After watching a recent video on Shoemoney and reading a rather excellent article on SEOmoz by Justin, I felt inspired to talk about a subject that everyone seems to dance around… Link Wheels, do they work? Don’t they? How can Google filter them.

Shoemoney interviewed one of the guys from Link Wheelers making some pretty bold claims about how effective link wheels are and Justin on SEOmoz gave an excellent break down of how the engines may filter out low quality links based on certain signals. Do links wheels get caught in these filters? Are they a valid link building model? Well, here’s what I think.

There is a little bit of stigma attached to link wheels, widely associated with spam and thin affiliate sites but the fact is, if done properly, link wheels or making use of your web properties can work really well.

If you are investing in link building then why not consider using that budget/resource to create your own ‘useful’ web properties and use these to link intelligently back to you main website? It makes perfect sense! Some smart affiliates have been doing this years.

Do you already have external sites? Are you using them to link intelligently back to your ‘money’ site?

At this point I think it would be a good idea to go over what link wheels are, how to use them and how not to use them.

What are link wheels?

Essentially they are web properties that interlink and point back to your main website or ‘money’ site, the technique has been around for years in the SEO industry but it still seems a lot of people aren’t familiar with them.

They are mainly used to create the illusion that your main site is the authority in it’s niche, building multiple web properties with relevant content and optimised links creates an external hub of info, if this hub of rich content cites your main website as the authority then of course Google is going to follow those optimised links and reward your main site.

Yes, this tactic can be used in a spammy way to manipulate rankings but if done with quality in mind the links you create will stand the test of time.

What not to do

Let’s be clear about one thing, this tactic works, however if you want to sleep easy knowing all your hard work is going to last, then it’s best to do it right. A lot of webmasters looking for the quick win will do the following:

• Create 10 – 15 Web 2.0 properties usually using free publishing websites like blogger, wordpress and squidoo
• Copy and paste content from an article directory or Google news
• Add the exact same anchor text on each site back to their money site
• Link all the properties together with one link 1 to 2, 2 to 3 etc……
• Never add content or build links into these new properties again

If you’re going to build an external hub of websites this is not the way to do it, don’t get me wrong, it will probably work but for how long? In my experience you’ll be lucky to get more than a month out of these links before they are devalued by one of Google’s many filters.

What to do…

Think about the traffic within your niche, what answers are they looking for that your site doesn’t provide for? For example, you may be running a beauty salon but a lot of the traffic within your niche is looking for teeth whitening or semi permanent makeup, it might not be appropriate to have content about this on your site but it doesn’t mean you can’t create one to cater for it.

What Kind of site should I register?

If I am honest, building a micro site on Blogger or on your own domain, it makes no difference, however you own your domain, you’ll always have control of it, plus you’ll have more flexibility in terms of design.

It has to be genuine

Make the content unique, add value and link out to some great resources on the web, invest some time in creating a decent design, have an about page and write at least 4 pages of content to get you started.

Yes! This is a lot of hard work, but the end result will be a link to your main site from a high relevancy, high quality resource that you own, run and control.

I have created 10 Micro sites, how do I link them together?

What ever you do don’t go and paste all the links in the footer to everyone of your web properties all anchor text rich!

Instead think more about quality, write a couple of articles on the topic thinking about how you could interlink with your main site, a micro site and another quality external resource.

Creating external sources this way will ensure the links you create continue to pass value in the long run.

DON’T interlink every micro site together!!

The idea is that Google need to believe these sites are all external properties, if you interlink them altogether it becomes easy to understand they are all controlled by the same person.

Linking between sites should look like something similar to the below:

Second level link building

So you have:

- 10 – 15 relevant micro sites
- 3 – 6 pages of quality, unique content on each site
- smart linking patterns to all micro sites and to the main site

Now all these sites should all ready have some link juice from each other but you’re going to need to boost it and I find the best way to do this is through article marketing.

Write an article for each site and point it back to each of your web properties, as well as linking it to a random quality resource on the topic (remember it has to be natural).

This will give each site the boost it needs to flow maximum link juice all the way back to your main website.

Many companies out there invest in link building and so they should, it works, however in my mind some investment should go into developing external hubs that focus on providing genuine content and assisting the main site in becoming an authority in it’s given niche.

Will it dodge the filters?

Early on in the post I made reference to a post by Justin Briggs, he details some filters your links can get picked up with, let’s quickly explore them and see if we’re vulnerable.

