A natural/organic link is not necessarily “the opposite of the unnatural link”. It is much more than that.

And although unnatural links are in fashion, maybe its time to put the spotlight on the organic links.

What is a Natural Link?

Natural links refer to those links that are put on websites without a direct intention of influencing the rankings of Google (at least from the POV of Google). These are called natural links because they haven’t been elicited in any way. As mentioned in the Webmaster Tools Help, Google considers to be a vote of confidence a link that page A makes to page B. These “votes”, usually,  help your site rank higher in the search engine. The thing is that this vote, the link, has to be made naturally, meaning that you don’t have to influence in any way someone’s decision to link to you. Shortly, natural link building means that no explicit agreement to exchange or place links was done.

Natural Links are an investment that will pay dividends on the long term!

You might be stuffed with it, but let me illustrate the natural/unnatural dilemma with an example from politics. Elections are in full swing and you, the citizen, have to decide which mayor would be the best for your city. Your vote will be considered sincere and also legal only if your choice will be made solely because you agree with someone’s political agenda or you think that a certain person fits best the role of the mayor of your city. If a candidate or someone from his staff try to “buy” your vote with money or by offering you goods or services, that vote won’t be based on that candidate’s political qualities anymore, will it? That vote will not be relevant and might also bring some legal consequences. The same things apply when it comes to natural links. They need to be obtained organically, without anyone trying to manipulate the situation.

Natural Link Synonyms

Natural links may be found “in the wild” under the following names:

• organic links
• good links
• ok links
• high quality links
• Google friendly links

Why “Natural” & “Link” in the same phrase?

Talking about a “natural” link building strategy might sound like an oxymoron. As they first appear, links were all natural and even now, links are supposed to be natural, right? Yes, I feel the hand of reality slapping me, so allow me to rephrase that.

As the digital world got bigger and bigger, webmasters began to feel smaller and smaller. Site owners started to feel insignificant if not lost in the incredibly large web. The need to create link strategies that will speed up the process and put webmasters in their dream place, the search engines’ first page, increased proportionally with the digital world.

For someone to naturally click on the most relevant site for his search query would mean that he would know all the content from all the sites that exist.

Pretty utopian, isn’t it? How the “natural” process really goes is that users link to the most relevant sites they find from a predefined list of webpages. They don’t really give their vote of confidence to the site with the best content that there is but to the one that is most relevant to him from “the short list” of webpages which is available. With almost 80% of users clicking on links that they find on the very first page of a search engine’s responses, everybody wants to be on that list. Who designs those “short lists”? Algorithms do. The people behind those algorithms are continually seeking to improve their ability in identifying which sites are to be trusted and which not. The sites that appear on the “short list” may be the ones that know how to “dance” along with the ranking factors and not necessary the ones with the most relevant content for a certain matter.

Google’s algorithm job is to spot signals of naturalness. The webmaster’s job is to act as natural as possible. But what happens when the algorithm changes? An action that was considered natural until then can pass as unnatural now. Huge amounts of money are being lost or won based on the algorithm’s rules. It’s a cycle that repeats every day, week, month, year. I think the Ralph Tegtmeier (aka @fantomaster) puts the finger on the problem in the following video:

Link Earning

The concept of link earning puts together all the qualitative efforts that a webmaster does in order to gain organic links. The key to this strategy might be crafting your content for your readership and not for Google. The new SEO context might oblige us to forget about link building and start focusing more and more on link earning.

Here are some methods of earning links:

• Generate original information

A good place where you can put your effort into is original analysis and research. Netizens are more than glad to find out new, interesting things. If you really dig in to find something and you generate interesting facts, you are more likely to get links. We’re doing this a lot at cognitiveSEO, so, let the links come to us! 🙂 The good part with generating original research is that it is not just about linking, it is about sticking in someone’s mind or making a really big difference in a specific area.

You must create content that you yourself would go out of your way and read.

• Be active in social media

Think of where people spend most of their time. That’s right; on Facebook, Tweeter, Google+, etc. If your users spend 4 hours a day on facebook, maybe you should start spending some time there too. You don’t have to just wait for your possible customers to come to you, you may need to pay them a visit. Being active in social media can pay off in lots of ways, not just links. You get to know your target and you can also find new opportunities for your business.

