Google’s algorithm has evolved a lot over the years. The main purpose of the improvements was to be able to better distinguish natural links from artificially generated links. Unfortunately, although big advancements have been made, top ranking websites with clean link profiles aren’t always the case.

It probably happened to you (or to someone you know) to run a business in compliance with all Google’s guidelines when it comes to  link building but, at the end of the day, to be dethroned by other sites from the industry with spammy link profiles. So, why is this happening? Let’s find out! 

1. Why Do Sites With Spammy Link Profiles Still Rank Well?
   1. They Built Those Links Long Time Ago
   2. They Didn’t Build Those Links (Negative SEO Attack)
   3. They’re Still the Best Site Out There
   4. Google Hasn’t Caught Them… Yet
   5. One Example to Prove Them All
2. Why You Should NOT Build Spammy Links as Well
3. Google Penguin 4.0 Update & the Disavow Tool
4. How to Submit a Spam Report
5. How to Outrank Competitors That Have Spammy Link Profiles
   1. Focus More on OnPage & Technical SEO Factors
   2. Really Step up Your Content Game
   3. Look for Other Keywords to Target
   4. Invest in Advertising
   5. Improve Social Media
   6. Get Inspired from Your Competitor’s Good Links

If you think I’m going to say that you can still improve your rankings using BlackHat SEO link building tactics in 2019, you’re wrong. But while some complain about their websites being penalized, others have a completely different issue:

“My competitors have spammy links but still rank better than me.”

Then, almost every time, the following question follows:

“What should I do in this case?”

There’s even an old Reddit thread about this:

If you’ve been struggling with this issue for a while, then you’ve landed on the right page.

The short answer to this question is that a spammy link profile doesn’t necessarily mean a website shouldn’t rank well. You see, Google’s (and other search engines) main purpose is to return the best search results for the users, not the search results with the best link profile. There are hundreds of other factors that are taken into consideration by Google when it ranks a website, and although links are still one of the top 3 most important ones, they aren’t everything.

Google has shown signs of steering away from links. Although links can’t completely be removed from the equation (at least not very soon), other factors, like user interaction, for example, have shown a lot of prominence recently.

If the top competitors have spammy backlinks but are still ranking good, well, my friend, then the truth is you’ve gotten yourself into a very competitive niche.

However, there’s still hope. But it’s not going to be easy, nor is it going to be cheap (is anything easy and cheap in digital marketing?). Before we dig into the tips and tricks, let’s better understand what Google has done against link spam over the years, and why.

Why Do Sites With Spammy Link Profiles Still Rank Well?

Ok, so if Google tries so hard to get spammers down, how come some webmasters with such obvious shady link profiles are still ranking well with their websites?

John Mueller from Google tells us that we don’t really know if they got away with it or not.

However, this often sounds unfair, as those websites clearly have spammy link profiles, but are ranking very well.

There could be a thousand reasons why this is happening, but I’ll try to provide some clearance with what I think is happening.

They Built Those Links Long Time Ago

Back in 2012, the BlackHat industry was thriving. ScrapeBox, GSA, Comment Spamming, Private Blog Networks, you name it. It worked. And people got hooked.

BlackHat SEO services were expensive because they could also be very profitable. Even big brands got into them as well.

The ones who suffered most were innocent business owners that had no idea about this. They just signed contracts with SEO agencies to get their websites higher on Google.

As the word spread, more and more shady things started to happen. It wasn’t a time when search engines provided the best results. And Google didn’t like that, so it took action against it.

Many of them lost their rankings forever. Some eventually recovered, through complex actions of improvement and link disavowing.

But some got away with it, and they’re probably still ranking today. Since the algorithm is now supposed to be real-time and to ignore spammy links, this kind of makes sense.

It doesn’t mean they are bad websites or that they still use BlackHat SEO strategies. It could just be that they got away with it. They were lucky.

They Didn’t Build Those Links (Negative SEO Attack)

Sometimes, instead of working on their own websites, people prefer to ‘work’ other websites out, by trying to attract Google penalties to them. These techniques are called Negative SEO Attacks.

In theory, the process is pretty simple: do BlackHat SEO to another website until Google gives it a penalty. When they drop, you replace the spot.

Example showing a negative SEO attack happening on Jellyfish’s website

When you look at a website and see a lot of spammy links, you might say they’re cheating. But although you can analyze a site’s link profile, you have no idea if they disavowed those links or not.

The Google Disavow tool is really useful, but it’s also one of the smartest moves Google made for improving their algorithm.

Because they feared the penalty, many webmasters started submitting their spammy links through the disavow tool.

Sure, it could help you not get penalized, but yet again, it could do nothing. Some even lose rankings after they start disavowing links.

What the disavow tool might actually do is that it feeds Google thousands of patterns of spammy links. So Google gets smarter and smarter every day. Smart, eh?

Negative SEO attack patterns are anyway different from shady link building patterns. You might think that’s not the case, but the truth is when people are doing black-hat SEO for themselves, they’re very cautious and try to stay under the radar. On the other side, when they’re framing someone else, they’re too obvious.

That’s the big downside of negative search engine optimization. If you make it obvious, Google will know it’s a negative SEO attack, but if you don’t make it obvious enough, who knows, your competitor might never get caught and the spam might actually help him rank.

So although you can see your competitor’s backlinks are reall spammy, you can’t know for sure how Google sees the situation.

They’re Still the Best Site Out There

As I said, a spammy link profile doesn’t mean a site shouldn’t be first on Google. This usually happens when all the other sites also have a spammy link profile.

Google can’t penalize all the websites if they’re all breaking the rules because it wouldn’t have any search results left to return.

If the top website has been there for years, providing value and good services to its customers, Google will reward it by keeping it there, even though maybe it knows they’re breaking the rules.

Google Hasn’t Caught Them… Yet

Asking why Google doesn’t penalize all the spammers is like asking why doesn’t the police bust all drug dealers. It’s just too many of them, and it’s impossible for Google to catch them all right away. But it probably will, eventually…

Spamming is still profitable because it works. If you manage to spam under the radar, you might cash in some quick profits. But the frustration of constantly being on the run isn’t a nice feeling.

If you haven’t done it yet, go ahead and read The Confessions of a Google Spammer on InBound. Once Google finds you, it’s over. And they have to start all over again from scratch.

Although I want to say that Google will eventually catch everyone… the reality of life is that sometimes bad guys win.

One Example to Prove Them All

At first, I tried looking for a lot of examples, but without much success. I tried searching the wedding niche, the flowers niche, but time and time the top ranking websites were actually legit in terms of link building.

But then I thought to myself… why not payday loans?

I mean… if there’s a niche there that’s been spammy as hell since forever, it’s definitely this one. Google even has an algorithmic update named after it. And lucky me, I hit the Jackpot (although I couldn’t personally access all the websites; but this could be due to my location).

So I took a couple of sites from the top and one from the second page (United States/British) and used cognitiveSEO to classify the anchor texts and run the Unnatural Link Detection Tool.

The results were promising. The big majority of the links are definitely unnatural.

Snippet from the Unnatural Link Detection tool showing a top ranking website (speedycash.com)

Another website from a lower set of results shows similar patterns:

Snippet from the Unnatural Link Detection tool showing a competing website from the second page (cashone.com)

However, I can easily back up my points made earlier in the article with this example.

Point no. 1: The sites have been in business for a long time.

You can easily check when websites were registered. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they were in business since that date, but it’s a decent indicator.

These websites were registered over 15 years ago. If the company was doing business back then as well, it’s probably a very legit business with a lot of experience.

Screenshot taken from bulkseotools.com

Point no. 2: The links were made a long time ago.

By checking the link velocity section, we can quickly spot that these websites built links some time ago, but aren’t doing it right now.

Cashone.com’s link velocity; screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

Mypaydaylonan.com’s link velocity;  screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

The top website seems to be actively building links, but the spike just before 2012 is definitely a lot bigger than the ones happening right now.

Speedycash.com’s link velocity;  screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

Point no. 3: These websites are still offering good services.

Although they still look spammy design-wise, one of the websites has over 2,000 reviews on TrustPilot, showing an average grade of 9.1. They could be fake reviews, of course, but yet again, they could not be. I think TrustPilot are doing their best to keep things real.

Sure, I didn’t analyze one thousand sites, but I hope I made my point. Chances are that most websites in this niche have a significant amount of unnatural links in their link profiles.

Why You Should NOT Build Spammy Links as Well

I know it’s tempting. I know how you feel. You’ve probably tried everything and they still rank better. But unless you’re trying to go for a hit and run niche site, no. It’s too risky.

Old sites that did BlackHat stuff in the past might still be ranking well in the Google search results, but new sites doing shady stuff attract a lot more attention. You might get penalized right from the start, losing your chance to ever rank for that keyword.

Although building a million spammy links might look easy, it’s not. It takes a lot of effort and the learning curve is quite steep. It’s also not cheap. You’ll need advanced tools and thousands of proxies to cover your ass up.

If you want to beat a BlackHat site the WhiteHat way, then it’s not going to be easy. But the advantage is that you don’t risk anything, and what you build, you build on the long-term.

Your time is far way spent on other things, such as quality content, improving user experience and relationship building. Instead of pointing our fingers at someone else, we should be taking a look at our own actions, and see how we could improve those.

Google Penguin 4.0 Update & the Disavow Tool

If you’ve heard about the Penguin Update, then you probably know it’s triggered by spammy links. Although it’s not the only algorithm that penalizes websites with spammy link profiles, it’s definitely the one that took the most spammers down. If you’re planning on some shady link building, then you should look out for flappy walks and orange beaks.

The problem with the first three Penguin algorithm updates was that although they got better, they were still pretty slow. Google used to gather information over a longer period of time (about 2-3 months) and then roll out a patch that would suddenly impact thousands of websites that broke the rules.

As of the latest version, Google’s spammy link tracking is now happening in real time. With the Penguin 4.0 update, Google ignores spammy links or penalizes single pages instead of penalizing entire websites.

This doesn’t mean that websites can’t be penalized anymore. Plenty of users still admit having suffered from Google penalties that affected their entire websites.

Some experts, such as Rand Fishkin, speculate that Google used this slow mass penalty process to create a fear factor that will determine webmasters to submit their spammy link profiles through the Disavow Tool.

This tool, launched in 2012, some months after the first Penguin update, enabled users to submit links that they wanted to be ignored by Google. People thought that if they submitted their links sooner, they could avoid a possible Google penalty. Google then supposedly fed the Disavow Tool database to the algorithm and used this to create a real-time version of Penguin, one that better understands link spamming patterns.

The Disavow Tool also somewhat protects webmasters against negative SEO attacks. If someone built some spammy links to your site you could start disavowing them. However, Google had previously stated that the Disavow Tool isn’t a replacement for removing links and that no reconsideration action will be taken unless users also try to remove some of those links.

Good ol’ Google! Never fails to surprise you with its tricks, right?

However, the truth is that using the disavow tool can help you recover from a Google penalty. If you’re ever in that situation, it’s worth a try.

How to Submit a Spam Report

Although you can do this, I wouldn’t recommend rushing in. It’s not exactly the same, submitting a spam report does resemble a negative SEO attack because while you could try to outrank your competitor by gaining positions yourself, you’re trying to pull him down instead.

Think about the things I mentioned earlier:

What if your competitor just hired a company to do search engine optimization and he has no idea, although he’d probably be against it if he knew? 

In addition, if you have some shady links yourself, or share some of the backlinks with your competitor, submitting a spam report might attract Google’s attention to your website as well. You’ll see why in a minute.