Truncated PageRank

This filter is based on a site having a lot of links from sources that aren’t well linked to, throw up spam sites, low quality content sites would all fall under this and if all your links are coming from sites that have few incoming links then you could get caught in the filter.

Link wheels like the ones described above will be secondary links, they will be linked together and then boosted with article directories, this means the juice passing to the main site are less likely to be impacted.

We’re safe!

Owned Sites

If you have a network of sites, all registered by you and on the same IP, this is going to let Google know these are ‘accessible’ properties and the link value could be filtered out.

The micro sites we build should be on different IP’s and where possible registered under different names.

Pretty Safe again.

Relative Mass of Spam Links

Again, the more spammy sources you have linking to you the more likely you’re going to trip a filter.

All our microsites will be full of genuine content, provide real references and be of genuine use to a reader.

They aren’t going to hurt our main site.

Link Growth / Speeds to Nodes

Again a simple concept that has been around a while, how quickly is your link profile growing, natural sites will develop more rapidly as the site gains more authority, spam sites gain a lot of links quickly but die off over time.

This is one where the link wheels could get caught out, build your sites gradually, don’t rush through them and risk building too many links too quickly.

Still safe.

Trust Rank

The closer you are to deemed spam sites the more likely you are to be spam???

In my opinion I’m not sure how important trust rank is, maybe it is a signal but one that only works with other ‘spam’ signals, otherwise it makes it far too easy to effect competitors just by spamming them.

Plus, you can unfortunately rank high on spam links alone. Either way our sites are genuine.

Nothing to worry about!

Anchor Text

If you go using the same anchor text on every property you will get caught, use your brain mix up the anchor text and stay safe.

Link Growth Threshold

Justin describes how some links can be devalued if they come through too quickly, it’s not difficult for Google to understand what should be being linked to and what is manipulation. Social signals and search trends can confirm if a site is worthy of links.

Again we’re being slow and steady, win win.

Robust PageRank

Genuine sites don’t rely on one or two powerful links, will you site fall if you remove 1 or 2 strong links? If so you’re potentially susceptible to a filter.

However building your micro sites will provide genuine diversity, bullet dodged.

PageRank Diversity

I published a post on this not so long ago:

- Sites with a link profile consisting of high PageRank sources looks unnatural and possibly paid

- Sites with nothing but low quality sources look spammy

You still need to be link building as well as developing these properties and building them will actually assist in the diversity of your link profile.

Diminishing Returns

This backs up the idea of domain diversity, no longer will site wide links be massively powerful but instead the more links you have from one domain the less powerful the links will be.

This tells us there is a threshold on the amount of link juice we can get from these micro sites, however that doesn’t mean their not worth developing.

The fact is there is nothing Google can do automatically to stop this type of link building, it works and as long as Google relies on links it will continue to work.

Do it intelligently and you will see massive returns!

This isn’t something I like writing about but the fact is a lot of so called SEO companies are defrauding their clients, misleading, mis selling and flat out lying most of the time.

I am not going to name the SEO company in question but you can be assured they appear in the top 5 for a lot of the broad ‘SEO’ search terms and trust me, just because a site ranks for these terms does not mean they are good at SEO.

You here horror stories all the time, “They did no work and charged me thousands”, “I was on a monthly retainer for 6 months and saw no improvements”, these are common statements but the level of deception displayed in the latest horror was something I had never come across before.

I would love to out the company but I want to save myself the aggro and legal implications, anyway here is what happened.

The Start

It started the usual way, potential client types in ‘SEO’ gets a quote from the top 5 and makes a decision based on case studies and promises of quick results.

The company promised to provide the following:

- Keyword research
- Blogging
- on page suggestions
- link building
- consulting and strategy
- reporting

These guys rank well so they must know what they’re doing right? Well let’s break these services down.

Keyword Research

They came up with a list of keywords and advised the client these were the terms to target.

- No search volumes were provided
- No potential conversion rates were discussed
- No potential results were analysed

So they loaded up the Google keyword tool and exported the results, not great but hardly criminal so lets move on.

Blogging

They updated the blog with unique but dry SEO driven content, again not ideal but nevertheless plenty of others do this.

On Page Suggestions

They didn’t say this but may as well have done “Stuff Your Title Tags!”.

This worked really well and they saw their rankings rise, thanks Google, trust developed in a less than adequete SEO partner.

Link Building

This is where things start getting really interesting.

The company placed 20 blogroll links, sitewide, in 2 weeks and sure enough rankings shot up to the first and second page of Google. The sites were reported with a PR figure next to them, they weren’t the best quality to look at but hey, they were working.

