There has been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about sitewide links or links in footers. Many experienced SEO’s and internet marketers have openly slammed them as being spammy and carrying little in terms of link juice and authority; however the truth is they are very effective links in terms of both ranking and building up your overall website authority.

Now from what we can see at Branded3 Search there has definitely been an update in terms of sitewide link profiles with many major players losing rankings because of their “sitewide” heavy profile. You only have to look at the SERPS for ‘SEO’ and ‘search engine optimisation’, the top ten are 60% different from what they were 3 months ago, in the UK at least.

Despite what seems to be an obvious attack on sitewide links they still remain effective if used properly and in moderation. SEO wizz has around 600 domains linking in and I can honestly say only 5 or 6 are sitewide links, if I was advising a client I would never want more than 1 in 30 links being a sitewide, this is just my opinion, SEO has never been an exact science, all I would say is use sitewide links intelligently.

So now we have the introduction out of the way, what is the best way to use these types of links for maximum impact?

The Homepage

Your homepage is always going to be the strongest page of your website, however overloading it with sitewide links isn’t going to help your rankings or traffic in the long run. Everyone knows anchor text is key to high rankings but what they don’t realise is the rules that apply to anchor text don’t apply to link profiles.

For example….

Your link profile needs to be diverse with lots of unique domains pointing back to your pages.

Anchor text does not need to be diverse – If you had 400 links pointing to your homepage passing massive juice but with the anchor text as your domain name, the chances are you’re not going to rank, however throw a couple of anchor optimised sitewide links into the mix and you could well see yourself in the top 5.

I demonstrated this a month ago, I haven’t really targeted the keyword ‘SEO consultant’ in my anchor text, my site has good authority so I switched my title tag to include it, this got me to the second page with very little anchor text links, however when I placed just 1 sitewide link optimised for the keyword, this was enough to push me into the top 3.

So…. Concentrate on building a diverse link profile and use sitewide links smartly to boost your anchor text.

Deeper Pages

Many do not realise yet or understand the power of strong links to deep pages. Many of the posts we write or guides we put together are filled with longtail search queries, low hanging fruit that’s just waiting to be plucked.

I have blogged before on how to optimise our posts to target these but a healthy sitewide link can make all the difference.

Now these are very hard to achieve but let me explain a little, if you can get just 1 quality sitewide link to a deep page of your website you will rank in the top 5 for every longtail keyword on the page. I have been fortunate enough to work with clients who have huge amounts of traffic (6 million uniques a month) and something that is key to success is the sheer amount of external links they have pointing to the deep pages of their websites.

I had a client who built 2 sitewide links to all their ‘listing’ pages and in 1 year they were receiving 250,000 unique visitors from Google every month.

So if you can, go for it, hit those deep pages with a sitewide and your traffic will rocket on that particular post.

To round up then, sitewide links are not evil, they aren’t going to get you penalised, however if your link profile is made up of hundreds of them expect Google to devalue some. If you or your company are in the business of adding a footer link in your clients websites, optimised with the anchor text of your choice, expect that to stop working real soon, those days are over.

You no doubt monitor your ranking within Google and even though many online authorities say keyword ranking is not as important as it once was there are still a number of reasons to keep track of it.

1) It lets you know Google is happy with your optimisation practices

2) It helps you understand how site and page changes affect your rank

3) And of course it helps keep you motivated (if you’re moving in the right direction)

So, monitoring your own site is a given, however do you monitor the search results page in general for your target keyword?

For example I am targeting the keyword ‘search engine optimisation’ it is highly competitive and after 8 months of hard work I am sitting on the second page in the UK.

As part of my SEO practice for this keyword I check my rank position weekly; however I also check the top 20 – 30 positions to look for changes and any websites that may have been penalised.

Now recently there has been a major movement in the UK within the SERPS for the keyword “search engine optimisation” and that is with the website and seo company SEOconsult. They have recently dropped from the first page down to the third page.

It’s important to remember at this point that we are NOT dealing with a site that spammed it’s way to the top, SEOconsult are a reputable business and still sit on the first page of Google for the keyword SEO, they have over 50,000 back links and a Page Rank 6 (for all it is worth).

