SES London 2013 - Paul Madden - Social Media and SEO

Paul Madden formerly blackhat SEO @SEOIdiot now SEO and in building guru based in the UK http://www.paulmadden.co.uk/ gave some great tips on link building post penguin.

I didn't take many notes having been a little stuck in the moment of listening however I did take some notes and hopefully caught the gist of what he was trying to get across.

Things to remember when link building;
- Links don't expire you have to take these off.
- Link data is a must!!!!
- Understanding the sites you get links from don't just say yes

GET A MONTHLY LINK AUDIT PROCESS IN PLACE!

Signals that should tell you your site is at risk;
-Far higher % of on anchor text
- site wide links are a no no
- stay away from suspect Cctlds
- Remove links that have died check BACKLINKS and if the sites still exists or not

% of link anchor text is the answer
GOOGLE IS BASED ON LINKS, don't forget this!!!

What you need to ask yourself when you are measuring link metric value;
What is the cctld
What is the purpose of site, is it of value?
Check for Banned words
Does the site have Links to bad places (use Xenu Link sleuth)
Commercial anchors
No interaction on site, comments, tweets, reviews
No social activity on site

TOP 4 things to remember when building links;
- audit link profile
- make sure the guys know what they're doing
- don't stop building
- watch link profile

Basically, measure, measure , measure and then keep track!!!
Link building is NOT dead, it's just getting tougher.

What Google can learn from Buddhism

Buddhist Love

Having been brought up in a very Catholic / Roman Catholic surrounding being Italian and all I initially found it very difficult to understand how other cultures / religions could fit into society. In fact I never understood how people (non Italians) could do things other than:

• Watch the Pope give sermons at the Vatican
• Support Ferrari
• Eat Pasta

As an Italian catholic boy that's what I was lead to believe was the essence of living.

As i started growing up I started becoming interested in more and more of life's GREAT cultures and religions and started realising that there was more to life then being Italian... This brings me to my story for the day, "What Google can learn from Buddhism". To be more specific what Google and their linking algorithm's can learn from the Buddhist way of life...

The Yin and Yang of Love

The Way of Love and Affection

(This is an extract from Humanistic Buddhism, a Blueprint for Life)

 "In terms of marriage, the marriage of man and woman is the elevation, perfection, and unity of love. However, love is not a one-way street; love means that people should try to understand one another and to take the love they feel for a person and broaden it to include all sentient beings..." furthermore it states, "Love is reciprocal. True love means helping and blessing the beloved. Love is not owning, but rather offering. Small love means loving that which is related to oneself; great love means loving that which is related to others. Love others as thyself; lead thyself by following others".

What can Buddhism teach Google?

Well, for those who are newcomers to SEO, companies/websites that would like to rank well in search engines rely heavily on something called a link building. For those who want to read more on this, check out SEOmoz - http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011.

Back when SEO was still all about on page optimisation and sharing links with other people, Google relied heavily on something called "Reciprocal link building". Things changed, and over time Google realised that people were using this method of linking to boost their rankings. Quite easily. The method people used was to build a relationship with another website owner. Tell them they loved their site added a link to their website and asked the website owner if they would return the favour.

This is a mutual agreement and something I would refer to as link love. I love your site, you love my site, let's link up.

Google thought better of this and decided that this was way too easy for people to cheat the system and then told everyone that reciprocal links no longer worked. They were crap and that everyone had to now go an get one way links if they wanted to rank well.

The problem with one way links

With this great update that Google brought upon the SEO world along with it came SPAM. Web spam of a form that not even Google predicted would happen.

• Massive link networks started popping up
• Social media sites were spammed into oblivion to the point that some of the BIG social media, bookmarking sites are only used for link spam these days
• PR sites were spammed beyond belief, some of the PR sites i worked with were recieving on average 2000 PR articles an hour (for links)
• Big corporates started realising that their business models could change and began selling links on their sites for REDICULOUS amounts (Ask news24.com what is costs for a banner on the home page). In fact better yet, ask Forbes.com what it costs for a link in the footer of their site.
• Small SEO companies offering link building services popped up quicker than Jamie Oliver could could a plate a pasta.
• Every company on the WEB started hiring link building companies to buy 1 way links

This lead to such a massive increase in web SPAM, rubbish sites ranking for irrelevant terms, and worst of all a REALLY REALLY bad user experience on Google.

Ultimately this lead to the Google PANDA & PENGUIN updates! This I believe all could have been prevented with SOME RECIPROCAL LOVE!

Conclusion

Google, read this, read the passage that the Buddhists so brilliant put forward. Love is reciprocal, love is not a one way street. As a webmaster of many many sites, we ALL know that irrelevant links to irrelevant sites is bad not only for SEO but for user experience. Myself as a webmaster would never link to someones sites if it wasn't relevant to my readers and my viewers.