Instead of blowing into some other person’s candles, try to make your own candle burn brighter. The truth is, if you had started doing SEO 5 years ago, you’d be ranking now.

However, if you see a website that tries to steal information from clients and or is involved in any illegal activities ranking on top, then you should definitely submit a spam report, as soon as possible.

In theory, Google employees should manually review these websites and decide if to apply a penalty or not. Any phishing or malware attempts will surely be banned.

There are more types of spam reports. Some of the more… dangerous ones, let’s say, anyone can file. This includes Malware, Phishing or Copyright related issues.

The rest of them, on the other side, will require a search console account (former Webmaster Tools). This means that Google will know exactly who is filing the report. If you ever did some shady things yourself, you should keep this in mind.

Of course, you could just set up a fake account to set a report, but Google will probably ignore those, otherwise an account wouldn’t be required in the first place.

How to Outrank Competitors With Spammy Link Profiles

Even though things aren’t in your favor, you should not give up. There are still things you can do to outrank these types of competitors.

Actually, the journey is one of the things that makes SEO so interesting: figuring out those things you haven’t thought of before; making a move that provides results; doing it without cheating.

Outranking a BlackHat SEO feels like gaining more money and power than the Godfather by selling lollipops.

Focus More on OnPage  and Technical SEO Factors

I know this might only sound motivational, but you should shift your focus from links to on-page factors. When people say they’ve tried everything, I still have a feeling they were only talking about link building.

That’s what usually happens when spammy link envy kicks in: you forget about all the other things, like making your website faster, securing the connection with an SSL and improving the overall user experience.

Here’s what you should be asking yourself:

Am I really offering the users a good experience?

One of the hardest things entrepreneurs have to do is jump into their customers’ minds. It’s hard to really see their frustrations and come up with good solutions to solve them. You might’ve heard the phrase “Customers don’t know what they want.” Well, that’s true and it’s exactly the issue! They don’t know what they want so they won’t buy. At least, not until you offer a good solution to the problem.

If you really want to understand the buyer, just go buy something. You’ll instantly shift into the buyer’s mindset. And that’s exactly what you should analyze for your site if you really want to find solutions and make more sales.

What’s your conversion rate? Is it satisfying? Where do your users click most of the time? Is it easy for them to understand what’s clickable and what’s not? Are you offering a live support chat? Are they wasting time looking for something? Maybe you should bring it more to the front.

Am I really trying to solve their problems?

Many websites out there don’t try to solve a problem. They’re just in because they heard you can make some money online. As long as you’re not focused at all on solving a user’s problem, you can’t really improve your website.

Is the content really answering their questions? Does it resonate with who they are? Figure it out before you put another word on your pages.

Is my website better than theirs?

The website must be prettier, faster and easier to use.

However, I’m not talking only about design and website performance . There are a lot of other variables which actually come from outside the website:

Is your brand known at all compared to your competitor’s? Could you really handle all the orders without an issue? How’s your social media engagement compared to theirs?

Really step up your content game

Everyone knows that content is King. But an inconsistent King can quickly lose his throne. 

Consistency has proven itself time after time in the content marketing and SEO industry. We’ve experienced this ourselves here, at cognitiveSEO. That being said, get yourself an editorial schedule ready, and stick to it.

It doesn’t really matter how much you post. Obviously, the more, the better. But what really matters is that you post on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.

Remember that with quantity, you risk losing quality. To be able to post more often and keep the quality of your content, you’ll have to expand your writing department.

Think of innovating things in your niche. Analyze your competitors’ content and try to find the content gaps. Set personas for your targeted audience and really dig into it.

One thing I often recommend to websites, especially if it’s an eCommerce site, is to start blog posting. This can help a lot with building the authority of the domain, as articles and blog posts get shares and backlinks much easier than products. You’ll need a good content marketer for that. Some niches have a hard time coming up with interesting content.

Here are some next level tips on how to expand your content strategy, even in a really boring niche. It’s not a short video, but it’s worth watching.

The secret here is finding those questions and objections your clients have that your competitors don’t answer, and answer them! Any gap in the niche that the competition hasn’t filled yet is a great opportunity for you to improve your website.

Another great thing to do is update your content regularly with new information. You always learn new things about different topics. If you think you have new information you can add to an existing article, never hesitate to do it!

A great way to improve your content marketing strategies is using the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool & Content Assistant. This set of SEO tools works by analyzing all the pages that rank for that keyword and providing keywords that you should add in order to make your article more relevant.

Don’t just bulk keywords in. Think of them as topics you haven’t covered before. Add them to relevant places and always keep the end user in mind. If it doesn’t make any sense for the reader, don’t add the keyword at all.

We’ve optimized our own content recently and the results were promising, providing a 70% increase in SEO visibility.

Look for other keywords to target

Keyword research is really important if you want to do well in SEO. Sometimes, if you can’t outrank your competitors on Google, you can try to target keywords that are less competitive.

Maybe the ones you are targeting right now are not the most relevant for your website and users. Maybe the keyword difficulty is too high for your website’s authority.

You can try targeting some longtail keywords instead. As you grow, your site will get stronger and will be able to target more competitive keywords.

Many times, people get stuck trying to rank for that one great keyword. Sure, high search volume keywords are nice, but there are other keywords out there.

Your spammy competitor can’t be ranking on all of them.

Don’t waste too much time trying to rank on a single keyword, or you’ll end up overoptimizing and doing yourself harm. You’ll also waste a lot of time and lose opportunities to rank hundreds of other keywords.

The cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool can provide you with some new keyword ideas that you can start targeting. The ones with more stars are more relevant to your primary searched keyword.

Snippet from the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool

Another interesting trick you can do is to use the Site Explorer to find the Top 10-20 ranking keywords for a website. Not so useful if you use it on your own site, but if used on a competitor’s website, you can get new insights you probably haven’t thought of before.

Snippet from cognitiveSEO’s Site Explorer showing a website’s top ranking keywords

Another good way is to simply use the basic Google Keyword Planner. However, to get more accurate keyword statistics, you’ll need to spend some money on advertising, using Google Adwords.

Speaking of Google AdWords…

Invest in Advertising

If you’re not moving, you’re staying put. That’s exactly what you’re doing if you’re obsessing over a competitor’s backlink profile.

If you can’t outrank them and get enough traffic from SEO strategies alone, then you might need to invest in advertising. You can advertise either with Google Ads or on Social Media.

And did you know that there are ads that help you rank better on Google? Yes, it’s called buying links.

You can buy links without breaking any of Google’s guidelines by simply nofollowing the links. The secret is to make them site-wide and make it obvious it’s an ad.

Countless examples prove that nofollow links still provide SEO value. The best thing about it? You can actually use your target keywords in the anchor text!

If you think it works for you, you might even try using some press releases. Just make sure they are from reputable news sites.

Make sure you also strengthen your brand if you have enough budget to advertise. Maybe place an image ad as well using your brand logo near the link. Smart ads also have the chance of getting viral, especially in the video field.

Invest in it the white-hat way, and nofollow those links!

Improve your social media campaign

Although social media has been going down as a referral source (and Google has been climbing), it’s still a good idea to invest your time into building a social following. People spend a lot more time on social media than they spend on Google, and you need to be there.

Your competitors might spend a lot of time building shady links, but they might suck at social media. We don’t know for sure if social signals are a direct Google ranking factor or not, but they can have an impact on organic traffic, which can lead up to more natural links (a real ranking factor).

Maybe your competitor isn’t doing anything interesting on Facebook. You could, for example, bring something new by building yourself a chatbot. Chatbot marketing works well because the open rates for the messages are really high (up to 90%).

Get inspired from your competitor’s good links

The only time you should spend on analyzing the competitor’s links is if you want to spot opportunities for yourself.

Spending too much time on a competitor’s backlinks profile is a waste. You could instead spend that valuable time to figure out new issues on your website and fix those.

The reality is that not all the links on a spammy profile are bad.

Links usually cause higher rankings, but it can also be the other way around. As websites start ranking, they get more organic traffic which can lead to more links being created, as people discover and share your content around. And those are strong, natural links.

If a site has been ranking #1 for a long time, I bet there are some natural links in their profile as well.

You can dig for those natural links and try to replicate them. This, of course, if you have a better website. Nobody will link to you if they don’t find the website and the info on it useful.

You can use the cognitiveSEO’s Unnatural Link Detection Tool to spot this kind of opportunities. Just run the backlink analysis, identify the good links and try to build them or earn them by contacting the owners.

Access the natural link navigator by clicking on the green bar

Steal your competitor’s natural links

However, no matter how many online learning platforms that speak about building links you’d attend, keep in mind that your primary focus shouldn’t be on link building. Stealing your competitor’s links is a great link building strategy, but earning them naturally is an even better one. If you start improving all the things mentioned above, links will start coming on their own.

Conclusion

Outranking your competition isn’t an easy job, but it’s often something that needs to be done in the digital marketing world. Shifting your focus from building links to improving other things about your website (such as OnPage SEO and the conversion rate) can make the process less frustrating and a lot more effective.

Make your website better by adding more relevant content and by analyzing and improving the overall user experience. Try to gain a little traction from other sources of traffic, such as Google Ads or Social Media. Work on your conversion rate optimization and keep your customers happy.

Try to fill any gaps you can spot in the niche that your competition isn’t yet taking advantage of, and most of all, try to have a better site than they do, not just a better ranking one.

As Rand Fishkin once said, “F@%# Link Building!”  Start link earning.

The post How to Outrun Competitors That Have Spammy Link Profiles But Rank Better Than You appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

In order to make sure you use the Google Disavow Tool right, you must first know when you are actually allowed to use it. This advanced Google feature should only be used in specific scenarios.

If you’re interested in finding out when you should use the Google Disavow Tool, keep reading, because you’ll get all your answers in this article.

1. What Exactly Is the Google Disavow Tool?
2. When to Use The Disavow Tool
   1. When there’s a dramatic drop in traffic & rankings
   2. When your site has been spammed with Negative SEO backlinks
   3. When you know your SEO Agency built spammy links to your website
   4. When you have a manual action applied on your site
   5. Other cases
3. When NOT to Use the Disavow Tool
   1. When there’s no drastic drop in rankings
   2. When you’re not sure if it is a penalty
   3. When there’s a small drop in rankings
   4. For testing purposes
4. How to Easily Disavow Links
5. Is the Disavow Tool Actually Helpful? (READ THIS)

A lot of webmasters see this tool as the ultimate salvation for their problems when they get an algorithmic or manual penalty. Even though generally  the objective of the Disavow Links tool was to be used as a resort to resolve link problems, it is not as simple as it seems.

What Exactly Is the Google Disavow Tool?

Long story short, the Google Disavow Tool is a feature in the Google Search Console (former Google Webmaster Tools) in which you can submit a list of backlinks that you want Google to disconsider. It was launched in late 2012 and was a pretty big deal back in the day.

The Google Disavow tool became a very popular topic in the aftermath of the Penguin 2.0 update. The changes made to the algorithm “dissolved” a lot of abused black hat SEO techniques and affected a lot of webmasters that found themselves on the wrong side of the street all of a sudden. The effects were harsh and visible and the website owners were desperate to recover their dropped rankings.

It became clear that this tool was developed in order to help webmasters solve their issues regarding penalties. The process seems simple. You have to create a file in order to show which links you want Google to disregard.

However, later on, people found out that the tool is actually much more than that. Through this very tool, Google collects information about spammy links across the web as users submit them. This way, it can improve its database of types of backlinks to better identify spammy and shady ones in the future.