Every month the client got a report with 20 more links on, however as the client completely trusted the company now they never checked the links, all the SEO company were doing is changing the anchor text on the 20 maintained links, no new links were built but the SEO company were taking a substantial amount of money every month.

A disgrace.

Consulting & Strategy

Non existant, the most the client got was a meeting every few month with a couple of sales guys, no disrespect to sales guys but for SEO strategy surely you need to be speaking with the experts?

The strategy was simple, increase your budget and we’ll head over to digital point and secure some more links for you They didn’t say this but it would have been the truth.

Glorified link brokers….

Reporting

When I saw the monthly report for this client I couldn’t believe it, an excel doc with random lists on it.

“500 directory links” was one of the headings, however their were no URL’s to prove these were placed.

“200 article submissions” again no evidence to prove these were placed.

There were two columns, one had the word ‘link’ in every column, the other anchor text which stated the anchor text.

- Traffic report? nope
- rankings? nope
- converions? nope

An utter disgrace.

So What Happened?

OK so the SEO company were doing a bad job and getting away with it, the clients rankings were going up all were happy, whats the issue??

At this stage there are 2 issues:-

1 – The SEO company were glorified link brokers, they offered no strategy and no real technical advice

2 – The reporting was non existent and later transpired thats because no links were being built

Still nothing I haven’t seen before, however what happened when the client found out they’d been taken for a ride? This is where things start to get ugly.

How a Rogue SEO Company Can Destroy Your Business

So the client realises they are just switching the anchor text on the same links not building new ones, the clients wants a refund but instead the company offer to make it up by building hundreds of links from unique domains in one month

All you genuine SEO’s know there is only one way to do this, yup, outsource it to some dude in India for $500 dollars where links will be placed to your site on some of the spammiest sites I have ever come across.

Guess What Happened Next?

The clients rankings were all pushed up the first page of Google! Brilliant, loads of traffic, loads of conversions!

But there’s a catch, about a month after these links were built Google caught up with them, devalued them all and placed a filter on the site for a few core terms, rankings dropped lower than ever before, traffic diminished and sales were 50% down.

A business destroyed thanks to getting involved with a rogue firm.

Rightfully so the client cancelled the contract after a 5 figure investment and to add insult to injury the firm removed what “OK” links they had built.

You Pay For What You Get, But Never Pay For Spam

You can only get done what your budget dictates, however what ever your budget is it should never pay for spam and just so we can be clear on what spam is let me throw a few examples your way, these were literally taken from the above SEO companies report.

Spam Site Yes that is around 300 links in the side bar

Spam Site Notice the 4 feet of links as you scroll?

Sure if you have a small budget you can expect some lower quality blog posts, article directories and a few directory submissions but this kind of spam is unexceptable at any level of budget, if you have them in your profile expect to be penalised soon.

On a positive note at least Mr Cutts and the team at Google are actively devaluing sites like this.

Picking an SEO Company

Don’t just pick a site from the top of Google when you search ‘SEO’, ‘search engine optimisation’ or any other of the glory terms. Anyone can buy links and rank.

Don’t agree a contract until you know what the strategy is, know what links you are going to get and know how they are going to be reported on each month.

Ask people in the industry, they will normally tell you who are the better agencies out there.

If you are currently being provided with SEO services and haven’t had a link report or have been getting links like the ones above, stop now, start asking questions and think about how to repair any damage before making rash decisions.

It’s really not the sort of post I like to write but something needs to be done to educate business owners and stop them making mistakes like the one above.

After reviewing some of clients traffic this morning we came across an interesting trend.

Most people in the SEO field understand how powerful links on City Visitor are but they also know how much traffic they can potentially drive, especially from local terms.

Now I have no qualms with the links, they still work well but it seems to me like they have been delivered a Panda Hammer.

This is a screen shot from one of our clients showing referring traffic from the domain;

By the look of this anyone paying for links or placements on an ongoing basis need to rethink how much they want to invest particularly those doing it for traffic alone, as an SEO boost the links still work well.

This is just one client so it is possible it could just relate to this niche, however we have links in 84 different locations so it’s definitely not a location based problem.

First Google Places, now Panda…….. ouch

All the recent commentary surrounding Google’s most recent Farmer Update has been firmly focused on what content will and won’t be in Google’s index in the coming months.

Websites are already reporting drops in traffic and in indexed pages but to be honest how many pages an article site has indexed isn’t important to me, what is important is the links on those sites.