However, if you take the time to look at the link profile of the site it will soon become clear in my opinion.

First Let’s Contrast It

If you ever see this happen to a competing site or indeed if it happens with your own site, the first place to go is the front page of Google. Look down the top 10 results of the SERPS and pick out a ranking site that seems the weakest out of the bunch, or the one with the least amount of links.

I did this for the keyword ‘search engine optimisation’ and picked out the page Topclickmedia, this site has a significantly less amount of links pointing to the page, in fact it only has around 6000 but in order to see why this page ranks on the first page and SEOconsult have been dropped you need to look at the link profile in a little more depth.

I quickly used the SEObook backlink analyzer to do this but you can use any software you wish. It only pulls out 1000 of the most important links but it is enough to understand why the sudden drop has occurred and why the smaller page is ranking higher.

First let’s take a peek at some of the links pointing to Topclickmedia;

Now looking down this link profile I specifically targeted links using variations of the keyword “search engine optimisation” and as you can see it is a very interesting link profile.

There are a few things to note here;

1) The links are made up of lot’s of different variations, there is obviously exact anchor text but only around 25% were exact, 39% were variations of the keyword.

2) The links come from deep pages of other sites and not homepages

3) The links are mainly in content making up part of a blog post or an article

I would say this is a big thumbs up for Topclick they are getting in content/editorial links using multiple variations and hey they rank higher with fewer links.

Google have been spouting for a while that they want to give more credit to natural looking anchor text profiles and editorial links but the evidence has been thin to say the least. Has there been an update?? I strongly believe there has.

Let’s Take A Peek at SEOconsult

Right, time to compare the link profile to see how it differs and to see if we can see any clues as to why the rankings may have been hit.

The snippet above is pretty much what you see throughout the rest of the links, most of them anchored with exact keyword terms “SEO” “search engine optimisation” and “search engine optimization”, there is very little in the way of variation. However, that’s not all, it is also quite clear that most of the links are in footers, sidebars and directory listings.

So my verdict…

I believe SEOconsult has been penalised due to their highly optimised anchor text and lack of editorial like links. These kinds of changes have been seen on the Google.com domain months ago and it looks like they’re filtering through to the co.uk side.

Why would Google make these changes??

It’s simple really and makes sense;

1) Directory links, footer links, sidebar links are more likely to be either paid for or site wide.

2) Even though Google encourages keywords in anchor text, highly optimised link profiles scream manipulation and Google does not want to look stupid.

3) Links within content are generally on deeper low PR pages, this means they have a higher probability of being editorial in nature.

Conclusions

I am not saying to stay away from site wide links or even footer links completely. I am simply highlighting that in general your link profile needs to be editorial in nature and your anchor text needs to look naturally varied, stick to around 25% exact anchor on manufactured links.

I hope this has been helpful.

This is definitely my last post before the Jolly Holidays, hope everyone has a good one and wakes up on Christmas morning with a first page ranking

Disclaimer – The views expressed in this article are the opinion of the author and not factually based principles. The author is not associated with Google in anyway or any of the above businesses mentioned.

I want to address something today which seems to be a concrete SEO principal yet I see very little evidence around to justify the theory.

The theory goes something like this “Over optimising your anchor text can cause a Google penalty, as Google have filters in their algorithm that pick up on anchor text manipulation” , you may have heard something slightly different but the idea is the same.

The above theory poses a few questions, namely;

1) What is anchor text optimisation?

2) Should we engage in it?

3) Can we over optimise our anchor texts?

This post incorporates some factual research with what I consider my own thoughts and feelings on anchor text.

What is anchor optimisation?

I am sure most of you know what anchor text or link text is but for those of you who may not it is the text used to create a link back to your site, or the text in the middle of the ‘a’ and ‘alt’ tags. This is anchor text and optimising simply means to include the keyword you are targeting within it.

Simple really, if you have a page targeting the keyword “search engine optimisation” then you try and get as many anchored links as possible with that text in, this is also known as ‘keyword sniping’.