For this very reason, the Black Hat SEO community doesn’t like the Disavow Tool. Many advised people not to use it, because it will help Google get stronger and catch their tactics quicker. But fearful webmasters rushed in to submit their spammy link profiles, in hope that they will be spared or forgiven.

Today, as of the new version of GSC, there’s no actual way of accessing the Disavow Tool from the Search Console. Although Google sends you to the new version, the tool can’t be found there either. 

The Google Disavow Tool can be however directly accessed from the web by searching for it, or by accessing the Disavow Links Main Page.

In order to use the tool, you need to have a verified property in GSC. This means you can disavow backlinks only for websites that you own. The process is pretty simple once you have the proper list.

Getting that Google Disavow links list right, however, is another story. I’ll explain it soon.

When to Use the Disavow Tool

Short answer is that there are only a few isolated cases in which you should use the Google Disavow Tool. If you’re not sure you should use it, then the answer is probably don’t.

When deciding to use it, you should take into consideration a couple of things:

First of all, you need to make a quick link audit and see which are the links that are harming your site the most. You need to carefully determine the bad and the good and see which links could influence your site’s ranking drop. If you’re not careful, you might end up loosing some valid links that would otherwise pour some of that precious “link juice”.

Then, you have to take into account the fact that, before appealing to the disavow tool, you could try to remove the bad links manually by contacting the owners of the websites that point to you. Before panicking and running straight for the disavow solution, you should carefully try to clean up your mess the old fashion way. It may sound like a laborious task but you can make use of third-party tools that can help you speed up with the unnatural link detection and outreach.

You may want to use this tool if you stumble upon the following problems:

1. When there’s a dramatic drop in traffic & rankings

Obviously, a dramatic drop in traffic and rankings indicates an issue with your website. However, you should not rush in to disavow your links. First, make sure that that is the issue and try to exclude everything else before you decide on doing it.

The whole concept of disavowing unnatural links must be taken very seriously as it may also harm your ranking. This process should not be done on a haste.

You should take your time weeding out the bad and you should submit a list to be disavowed only if you’re 100% sure of the links that you send. You should also remember to try to manually remove the harmful links, not only to show Google your good intentions but also because you don’t know how long the disavow process could take.

2. When your site has been spammed with Negative SEO backlinks

If your website has been subject to a large scale Negative SEO attack, then you can consider disavowing those bad links.

But how do you know when your site was attacked? And how do you know which links are good and which links are bad?

Well, you can always use the CognitiveSEO Tool to monitor your backlinks and see if your link profile suffers major changes in a short amount of time. You can also use the tool to determine which links are natural and which links fit the patterns of spammy links by using our Unnatural Link Detection feature.

I’ll tell you more about how to exactly identify the bad links in a bit, so keep reading. First, let’s take a look at some other scenarios where you should consider using the Disavow Tool.

3.When you know your SEO Agency built spammy links to your website

Many times, webmasters hire companies to do SEO work for them. If you don’t choose your SEO agency right, you risk ending up with an SEO that will use BlackHat link building tactics to try and boost your site.

This might end up in a manual action penalty for your website, which are usually pretty hard to recover from.

If you find out that your SEO agency has been building unnatural links to your website instead of using techniques accepted by Google’s Guidelines, then you should consider using the Disavow Tool.

However, keep in mind that you should never disavow links massively if your website has not yet been penalized!

4. When you have a manual action applied on your site

Manual actions aren’t something you will often see. They are rare, isolated cases. However, they do exist and, if your website is one of them, you can consider using the disavow tool.

There are multiple types of manual actions, so make sure you start disavowing links only if you see the “Unnatural Links” warning. 

Other types of actions are related to Thin Content or User Generated Spam. These problems are fixed in other ways, without using the Disavow Tool.

To see if any manual actions have been applied to your website, go to the Google Search Console and find the Manual Actions section in the left menu.

Hopefully, you’ll see something like this:

If you see any warnings here, make sure you fix them and then submit your site for reconsideration (also done in the GSC under Manual Actions).

5. Other cases

Now of course, there are some other certain situations when you might want to Disavow some links that you’re sure provide no value, for example when the linking sites have viruses or malicious software.

However, if these links take 1% or less of your total links, then you probably shouldn’t bother (except if that 1% means thousands of links, which looks more like an attack).

John Mueller said that it’s also possible to disavow links in order to prevent future penalties and achieve ‘peace of mind’. That’s a sneaky way of threatening webmasters that they will get penalized if they don’t submit their links.

However, Gary Illyes later said that he would not bother to disavow some spammy links.

I have a site that gets 100,000 visits every two weeks. I haven’t looked at the links to it for two years, even though I’ve been told that it has some porn site links. I’m fine with that. I don’t use the disavow file. Don’t overuse it. It is a big gun. Overusing it can destroy your rankings in a matter of hours. Don’t be afraid of sites that you don’t know. There’s no way you can know them all. If they have content, and they are not spammy, why would you disavow them? Sites like this are very unlikely to hurt you, and they may help you. I personally trust Google filters.
	Gary Illyes
	Chief of Sunshine and Happiness at Google / @methode

Our recommendation is to ignore these links unless there’s a visible penalty on your website, such as a manual action in GSC or a massive drop in traffic/rankings which can’t be attributed to anything else (HTTPS migration, redesign or some other major modifications to the site).

If you think your site is suffering from some bad links and you really want to remove the links you suspect, start slow, by disavowing only 5-10 links at a time. Wait for a couple of weeks to spot any effects and then expand by updating the disavow file with some new spammy links.

Track your rankings carefully to spot any differences and if you see massive negative impacts, remove the disavow files and stop messing with the tool immediately.

When NOT to Use the Disavow Tool

Usually, the answer is to never use the disavow tool except for the cases mentioned above. Some people think that it’s a good idea to use the Disavow Tool from time to time to make sure they clean their link profile, but they end up messing things up very badly!

To get a better understanding, here are some specific scenarios when you should not disavow the links:

1. When there’s no drastic drop in rankings

The reasons for which you may experience a drastic Google ranking drop may vary from website to website and in generally there is a serious guideline violation. But if you don’t experience that, you shouldn’t be panicking.

You may just be outranked by a competitor. As a consequence, there is no need to rush and get the disavow tool from your link survival kit.

You should try to analyze and track your competitor and see what is their SEO and content strategy. Also, you should maybe step up and improve your own approaches.

2. When you’re not sure if it is a penalty

When you receive a manual penalty the situation is pretty clear. Especially if you make use of Google Webmaster Tools ( which we strongly recommend). You will receive a message in which they warn you about the actions taken against you.

While this is easy and straight forward, an algorithmic penalty is not that obvious. You’ll have to make a personal assessment to see if it’s a penalty or it’s just the fact that the links are low quality. And if it is indeed an algorithmic penalty, what is harming your site’s ranking?

3. When there’s a small drop in rankings

It may just be a quick road bump in the road. You may always experience a flux in ranking that is unpredictable. As a golden rule, if you don’t have an explicit message from Google that you’ve been penalized or if you know you have an unnatural link profile, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

Your ranking could just recover on its own after a day or two. Moreover, a small drop in search engine ranking may just be influenced by the fact that you have many low quality links pointing to your site.

The solution here isn’t to remove those links, but to focus on building higher quality ones.

Usually, an algorithmic penalty will take place after an algorithm update. Sure, sometimes you might get penalized much later after the update, but usually, if that’s the case, chances are that it’s rather a manual penalty than an algorithmic one.

If you’re not sure whether there’s been an update on Google’s algorithm, you can check the CognitiveSEO Signals Tool.

You also have to check what the algorithm was about. Google doesn’t say much, but sometimes it says things like “this update will affect website that are not optimized for mobile”. If you can correlate what Google says with your website, then you have an issue.

4. For testing purposes

The final advice on when not to use the Google disavow tool would be to not just use it so you can see how it works. Cyrus Shepard made such an experiment and here are his “sad” findings.

DON’T DO THIS AS HOME!!! – Just don’t toy around with this tool, you may get fried!

The saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is very much true in this case. This is one of those tools that you just don’t want to learn at your own cost. It’s too powerful and the damage it may do if misused may be irreversible.

The Disavow Tool is an advanced feature and should not be used unless one actually knows what they’re doing. It’s risky and shouldn’t be played with.

Unless it’s one of the scenarios mentioned above, which are pretty critical if you ask me, it should be avoided.

Don’t disavow links or domains with low performance. Low DA links are part of a natural link profile. In the end, disavowing them might do more harm than good.

Maybe a new, small website with low domain performance writes about your website and links to it. Should you disavow these types of links? Definitely not.

Someday, that low domain performance website might become really popular and have a great deal of domain authority. Not only this, but the link might already be contributing to your site’s well being.

How To Easily Disavow Links

As stated above, you usually have to disavow links in severe cases of web spam and negative SEO attacks or manual actions. In case your site was massively spammed or already penalized and you have no way of removing those links, then you can use the Disavow Tool without any limitations to try and fix things.

Remember that you’re doing this at your own risk. Don’t rush Disavowing links if you’re not penalized yet. 

The truth is that disavowing links is a very difficult and time consuming process. In the end, it sounds as simple as uploading a text file on the web, but generating that text file correctly can be a bummer.

You’ll have to differentiate the bad links from the good ones and Google doesn’t actually help you do that. It will just tell you that your site has been penalized for spammy links.

Luckily, there is an easy way of dealing with unnatural links. By using the CognitiveSEO Unnatural Link Detection Tool. The tool makes it very easy to identify those links using an algorithm. The links that fit spammy links patterns will be marked as unnatural.

It is not, however, 100% automated. Before the tool can actually determine which links are good and which links are bad, you’ll have to sort out your anchor texts. This is usually done quickly in the tool via the anchor text classifier.

The graphic above has been modified for privacy purposes. It is just an example.

The tool will automatically identify most branded keywords. However, the ones only containing keywords your site wants to target will be Misc by default. You can use the search filter on the left and bulk classify. The more diverse your anchor text distribution, the better for SEO, but the longer it will take to classify.

After that, you will get to see the unnatural links:

Once you have your list of unnatural links, you can mark them for disavow. You can also choose to reclassify the links as natural (OK) if you want. We highly advise you to take a look over your unnatural links (if you don’t have thousands). Mark any links that aren’t obviously spammy as Suspect and decide later if they really need to be disavowed.

After that, from the Unnatural Link Detection menu you can Export Google Disavow which will result in the Browser downloading a text file containing all the links/domains in the proper format for uploading it to the Disavow Tool.

It’s best if you try the tool yourself. You can sign up for a free trial and also get a live demo in which one of the cognitiveSEO team members will showcase the tool for you.

Remember, if there’s no penalty yet, those links might be the ones keeping your website near the top. Disavowing links can also result in a drop in rankings, so be very careful how you play with it!

It’s always a better idea to try to completely remove any spammy links to your website from the web. It’s time consuming, but it’s the more efficient way and it’s also what Google recommends.

If you want a step-by-step approach, you can take a look at this more in-depth guide on using the disavow tool.

Is the Disavow Tool Actually Helpful?

There’s a lot of controversy around the Google Disavow Tool. Is it actually useful? Will it prevent a penalty? Does it actually work?

The truth is that for each of the successful penalty recovery stories documented by us, there are indefinitely more out there that have not seen any success, even when using the Disavow Tool as recommended by Google.