Just about every website on the net relies on links from content networks, whether they be from article directories, news websites and press release sites, sure those links aren’t the most powerful but my bet is the anchor text within them still passes a fair bit of weight.

A Few Coincidences?

After talking to a few fellow SEO’s I have come acrossome s interesting stories:-

A) 2 Niche webistes that solely rely on links from ezine articles & go articles dive bombed out of the SERP’s for keywords they have ranked for nearly 18 months.

B) A 6 month old blog linked to from 50 different blogs in 24 hours with the same anchor text didn’t see any increase in rank. All the blogs used to link from were typical low quality content driven blogs, before Christmas this would definitely have had an impact.

What Does This Mean?

The truth is I am not 100% sure yet, my gut feeling is a lot of these low quality blogs, news release sites and article directories will pass very little link weight moving forward. It’s too early to tell for definite but all the indications are pointing firmly at a devaluation of fresh links from low quality content networks.

If you were under the impression that these links never worked, you are wrong, I have achieved super quick rankings on decent keywords in less than a month using this exact method, as recent as December 2010.

I know the update hasn’t, or doesn’t seem to have hit the UK yet but I would be interested to hear any stories of devalued links.

I am sure you have read about the JC Penney Google slap at the beginning of the week, they basically spammed their category pages with irrelevant anchor spam.

For those of you (like me) in the UK JC Penney are a major US Retailer turning over in excess of 17 billion dollars a year and yet they couldn’t invest in their site enough to avoid this SEO car crash!

The truth is I can fully understand why they spammed the heck out of their pages……. they have a terrible site!

- Bad Architecture
- Lack of Basic Optimisation
- Lack of Content

The very basics of SEO were missed and I think they knew about it all along. Let’s just break this down…

Title Tags

The very basics of SEO and most important aspect of your page, the title tag, yet let’s look at what JC Penney consider a good title tag;

Bedding = JC Penney: bedding

Jeans = JC Penney: jeans

I mean come on?? Terrible, just a little bit of effort and they could have doubled the traffic on all their category pages just by optimising them better.

URL Structure

17 billion turnover and they can’t be bothered to rewrite their URL’s and redirect them to more keyword rich URL’s.

Jeans URL = http://www5.jcpenney.com/jcp/XGN.aspx?DeptID=70673&CatID=71043&cmCatLevel=3&shopperType=G&CmCatId=&cmAMS

I have worked with various websites with URLs like this and getting them to rank is almost impossible.

But hey, don’t clean your site up just spam.

Content, Content, Content

Come on guys, where’s the content? Surely thats not too much to ask?

In fairness they have implemented user reviews on product pages, but the categories are terrible, check out the above jeans page.

Really no excuses.

I have no doubt their SEO company gave them this same, very basic advice and probably got the reply “Sorry you can’t touch the site”. This leaves the company in a position where they either spam or deliver no rankings.

Having said that, they were with their SEO provider for the last 6-7 years, surely they could have persuaded them to sort out their site in this amount of time?

So they were..

Lazy – because the changes were basic

Stupid – because they have a big enough brand to rank for anything

Deserved – because they have the budget to employ the right people and make the right changes

If you’re a big brand with a bad site, my advice is invest in this before even thinking about building a link.

OK,this is going to be short but sweet and mostly me rambling, however try and stay with me I do have a point

Right, there has been a lot of moaning around the web about the state of the SERP’s, in fact I have done a fair bit myself, mostly about the crappy results being returned for pretty commercial terms.

Then Rand at SEOmoz brought up the issue and literally just today there was another post on the SEOmoz blog highlighting some crazy results Googlere returning a.

As far as I am concerned the moaning is over, there needs to be a solution and I don’t think killing links is the way forward.

The Link Graph

Many have suggested that the problem is the link graph, the fact it  is too easily manipulated and until Google drop their current model they’re always going to struggle with Spam, this has an element of truth in it but there is a fundamental problem.

Without the link graph Google have no business model…..they need a way of ranking sites and any other method just isn’t going to cut it.

Google commands a massive amount of targeted traffic, no matter what method or data is used to rank sites there is always going to be manipulation out there, where money can be made the scammers will always be around.

The Social Graph

Google have admitted to using social signals to rank sites and even though I have seen multiple examples of this working I still think it’s a minor rather than a major factor.

You can guarantee that if it became a ‘major’ factor paid tweets would be rife, spammed and hacked facebook profiles would become the ‘norm’ & paid stumblers, diggs, reddits etc…. would become even more popular than they already are.