Should we engage in anchor optimisation?

OK, first let me ask a question; Do you want to rank high for competitive key phrases?

If the answer is yes, then YES you need to optimise your anchor text whenever possible. I think I explain this best with a little factual research.

After analysing the links of the top 5 sites for 15 different key phrases, the answer whether or not to optimise seems clear;

As you can see on average the sites had 34% of all their links anchored with the exact search phrase they were ranking for and on average 40% of their links were anchored with a variation including the exact key phrase.

Example

Exact = search engine optimisation

Variation = organic search engine optimisation services

Not a variation = search engine marketing and optimisation

Variations were only counted when the exact keyword in the right order was within it.

On top of this information the average site in the top 5 used an average of 20 variations all including the exact match within them.

What does this tell us?

Clearly it shows that if we want to rank high on Google we need to be targeting our keyword in the anchor text.

What About the other 60%

On average 60% of the links did not include the keyword and used other types of related keywords and variations. Remember all links carry link juice no matter what they are anchored with, however Google clearly puts a good amount of weight on the anchor text therefore you cannot rank for a competitive term without optimising the anchor text.

So the other 60% will pass link juice and authority but will do very little to help you rank for a specific term.

Can we over optimise?

Now I can’t say that I have ever had a site been penalised for over optimisation of anchor text, however Aaron Wall at SEObook claims he was hit in the early days of the site. There have also been other reports of anchor text penalties because of manipulative behaviour.

I am not sure if I buy it, primarily because it would then become easy to sabotage a competitor’s site, just build a ton of links with the exact anchor in it.

However to be on the safe side I would recommend using variations as well as an exact match.

Remember you are only going to be in control of a percentage of your links, so these are the ones you have to make count. I would recommend picking an exact keyword and around 15 – 20 variations of it, use the exact text 7 times out of 10 when writing articles, submitting to directories etc… the rest of the time use a variation, try it on a rotating system.

This means you are keeping things safe and in line with the top 5 sites on Google in the above test.

The rest of your links will be out of your control and could come with a range of anchors, there is nothing you can do about that, just keep creating the anchor text links.

If you are in any doubt of the absolute power of anchor text, do a search for ‘caffeine’ look who sits at number 2!!! Google with a page that has nothing to do with ‘caffeine’, want to know why? Anchor text.

Then type in ‘click here’ what do we have? Adobe!!! That is because all of their links are anchored click here!!

I hope this answers any questions you may or may not have been having about anchor text, don’t be scared by those who tell you that you will be penalised, you need to optimise them in order to compete, simple.

Well it’s that time of week again and this Friday I feel like delivering a more relaxed post. If you’re a reader and looking for super doopa SEO advice (like is normally delivered here ) then this post might not be the one for you.

However, if your looking for a little bit of a chuckle at the expense of the many idiots in the SEO industry, please keep reading and join in the fun.

The SEO industry, unfortunately, is full of scammers, people who have no intention of delivering quality but instead their business model is to take your money and deliver very little in terms of tangible results.

Today I thought I would give you my top 20 ways to spot an SEO Scam, so no time to lose, here we go……

Guaranteed #1 Ranking

- OK this is a laughable promise that any real SEO would never even think about making.

Blog Spamming

- Yes folks there are companies out there who think the correct way to build links is through blog spamming and most aren’t afraid to admit it :s

Pay on Results

- Now I have to be careful when I talk about pay on results as there are some companies out there that offer pay half now half on results, however the result is never #1 for competitive terms. There are also companies out there who offer pay on results SEO full stop and there are many reasons why most are scams. SEO or real SEO is a slow process, who do you think can afford not to be paid for 6 months of solid work? Or are they simply trying to get hold of sensitive information for spam and fraud?? Be careful.

The more traffic you get the higher you rank

- Really? I thought it was the other way around. Yes these companies do send robots to your site and play it off as real traffic.

They have an insider

- They always no somebody inside who can manually up your ranking, for a price

No Analytics Needed

- I mean why would they need your analytics? It’s not like their going to give you an end of contract report or highlight new organic opportunities, come on.