In 2016, Google introduced Penguin 4.0 which supposedly made Google capable of ignoring spammy links altogether, as they were posted. In other words, the Disavow Tool worked and the spammy links database has improved the algorithm by making it able to run real-time.

But in this case, is disavowing the links needed anymore?

This question has been asked many times around different events, on social media and throughout Webmaster Hangouts. Some answers came up to help us draw some conclusions:

Gary Illyes said on social media that:

For penguin specifically there’s less need, yes, but if you see the crap, you can help us help you by using it.
	Gary Illyes
	Chief of Sunshine and Happiness at Google / @methode

Also, John Mueller said this about keeping or removing the disavow files:

If you’ve cleaned up the links & they’ve been reprocessed, you can remove those URLs from the disavow file.

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) October 28, 2016

The question wasn’t really about cleaning the links, but about the necessity of keeping the disavow file post Penguin 4.0. However, John’s answer instead reminds us that the spammy links should still be removed from the internet, which is something Google mentioned when they first launched the Google Disavow Tool.

Eric Kuan from Google said that “Google may not process them (disavowed links) if they don’t see you making a serious manual attempt at removing those links.” If you’ve spammed the website yourself, that makes sense. However, if you’re the victim of a negative SEO attack, it’s kind of unfair, don’t you think?

The truth is, there’s no guarantee that using the disavow tool and submitting your site for reconsideration will remove a penalty. The best way to not get penalized is to not do anything that will get you penalized. However, it’s worth a shot in critical situations.

In the end, you have to consider that the Disavow Tool:

• Takes time: If you want to do things the right way, you’ll have to spend a lot of time researching your link profile and making sure that you’re not disavowing any useful links (remember, the CognitiveSEO Tool can help you speed up this process)
• Can mess things up: Remember, the Disavow Tool is an advanced feature and should only be used in specific cases. You shouldn’t waste your time with it if you’re not 100% sure it’s the right way to go.

• Has actual guarantee it will work: Even if you know what you’re doing, there’s no guarantee it will help. Who knows, it might actually make things worse.

Conclusion

The main point that you should remember is that this tool shouldn’t be used if you’re not 100 percent sure how it works. Disavowing links is a powerful and irreversible process that may resolve your ranking drops or may throw your site into search engine oblivion.

Even though the Google Disavow Tool proves to be an invaluable asset to use in times of need, it can very well be misunderstood and easily used for the wrong purpose.

If you couldn’t prevail at removing unnatural links through traditional methods, you should obviously try disavowing them. But the tool should be used only in specific situations, such as a Manual Penalty. If you’re unsure how to use it and what it’s capable of doing, you should avoid it. However, if you think you’ve tried everything else, it’s worth a shot.

By adding smaller amounts of links at a time to the disavow file, you can avoid messing things up very badly, although this process is more time consuming.

What are your experiences with the Disavow Tool? Have you successfully recovered from a penalty? Did it not do anything at all? Have you used it to try prevent any future penalties? Let us know in the comments!

The post When You Should and Shouldn’t Use the Google Disavow Tool appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

And, as the environment changes, so do we. The key is in that very word: “better” – not “good”, but “better”, which comes with the promise of continuous improvement.

This is why after creating the cognitiveSEO tool we have never really stopped working on new ideas. Sure, there was plenty of tinkering with the existing tool, in trying to give you the best analysis of off-page SEO issues, overlooking the quality of referring domains, your backlink profile, potentially broken links and so on. But a comprehensive SEO audit isn’t complete without looking at the on-site elements related to site architecture: the website pages, their loading time, the xml sitemap, meta tags and meta descriptions, content quality, etc. And this is how the cognitiveSEO Site Audit was born. 

We’ve worked a lot (please read tremendously) to make this new Site Audit tool and give it all sorts of unique features.

What’s it all about?

In short, our brand new SEO website audit tool flags ALL possible OnPage SEO issues a site might have and provides recommendations on how to fix them. Putting it simply, the new tool allows you to improve your website’s onpage SEO performance, at the highest level of detail.

Therefore allow me to present you just some of the things our built-with-sweat Site Audit can do for you: 

1. Find All Possible SEO Issues of Any Website and Get Recommendations on How to Fix Them
2. Use cognitiveSEO’s Site Audit to Get Improved SEO Results and Conversions
3. Improve User Experience by Correcting Site Architecture Problems
4. Cutting-Edge Technical Yet User Friendly Site Audits for Both Marketers and Professionals
5. Why cognitiveSEO Is the Only SEO Tool You’ll Ever Need

The addition of the Site Audit feature makes cognitiveSEO the only SEO software you’ll ever need. 

What does this mean in terms of wins for you? At cognitiveSEO you now have everything SEO related all together: backlink analysis, technical SEO Audits, content audits, keywords research & rank tracking, content optimization, Google Penalty prevention and recovery, and much much more.

1. Find All Possible SEO Issues of Any Website and Get Recommendations on How to Fix Them

Although the title might be self explanatory, you need to know that the title is also very accurate. 

Our website audit gives you a much wider array of SEO items to look at and can analyse issues of all types that might prevent you from reaching your best possible ranking.

Of course, off-page issues are highly important to work on at times, but they won’t target all the important search engines ranking factors. Here’s where the on-site factors step in. To make sure you’re not missing anything, you should be aware 24/7 of the offpage and onpage factors that influence your website’s performance.

The truth is, that with the ever-evolving search engines algorithms you need an efficient solution to keep your rankings safe. And cognitiveSEO does exactly that: it lets you know all the issues that might prevent your online business from getting the organic traffic and the high rankings you deserve. 

Even more, cognitiveSEO’s technical SEO audit tool helps you detect all the weak points of your website before your users do, giving you a competitive advantage on the competitive market we are swimming in. Our SEO Audit Tool crawls all the pages it finds on your website, regardless of the size of your website, and provides a fully customized set of data easy to comprehend and visualize.

While knowing the exact problems your site encounters is great, just half of the job is done. But we take care at the other half as well, as we offer you precise recommendations on how to fix the error on your site so you can outrank your competitors and quickly increase your overall website performance. So, all you have to do is crawl your website with our SEO auditing tool. Pretty neat, right? 

cognitiveSEO’s onpage analysis offers a set of unique features and numerous parameters that allows you to see what’s under the hood of your entire website and your SEO campaigns. Below are just some of the features that our comprehensive audit checklist contains.

2. Use cognitiveSEO’s Site Audit to Get Improved SEO Results and Conversions

At the end of the day (or of the year) there are a lot of metrics we look at to measure our website’s success. But there is a particular one that is on everybody’s lips and which actually pays the bills: the conversion rate. 

We are not going to talk about incredible tips and tricks on how to deliver overnight magic solutions for boosting your conversions. But about the tangible, actionable things that you ca do to improve you sales and conversions. 

Performing a complete website audit will give you a deeper understanding of why your site is not generating the organic traffic you think it should or why your sales and conversions are not improving.

Let’s take for example the situation from the screenshot below. The analyzed website has pages that are really really difficult to reach. There are even pages you can reach after more than nine or ten clicks. In an era of instant data and solutions, having these type of pages could be a buzz killer…not to mention a conversion killer. One of those hard to reach pages could be an important one for you; one from which you would expect to generate conversions or any type of transaction. 

Knowing what’s holding your conversions at a low rate is the first step for increasing them. Look for your website elements that could yield your biggest wins.

Once you run a complete website audit you will figure out that there is so little effort you can invest and the results could be so huge. 

3. Improve User Experience by Correcting Site Architecture Problems

An excellent site architecture is mandatory for both search engines and for user experience. Why, you might ask.

If we think about the site architecture issues many websites encounter, we can understand how they can mess both search engine crawlers and the user’s experience.

Here are just a few examples: 

3+ Clicks to reach any page –  It’s known that pages that are 3 to 7 clicks away from the homepage are harder to reach while pages that are more than seven clicks away from the homepage may never be reached by a visitor that lands on the homepage. You should check that no important pages are too far aways from a click path point of view from the homepage. This way, both your visitor and the search engine could easily get to that page. 

Internal anchor text bombing – Internal links are highly important; yet, if your landing page is not Wikipedia, having tons of internal links could do you more harm than good. Your best bet is to write internal anchor text for both visitors and engines.

The URLs are not search or user friendly – We’ve even conducted a study on this matter a while ago, finding out that the more concise and self explanatory the URL, the greater the chance to be higher up on ranks. Google loves shorter URLs but also your users. Really, as long as the length falls between 50 and 60 characters, you’re probably in a good spot. But as long as your URL looks something like this, http://www.example.com/product.aspx?ID=/c/YoZn1Z2v/46411526post=20908&action&IT=5f7d3d, you might want to reconsider your choices. Luckly, our Site Audit will let you know on any issues you might encounter with your URLs. 

Dynamic URLs – If it’s even remotely possible, avoid them completely for your user and the search engine’s sake. Yet, knowing what URLs are dynamic can save you from lot of troubles. 

With the flood of gigabytes and gigabytes of new information being created every second, search engines took on tremendous importance. Some even became so ever-present in our lives that we take their search results for granted, not wondering how they are produced or how the silent and irregular algorithmic update might influence them. So understanding why something is relevant, while something else is not, has become a separate mode of innovation and improvement in itself. It’s rank high in the search results or perish.

Our onpage SEO audit helps you diagnose all the SEO errors and problems with your site structure or website architecture so that you can deliver the best UX for your users. Our SEO checker also performs an in-depth competitor analysis so you can check what your competitors are doing and how can you beat them at their own game.

4. Cutting-Edge Technical Yet User Friendly Site Audits for both Marketers and Professionals

How do you recognize a good Site Audit tool? To be honest, there are many step by step guides on how to do that but one of them is by checking if it fits the needs of both marketers looking to improve the overall performance of a website and a skilled technical SEO who wants to dig deeper into the analysis. 

cognitiveSEO’s powerful Site Audit offers you the exact customized data that fits your needs.

SEO audits are for both savvy, super technical SEO gurus and digital marketers or for content marketers coordinators. While speaking the language of all could be hard and why not, tricky, when it comes to SEO we need to understand that search engine optimization is a mean and not a purpose. Therefore, regardless of your job title, as long as you are part of the “online business team”, or you’re on the “improving your site” side,  then you should take a sneak peak at a comprehensive website audit. 

5. Why cognitiveSEO Is the Only SEO Tool You’ll Ever Need

By adding the new Site Audit onpage module, cognitiveSEO will be the only tool you’ll ever need, a complete toolset that will serve for all your SEO needs – both on and off page. Within the ever-growing tools landscape of SEO, it can be very comforting to be able to rely on a single provider for all your needs.

It’s not just comfort – relying on a single ecosystem means better integration, more efficiency and increased simplicity.

And if you don’t believe me yet, here is a short list of the features cognitiveSEO provides:

• Technical SEO Website Audit
• In-depth Backlink Analysis
• Content Audit
• SEO Visibility
• Site Health Audit
• Desktop, Mobile and Local Rank Tracking Tool
• Keywords Research
• Content Optimization
• Social Visibility
• Automated Digital Marketing Reports
• Quick Backlink Checker
• Shareable SEO Dashboard
• Google Algorithm Changes

You need to know that the idea of having an all-in-one SEO analysis toolset started seven years ago from one man’s passion for SEO and digital marketing and his desire to find a cost-efficient solution that could meet all his professional requirements. Years have passed and cognitiveSEO has grown stronger each year, with lots of awesome users confirming the same need: an all-inclusive SEO software that would be reliable, accurate, affordable and would integrate anything an SEO Pro, webmaster or digital marketer would need. 