• Share your knowledge

Yes, “how to’s” and tutorials is what I am talking about. If you’ve managed to do something or you discovered how to make something faster or easier, you could help other people by making a tutorial about it. It will be highly appreciated in the online world. Even if you don’t get the pile of links you were hoping for, but you will bring exposure to your brand.

Content for the “Long tail ” only needs a couple of link to rank high.

As I mentioned before, sometimes it’s not just about the links; it’s about having a resource that no one else has. In the long run it will pay off.

• Community Building

Community building is a long term investment that will pay off on the long term.

You can obtain natural links from creating content that is not only relevant and useful but that will have the power to attract links from bloggers, people from forums, blog comments, etc.

• Answer Questions Online

I am talking about answering the many questions people have in the online world. On a forum, for instance, you can answer to a question about how to get rid of some spyware. If your answer will bring the solution or any added value, the community will appreciate. It is likely that they remember that you “saved” them in some situation and most likely they will reword you with a link. So, helping other people can be a big way to do it. Don’t expect to win the Nobel Peace Prize but you may expect an investment that will pay dividends on the long term.

• Offer a Free Service to Your Community

Run a service that people find really useful or something that improves others’ experience in the digital world. For instance, you can create a browser extension. I am sure that you are familiar with the AdBlock extension. This extension is an open source that generated millions of downloads and a pretty nice amount of money made from donations. As you can see, people are grateful and willing to pay off as long as their experience as a user is improved. What is great about offering a service is that you can do the work once and on the long term lots of people will pay you off in links.

Techniques that Don’t Involve Great Content

It is hard to say that there are techniques that won’t rely great content. Let’s see, though, what we can find in this field:

• Controversy

You don’t have to be a tabloid to obtain buzz and links. You don’t have to make a profession out of gossiping or hating everybody either but some controversy might give you a boost of traffic now and then.

Done with measure, some controversy generates a lot of links but is not a long term strategy.

There will be a boost in the beginning but at some point, people will pay less and less attention to you. You don’t want to be like the boy that cried “wolf” and afterwards, no one believed him anymore. If you always get busy with saying “look at me, I am being loud, you have to pay a lot of attention to me”, you may irreparably lose your authority and credibility.

• Site Architecture

I know it may sound common but sometimes we tend to take for granted the little things. You have to make sure that your site has a good site architecture. What is the easiest way to find out? Answer to these questions: Can your site be crawled? Can your site be bookmarked? Can Google or the user get to all the pages on your site? If the answer to these questions is “no” or “I don’t know for sure”, you need to take a look at your site before doing anything else. If your site is broken your changes of being linked at are almost Zero.

• Offline Activities and Branding

Being hooked in the online world we often forget about the great opportunities that the offline world brings. If you forgot about outdoor and smart unconventional advertising and brand building, it’s a good time you bring them back into your playground.

• Newsletters

Another way in which you can drive traffic, conversions and ultimately links are  Newsletters. They might look a bit out of fashion but they still work. This way you make it easier for your public to have your information show up in their inbox and, therefore, easier to click on it.

Common Mistakes

You did everything by the book, but the results don’t look as you expected. So, what could have possible happened? I’ll list three common mistakes that may occur in the “link zone”.

1. You were too busy creating a link building strategy

Your job is not just creating a link building strategy. If your main activity will be focused on building links for search engines, you are cutting off a lot of avenues.

Before being preoccupied with how to get links, you have to build something really attractive, a reason why people would want to link to you.

After you managed that, don’t forget that there is more than the online world. There is a broader area of offline marketing out there that can bring you the links you wish for. You need to get rid of the tunnel vision focused on just links and start marketing your website without thinking about search engines but about your consumer instead.

You use the wrong keywords on your site.

For instance, you’ve just opened a great sushi restaurant in Manhattan. You don’t want to just say “sushi” but you want to include words like “where do I find the best sushi in Manhattan” etc, because it is very likely for people to search for “sushi manhattan”. Think about what the user is going to type and include those words on your page. You need to do a proper keyword research for your own site. Also, let’s say you have a car service shop. Post a list with all the services you have to offer on your site but not in a jpg or pdf format, but in plain text. Put your business hours on your page. It is very likely for people to look for a car service open till late and you might be the one who offers this service;

That piece of information can generate a link and, further on, a client.