Whats HTML?

- Yes us SEO’s are not quite as fussed about HTML and PHP as you dev’s, but any SEO who tell’s you html is not involved in the process is lying and should be avoided.

Alexa Rank is Key

- It is really surprising how many people think Alexa rankings is key to actual rankings, come on people. I have never seen a tool trusted so much that can be manipulated so easily.

Do they rank for there name?

- If the company don’t even rank for their own name their not worth bothering with, nuff said.

Organic link farming is OK

- There is no form of link farming Google agrees with and unfortunately it used by some of the big companies to generate links. My opinion is it won’t work forever and when it stops you are going to find yourselves in a little trouble. The kind of link farming I am talking about is creating thousands of domains to create links from see Artificial content networks for more details.

If you come across a site explaining they can get you instant links from their partner sites it is most likely a farm and the page your reading is most likely blocked with robots.txt.

Google indexes emails

- This is so funny but true, only 3 months ago I had a guy offering to build links for my clients, I asked him what his main methods were and he replied, mass emailing links as Google indexes the pages!!!! Now you can see why I don’t outsource.

Adwords increases rank

- Er no, but hey it makes for a great chain sale!!! Ye adwords increases rank now pay me to manage your adwords account as well

Adsense helps rank

- Again another shameful tactic, advising clients to use adsense as a way of increasing rank, but you must use their publisher code??? I haven’t seen this one for a couple of years but it was definitly around at one point.

Link to their partners to increase rank

- hmmm, no I don’t think so..

My best friend is Matt Cutts

Ye mine too

Top rankings for $10 an hour

I take it your working 24 hours a day then?? You pay for what you get in this industry. A cheap deal is normally just that.

They guarantee a 1000 new links right now

- erm link farm, spam….. I’ll say no more.

Increase rank by submitting to search engines

- I can’t believe people charge for this, either way it doesn’t work.

HTML Validation

- Right let me explain this carefully before offending the wrong people, having valid html is good, however it will not increase your ranking, SEO’s use this to sell their services and the truth is it won’t impact your campaign. This may change in the future but it currently has no bearing.

The only type of html you need to keep clean is your architecture, ensuring Google can find all your juicy content. Having said this it is good practice to keep your site as clean as possible.

Keyword targeted title optimisation

AKA adding keywords to your title tags, if this is all it took to rank a site we’d all be SEO experts.

Well there you have it my top 20! One more gripe I’d like to add that isn’t related to scammers I don’t think but it’s really annoying.

I don’t mind people emailing me about outsourcing, I am not going to take it up but I don’t mind receiving offers and appreciate you have to put yourself out there.

However…… If I get 1 more email starting “greeting of the day!!!” I am going to spam you back 100 times harder!!! No not really but stop doing it. It’s annoying and gets deleted without a thought.

So hope you enjoyed this different kind of SEOwizz post, if nothing else I hope you had a giggle and please feel free to add your own scam tips in the comments.

I am not the kind of person to ‘out’ a site because of poor or manipulative SEO practices. Like many others I come across sites that spam, cloak and use all kinds of unethical tactics and simply carry on, however there is something I need to highlight today, something that is annoying but could also be dangerous for an unsuspecting webmaster.

Like many others I receive the usual spam ‘link exchange’ request, something along these lines;

I reviewing your website I found that your website is good match with my site service relevant (IT, SEO) so I want to back link on your site. Please add my link, detail as below:

This was an actual email I received and I doubt the person sending it even looked through my site, because if they had have done they would have quickly realised there efforts are worthless and potentially dangerous.

…If your thinking, ‘Tim, everyone get’s spammed. deal with it and stop moaning’ your right, however I have a major issue with what the spam email was requesting, but let’s break this down a little.

Low value link

I am not going to link back to the site responsible but I am going to highlight the sites they were willing to give me a link from.

OK they wanted a fully anchored link from my PR3 page which has thousands of relevant links pointing at it, this would seriously boost their SEO efforts. In return they were willing to give me links from pages like;

This one

and

This one

Now you will notice these pages are filled with external links, to other reciprocal link partners they have swapped links with. A link from a page like this offers no value to your site, so you will be giving them a valuable link in return for nothing.