We are proud to be standing here today, knowing that we’ve created something that both ourselves and our customers can use to improve their business.

With no hidden tricks and no shortcuts, but by using a powerful SEO software and the greatest tool of all: our brain.  

The post cognitiveSEO Launches The Site Audit Tool That Fixes Your Site & Increases Your Ranks appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

But what do you do when a new Google Update arises? How do you know it’s the cause of a traffic drop on your website? What are the steps you need to take in order to determine that?

Well, keep reading, because in this article we’ll discuss the steps you should take when a new Google Update is announced.

1. Follow the Right Sources
2. Check Your Traffic & Positions
3. Check Again & Don’t Rush to Take Action
4. Get in Touch with an Expert
5. Audit Your Website
6. Exclude Other Penalty Possibilities
7. Develop a Strategy for Recovery and Execute It Step by Step
8. Keep Doing the Good Type of SEO

1. Follow the Right Sources

As soon as a new Google Update kicks in, thousands of bloggers start writing about it. Not all resources, however, are trustworthy.

I’m not saying that people have bad intentions, but they might be uninformed or might have ran the wrong tests to determine the effects of the update.

Just a couple of weeks ago, someone in an SEO Facebook group ‘analyzed’ the last August Google Update and pulled out some pretty sketchy conclusions.

Luckily, people figured it out pretty quick and started complaining in the comments. It wasn’t necessarily bad advice, but it didn’t really have anything to do with the update.

Ok, you’re probably wondering what sources you should follow by now. Well, they’re a handful, to be honest.

There are four main sources where usually all the news come from:

First, we have Google’s Official Webmaster Blog. Here is where Google officials will compile an official statement when they want to publicly announce something. You can also follow them on Twitter at @googlewmc and on their YouTube Channel. However, Google will rarely share any specifics about any update, other than the fact that it has been implemented.

Then, there are the three big news portals in the Search Engine industry which are Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable. This is where journalists and experts in the industry post the freshest news about Google and search engines in general, which means it includes Bing, Yandex and others.

Obviously, sources don’t stop here. You can also follow blogs such as Moz and Backlinko. Blogs such as these will provide the information with a delay but will also often compile it into step by step, very actionable advice and guides.

Last but not least, you should obviously follow our blog. Subscribe to cognitiveSEO and follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get the lastest news regarding what’s happening in the SEO field.

There are also some very interesting people on Twitter that you can follow which will always share the fresh stuff as soon as they find out about it.

Here are their names and Twitter profiles: Barry Schwartz, Bill Slawski, Gary Illyes, Aleyda Solis, Cyrus Shepard, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan and probably many others, but I don’t want to fill your Twitter feed too much. Following these people will guarantee you’ll hear the news pretty soon.

2. Check Your Traffic & Positions

The fastest way to know if you’ve been penalized (and probably the only one as well) is to check your traffic.

You can also take a look at the Search Visibility widget from the cognitiveSEO Tool. If you see a drop there, that could be the sign of a penalty. In some cases, it can also be more relevant than other analytic tools.

For example, if most of your affected pages are on position 40+, you might not see a big change in traffic, as those pages rarely get any traffic. However, if the positions decrease, you should notice a drop in the Search Visibility metric.

You can also use the Rank Tracker to monitor your most important keywords. You can even set notifications that will let you know via e-mail anytime there are changes in the positions of your keywords.

Make sure you’re checking only the organic traffic and not the general traffic. Google Update penalties apply only to organic search results, so PPC and Social Media traffic must be excluded.

You can also check the Google Search Console for the average position of keywords instead of using the Rank Tracker. If it has dropped dramatically, you might have been penalized.

However, if you’ve dropped only a couple of positions, it’s possible that the update just pushed up other competitors. And this takes us to the next step, which isn’t very different…

3. Check Again & Don’t Rush to Take Action

Haste makes waste. We’ve all experienced it. No matter how dramatic things might look, make sure you do a thorough analysis before you proceed with any action.

A big rule of thumb is to check the traffic again after some time. It could be one week, it could be one month, but make sure you keep an eye on that traffic. If the traffic and positions haven’t dropped at all, give it some time and check them again.

You never know, things might initially look good. This was the case for CognitiveSEO some time ago, when an update initially boosted us up in March 2018.

After some time, however, the traffic went down again, making the boost look less significant.

If you take a look at the spikes in the graph above, you can see that they match the following graph from the cognitiveSEO Signals tool.

We’ve heard about and seen other similar examples. However, it can always go the other way around, when you have a slight push down, but then things start to get back to normal. That’s why you don’t  want to make any hasty, poorly calculated decisions.

Worst thing to do is, however, to start changing things when the traffic hasn’t changed at all and your positions are good, based on what you’ve read on the internet.

You’ve read that the update possibly targets websites with 5% greater keyword density? Don’t rush in starting to remove keywords or rephrase articles, especially if you’re still ranking high with them.

Why? Well, it’s because:

Changes in your pages might actually attract Google’s bot to crawl and reconsider your website.

Even what you consider to be improvements to your content/page can sometimes result in ranking drops. That’s why you should do your best to avoid any changes to your content as long as you’re ranking high and are ‘content’ (bad SEO joke) with your positions.

For example, we have an article that ranks very well and has ranked very well for years now. The thing about it is that we don’t consider it to be one of our best. It has been written many years ago and competitors have since improved a lot, pumping big pieces of very detailed content. However, our article still ranks very well.

When we launched our Content Tool, we started an optimization campaign to improve all our articles. However, we skipped that article. We don’t want to make any changes to it and risk making it drop. Once it will start dropping on its own or, better said, our competitors will outrank us, we will consider updating it and transforming it into a better piece of content to try and get it back at the top.

4. Get in Touch with an Expert

I’m not going to list anyone here, nor will this be a guide on how to pick a good expert. You’re going to have to do that research on your own. The only advice I will give in this direction is to follow step number 3. Double check and don’t rush to make a choice.

What I will say however, is why you need an expert when dealing with a penalty.

First of all, you will save time. An expert will always know what to look for and will also be able to prioritize issues. Second, you won’t have to worry about making any mistakes or taking any unnecessary action that could potentially do more harm. This, of course, is if you choose the right expert, so make sure you do your research well. Third but not least, the more you stay penalized, the more money you lose! Even if you have to pay someone to help you, in the end you’ll be better off.

Having an expert help you is the best and most efficient way of dealing with a Google Penalty.

If you have enough experience with SEO and want to deal with a penalty yourself, everything must have a beginning. Good luck and be brave! However, it’s still a good idea to have a second opinion from another expert before you start implementing any major changes.

5. Audit Your Website

Every penalty fix should start with a website audit.

Whenever you notice some significant changes in traffic, it’s good to audit your website, even if it’s the 5th time this year. You never know what plugin caused an issue or what the dev team missed out on.

There are 4 main areas where you should take a look:

Technical:

When Google launches new updates, it can go through websites again and reconsider them. Old issues that Google might have overlooked on purpose might now be a reason for concern.

Are you confusing Google with bad hreflang or canonical tags implementation? Not a problem if your site loads in 3 seconds and all the others load in 10. However, if a new crawl reveals that other, better structured, sites start loading in 3 seconds as well, you’d better get to work.

This is a very broad subject, but our colleague Andreea has a great article on how to fix technical SEO issues.

Backlinks:

Backlinks can always be an issue. Even if Google said that Penguin 4.0 ignores spammy links, we’ve heard recent stories of websites getting penalized after a negative SEO attack.

You can always use the cognitiveSEO link analysis toolset to audit your link profile. The tool makes it easy to spot and sort out spammy links with the Unnatural Link Detection feature.

Content:

Content is a very important part of your website. Make sure you’re not disrupting Google with duplicate content, meta descriptions and titles.

Also, it’s a good idea to compare your content with the content your competitors have. Is there any particular area that you could improve on? Are there any topics that are searched but haven’t been covered?

User experience (UX):

Many recent updates and algorithms (such as RankBrain) focus a lot on user experience and how the users interact with your website.

You can start off by asking some friends to interact with your website. Give them specific tasks, but don’t tell them the steps. For example, ask them to contact you, find your number, send a message through the form, purchase a product or enroll in a newsletter.

Just give them the homepage and ask them to take notes on issues that they might find. Make sure to do this on both Desktop and Mobile Devices, with an emphasis on mobile devices, because it’s a growing market.

You can also use tools such as UserTesting to get your input, or ask a UX expert to have a look at your website and give some advice.

6. Exclude Other Penalty Possibilities

Even if a traffic drop shows up right after an update is announced, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the update is the cause of the drop.

As mentioned before, during a new update, Google might take a look at your website and find some undealt with issues. 

It can also be a manual penalty, so check your Search Console. You’ll usually get a message there announcing your penalty, the reason for it and some steps to have it fixed. You can submit your website for reconsideration after dealing with the issue. More details about this can be found at this link.

There’s also the possibility that you are the recent victim of a negative SEO attack. You never know what really takes you down until you audit, so that’s why we have step 5 in place.

Make sure you exclude any other updates or issues before you start trying to fix the problem.

7. Develop a Strategy for Recovery and Execute It Step by Step

Once you have everything in line, it’s finally time to outline the plan. The secret to a successful recovery plan is prioritization. You might find a dozen of issues, but if you start fixing the minor, most insignificant ones first, you’ll lose money because they won’t have an effect on the penalty and your rankings will still be low.

A plan will not only help you execute everything faster, but it will also help you keep track and monitor your results. If you don’t monitor the results of your actions, you won’t know what caused the penalty.

Once you’ve finished one step, give it a rest to see if it has any effect. Doing everything at the same time won’t help you figure out the cause of the penalty, so you won’t be able to know what to avoid in the future.

8. Keep Doing the Good Type of SEO

Most of the time (as long as your website is not completely deindexed), the best way of getting out of a penalty is to keep doing the good things.

Getting penalized is similar to gaining weight. You add a little bit every day, but you don’t really notice it, until one day the mirror finally ‘breaks’ it to you. The probability of you losing weight very quickly is low. If you’ve gained 25 pounds in one year, expect to take it around 1 year to lose it!

Trying to run 5 hours per day won’t work because, generally, you won’t be able to sustain it. Trying any shortcuts, such as pills and very restrictive diets, can get you into more trouble.

The best solution is to keep doing the right things over a long period of time and results will come. If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you should definitely know what the right things are. If you haven’t followed us… Well, now it’s the right time to start!

Just as a general outline, great content mixed up with great distribution result in great backlinks, which result in great rankings.

Brace yourself:

As for the ending, unfortunately you never know if you’ll ever recover from a penalty. It could take 2 weeks or it could take 2 years. That’s why it’s a good idea to always follow the rules and also never put all your eggs into one basket. Go take a look at the advantages of PPC, for example. It can come in handy during a Google penalty.

What are your experiences with Google Updates? Do you always see traffic fluctuations on your website? Have you ever been massively penalized? And… more importantly, have you ever recovered from a penalty? What were the steps you took? Maybe we can gather some more detailed steps for specific types of penalties in the comments section.

The post Google Update Survival Guide: What To Do When Google Updates Its Algorithm appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

While link building, alongside content, might have a bad name in the industry it still is the number one signal Google looks at when deciding to rank a website. There are countless guides, tips and “top five ways to build links” articles out there, but we’d like to take a deep dive into the technical part to approach this subject. We want to make sure that when you get into the link building process, you do it the right way, since we all know what happens when you get bad and harmful links pointing to your website.

It’s crucial you follow tested guidelines and link building tactics when planning the link building process. So, here they are, 8 steps for doing proper link building in 2020.