You’ve messed up the title or the description of your page

You want to have something that people will actually click on when they see it on the search results.

What is your home page title? If, for instance, I am going to bookmark it, will I easily understand later what was really about or is the title not very suggestive? Also, your description will show up in the snippet and that synopsis can be a link generator or, on the contrary, a turn off for the user.

Conclusion

It is hard to tell whether a 100% natural link building strategy will get you on the first pages of the search engine in a favorable period of time. But one thing is for sure: while techniques and strategies come and go, organic links will always remain.

Everything you are doing is first of all for the audience and not for the search engines.

There is no (or shouldn’t be) such a thing as a manual on how to build links organically, or how to create the exact type of content that results in valuable links. There are some guidelines you need to follow and some directions you can track that can help you have a natural, worry- free link profile.

Photo credits: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The post Organic Links – What they are and How to get them? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

“I don’t have any knowledge about a recovery using the Google Disavow on an algorithmic penalty. Only manual penalties have been publicly reported to work using the Disavow tool. Knowing this I wanted to be 100% sure that this isn’t something else. I took the diligence and analyzed the situation carefully.”

Read the full-disclosure at the end of the article.

Let me tell you my experience with CognitiveSEO and the Google Disavow Tool.

I’ll begin a few months back in time.

PENGUIN our worst enemy

Note by Razvan – You can find another traffic screenshot in the mail conversation I had with Manuel, at the bottom of this email.

One of the websites I manage SmartLipo.com had suffered considerable Google ranking + traffic impact with the release of PENGUIN back in April 2012. But the first releases of penguin did not kill us completely from Google’s Organic results. Google traffic kept dropping slowly over time. Until in May 22, 2013 the 4^th update of PENGUIN was released. After this release we dropped and dropped and dropped in rankings for our main two keywords. Traffic from Google was almost none soon after that.

Note by Razvan – This is SmartLipo, the site that recovered from the Google Penguin Algorithmic Penalty using Google Disavow

Here is the full history of the site on the WayBackMachine

We had been trying everything possible

• Removed links we could remove, and contacted webmasters to help us removing (suspicious links)
• Recreated the whole site, with a new backend, enhanced page speed
• Created new content (taking into account what users are and were looking for)
• De-optimized what we considered over-optimized SEO
• Tried to build new (clean and not black-hat) external links
• Improved our Social sites (facebook, twitter, opened a pinterest account)
• Corrected the errors reported in Google Webmaster Tools (as much as we could)
• Etc, and other things

Nothing seemed to have the slightest impact in our Google rankings (hence our Google traffic)

Discovering and getting to know CognitiveSEO

One day in May my boss tells me to try the disavow tool. I was very skeptical of using it, having read that it could be harmful if used wrong. But what else did we have to loose? Google de-indexing us perhaps?  He (my boss) pointed me to use this tool he saw that featured an Unnatural link detection option. I went and played a little in Cognitiveseo. I created a new campaign for the site, the report was ready after a few minutes. I decided to import links that I exported from webmaster tools. I just felt more secure adding some extra link data.

Using the ‘Unnatural Links Detection’ option

I decided to run the link classification, it takes a few minutes. I decided to go slow, and take my time. As I mentioned I am too skeptic and cautious (that can be sometimes a problem when you need to react fast). Anyway I decided to take a look at every domain and almost every link, I was not sure to trust the unnatural link report from the beginning. I went and checked with my own eyes almost every link and every domain (no matter if suspect, unnatural or ok). I found some unnatural links that I liked and some ok links that I did not trust. But in general I ended up agreeing with the report in a considerable percentage. Apart from the few links I manually readjusted from OK to unnatural and vice-versa I did not have much work to do on the report. I took a second look (took me some time), and decided to export the domains I marked as disavowed (well actually all suspicious and unnatural ones).

Once outside Cognitive I went and took a last look at the domain entries of the disavow file, making sure no good domains were in it (at least the ones I consider vital: e.g. Facebook,  twitter accounts, trusted customer sites linking back to us, some blogspots.com domains, etc., you get the idea of which site you can trust).