Notice how I no followed the links? There is a reason for this…..

Link Farm

The above pages are basically link farms, lots of links pointing to various pages that have all been created artificially to increase rank.

It was only a year or two ago when the real estate webmasters were hit for this exact same link building method, see my post on reciprocal linking.

Google Penalty

So if we exchange links and receive a link from a page that will pass no link juice, no pagerank and no real value at all, we are also risking been associated with a link farm.

This can result in a penalty, however even if you escape the penalty the strength of your links could still be devalued in some way. So by agreeing to a request like this could actually damage your own site.

Reason for the Rant

The reason I am going on about this is because an unsuspecting webmaster, eager for a link, could quite easily fall into a trap like this. Someone who is not savvy to the way the search engines work may find themselves penalised and have no clue why.

I think the most disappointing thing about this from my point of view is that the request came from another SEO company. Is it any wonder SEO get’s such bad press?? They clearly use this tactic to build links to their clients websites, it’s poor to say the least.

Anyway the purpose of this post was simple, if your considering complying to a link exchange request make sure the page your getting a link from gives you as much as your giving and do not get involved with webmasters offering these types of unethical links. It may work for them today but I can almost guarantee you that the search engines will be on top of it tomorrow.

If by any chance the person that sent me the email is reading this, please stop spamming and please use link building methods that are beneficial to all

Thanks for reading.

A few of my recent posts have put a somewhat negative light on reciprocal linking and in today’s post I wanted to fully explain my position on reciprocal links.

There are Lot’s of ideas on reciprocal linking some of them are fine others can actually cause your site to be penalised, let me run through the 3 main types of reciprocal links…Starting with the BAD.

The BAD

These are the type of links that caused all the real estate problems back in 2007/08. Site owners were contacting other real estate site owners in different parts of the country and offering to exchange links and  using anchor text for the sole purpose of increasing PageRank and Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rank.

So they did this by creating a links page on their sites and sent a link to the homepage of the reciprocal site. The Reciprocal site would then return the favour from their links page.

It looked a little something like this;

Now these link pages could sometimes have hundreds of links on them and it did not take long for the search engines to figure them out. The links were quickly devalued and the sites lost their rank.

If you have a links resources page on your site, don’t panic. As long as your not using it to create a reciprocal directory then it is natural.

This type of linking is set up for the prime purpose of manipulating the search results and PageRank algorithm, my advice would be to stay well away as it is not uncommon for sites to receive penalties for it.

The UGLY

I’m sure people are not going to like me for what I’m about to say but this is my opinion based on personal experiences.

Reciprocal links to directories, including blog directories are plain ugly and will pass little if any real value to a site. This also includes mass blogroll lists.

Now before you simply click the back button, hear me out.

If you have reasonable amount of these links it is going to make no difference however if you find your homepage has over 30 of these types of links your site may start to suffer. I have not seen sites penalised for this sort of linking but have seen link juice completely run dry.

Let’s think about this logically;

Does the above link profile look natural to you? Remember what Google wants is to award links based on credit worthy content. If your linking to loads of exchange directories or to a long list of blogging friends, these are not awarded based on quality content, they’re based on relationships.

Your blogging buddies may have quality content on their sites/blogs, but why are you exchanging links? If it’s based purely on a relationship this is not something Google will want to use to base their rankings on.

Again I will say there is nothing wrong with a hand full of these types of links, but having a long reciprocal link list in your side bar is simply ugly and will do you no favours in the search engines.

The GOOD

Finally the good, the way reciprocal links can work and pass real benefits to your site.

If you come across content that is highly relevant and similar to something on your own site you may want to link to it, you may also want to send a link to the homepage of the site that published the content. YOU MAY…. even want to contact the site owner and say

“hey loved that article you have published, I published something on my site that backs up your opinion, you may want to link to it”.

This could result in a link pattern like so;

This type of linking is perfectly legitimate because it is natural and the links have been awarded based on quality, relevant content.