1. Step 1. Preparation 
   1. Agree Upon Concepts, Budgets and Reporting Metrics
2. Step 2. Strategy
   1. Develop Context for Your Link Building Strategy
   2. Create a Content Marketing Strategy
3. Step 3. Quick Wins
   1. Take Advantage of Broken Link Building
   2. Practice Internal Link Building
   3. Turn Mentions into Links
4. Step 4. Content
   1. Craft Content for Influencers and Existing Customers
   2. Integrate Online and Offline Campaigns
   3. Create a Variety of Content *Types*
   4. Build Surveys
   5. Initiate User-Generated Content
   6. Create ‘How-to’ Videos
   7. Make Quality Images Available Under CC License
   8. Use Blog Reviews
   9. Re-purpose Existing Content
   10. Consider Every Possible Idea
5. Step 5. Prospects
   1. Prioritize Link Prospects that Can Deliver Traffic, As Well As SEO Benefits
   2. Perform Competitor Research
   3. Look for Expired Domains in Your Industry
6. Step 6. Networking
   1. Engage with your customers and with the influencers
   2. Establish an Online PR Mindset
   3. Become an Industry Expert
   4. Offer Giveaways, Contests and Special Offers
7. Step 7. Promotion
   1. Promote to Your Customer List
   2. Promote to Your Prospect List
8. Step 8. Report & Debrief

We’re now in 2020 and the times when you were hunting for links for the sole purpose of ranking higher in the SERPs are long dead.  Yes, it’s totally OK to want links, shares, and mentions as a result of something worthy you did, something real that people found to be worth sharing. The higher ranks in the search engines and driving traffic will come as a result of this, the algorithms are already advanced enough to notice when people are speaking about you. And the more people are speaking about you, and the more influential those people are, the better the results. 

Before starting a successful link building process, you need first to know the rules, the lines that you shouldn’t cross, which basically translates to “What can I do in order to avoid Google Penalties?”. Whatever your goals for the link building efforts may be, you must stick to the guidelines in order not to shoot yourself in the foot with your actions. Let’s take a look briefly.

Manual Penalties

The first type of penalty you want to avoid is Google’s manual penalty. As the name suggests, this kind of penalty refers to actions taken by Google employees who personally go through your website, review it and penalize it. You will encounter this situation if Google believes that you may have deployed some shady tactics in your link building actions. Dealing with this kind of penalties takes a lot of work but it can be done. Our advice would be to stay clear of any shady tactic and read up on the guidelines.

Algorithmic Penalties

The second type of penalties are the algorithmic ones. These are the penalties received from the Penguin or the Panda updates and, as the name suggests, they are automatically applied to your website if the Googlebot detects an unhealthy link profile, duplicated content on the pages and other shady behavior on your website. Google is constantly updating the algorithms in order to minimize the involvement of human reviewers.

The biggest difference between these two types of warnings is that you will not receive any message or email from Google when your site is affected by an algorithmic penalty. You’ll just see your rankings drop into the void. There are also ways to recover from a Penguin penalty, but again it takes time and effort so we suggest you should avoid any shady action in your link building process.

Main Guiding Principles

Before we get into the action, let’s go over some guiding principles that we’re going to pay attention to when starting the link building process.

Never get unnatural links. Always aim for earning good, natural and high-quality links.

Let’s go through an example by using the cognitiveSEO tool to check the aftermath of a backlink profile. Remember that this is not one of those link building tools that guarantee 10 high quality links in one day. What the cognitiveSEO tool does is to automatically classify the links you’ve alreadygained into three separate categories: unnatural link/black hat link (the ones that will draw the wrath of Google), suspicious link (the ones that may raise a few flags) and OK link/ white hat link (the good ones).

Above you have a somewhat good link profile. The vast majority of links (87%) are awesome, but still, there are some bad ones. The thing to get from this link profile is the fact that if you have this many good links, you can get away with a couple of shady links. If you find yourself in the situation above, with a lot of good links, you shouldn’t worry about those grey/suspicious ones (though you should check each one of them to make sure they are not actually unnatural). You should still get rid of the unnatural links since they may bring penalties, no matter what percentage of unnatural links you have.

Now the example above is what you don’t want to see after you’ve done some link building. In this situation, all your efforts have been in vain and you just gave yourself a lot of work to remove the links you have gained. You should pay close attention to unnatural links, especially in the early stages when you have few overall links.

Always Look at the “Brand” value first. Ranking value is a by-product when you talk about the acquisition of a link! Don’t Make “Rich” Anchor Text Links!

What we suggest when starting a link building campaign is to focus more on the brand terms and not on commercial terms. 

Even if you want to rank for that keyword, it’s best to have your brand’s name in the anchor text. We’re not saying that you shouldn’t get any keyword rich anchor text, but keep track of the balance between brand anchors and commercial anchors. If you have the majority of anchors pointing to your website in commercial terms, it could very well raise some red flags at Google and “decrease” that links’ quality.

We know what you’re trying to do with link building, you know it and you can be sure Google knows SEOs are trying to influence its search engine. Building links should be natural, a reward for great content or a great product, not some guy spamming comments to various websites. Keep that in mind when starting such a process, don’t make links that are clearly unnatural, “build” them as if people found value in what you do and want to spread the word.

When calculating risk, you weigh-in the benefits vs. the harm. Well, in this case, let us be as clear as we can be, the harm of building low quality, unnatural links is immensely bigger than the reward. Not to mention the fact that Google’s algorithms get better each day. Google is a pattern recognition machine, so don’t leave a pattern in your links that match spam sites. Get only small amounts of links from easy-to-build neighborhoods.

Less manual link building!

Don’t go around asking for links to your business. Even though it could be a great one, and even if you know links are an important rank factor, people are less likely to link back to you if you do that. Instead do cool things, write great content and people will share that. Present your own product to potential link building prospects, ask for reviews and if they find it ok or not, they might link back to you.

Always monitor your links!

If that product review gets a link, and Google might see it as unnatural, then ask the reviewer to include a nofollow tag on it. By monitoring your links you can notice if you get a wave of bad links that could indicate that you are the target of a negative SEO attack. By noticing it, you can easily disavow those links and rid yourself of a potential Google penalty.

Target links from sites and articles relevant to yours. The same semantic category of content means a lot nowadays.

When you’re running some SEO audits, you will surely agree with us that it’s rather shady if you’re in a US car insurance business and the majority of your backlinks come from a cooking magazine, from Sweden. Those links are toxic. Now, even if you bought some advertising space on that magazine, those links don’t help you all and they may even raise some flags over at Google and may get you penalized in the future. Within your online marketing campaigns, when building links, focus mainly on your business, and build links in the country that you are targeting.

Step 1. Preparation 

So we went over the guiding principles of link building and now it’s time to get to business. And that word, business, is exactly how companies should view link building.
Keep in mind that 91% of all pages on the internet get zero organic traffic, mostly because they have zero backlinks pointing to their content. You can read other interesting stats here if you’re still not convinced that link building it’s a must for you. 

The link building process is not something that some guy over in IT can easily do once a month.

It has to be well thought out and the campaign needs sound business practices, including budgeting, good relationships between all the people and departments involved and agreed monitoring metrics in place before the process starts.

1.1 Agree Upon Concepts, Budgets and Reporting Metrics

The main idea you should get from the first step in the link building process is what your client does, what your business wants. As an SEO, you need to sit down with your client, boss or colleague and go over the definitions of what a link represents if the social mentions and discussions can be counted toward links. Get to know all that and make your client understand the concepts that you’ll be working with.

After going through the concepts and the budget, the next step is to go over the metrics that will measure the success of your link building campaign. Define these metrics together with the client and agree on what you’ll report on, be it ranking improvements, number of links/referring domains, social visibility and so on.

Step 2. Strategy

So, you’ve agreed on the metrics and the budget with your client: it’s time to start planning and strategize the next steps. And just as the greatest strategist wrote: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”, in order to achieve success you need a well-established plan with a list of tactics.

That plan should be placed within the context of the owning company’s goals and any historical and existing marketing and sales strategies.

2.1 Build Context for Your Link Building Strategy

Before going on with the strategy, you need first to understand the context. Context is very different for each company, for each industry and market. You will need to have answers for all of the following questions:

1. What is the brand?
2. What are you selling?
3. Who’s it being sold to? What do they love and hate?
4. Are there personas to represent target audiences?
5. What are the big world goals of the company?
6. How important is the website to those goals?
7. What are the expectations of link building?
8. Who are the decision makers?
9. What’s the history of this company’s link building – what has/hasn’t worked, and why?
10. Does the site have an existing Google penalty for bad links? If so, fix first.
11. Do you know the company’s editorial calendar (online and offline)?
12. What stakeholders do you need to work with (ie. other departments)?
13. Find out what you need to know about internal company politics.

Only after you’ve answered all these questions you may proceed to building the strategy.

2.2 Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Make your content marketing strategy as in-depth as possible. This is the only way to ensure that when executing it, you won’t waste time on details such as “Who am I writing for”, “What do I want the reader to do after finishing my article”. You strategy should include:

• the topics to tackle
• the headlines for each article
• the frequency of posting
• the length of the articles
• the articles schedule
• inspiration and research sources
• call to action for each article

After you’ve finished the overall strategy, it is time to move on to the tactics. We advise you use a broad range of tactics to achieve your strategic goals.

Step 3. Quick Wins

The next step in the link building process is the “quick wins”. These refer to quick and easy fixes to your website that can bring in a lot of results.

3.1 Take Advantage of Broken Link Building

The first quick win tactic is fixing the broken links on your website. To find out exactly which links have 404’s, you can use Site Explorer. Follow these steps:

As you can see, having broken pages might mean losing a lot of traffic, rankings and link juice. You can also see the type of error by looking at the status code. In our case, we have only HTTP 404 (not found).  

You’re now presented with a list of all of the 404 errors that Google crawlers have found on your site. The next step of this quick win is to add 301 redirects from these 404 error pages to pages that you wish your visitors to go to. To see exactly who is linking to the broken pages you can use the cognitiveSEO tool and check each of the broken 404 pages.

Now that you’ve found who is linking to your broken 404 pages, you can even send a message to the webmasters to fix their link and have them link wherever you wish. This is a great advantage for you, but also for the owner of the webmaster who has broken links. Usually, they don’t even know about this situation and offering to fix this issue and replace their broken links with new ones should be hard to refuse.

3.2 Practice Internal Link Building

Optimizing your own website is the key here. Make sure you review all the pages from your website and make sure that from each one you can get to any page which has a similar and related subject. You can use here relevant anchor text to link to the pages that can provide value to a user who’s on one of these pages. What we mean here is to keep the user behavior in mind and try to place links to any page on your website that users might be particularly interested in.

If your users see you as a Hub of Quality Content, the Search Engines will follow.

It doesn’t really matter if you are linking up and down or even across the site’s hierarchy. Make sure related and relevant pages are inter-linked and if your site is big enough to be organized into categories, a separate menu for each of them might help you out. Should you have a smaller website, linking from content can also provide great help to both the user and the search engine.

Remember that wherever the pages are in your site’s hierarchy, you’ll need to present your most important pages on your home page. Take a look at how Tripadvisor does this on the image below:

As you can see from Tripadvisor’s home page, you’re able to quickly access its most important pages. By linking them this way, lots of link power from your homepage is transferred to the deep pages of your website.