Submitting the disavow file to Google

On July 9th submitted the disavow file to Google (made the sign of the cross). I captured a screenshot to show later my boss that I did use the disavow tool as he suggested a few days back. I continued with my life. I kept checking rankings every other day, nothing seemed to change the first days, the first weeks.

The resurrection

Close to 3 weeks passed after the disavow submission, when all of a sudden one day when I run the rank check (using a VPN tool) from different IPs and different states in the US, I saw that our site was raking #3 and #2 from many different locations. At first I thought I was doing the rank check wrong, maybe the VPN is not working and I am doing a local search? Maybe the browser cache is holding onto my Google session? Are these results personalized? I did not want to get any false hope so I did not tell my boss about the news, I decided to track ranks for the next days, every morning. The ranks were consistent, #3, #2 and even #1 in some cities. I finally accepted it to be true as I saw the increase in traffic in Google Analytics. I did not want to celebrate, maybe its temporary, maybe google is playing a prank on us, maybe it’s all a dream. Well that dream has been going on for the last 5 weeks.

Conclusion

Although I have done many things to my site, I am pretty f***ing sure the disavow submission was the one that helped me back in rankings. I could have done it without the help CognitiveSeo.com, yeah but it would have taken me weeks if not months to find out by myself which links are bad and which not, and webmaster tools does not give me many links that Cognitive does. Cognitive is a perfect way to complement what webmaster tools shows you (external links). And now I know that Cognitive saves a mountain of time classifying bad from ok links.

Cognitive is not paying me to write this, I just want to acknowledge and share this story with the skeptical ones like me out there. Hope it works for you as it did for me. If you do it right, I am sure it will.

–

Manuel Porras – Webmaster – Smart Lipo Google+  https://plus.google.com/u/0/114452216971255669727/posts

Transparency Note and disclosure from Razvan Gavrilas(founder)

On September the 3rd I received the first mail from Manuel, (I did not know him until then).

I answered him that I would be interested in his story, but he never got back … until 17^th of September, when he mailed me the story that you just read.

I don’t have any knowledge about a recovery using the Google Disavow on an algorithmic penalty. Only manual penalties have been publicly reported to work using the Disavow tool. Knowing this I wanted to be 100% sure that this  isn’t something else. I took the diligence and analyzed the situation carefully. Here is the full transcript of the mail discussion between me and Manuel (for the sake of full transparency).

As the founder of cognitiveSEO, I am extremly happy and proud when people connect with me and tell me their successful stories on how the tool made their life easier.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you all, our customers, for making this possible. It is YOU that give us the power to innovate & solve your problems faster & better.

The post Unnatural Links & Penguin Recovery using the Google Disavow Tool appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Today we introduce:

Prefix / Folder Backlink Checking

I am sure that at least once in your “SEO PRO life”, you needed to quickly check the backlinks for a product category (ONLY) or a blog directory?

This new feature allows you to segment the links that point to all of the pages on a site that respect a specific word pattern.

You will instantly get, not only all the links to the pages respecting the prefix pattern, but you will also get historical link growth information for those pages only + everything you would normally get for a Domain/Subdomain or Page analysis.

To better understand the usefulness of this new feature here are some use cases for the prefix/folder analysis.

5 Creative Use Cases for the new Prefix analysis option.

1. Who are the most linked authors from SearchEngineLand?

   

2. What are the most popular Techcrunch articles for any given day?

   

3. How did the MoneySuperMarket “Car Insurance” folder links evolved over time?

   

4. What are the major news stories on CNN this month (September 2013)?

   

5. What are Microsoft’s most active Twitter accounts?

   

Happy Backlink Hunting!

What do you think of this new feature?

The post 5 Creative Use Cases for the New “Prefix” Backlink Checker appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Important Update!

We released the automatic unnatural link classification tool to help you in your unnatural link recovery, after this post was published.

We recommend you check it for unnatural link analysis!

With the latest chit chat that Google is going to release the next version of Google Penguin soon, I think it is a good time to remember how you can easily detect unnatural links in your sites’ profile.

This detection technique can to be used for any site, even if it did not receive a penalty or unnatural link warning. It is a good technique that you can use to understand and manage the risk that you might be exposed to when the next unnatural link update comes.