If a manual review was to take place the above linking pattern would not stand out at all, where as the other two would stand out like sore thumbs!

So if your thinking about a link exchange ask yourself the following questions;

• Am I exchanging to point my readers to a useful, relevant resource?
• Will I still award a link even if I don’t get one back?
• Is the page the link is pointing to a relevant quality resource?

If you can answer yes to them all your on the right track.

Once again, thanks for reading.

As part of an SEO report it is often recommended that a site needs more links from a more diverse profile. When speaking with the clients there is always one person that comes up with the great idea of buying up 50 – 100 domains and using them to link back to the home site.

This may sound like a neat idea on the face of it but unfortunately the search engines are well on top of this spammy method.

Back in the day 2005/2006, Blackhat SEO’s would do this very same thing, buy out a load of domains, interlink them all and use the link juice to artificially increase the rank of their target site, it would have looked a little like this;

All the sites are inter linked with each one passing one link back to the main site.

Now, back in the day this did work but not anymore. If you think you are going to rank your site using this type of method there are a few things you should know first.

Hurdle One – Registration

OK if your even going to think about using this method you need to be thinking about registration. This is surely going to be one of the first things Google looks at, a whole bunch of sites linking to each other then passing link juice to one site and all registered using the same details?? I smell a penalty.

Let’s say you have this one covered and use fraudulent registration details, which is against the law, but let’s role with it….

Hurdle Two – IP Address

The next thing you should worry about is hosting. If all your websites are hosted under the same IP then your heading for trouble, but let’s look at this in a little more detail. For those of you who may not be familiar with IP addresses let me explain a little.

Your IP address is a unique number assigned to every machine that uses the internet, without it you have no presence and are unable to communicate with other devices.

A typical IP may look something like this 145.26.45.641 each number range is also known as a block.

eg. 145. = block A / 26. = block B / 45. = Block C / 641 = Block D.

Google now takes into account IP patterns in order to establish blackhat activities. Block D is typically related to where your site is hosted, therefore if all the sites are hosted at the same place the search engines will pick up on this fairly quickly.

But even if you get around that the search engines can also look at the C Block, again looking for patterns that may suggest unethical activity.

Hurdle Three – Link Patterns

Even if you have managed to overcome the registration and IP pitfalls you now need to worry about the actual linking patterns between the sites.

If you have 50 sites that all interlink, this looks extremely unnatural and the search engines will jump on it like a ton of bricks.

You could not interlink the sites and instead simply point a link from each back to the target site like so;

Ok so this look’s less unnatural but how are you going to get links to the micro sites in order to have them crawled and indexed? Your now going to be building links to 5 sites?? Plus all these 5 sites will be getting links from the exact same places, again unnatural.

This type of link building is no longer useful and search engines are very savvy to this kind of activity, I highly discourage the use of it and even if you find a way that works today, the chances are the search engines will find you out and it won’t work tomorrow.

So if anyone is thinking about using this technique in some way or form, do it at your own risk.

My last few posts have really emphasised the importance of links to your SEO campaign and I have actively promoted certain strategies and good rates at which to build links.

In this post I want to warn against a few things which could potentially see some of your links devalued or could even see your site penalised. Remember search engines want to show the best result for a search, make sure your linking strategy incorporates that idea.

Anyway, here are a few of the most common errors I see happening.

Fast or Slow Link Growth

Knowing how quickly to build your links can sometimes be tricky, there are many factors that determine how well your links grow but ultimately if you have huge spikes in your link graph it is going to ring alarm bells.

For instance look at the below graph, which line looks more natural?

Now an argument that normally pops up is; “what about social links?” many times if you write something that goes viral, you can earn a lot of links over night and as Google crawls the web daily it is going to look strange.

There is no definite answer about how Google distinguishes between social links and spam/bought links but my theory is this…. Social links will mainly point to deep pages of a web site, spam/bought links will almost always point to the homepage of a site.