3.3 Turn Mentions into Links

Another quick and easy win to gain some great links is to be on the lookout for your brand mentions on the internet. BrandMentions can help you perform a quick search for your brand and analyze what you get. The tool has a special feature that will let yo identify those 

Check out each site from the Web category and each post from the Social category to see if they point back to you. If they don’t point back to you, convert those mentions into links. Just go ahead and contact the webmaster or the author of the articles that mention your brand and ask them nicely to add a link to one of the mentions of your brand. There is a high chance that they will do since they are already interested in your product or business to talk about.

Brand Mentions offers you the possibility to track your brand name, topics from your niche or anything you might be thinking of.  Patiently wait for notifications when you’ve got a new mention and, if it’s the case, transform that into a link. 

Step 4. Content

Now that we went through the quick and easy gains of link building, it’s time to get to the hard stuff. The content in itself is where most of your focus should be directed to.

4.1 Craft Content for Influencers and Existing Customers

Links can be gained from both influencers as well as from your existing customers. If you make evergreen content, we assure you that there is a higher chance they will share it and even link to it. They are one of the targets of your content marketing strategy.

When you write, make sure you have the overall strategy in mind and your strategy should include valuable information for influencers and for your existing customers. 

That way, you can adapt your content to their preferences. Find out what makes your audience tick, so you can make sure your content contains the best baits and hooks to draw in the audience’s attention.

One of the simple ways to find topics that create the most emotional response is to invest time on forums, Facebook pages and read blog posts and see which kind of content gets the most traction. Let us give you an example and let’s say that you’re targeting Chelsea FC fans. You go to one of their unofficial forums and take a look at what gets the most attention (now write about Jose Murinho and Eden Hazard).

This example says it all. You go in, check for what’s “hot” with your audience and immediately start producing content that will be of interest. If your content and opinions are great, you will probably be receiving links from them.

cognitiveSEO offers you the possibility to spy on your competitors and see their most shared content on social media to get inspiration for topic ideas. 

Directly from the tool, you can spot content marketing insights from your competitors and some content ideas that might work in your niche and audit your content through the power of social shares.

4.2 Integrate Online and Offline Campaigns

Make sure you build online hubs for every offline campaign. Especially in the case of events, where many people are invited, gathering them in an online hub on your website or on a social media site could provide some great linking opportunities. If you heavily promote the campaign in the online world, make contests and start engaging users, they will link to it and you’ll build some great natural links that way.

4.3 Create a Variety of Content *Types*

Content doesn’t refer only to blog articles.

Sure, they are the backbone of a well-structured content marketing strategy but there are so many ways to do it. Surprise your audience once in a while and produce an infographic. This type of content gets often shared, and it can be easily linked back to your business. Or better yet, start writing e-books for your audience.

Depending on the industry you’re in, make sure you take in consideration video content, too.

It has such a great potential in almost any market. Even though it is more expensive to produce, it could provide amazing results.

Make sure you don’t get stuck with blog content as a content marketing strategy. Start to include ebooks, webinars, press releases, podcasts and video content in your content strategy, too.

4.4 Build Surveys

We’ve even talked about surveys on our blog a while ago. They are a great way to get tons of ideas, better understand your users and get tons of data from them. You can create surveys super fast with tools such as Survey Monkey or services as Reserchnow. Emphatic or unexpected survey answers can inspire interesting articles that are worth promoting to “big media” publishers (such as infographics).

Let’s take the Forza supplements survey as an example.

They first ran a survey for research purposes on their site. Following the success of the research and the traction this is what happened:

Tons of links from high authority websites pointing back to the survey. Now depending on your industry and market, make sure you’re able to produce these types of survey. If you do it well, the reward for such content is big.

4.5 Initiate User-Generated Content

Getting your users to actively engage with your brand in such a way that it makes them want to generate content for your brand is an art. It’s such a difficult thing to do that the majority of businesses simply don’t even bother to focus on it. Well, that’s not necessarily true. Let’s say that you have a small cooking website, a simple way to build up user-generated content is to make a contest and ask them to post their own recipes on your website or on social media. We find that contests work best here, they are really easy to come up with, only require resources for prizes and the community can promote the contest among themselves.

You can incentivize this with a giveaway if you don’t make a contest. Let’s take Starbucks for example.

From the Starbucks’ example we can learn that it doesn’t have to be some great over the top contest, but just a simple idea that doesn’t require a lot of work from the community and which yields great results and, in the end wil,l get many links.

Another valuable user-generated content idea is the received comments for your articles. Passing the days when comments were spammy, now you can filter them and accept only those that are relevant and weigh information. Comments can complement your articles, generate new content ideas, create relationships and bring new clients. 

4.6 Create ‘How-to’ Videos

How-to videos have always bee on the wave right. They’re somewhat easy to produce, depending on your industry, and provide great linking and social share potential.

To get some ideas on what to focus on let’s use the Site Explorer tool to find the most linked pages:

Once you get the idea of what piece of written content gets a lot of traction, you can try to turn it into a “how-to” video. You already know that it can raise a lot of interest for your audience so you won’t take the risk that all the effort will go to waste.

Another way is to use Google’s autocomplete feature to find out what people are searching for:

Google provides tons of great ideas for “how-to” videos. Use the autocomplete feature from Google as seen above.

Take a look at diy. We can see that the most popular videos are the ones that appeared in the autocomplete feature from Google. We can’t say for sure that this is the way they get ideas for content, but for their website, it seems to work really well.

Looking through Google related searches is a good recommendation to get ideas for how-to videos based on the query you searched for:

4.7 Make Quality Images Available Under CC License

A simple and effective way to get some links is to upload images to your company’s Flickr account and mark them available through CC license. This will get lots of links since the only requirement for using the images is linking back. Ford seems to be using this strategy really well. The company profile is filled with images, graphs, and pictures of their cars that are used in different media and are linking back to the company’s website.

4.8 Use Blog Reviews

Review great blogs and websites in your market. This will draw the attention of the big players in the industry and if your review is a positive one, in most cases they will link back to you.

In the example above, Dailymeal made a top of the best food blogs in 2014 and posted it on its website. Now tell me which blogger doesn’t want their name to appear in such a top and which of them wouldn’t want to link back to this top in order to show how great they are.

• Collaborating with Generic Influencers to Receive Product Reviews 

These two next content types go hand in hand. The Generic Influencers product reviews refer to giving away your product, for free, to influencers in the industry. Depending on the product and industry, they will usually write reviews about and link back to you. Influencers are looking for content that will be of interest to their user base. It’s tough to convince influencers to try your product but here is where your “sales” tactics should come in handy.

• Getting Product Reviews from Experts

The second type of product review is getting experts to review your business on your own website. Now with this content type, you’re betting on the authority of the expert that writes the review. You’re betting that their authority will draw in the social attention that will be enough to get links from. In general, this kind of practice works best in auto industries, to get a celebrity to write a review of your product on your website will get a lot of people talking about it. You can even view it as an endorsement.

4.9 Re-purpose Existing Content

If you’ve been working on your content for some time, we’re pretty sure that you also have some old and great content that rarely sees the light of day. You can re-purpose the content in ways that it will bring additional value to your users. Creativity is always the key! Old content can be gathered up, cleaned up and promoted to your audience once again. You can easily make an e-book out of the content that has gathered over the years in your blog archive and promote it to your users.

Content pruning is a strategy that you could apply. We documented a comprehensive article about the topic and we also gathered some experts’ insights to find out whether it is an efficient strategy. It seems that most of them experienced some eye-catching results, such as 31% increase in organic traffic, a boost of 2,500 visitors, improved search visibility and so on.  

4.10 Consider Every Possible Idea

Always try to improve and never settle for the same ideas, even if they worked and provided great results. We all know the saying “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”, but in today’s world, what works today might not work tomorrow. This is why you always need to be constantly up to date with every new link building technique out there.

Even if you’ve done your research and worked in the same field for years, it’s still best to go over what’s new. There are a lot of sources out there from which you can learn, experts and people in the industry are always publishing and are trying to create conversations around the newest strategies. That way, you can make sure you’ll never be one step behind the industry and that your efforts are always up to date.

Step 5. Prospects

This part is done now. Now it’s time to move on to find the people and sites that should be outreached to in order to maximize your contents’ external linking.

5.1 Prioritize Link Prospects That Can Deliver Traffic and SEO Benefits

Always go for link prospects that have high authority and can bring in lots of traffic and SEO benefits. We’re not saying you should ignore the low authority domains but focus your efforts on the big fish. It’s likely that you’ll have to analyze the prospects with a Pro tool.

With a quick analysis, we can already see that this prospect is one of those “big fish”. They have a good link rank and a large number of referring domains that are pointing to the website. This is what you should be looking for. Next up is to check the link velocity:

By studying the link velocity charts, we can tell that this site is being worked on. Once you have data about the growth potential of the website, you can add it to your outreach list. In the chart above we can see that the website has a good link growth with nothing too shady about it. Getting a link now on this website will probably be worth a lot more in the future.

In Site Explorer, you can perform quick researches for potentialy linked websites, where you can view the link velocity, the domain performance, the number of links and reffering domains as long as the overall rankings.

5.2 Perform Competitor Research

You’re probably already checking what your competitors are doing. So why not check where they are getting their links from?

The cognitiveSEO competitive analysis allows you to benchmark your metrics to those of your competitors. But that’s not all it does. You can also check out your competitors’ links. By using the link intersection technique you’ll be able to find a lot of new link opportunities for your website.

Once you apply the filters, you should be left with only the high authority link prospects.

Above you have the filtered version displaying only the high authority link prospects. They are a great opportunity for your business to tackle. They are already linking to your competitors, meaning that they are somewhat interested in the business area you’re in. Once you contact them and present your product or your content, there is a high chance that they might mention you.

There are other ways to view your competitor’s links. For example, you can see which links you have and don’t have in common. In your SEO campaigns you can see a list of all the links your competitors have and you don’t. Those are all link opportunities. 

5.3 Look for Expired Domains in Your Industry

Another way to find quality link prospects is to search for expired domains in your industry. By using the cognitiveSEO tool, you can easily track and find links that are pointing to expired domains. Next step would be to try and contact the owners of the sites in order to fix the dead link issue. You can present them with another link (to your business) and tell them that broken links are hated by both users and Google alike. You will get some links this way. Here you can read more about identifying link from dead businesses. 

Step 6. Networking

It’s all about building a community, a tribe around your business and market. In the age of the internet, time flies faster than in the offline world. If you are not communicating online for a week, or a month, people will forget that you even existed, so don’t let that happen.

6.1 Engage with Your Customers and with the Influencers

Social media is a great way to speak to your customers. Have your company or your client set up accounts on all the major ones and with each piece of content that you create, spread it out. Find out what works best for each social media platform and fine-tune the content for the one that works best or for the one that you wish to tackle.

Targeting influencers is a more in-depth topic that should be tackled separately. Basically, you need to start and nurture a relationship with them in order to be able to even start to ask them for “favors”.

6.2 Establish an Online PR Mindset

When you engage in a link building process, you’re no longer an SEO or a marketer. You’re supposed to be all of it: webmaster, SEO, marketer, copywriter, PR specialist researcher and so on. Always pay attention to the industry news and get to understand the content that they publish. Reach out directly to the journalists and editors and offer them tailored content. If the content is great and if it offers value to their audience, it will be posted. Our advice is to be persistent and polite. Following up emails with phone calls is not something that you should shy away from.

Make sure you research on the person you have to contact, make a friendly and polite email for outreach. We’ve tackled some techniques for cold emailing you could follow to get the attention of your recipients.

