need to identify the feasible link opportunities before you start with your link building process.

#2.      Use Balanced Anchor Text

It is important that about 40% of your links should represent your brand, domain name or URL, whereas 20% of the link should focus on the exact keywords that you are targeting. The remaining 40% will make use of any part of the keywords that is mixed with the brand name and other anchor text like “click here”. Excessive number of backlinks with the same anchor text or continuously using the similar anchor text may not give you the desired results.

#3.      Avoid Mass Link Building Tactics

Applying any kind of strategy which can help you achieve thousands of links in a shorter span of time may appear to be suspicious to the Google. This will again drag you down to the previous position and will find difficulty in acquiring a good rank in Google.

If you are achieving numerous links due to the use of the software or buying the links, then there would definitely be specific patterns which will allow the algorithm to detect in the nearer future. The only authentic way through which you can expect to receive massive links in the shortest time is with the use of viral content and it is the only way through which you can keep the position of the website intact.

#4.      Analyze Your Competitor’s Links

Are you coping everything that your competitors are doing? Then, don’t do so as this will automatically affect your ranking and also you will hamper your business. It is important to create your own identity and take the best from the competitors to improvise it and implement in your strategy. You need to take a minute to look at the link profile of your competitor in order to get an idea. Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs & Majestic SEO are great tools to look into you competitor’s link profile. This will also allow you to get a broad idea on the amount of work that you need to do in order to give ranking to a specific term. You should think strategically to stand out from the crowd.

#5.      Emphasis on Building Relationships

It is the best tactic that you can adopt in order to find the best and relevant links for your website. It is true of the relationships that happen in the real world. You need to attend different conferences, seminars or meet ups which can improve the chance of finding the people of your own industry and then you can automatically create a platform through which you can build up the valuable network. You should focus on developing real relationships in the initial stage, rather than concentrating on the links. It can always be effective to keep the business cards to keep in touch with the person.

#6.      Interview the Industry Experts

It does not matter whether it is a text interview or higher quality video interview, you can definitely make use of this tactic in order to establish links to your website. It is found that there are many people who are either not aware of this strategy or they seems to be quite disinterested in applying this method. But, truly speaking it can turn out to be the most effective way to generate links to your site. You need not be scared to go and talk to the experts in your niche. It is the best way through which you can ensure success.

#7.      Play the Role of A PRO

Just completely erase your thought regarding link building and page ranking; you just need to focus on diversifying of links. You should build links that won’t get indexed on the site that make use of the “noindex” meta tag. The objective of doing so is to create the brand quality and also drive more traffic to the website from places where you normally do not visit on the internet.

#8.      Dofollow Vs. Nofollow

You will come across with every website that contains nofollow and dofollow links. There are some people around who are highly concerned about the number of such links, but there is no such ratio that you need to maintain on the site. You need to do few researches about the ratio that is widely used in the niche sites and get the idea on it. If you are having these links in a proportionate amount then you can certainly keep the spam sites far away and you will definitely gain the higher page rank while improving the amount of visitors to your website.

#9.      Branded Links Are Very Important

Google has its own metrics in order to understand the quality of the link and therefore, it is essential to have links that are branded and highly authentic. It needs to be branded not only on the homepage, but also on other pages. These links turn out to be highly beneficial for the website and it can certainly contribute in the higher ranking of the page.

#10.  Internal Linking Mayhem

Do you know, the links within your website that you use to link your pages together (internal links) are highly beneficial? You can certainly make use of the internal links in your link building campaign and SEO. These links do matter. In the recent Penguin update we have witnessed that we are always not in favor of using the keyword anchor text. There are also other intelligent and smarter ways to follow through which do link building in the accurate manner. In case of the links that are available on your website or blog posts which leads to the authority pages are considered to be quality links. In short, it can be said that the more the number of authority pages available within the site, the more number of authority links can be developed. But, remember not to overdo it!

#11.  Directory Submission

Though, it was once considered to be an effective way of generating traffic and ensure the presence of the business in the market, but in the present time it has lost its importance. Google has penalized most of the directories and so there is no use of spending the valuable time in the process of directory submission. However, you can still come across with some directories that are prevalent (like dmoz,Yahoo! Directory, BOTW) and you can consider submitting the articles on the site that are of the niche and you can expect to get a small boost in ranking.

Now If You Are A Blogger, Here Are Some Link Building Strategies For You…

In order to build links for your blog, there are some of the important things that you can do. Though, it is fact that you might have come across with some of the strategies before, but in this case you will be able to gain some extra tips that can definitely help you earn good links to the blog.You should remember that link building is not used in order to increase the search engine ranking or building up the Page Rank, it is more than that. In order to build links. You need to increase the traffic and also build some useful relationship and it needs to be your immediate goal.

#12.  Become a Guest Author

Guest blogging can be the effective way through which the bloggers can develop links to the website which will help you get counted in the search ranking and will also improve in the traffic. There are some of the ways through which you can find blogs to submit the guest posts. You can search on the Google by placing queries like “submit a guest post,” “guest author guidelines” or “guest post by” and so on. You can also make use of the Google Authorship. In case you know any blogger who writes numerous blog posts then search with their name and you will find them. You need to focus on the links on the content to include the link and should submit the original content and need to avoid posting it anywhere else.