Lovely site BitsofLace – Unfortunately Bad Linking Used …

This case study presents the story of a penalized site and how an unnatural links detection process should be approached. (mention – the site was brought to our attention by one of our customers asking for help in segmenting the unnatural links pointing to this site)

The site is operating in the “Lingerie” niche (BitsofLace.com) and has received several unnatural link warnings in the past. Their rankings have dropped significantly because of the unnatural links that were built in the past by several agencies or individual SEOs.

Let’s start with the conclusion so you can quickly understand what was wrong with the links of this site.

To put it simple, this site lost rankings because of an often seen, boring and un-creative link building strategy that combines a deadly mix of:

• Paid blog posts
• Web Directory links
• Forum & Article Directory links

So how did I find all this out? Here is the entire process described.  You can apply it to any site.

I started with a full link profile analysis. Looking for big distributions of links I notice the following:

• A high density of blog, article directory and web directory links
• A high number of commercial anchor texts versus brand related.

These signals guide me to look further at the webpage type distribution.

1. The story of the Paid Blog Links

Blog links are not unnatural usually, neither web directory or article directory links (or any other type of link … just to clear this out) … but it all comes to the distribution, volume and how they were acquired.

I check the deeper profile of these blog links.

We have them split in:

• Blog Post links
• Blog Comment Links
• Blogrolls and similar link types

Let’s dig deeper. The majority of the links are coming from blog posts. This could be a natural thing.  Content Marketing, customers writing about the service etc.

This isn’t the case unfortunately.

The first unnatural links signal is the low quality of the linking pages.

If I order by link quality, the most important link looks like a paid blog post. Natural links (expos, trade shows, real reviews etc) are also found but these are a tiny fraction (max 1%).

I should have looked at the commercial anchor text distribution for the blog links segment first of all.

A 55% commercial anchor text ratio is totally unnatural for sure.

I am looking at another 3-4 links and I can profile them all based on the similar footprint.

Here are some screenshots so that you can get the idea.

Content written around commercial anchor text posted on these blogs. All of these blog post links are unnatural from Google’s point of view. They were built with the sole purpose of influencing Google’s rankings. They do not provide any value to the user!

The same can be said about the other links coming from blogrolls and blog comments.

~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.

 2. The story of the “old and dirty” Web Directory linking technique.

How natural can Web Directory links be you should ask yourself? Last year Google even started de-indexing directories.

Let’s be frank for a moment, you put those links there with the sole purpose of increasing your rankings.

Rarely we see high quality web directories sending real traffic to your site via the link posted there.

With such a high distribution of 23% links coming from web directories I should mark all as unnatural without even looking at them. But let’s be accurate and methodical and make an informed decision.

Having such a high percentage of 93% links DoFollowed, highlights the intention of the people that “optimized” this link profile to have the site rank higher with Web Directory links.

I tried inspecting these links in various forms so that I could find a quality link from a web directory.

I couldn’t!

I checked the most powerful links ordered by Domain Trustworthiness and Link Trustworthiness. All the top links are low quality web directories (from the user’s experience point of view) by any metric you choose to filter.

Here’s a quick preview on some of these low quality unnatural web directory links.

~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.

 3. The story of the Forum “Personas”

Normally you get people talking in forums about your product. They might be mentioning your brand, talking about your service etc. When you have a high distribution of forum domains sending links to your site we can only have two options:

1. The site is a “super super” successful brand.
2. The site is promoted by a “super” proactive forum spammer.

Again we have a lot of DoFollow links. Raises a red flag!

In the forum links segment I searched for the word “profile” in the title or link and this is what we got as a visual link profile.

Why I searched for the word “profile” you might ask?

Because this represents the fingerprint for forum profile pages or “personas” as some SEOs call them.

Fake Forum profiles created with the sole purpose of generating unnatural links to the promoted site.

We do have some natural links generated by real people on the forums but these are like 10% out of the entire dataset. The rest are “personas” generating links both on profile pages and inside forum discussions.

~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.

4. Article Directory Thin Content can Sink your site.

As a link building strategy this is an old one, that once worked and now it doesn’t anymore. As with any other link building strategy, the more it is abused by SEOs worldwide, the less it is going to work on a long term, as it is something that is generated unnaturally with the purpose of influencing the search engine’s rankings.