If you site has 50 links and Google crawls your site the next day and it has 500, this is bound to raise suspicions. Look for slow natural growth and stay away from the guy who will sell you 600 links for 40 bucks:)

How Natural Is Your Link Profile

Right.. now we all know the benefit of using your keywords in the anchor text of your links, however be cautious here. I think I mentioned in a previous post, the top sites have an anchor distribution of around 40%, anchored with their chosen keyword, aim for 30% to 35% just to be on the safe side. Google does advise using descriptive text within our links but an unnatural profile means your risking been dubbed spam.

If your site was dobsons.net and you sold used cars your anchor profile would “naturally” look something like this;

dobsons 132
dobsons used cars 78
used cars 64
etc…..

This is fine however…

used cars 278
used cars dobsons 34
dobsons 25
etc….

This is going to look suspicious.

I have mixed feelings on what counts as over optimisation here, but what I will say is, make sure whatever anchor text you use, matchs the content 100%, the further away the anchor from the content, the more chance you have of receiving a penalty.

Another Aspect

As well as your anchor text you also have to be careful with the sites that link to you. Many webmasters try to manipulate the algorithm by buying up domains, inter linking them and then pointing them at one site, a bit like the scruffy diagram below

Google picks up on this kind of tactic very quickly and trust me it also penalises it, this is verging on blackhat and if you control a link profile like this I would recommend cleaning it up, I have seen sites recently get banned for doing this.

Does Your Content Deserve It?

Google has hundreds of thousands of quality controllers who search the web and give feedback on the results they find. If your site get’s flagged repeatedly, expect to lose rankings.

The way to avoid this is by producing quality content that is relevant to the search query. Is your site the best result for the search query? If not then it’s time to start adding content.

Many sites simply spam links to get a poor result to the top of the SERPS but lack real content, many of these sites are caught out during the quality review.

The above are a few things to think about, I still fully advise article and directory submissions, however use the links smartly! Don’t anchor everything with the same keyword and don’t start building sites for the purposes of gaining links alone.

Hope you found this useful.

Thats right, according to a story Forbes, SEO professionals can actually sabotage your search position in order to advance their clients position. They do this by link spamming a particular site, therefore making Google believe your a spammer and subsequently penalising your site, it’s also known as “Google Bowling”.

My first thoughts are that this is 100% unethical and anyone who practices it should be treat as cyber criminals. On the other hand I have always questioned it’s effectiveness, I have always been from the school of thought that spammy inbound links are only ever going to have a minimal effect on a well established site with a solid brand. This is something I kind of stand by, however Matt Cutt’s was quoted as saying;

“We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against it,” he says. “I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice.”

So Matt admits it is a possibility but states quite clearly that it is something Google are aware of and that it would be difficult to perform. Critics have said that Matt Cutt’s statement is a concession, implying that negative SEO can and does occur.

The story is based around a ‘negative’ SEO named Brendon Scott, who admits to performing negative SEO for clients to the sum of thousands of dollars. He even states that he has been hit by negative SEO forcing one of his sites to lose 5 million unique visitors in 10 days. He obviously signs non disclosures with these clients so cannot give us any solid examples. hmmm.

Brendon does go on to admit that the effects of negative SEO are short lived and Google soon recovers the situation and amends the index, pretty much how Google deals with most web spam.

I personally still feel that to sabotage a competitors site that is a sound quality resource is highly unethical. If your fighting against a bogus report on your product or service sitting on a site like rip off review then yes you should try and impact the relevant search terms. However I would do so by writing and distributing positive content aimed at elevating the positive information and pushing the negative review further down the index. It does the same job and will stand the test of time.

If you build a solid resource and effectively build your brand, you are safe guarding yourself from any spam attacks and in my opinion have no need to worry.

Please let us know your thoughts.

As part of my work I regularly track rankings on many different keywords in many different niches, some for fun and some for business. These rankings change almost on a daily basis, especially for the newer sites SEO Wizz looks after.

You’ll notice the picture at the side is of the desperado roller coaster at Buffalo Bills resort in Nevada. I have had the pleasure of riding this roller coaster and trust me when I say the drops are immense, however this makes for a better roller coaster? A bigger thrill or buzz, right?