#13.  Contribute To the Unique Content

Article directories get a lot of legitimate scrutiny while using the webmasters. You can make use of the high quality editorial contributions to maintain the highest standards. With the guest blogging you can earn huge benefits than the article networks while some bloggers may find it difficult in order to score the guest post opportunities. Your quality article will definitely help you earn good quality links. You should add some extra feature to your content rather than writing text. You can think of implementing of images and videos to make your content seem more attractive. You can make some sort of moderation that wills not anyone else to post that they want to do. Add featured authors on the home page and newsletters etc.

#14.  Commenting on Other Blogs

Blog commenting is taken as the strongest and the most powerful variety due to various reasons which can help in the link building process. If you leave any valuable comments you will get extra attention from the owner and the author of the blog which will help you develop the relationship and you can also gain the opportunity of building links. This will automatically help you draw more traffic to your website improving the visibility and creating a huge significance in the market.

SEO is Going to Die More, Says Matt Cutts

No, I am not obsessed with Matt Cutts. I barely even know him. We once shared a drink and then… well. that’s another story…Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video to help answer many of the questions webmasters have been asking over the past several weeks.  He focused primarily on what webmasters and SEO professionals can expect in the near future regarding what types of things will help, and what will hurt as far as ranking in Google’s results goes.

The video contained ten specific areas and how they will affect the future of SEO for virtually every type of site.  It is no surprise that the main theme of the video is that black hat strategies will continue to be penalized and good sites who follow the rules will benefit. 

Penguin Updates – Google will continue to tweak their penguin updates starting with a big change expected to go live in the next few weeks.  This update is supposed to have an even bigger impact than the original penguin update.  Naturally, this will make some people happy and others angry, but it really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

Advertorials – Sites using advertorials to attempt to inflate their overall link profile were penalized earlier this year.  Even more action against this type of link building is going to be coming out later this year.

Spam Queries – Some keywords tend to attract black hat techniques more than others.  Terms like payday loans, for example, are flooded with hundreds of low quality sites.  Due to requests from outside of Google, these types of terms are going to be getting the attention of Matt’s spam team.

Upstream Targets – Link builders have been using layered ‘networks’ to avoid getting punished by Google for their unnatural link building.  Google is going to start looking upstream at where the links are coming from and punishing those who are building unnatural link networks.

More Sophisticated Link Analysis – This point was perhaps the most interesting of all of them.  Google claims they will be creating a more sophisticated profile of each site’s back links and where they are coming from.  This more detailed analysis will undoubtedly help them find black hat SEO strategies and penalize them as well.

Hacked Sites – Google will be implementing improvements on warning users of potentially hacked sites as well as notifying the webmaster so corrective action can be taken.

Authority Sites – It is no surprise to anyone that Google loves authority sites, and Matt made it a point to say that they will continue to give ranking boosts to authority sites.

Panda Smack – Google acknowledged that some of the sites which were hurt by the panda updates were really not true black hat sites and they will be working to ‘soften’ the impact this update had on some of these sites.

Multiple of Same Domain in SERP – In an attempt to diversify the results on the first page of results Google is going to reduce the number of pages from the same domain that are displayed.

Webmaster Communication – Finally, Matt once again expressed his desire to have more open communication with webmasters so everyone can get the rankings they deserve.


Overall this was a very informative video and I highly recommend everyone take a look.  You can see the video in its entirety on YouTube CLICK HERE .

Upadate Upone Panda and Penguin

Matt Cutts from Google speaks on the yet to be released Panda & Penguin algorithm update and Link Network Updates

One of the most significant tech news of the day came from the headquarters of the world’s most popular search engine. Matt Cutts, the spam search head of Google spoke out to the media about certain issues like fighting spam searches on the search engine. Well, this time they have come up with two efficient algorithms, the Panda and Penguin algorithm to fight spam. The man from Google also spoke out on the new link networks that the company is targeting in 2013.

The Panda Updates

As far as experts are concerned, Google is doing its level best to launch the Panda update in a week or so from now. This launching will certainly propel them ahead of other search engines. The last Panda update was long back in the month of January and we haven’t witnessed an up-gradation for quite some time. So, the expected day for the new update is expected to be 22^nd March, 2013.

Updates in Penguin Algorithm

This Penguin algorithm, after its release in April last year, has not undergone more than 2 updates. So, this time Matt Cutts has promised that the update of this year will be a significant one as far as technology is concerned. Moreover, it is expected that the 3^rd update, i.e. version 4 will be widely discussed by technical people across the globe.

New Line Networks

This March, Google is ready to go for another new network line for increasing its spectrum of coverage and at the same time improving upon its existing dominance in the field of online searches.

Well, March, 2013 surely seems to be a time for incorporation of new algorithms and techniques as far as Google is concerned. In a bid to improve its services and gaining more revenue, Google is playing hard and fast to retain its top spot. From the business point of view, Google is projecting itself as the mono pole of the search engine business.

On the other hand, for the users, the incorporation of the much anticipated Panda and Penguin updates will send new ripples across the SEO market. Moreover, these spam fighting steps will allow users to have a better search experience. Threats of improper results can be nullified and users can have the freedom to trust Google.