Anchor Text

It has been mentioned on SEOmoz multiple times that anchor text is the issue and that Google should seriously devalue the impact it has on rankings but where to they add that value?

High PageRank = More Link buying

In content = More blog networks

Trust = Does anyone really know what that is??

I think the fact is no matter where Google tweak there algorithm it is always going to manipulated.

All Hope is Lost?

As far as I can see the only real way to sort this issue is to make more webmasters/business owners and bloggers aware of SEO how it works and why you should be investing in it.

Of course you’d say that Tim?

Well ye I would, however I honestly believe it’s the only way to clean up the SERP’s. Think of it this way you’re a business owner, you’re hot on SEO, you have a fantastic site and a top product, you see a fake spam site pop above you for your main keyword, obviously spam and not likely to be legitimate.

So what do you do??

You report it and it is removed within days, job done.

Now I know I am going to have those that passionately disagree with me and think this is encouraging site outing and it is but let me be clear.

If you have a genuine competitor that has bought a link on a dodgy site, that’s not spam, your Job or whoever is in charge of SEO is to beat them. A spam site is one that offers no value to a user what so ever, a genuine website is not spam regardless of how many anchor text links they have.

So the more people understand SEO, the more will understand spam, the more spam reports are complete and the less spam there is in the index.

There will be many big brand websites out there that think they should rank regardless because of there trust, brand presence or some other invisible factor, the truth is if you want a piece of the Google pie you have to invest, let’s all stop the moaning and get on with what we know works.

All my regular readers will no doubt be aware of my current issues with Google and the results they are bringing up at the moment.

In my opinion the results have rarely been as polluted as they are right now, across the board keyword stuffing, automated links, comment spam and black hat redirects have taken over the landscape, topping results in some of the most competitive industries.

Google have come forward and admitted they have ‘taken their eye off the ball‘ but when a spam result begins to dominate a brand term then you know something is seriously wrong.

Just this morning Patrick highlighted a result for ‘GHD’:

Thats right not the brand website but a keyword stuffed, link spammed fake! On page tactics from 10 years ago and a link profile even worse, yet it is still dominating a brand term.

Over the last 1 – 2 months I have become extremely worried about the SERP’s, Google has always sufferred with spam but has generally been on the ball part from the odd slip.

Christmas time is a competitive season and consumers are looking to find the most relevant sites and make genuine purchases, Google are doing nothing to help them here.

How long will this go on for?

Just a real quick announcement type post, but I am sure some will find it interesting…..

I have received a significant number of emails over the past few weeks asking me why I no longer rank for some of my core terms, many were presuming some kind of penalty or filter….

Well first of all I’d like to thank you all for your concern, however the ranking drop is completely of my own doing…

Why would you kill your rankings?

Well I didn’t exactly set about to kill my rankings, I simply decided to have a clean up of my link profile, booting out some links I had on other sites I own and cleaning up a few of the site wide links I had pointing at SEOwizz.

Within 3 days of removing what I presumed to be poor quality links, SEOwizz dropped out of the top 100 for some core terms such as search engine optimisation, SEO etc….

I have to admit at first I panicked, however presumed it must of been some kind of Google Dance and my rankings would pop back up, 3 weeks later and they’re still struggling.

Now you might think the first thing I am going to do is put all the links I removed back up, but you’d be wrong. You see, even though Google’s algo was fooled I wasn’t and I have got to the point where I have to be a little more careful about my link profile due to a little too much attention from the wrong sort of folk

In all honesty my core rankings only brought in around 2% of my organic traffic so they were literally ‘glory rankings’, the majority of my traffic comes from long tail queries and this has gone up in the last 3 weeks rather than down.

So to sum up, no I haven’t got a penalty, yes my rankings have taken a hit, however don’t think for one second I won’t be back up mixing it at the top very soon .

Thanks for the emails.

I get a lot of emails every week about various SEO related issues, so much so that I am considering launching a forum in 2011 so the readership as a whole can benefit from the queries and subsequent answers.

One question that has been raised multiple times this week is the issue of relevancy;

“Do links have to be relevant to count?”

Now I have always been an advocate of relevant links and an all round relevant on site theme, however that doesn’t mean irrelavancy doesn’t work.

The Truth

Even though I do not advocate it, the truth is links that have zero relevancy still count, in fact they work well. I have used them on some of my micro sites and have seen competitors rank high on nothing but irrelevant links.

These kind of links have been placed based on metrics such as PageRank or the alternative MozRank with no regard given to relevancy or naturalness.