Here is the type of thin content linking in with commercial anchor text that was used for this site.

Natural Link?

Not at all!

Human generated content posted on a mass scale on 95 article directories. Variation of the anchor text and content is found on all of these sites. The problem is that Google can fingerprint this as it has a big proportion of the link profile and it raises a red flag for Google to check.

~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Let’s recap:

• ~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.
• ~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.
• ~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.
• ~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Total 72% Unnatural Links Detected

And this is not all!

We can go even deeper and check the other type of pages, and I am sure we will find more unnatural links. I just wanted to showcase how easy it is to spot these unnatural links by segmenting the links by webpage type.

The website type segmentation gives you the macro view on the link building strategies used.

The analysis was done in 5 minutes + 10 minutes to have the cognitiveSEO system crawl and analyze the entire dataset of links so that we have fresh data on the links analyzed. It took me 5 hours to finalize this article though :). I hope you will enjoy it!

Here are some other articles that are of great help when it comes to identifying unnatural and low quality links:

• Identify Low Quality Links [how to]
• Surfacing Unnatural Links > Why You’re Doing it Wrong [how to]
• Backlinks Analysis Case Study
• Google Penguin Case Study
• Google Penguin Crashes Wedding Site’s Shady Link Building Strategy [case study]

What do you think about the unnatural link building strategy used by this site?

What other methods do you apply to segment unnatural links?

The post Unnatural Links Detection – How To Guide & Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Main Topics

• What are Unnatural Links?
• How do I spot them?
• How do I recover from an Unnatural Links Penalty?
• Quick Overview of the recent Interflora Penalty.
• “Unnatural Link” Sites Analyzed – Case Studies
•     SmartLipo – Medical Surgery Niche
•     Allesovergokken – Online Gambling Niche Netherlands
•     Webhostingmadness – Webhosting Review Niche
•     Learnenglishindublin – Learning Foreign Languages Niche

What are Unnatural Links?

• Links that are created with the sole purpose of influencing a search engines rankings.
• Mostly DOFollow links, these links can be spotted by Google using trained algorithms that search for specific patterns in specific niches.
• These algorithms are also “helped” by humans that verify specific sites and possibly flag them. You can read more about this if you search the cognitiveSEO blog for Google Rating & Webspam Guidelines. There was a leaked document last year that explains the process.

A few examples:

• blog comments built at mass scale
• link networks that interlink and link to a specific site to help it increase its rankings
• paid dofollow links (advertorials, sponsored links etc )

More on the subject here.

The BIG 3 Rules of Ranking with Natural Links

1. Google is a machine that is trying to “emulate” the real world.

• What it seems unnatural in the real world should be unnatural to Google. (if it is not now, it will be in the future)

2. Become Trust Worthy!

• Prepare for this. It Takes Time. (like in real life).
• Basic Idea – Show Google that you are Trust Worthy and Google will give you Ranking Juice.
• Gain Trust without Commercial Anchor Text.
• Be Strategic & Patient.

3. After Google Trusts you Don’t Abuse it!

• Start using Commercial Anchor Text to guide Google to rank you better.
• Continue to build trust!

The BIG 5 Rules of Unnatural Link Analysis

1. Each niche is different, and this can be seen by the different link profiles.

• This is from a naturalness point of view.
• Everything has a Context. Put is out of the Context and it has no value.

2. The same rules to identify unnatural links in different niches will not apply.

• There are generic ones that will apply though, such as – high number of low metric links.

3. Look for Backlink Profile Extremes.

• Analyze from different angles. Profile by Site Type, Link Type, Metrics etc.

4. Big Density of Commercial Anchor Text compared to Brand Anchor Text

5. Look for Links with Similar Footprints. (Advertorials, Link Networks, Footer Links etc)

How should I recover from Unnatural Links Penalties

1. Identify & Mark the Unnatural Links.
2. Ask the site’s webmasters to remove those links.
3. Most of them won’t, so your only chance is Google Disavow.
4. Do it carefully! Don’t sent the whole list of links to Google. It won’t work.
5. Explain what happened and give details for as much unnatural links as possible.
6. Remove all unnatural links from an affected domain.
7. Wait … while “waiting” start building natural links. Increase your Trust and Dilute you Bad Link Profile.