If someone links to me and I link back to him, that's reciprocal love and a mutual agreement that says, "Your site is great man, thank you for linking to me". That is good for EVERYONE.

Yes, filter out the SPAM. Yes filter out the irrelevant content. Yes drop all the crappy sites out there.
BUT, bring back reciprocal link love with a more advanced algorithm, you have all those engineers, maybe you should look at hiring some monks...

Link Building for Google.co.za Guide - Part 1

I think I've been working in this industry for too long. When I first started reading BLOGS and doing my research on SEO and how to best optimise your site for Google (in fact my very first search terms was something on the lines of "how to get website visitors to my blogger blog) I read an article that said something on the lines of .... "you know you've been working in SEO for too long when Google updates have made a full 360 degree turn and come back to the point that you started learning about SEO..."

WELL, I'm kinda sad, but happy to say that I think I'm there.

Link Building circle of life

1. Always have a well balanced link strategy (according to every guy who does whitehat seo), this way you'll never have a problem
2. 2008, Competition heats up, people start sharing links with each other (reciprocal links become the thing)
3. 2009, reciprocal links no longer play a big role (Google update)
4. 2009, everyone starts building links using BLOG comments, WORDPRESS and BLOGGER become the biggest sites on the web because of this
6. Directories the biggest thing since sliced cheese.
7. Google slaps directories accepting money from submissions. Probably slapped all directories.
8. 2010 Wordpress and Blogger add "nofollows" to their BLOG comments
9. Social bookmark links, FREE one way links, FREE and easy!!!
10. Google stops relying so heavily on these links unless they actually have a bit of weight behind them
11. Panic stations nobody knows where to get links, so they start paying for them. Indian companies offering free links
12. In fact these companies get so clever they start getting people to pay for subscriptions and you can get as many one way links as you like. FOR FREE. See Build my rank closes it's doors.
13. CIRCLE OF LIFE - if only we had stuck to the well balanced link building strategy, none of these would have affected us and we'd be ok.

Google over the couple of months have released more updates to their search algorithms than God has sheep and it's about time that the experts, especially in South Africa start sharing this information with those out there who are starting off with their first BLOG, website, whatever it is you're trying to do in an attempt to gain traffic for your website.

I am going to skip all the boring juicy bits about, meta data and on-page optimisation, I'll go back to that at some point but let's be honest folks.... RANKING is alot about links. The problem is if you follow the trends and reply to every link builder from New Delhi that says he can get you links for $15 a pop, you're going to end up regretting it at some point..... WELL, this is not to say that these links don't work, but there's a very methodical process to link building that you should follow.

A very famous and well known "link Jesus" actually follows a process of link building. A process that works DARN well or he wouldn't be the guest speaker at every conference on link building.

What's my current issue

I'm pissed off that's it's taken Google so long to figure out who the hell is buying shit quality links and who is not. It's pathetic and it should not be allowed. I do alot of work in the insurance industry and I can tell you now that sites like Carinsurance.co.za should not be ranking 1st for "car insurance". Cheapcarinsurance.co.za should not be ranking 5th for car insurance and so on. Google team, if you want a list let me know...

So in an attempt to share some of my knowledge and input I would like to point out what I believe is a good process or starting point for link building...

This is the end of part 1... stay tuned for more!

Part two...

Starting Your Link Building Process...

Removing Spammy Links - Google's official statement

This month, Google published an official statement about low quality links in their webmaster blog. For those of you who are new to SEO, there are various types of links that search engines consider when valuating the importance of your website but for the purpose of this article, we'll stick to 2 types;

1. High quality links (one way links from authoritative sites within the same industry, business you're in)

2. Poor quality, low quality links (one way links from either SPAMMY sites, or sites that just are nothings in the internet world)

According to Google, in order to reduce the "so called" negative effect that one way poor quality links have on your site, this is what you need to do:

1. Linking is a significant factor in Google's ranking algorithm but it is just one of many factors. Other factors are the content of your web pages, the site structure and the appearance of a keyword in the different web page elements.

2. If you have a high quality website and get links from spammy websites, try to contact the website owners and ask them to remove their links. Google will not help you with that.

3. It the webmasters of the spammy website are not cooperative, don't worry and focus on the links that are under your control.

4. Google recommends to optimize the many factors than influence indexing and ranking. The top 10 optimizer in our website optimization tool has been designed for exactly that task.It analyzes dozens of factors that influence the position of your website in the search results and it shows you what exactly you have to change so that Google will list your website on the first result page.

5. Google says that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time and that they may not be considered by Google's ranking algorithm.

6. If you want to make sure Google knows about the spammy links and is valuing them appropriately, you can report them to Google with their spam report or paid links report forms.

What are your thoughts on this?