Even though it works it is a dated tactic and eventually it will be stomped on.

Defensible Profiles

If you’re building a genuine online business you want to be around the SERPS a long time, you don’t want sleepless nights wondering when Google is going to figure out your nasty links profile.

Whether you pay for links or not it doesn’t matter what does matter is that your links are relevant, natural or defensible.

If your link profile is made up of links on travel websites when you specialise in code review it is only a matter of time before they are all devalued or even worse your site is dropped. The same goes for how your links are positioned, what anchor text they are using, the strength of the pages your getting them from etc…..

Naturalness

The main aim of your link building strategy should be naturalness, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build links manually but does mean you should be smart.

No matter how you attempt to acquire links, content syndication, directory submissions, paying, 3 way linking, forums, press releases or simply emailing, as long as the links are natural and defensible you have nothing to worry about.

The reason why relevancy is important is because it is natural and if you are unfortunate enough to recieve a manual review and all your links are from pages relevant to your own at worst they may be devalued.

So….

Do irrelevant links work? Certainly

Would I recommend it? Certainly not

Simple post but hope it helps.

Well it seems like my last article caused a bit of a scare and sent shivers down the spines of link buyers everywhere

No, but seriously it had over 10,000 hits last week and was reported in all the right places, however there was the odd murmur labelling the article unreliable and structured poorly. They may have had a point but I think I made it clear at the beginning of the post that it wasn’t scientific in anyway.

There was one particular point that seemed to hit a nerve and that was the point about branding or more specifically how a more natural, brand targeted anchor text profile could be getting more ranking weight than usual. This point of view was based on experience rather than in depth research, however I thought I’d look into it a little closer.

Please note: This is personal research performed over a limited number of search results and keywords. The research shows correlation between a sample of link profiles and their rankings for a given keyword, it does not establish a guaranteed ranking factor

Ok now I’ve got that out of the way let’s jump right into what I did.

The Method

I chose 10 keywords that I monitor closely for personal and business reasons;

1- perfume
2- search engine optimisation
3- internet marketing
4- loans
5- car insurance
6- injury lawyers
7- search engine marketing
8- flights
9- car finance
10- property for sale

The top ten results for each of these keywords were then examined and their link profiles broken down. Only links from unique domains were looked at and the relevant anchor text, the two types of anchor text in question were the exact match keyword and any brand related terms.

Exact Match – Only keywords that match the search query exactly

Brand terms – All terms relating to brand e.g. http://www.brand.com, brand, www.brand.com, brand.com

Once the links were collected the percentage was calculated compared to the total number of unique links.

The aim was to see how brand heavy link profiles compare to heavily optimised anchor text.

The Results

The results I found confirmed some of the ideas I’ve had about anchor text and how a more natural profile is now receiving higher rankings. Either that or some of the obviously manipulated profiles are getting filtered out.

Anyway take a look at the results, 10 different keywords, 100 different websites and here is how the link profiles turned out;

As you can see from the trend lines, the sites with more brand or URL links within their profile, generally rank higher, at least across this set of keywords.

In some industries the websites at the top had far less linking domains, far less exact anchor text and yet still out ranked the some really strong websites, for instance take a look at the perfume keyword;

The trend lines becomes even more aggressive, it’s almost a barrier to top 5 positions to have over optimised link profiles.

Conclusions

Ultimately this may have nothing to do with emphasis on brands, instead it might be a simple filter on over optimised websites, all I can do is fall back on what I said in my previous post.

Around April/May there were some huge ranking swings across the board, there were various updates to top ten positions, from my experience and the little bit of research I have done it is due to the above. As SEO’s and webmasters we need to start giving more attention to a natural link profile, yes we still need a portion of optimised links, however in my opinion that portion is nowhere near as important as it once was.

For a long time now optimised Anchor text has been the SEO’s ultimate weapon, in some niches it was enough to dominate the top 5 positions, for me the latest swing in rankings makes it clear that Google is going to be more on the ball when it comes to discovering over optimised profiles and more willing to filter out websites that on the face of it look strong but underneath the hood highlights 99% manipulation. Try and discover ways for your site to earn natural links and then compliment that with some old school SEO.

To those who claimed my last article was “the reason the SEO industry has a bad name”, how was this one? Your feedback is always appreciated

As always thoughts are welcome….

You should also check out this awesome break down by Nichola about over engineering the link graph – Really great read!

p.s. Thanks for all the emails about the malware attack, it is now clean and the hosting issue has been solved, it was cleaned up within an hour of infection.