Quick Overview on the recent Interflora Penalty

1. Interflora is a site that sells flowers in the UK and other countries. It is one of the biggest flower sites in the UK.
2. Approximately a week ago it was penalised by Google and the entire SEO community started to analyze this.
3. My opinion is that this is an enforcement of another guideline from Google regarding “advertorials”. This is because Matt Cutts himself posted the same day on twitter a short note about the specific guideline.
4. There were other cases in the past with sites like JC Penney and others that were penalized by Google.(“brands”). For Google this is the easiest way to spread the word about an enforcement of their guidelines.
5. A way of educating the SEO community.
6. Was this purely about other unnatural links? I do not think so. Other competitors of Interflora have a big amount of unnatural links and still they are not penalized. This was about “Advertorials”.
7. If we check these against their competitors we will see that this makes the difference.
8. A “new old” unnatural link = the advertorial link.
9. What it works today … might not work tomorrow!
10. But a lot of spammy tactics still work.
11. Work for a day or a week. But if you plan for longer than that you have to comply.

The post Backlink Analysis – Google Penalties Case Studies appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

High rankings for highly competitive keywords are still being obtainable, post “Penguin”, with black hat practices.

How do I dare to say that you might ask? Well because I have a case study that tells me so (plus I see them in the rankings day by day). It works the same way it worked 5 years ago. Well, Google did fix a few bugs here and there, but the black hat concepts are still the same and they still work.

Get a bunch of links and throw them at your target site.

Wait a minute. Don’t do it yet. Why? Well because here stuff starts to get different than it was 5 years ago. 5 years ago if you had a new domain and you would throw 1000 links at it, from 300 domains ( random example) your site would have been ranking in the top 5 for the following 2 weeks to a month , with a steady position … rarely you would have seen fluctuations.

Since then, Google has changed a lot. Some of the major changes that would stop such a black hat technique from working today are:

• The Google Index is being updated almost instantly (not weekly or daily)
• Google evaluates links with more in-depth knowledge of the link graph.
• Google takes in consideration Link velocity from a naturalness point of view.
• Google has human site reviewers that police the SERPs.
• and many more …

Let’s take our example and see how it still works today.

First we need to get our objectives straight:

• One of the Top 3 positions on the keyword “payday loans” in Google (global) – this snapshot show us our site that was abused and ranked No.1 on this keyword.

Like with any cake you (your mommy, wife or girlfriend) cooks, you need to have some ingredients before you begin the actual cooking process. This is what it was used in our case:

Black Hat Ingredients

• One “aged”, well ranking site (you can choose any niche whatsoever – does not have to be related to the keyword you target) – cedarlakedance.com registered in August 2005
• A really good backlink analysis tool to check your competitors & identify how their link profile is constructed (by site type/link type/ link position/ metrics etc)
• A mix of high & low quality hacked sites where you will put links on.
• A Hacker.
• A cloacking script to detect Google Referrers.
• A Landing Page to convert visitors into Money.

These are the ingredients. Like with any other recipe … if you mix something wrong, the end result will be a failure (or an unexpected success 🙂 ).

Black Hat Directions

1. Ask Hacker to check the site and find potential vulnerabilities. After this he will need to actually hack it and be able to put a html page on the server. (totally illegal – “DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME”)
2. Don’t modify anything yet. Leave the site as it is.
3. Use a top link analysis tool to analyze the top ranking sites (top 5) and get the number of referring domains they have.

• Analyze even more and classify by
  • Dofollow /nofollow
  • deep links /deep backlinks
  • Profile backlinks by site type/ link type
  • Profile backlinks by Authority Metrics
• After profiling their backlinks you will have a number of referring domains that you would target to achieve the No. 1-3 ranking. In our case the site settled to have approximately 600 referring domains in the end.

4. Apply the Google Bombing technique with a Link Velocity twist.

• Use the same anchor text (“payday loans”) everywhere. – no mix needed because of the Google trust that is applied to the victim site.
• Use the set of hacked sites to get your links live. This could be a private network of hacked sites or a set of link networks that would allow you to get blog posts or server side widgets posted.
• Important: All this needs to be done dispersed over a 1-2 week period of time ( in this case it was done starting with the approximative date of 14-May-2012 and it goes until 11-June-2012

5. Monitor the targeted keyword in Google until the victim site shows up (if you do not … watch the mix you did & retry)

6. Switch the original page with the Landing Page that you will use to convert the visitors into Money. Install the cloacking script also, so only people coming from Google will see the landing page and not anyone visiting the targeted page. Show Google the same page the Google visitors will see.