Google’s rankings are like riding a roller coaster, they slowly rise to the top and then out of nowhere you drop 4 pages back before rising back to the top again. Just this weekend my site dropped back to page 4 for “google seo” when I usually sit at number 1 in the UK pages and number 11 globally. Thankfully the rank has been restored within 24 hrs, along with the lovely traffic.

I’m sure you have also experienced the Google roller coaster but why exactly does this happen? The truth is no one really knows but we can have some calculated guesses at why it might.

On Site Changes

In order to stay “current” every site needs to make changes regularly, whether it’s prices, descriptions, old products or old news. These changes can have an effect on the optimisation of our sites and ultimately on our rankings. Not that long ago I explained the importance of being able to have a static homepage for SEO purposes, it helps keep you optimisation consistent and your rankings.

Most of the time these site changes will be minimal and therefore have a small impact on your Google rankings, however changes such as site design or restructuring can leave your pages needing to be re evaluated and optimised accordingly. If your site is strongly optimised towards a keyword which brings in a boat load of profitable traffic, I would personally recommend exercising caution when making site wide changes.

In addition to the above you also have to remember a big part of your site is it’s link profile, even small changes in your link profile can create ranking fluctuations.

If you have done a good job earning natural links changes in your link profile will be minimal, however if your being naughty and using paid or reciprocal links, these can become difficult to manage and could see you dropping drastically out of the SERPS. I was dealing with a client recently who had seen a massive drop in rankings, of course the SEO company working on the site before had bought links in mass, the sites selling the links had been caught my Google and all their links no longer passed PageRank, a huge drop in the clients link profile. Another reason not to buy links.

Another aspect of on site issues to take into consideration is your server down time. If Google attempt’s to access your page and is stopped due to a server error it may well drop you in the search rankings. I don’t think this would happen on one remote error, but if your site was continually experiencing problems this could well have an impact on your rank.

Google’s Algorithmic Changes

As we all should know, Google’s algorithm is always changing trying to edge closer to creating a perfect index by fighting spam and increasing relevance

These changes can have an impact on how Google views our site and can therefore cause a loss in rank. It has been reported that these changes could happen on a daily basis, each one effecting the way Google scores and weighs your sites relevance. For the most part the subtle changes won’t effect you and when they do you may find that it only effects a small minority of sites.

There is then the unexplainable loss of rank, it almost seems like Google decides to drop your site for a few weeks and then place you back in the exact same position, just for fun. There really is no explanation for this, some call it the sandbox, others call it a Hiccup! Either way we have found that this kind of activity happens more often to newer sites trying to establish authority. This probably explains what happened to SEO Wizz.

Why Are My Competition Competing??

Thats right, your not the only SEO savvy webmaster chasing that keyword and sometimes your going to lose out. So if your rankings change it could be nothing to do with anything you have done, it could be them.

Pages are going up around the web everyday and subsequently being indexed by Google. Some of these are going to be targeting the same keywords as you, this is why it is important to be one step ahead. It’s also worthwhile remembering that your not only fighting off direct competition but you are also dealing with, blogs, forums, and news feeds all of which could hold a good amount of domain authority. Optimise all your on page elements and build links continually by adding information rich pages to your website.

Remember that Google is on the relevance quest and may think a site is more relevant to a search query than your own. Just because you have a page on SEO is not going to make you the most relevant SEO source on the web, aim to fill your site with quality resources and references to make sure you remain the best source of information online.

An important element of maintaining a top ranking is to continually build a quality, relevant link profile. This is the hardest aspect of SEO to sell to clients. “Ok we have you in the top 3 but your only going to stay there if we keep increasing the quality and popularity of your link profile”. Think about it logically, Google wants the most up to date, relevant information in it’s index, if your site’s link profile has become stagnant Google is going to consider your information out of date and irrelevant. Keep building links.

Finally as a word of warning, if your rankings do drop don’t rush out and re optimise your site, don’t panic. The best thing you can do in this situation is sit back and do a little research, check out your competition, consider any changes to your content and see if anyone else is experiencing similar problems. Only after you have thought it over should you formulate a plan of action.