7. Monitor your targeted keyword. When you go down. Delete all the links that you have pointed to that target page so that you keep the link network secret to your competitors.

Ok. So let me exemplify with this site that got the No.1 ranking in Google … even after “Penguin”  (sign that Google still has a lot of things to fix in their spam algorithm). First of all Google detects that the site might have been hacked. They do put a lot of effort in detecting this type of things. Google Alerts you about this in the SERPS.

Here is how the anchor text distribution profile looked before being abused.

Here it is how it looks after being Google Bombed.

Here is the link velocity used to get the links on while Google Bombing the site.

And here are the thinks that are unnatural … still Google things they are.

• ~ 40% of the link profile is made of abused new links over 2 weeks. Big proportion of different referring domain links acquired.
• Only “payday loans” anchor text was used.
• Only Dofollow Links.
• Only Text Links.
• The majority of links come from Russian sites ( totally unrelated to the previous link profile)
• All links point only to the main page of cedarlakedance.

In case you want to dig more into this, here is the CSV files to download with the entire link profile.

All this worked because the victim site was a trusted site, and Google considered this to be a spike in the sites authoritativeness. They did figured something out about the site being hacked, but they could not figure out the whole story. Until they do these kind of abuses will still work.

Practically these are techniques that are as old as the search engines are. The only thing that changes is just how these techniques are applied to make them work.

UPDATE

After a set of tweet exchanges with Ian @portentint & Ralph @fantomaster, I think it should be best noted that techniques that are using illegal practices (that are said to be illegal by the law) should be called “Crap Hat“ (evil search spam) and those that are only using SEO methods that are against the TOS of the particular search engine should be referred as “Black Hat”.

The post Black Hat SEO Technique Exposed- No.1 on “Payday Loans” appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Yesterday Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google is indexing Ajax / Javascript.

Today we are announcing that cognitiveSEO is doing the same thing … but from an SEO point of view.

What are the “Link Previews” ?

In the past 12 months we have been working on a unique and powerful feature, called “Link Previews” (the actual geeky R&D name was “Visual Based Location”) .

To put it short :

cognitiveSEO “Link Previews” are practically Google Instant Previews for inBound Links.

We have developed a powerful and highly automatized visual crawler that can render any webpage (including Javascript/AJAX based ones … just like Google does) and has the ability to identify the position on the page of the inBound Links you are interested in. Our system will give you the full screenshot and then highlight the identified links on the page. We go further and check if the link is a Javascript Link or a Hidden Link.

This is pretty neat, as now you will be able to browse your backlinks visually.

Imagine that! Here is a visual preview:

The “Link Previews” identify where your inbound links are positioned and if the links are visible on the page. To be more exact, this is what our seo tool can tell us about a link:

• The Link is positioned in the Header of the page
  
• The Link is positioned in the Body of the page
• The Link is positioned in the Footer of the page
• The Link is Hidden or “Javascript Genererated”
  

It is important to mention that the visual renderer does this on a large scale for hundreds of thousands of links … and it works pretty damn quick, squashing every CPU cycle from the crawling machines.

5 outstanding things “Link Previews” can do for You

1. Fast Analysis & Browsing of Backlink Profiles

2. Find Hidden and Javascript Links (facebook comments for example)

3. Understand how many backlinks are positioned in the Header , Body or Footer of the page (you can do this for either your sites or your competitors)

4. Identify unnatural patterns in Backlink Profiles

5. Manage & Monitor your Links visually

In the following days we will update the blog with more outstanding features from the cogntiveSEO toolset. Stay tuned !!!

If you did not register yet for the cogntiveSEO Beta please do so. You will ne notified before anyone else when we launch this month.

What do you think about the “Link Previews” feature and concept ?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas. What other creative use cases would you find for the “Link Previews” ?

The post cognitiveSEO is Crawling Ajax – so does Google! appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.