6.3 Become an Industry Expert

People need reasons to listen to you.

You can “scream” as loud as you can on the internet, but if people don’t see the reason, they won’t be bothered to look at what you’re saying.

The only way to fix that is slow: step by step become an industry expert. And, since you’re working in that industry, it will help you as much as it helps your business. So our advice is to become an expert, prove your knowledge through blog posts, user engagement, books, and guest articles. Once you reach that level, you’ll find it a lot easier to reach your audience. Eventually, others will come to you for quotes and ask for content from you, the links will also follow shortly.

HARO (Help A Reporter Out) offers a great service. You can use them in order to get on the radar for the journalists that are looking for experts in specific areas of expertise. Moreover, they could mention and quote your expertise in their own articles, getting really great and high-quality articles.

6.4 Offer Giveaways, Contests and Special Offers

Invite bloggers and other influencers to run contests and giveaways on their blogs with your top products. Everybody likes a contest and we’ve mentioned earlier that they have a lot of link potential.

You can use the rafflecopter platform for giveaways that require entrants to follow, like and share. With a simple giveaway, you can get links and a lot of social media attention.

Step 7. Promotion

There are lots of ways to engage in this action. You shouldn’t focus only on social media. You can opt for email campaigns, paid advertising (search and other forms), content syndication or guest posting. 

7.1 Promote to Your Customer List

Each new piece of content should get announced to your audience.

You’re not running a monologue website, you need people to talk back to you, to engage, share or challenge your ideas.

Keep an email list of your readers and regularly email your content (with their permission). Use social media to promote your content and use their groups and circles to promote it to relevant users, the users that you want to promote your business to them.

7.2 Promote to Your Prospect List

The same goes for influencers. Emails, social activity are all welcome, but for them you need to go that extra step. You need to always have a conversation going on, help them out on their articles and even meet up with them at social events.

Step 8. Report & Debrief

We’re finally at the last step of the link building process. The one in which you check if all your efforts were successful or not. Now is the time to go over the notes you initially talked about with your boss or client and study the metrics that you set out to follow.

Only by constantly monitoring metrics you can improve future campaigns.

Conclusion

It looks like 2020 has a lot to offer to digital marketers. The link building process is getting more and more creative while Google tries to reward great content with higher rankings.

Always keep in mind Googles’ guidelines so that you won’t shoot yourself in the foot while trying to grow your business. We advise you to creatively build natural links and to try to create lots of conversation around your business. Google is constantly upgrading its algorithms to finds the unnatural links and a penalty is the last thing you want to deal with when you try to grow your business.

The present article is not intended to be an ultimate guide for link building resources. It’s more of a process backed up with link building tips that might positively impact your ranks in Google. Some are more advanced link building tactics, including some technical SEO topics, but most of them are link building opportunities easy to find and implement. There are many great research tools that can help you reach your goal of having high search engine rankings, yet, remember that the greatest tools you have at hand are your own brain, your common sense, and your experience.

The post 8 Steps to Kick Off an Ultra Powerful Link Building Campaign appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

But is that true?

The short answer is… it depends. But if you’re asking yourself which one you should use and you want to make a very documented opinion on the subject before you take any action, I recommend that you give this article a good read.

1. cognitiveSEO’s Subdomain to Subdirectory Switch Story
2. Successful Subdomain to Subfolder Switch Stories
   1. John Doherty & HotPads’ Blog Switch Story
   2. Timo Reitnauer & Iwantmyname’s Double Blog Switch Story
   3. Craig Emerson & His Blog’s Switch Story
3. What Do the Experts Have to Say About Subdomains vs. Subfolders?
   1. Eric Enge from Stonetemple
   2. Sam Silverwood Cope from PI-Datametrics
   3. Stephen Kenwright from Branded3
   4. Gianluca Fiorelli from MOZ
   5. AJ Ghergich from Ghergich & Co.
   6. Barry Schwartz from Rusty Brick
   7. Cyrus Shepard from Fazillion Media
   8. Michael Martinez from SEO-Theory
4. To Move or Not to Move, That Is the Question

I took the effort to collect some stories of people who made the switch. I also asked a bunch of SEO experts around the world what they think about it, so we can have a really good idea of what different people think about this subject.

But, before we get into that, I’ll tell you a short story about our own experience with switching from a subdomain to a subfolder.

Or, you can miss out on everything else (bad idea) and click here to skip directly to the answer.

1. cognitiveSEO’s Subdomain to Subdirectory Switch Story

In the summer of 2017, during the launch of our Keyword Tool and Content Assistant, we considered using a subfolder instead of a subdomain (as we had previously used for the Site Explorer). This would mean cognitiveseo.com/keyword-tool instead of keyword-tool.cognitiveseo.com.

We had to find out for ourselves if this switch would somehow improve the page’s performance.

To avoid user confusion and keep both tools on similar paths, we decided to also move the Site Explorer from https://explorer.cognitiveseo.com to https://cognitiveseo.com/site-explorer/.

The change happened the very late June, although the search engines and ranking trackers noticed the change a little bit later, in early July.

So… what do you think happened? Well… Nothing

Contrary to popular belief, no improvement was seen whatsoever. Here are some screenshots from our rank tracker, over the past year. You can clearly see the moment when Google noticed the change and indexed it accordingly:

Screenshot from the cognitiveSEO tool’s Rank Tracker showing the positions before the switch.

Screenshot from the cognitiveSEO tool’s Rank Tracker showing the positions some time after the switch.

As you can see, from March till December, rankings have been fluctuating very little, with the overall position keeping itself around 5th.

Showing analytics data isn’t actually helpful, as traffic always fluctuates and our traffic might be naturally up or down a little month by month. But just for the record, the traffic reflects the rankings, so no, we can’t say we’ve noticed any improvement.

Ok, so now we know. Switching from a subdomain to a subdirectory doesn’t improve traffic, right? Not so fast… keep reading.

2. Successful Subdomain to Subfolder Switch Stories

Our story might not reflect this, but there are a lot more stories from other people that say something else. Here are just a few of them which claim that switching from a subdomain to a subdirectory of the main domain will positively impact rankings and traffic. They also state that it’s a rather quick result.

Compared to us, these websites moved entire sections on the main domain, instead of just a single page.

2.1 HotPads’ Blog Switch Story & The Overnight Traffic Doubling

Jonn Doherty, founder at GetCredo tested the switch myth on HotPads.com blog. Here’s the tweet that caught my attention:

@randfish we moved the HotPads blog from subdomain blog. to /blog. Guess where that happened. pic.twitter.com/guLMN6HluX

— John Doherty ? currently in Chamonix ?? (@dohertyjf) February 7, 2015

Although the tweet wasn’t very detailed, John took the time to reply to an e-mail I sent. I’ll take a brief moment here to thank him for this.

Here are the questions I asked and his answers:

Why did you decide on making the change from subdomain to subdirectory?

“We decided to make the change from subdomain to subdirectory because I believed it would be better for SEO. We had an old blog on TypePad that looked outdated because we were updating the site as a whole, and I had just hired a content manager and I wanted our content to have a fighting chance to be read/shared. We replatformed to WordPress at the same time and eliminated a bunch of old content, and did the proper 1:1 301 redirects.”

Were you afraid it would go bad?

“No, I was not afraid because we were working off such a low base of traffic.”

When did the merge take place, and when did the traffic start to rise?

“This was a few years ago so I am not positive on the timing, but if I recall correctly it was around February 2014 and we saw an impact almost immediately.”

Would you recommend this to others?

“From an ideal SEO perspective, for sure. I saw the impact personally as have many others, so in my opinion it’s not really a debate anymore whether or not it works. The question is really if it’s worth it strategically, within a broader view of the company’s goals and directions, to push for it or not.

It’s not a small change to make, and unless you have a backlog of content built up that you need to rank better to improve your business and you are investing in active content development and need that to rank, it might not be worth your time to prioritize over other things that will actually move the needle on your business revenue-wise, depending on your business of course.”

Are you sure that the merge was the cause of the traffic increase?

It was a big part in my opinion. As with anything SEO-related, there were multiple moving pieces and fixes happening when this move was made. It was a combination of all of the things we fixed – moving to a subfolder, replatforming to WordPress, better indexation and blog architecture, and removing low quality content.
	john doherty
	Founder at GetCredo / @dohertyjf

So the key element to remember from John’s answers is that the switch to the subfolder isn’t the only thing he did during this website update.

I found another similar example, but haven’t been able to get more detailed insights about what exactly happened. Ruth Burr Reedy states on Twitter that Todd Friesen from SalesForce did a subdomain to subdirectory switch and doubled his website’s traffic overnight.

One of the biggest SEO successes @oilman has seen at @salesforce was moving blog from subdomain to subdirectory. Traffic 2x overnight #smx

— Ruth Burr Reedy (@ruthburr) June 23, 2016

There are however two more stories I want to feature, so stay tuned! 😉

2.2 Iwantmyname Blog’s Switch Story & The Double Bad Luck

This isn’t actually a successful subdomain to subfolder switch story, but more of an unsuccessful one

In a blog post a couple of years ago, Timo shared his website’s experience with the world. In July 2014, he moved his blog from a subfolder to a subdomain, for some particular reasons he had, such as performance with some GitHub Pages implementation, flexibility of the platform and maintainability.

The results? Not cool.

Screenshot from the Iwantmyname blog showing a drop in traffic after switching to a subdomain

The team thought at first that it’s something normal, and that the blog will quickly recover the traffic it was gaining. However, after several months and a lot of reading, they finally decided to move the blog back to the root domain.

Although the recovery can’t be attributed to the switch back to the root domain, the initial switch to to subdomain clearly took their traffic down. The Iwantmyname team went through bad luck twice in a row.

2.3 Craig Emerson’s Blog Switch Story

In 2014, Craig Emerson posted an article on his marketing blog, stating his successful story of switching from a subdomain to a subfolder.

One very important thing here that Craig mentions is the fact that, among other facts, he mentions properly linking between his subdomain and the root domain. However, most of the backlinks were built to the subdomain.

This is important for a future part of this article, in the section where we ask the experts.

Craig’s example before the switch

After the switch was done and the proper 301 redirects were set up, Craig saw an improvement in search visibility in about 2 weeks, which by SEO standards is a very short time.

Craig’s example after the switch

I went from somewhere out of the top 100, and I know for a fact I wasn’t even in the top 200, to being number 57 in the SERP’s simply by changing from a subdomain to a subdirectory.  Everything else related to my site remained constant.
	Craig Emerson
	Blogger at BloggingFlail / @CraigEmerson

This is probably the cleanest example of a successful subdomain to subdirectory switch out there.

Craig’s case is more interesting because in his example, no other change takes place. It’s a clean example of being able to rank higher just by moving your content from a subdomain to the root domain.

3. What Do the Experts Have to Say About Subdomains and Subfolders?
 

Ok, so these are public stories. However, those stories aren’t even a handful. Experts all around the world deal with this problem everyday, so I decided to ask some of them, and hopefully come up with a final conclusion.

3.1 Eric Enge from Stonetemple

@seo_theory @dharmesh in a vaccuum, I recommend subdirectories, but never worth moving a blog from a subdomain for that reason alone.

— Eric Enge (@stonetemple) February 10, 2015

I asked Eric if this is still his opinion, and he said that he stands by it still. Here are his reasons:

“Google is pretty good at seeing a subdomain as being an integrated part of the main domain. The primary reason that it’s an issue is that it’s very easy to have a subdomain that is operated by a third party.  For example, you wouldn’t treat all the subdomains of blogspot.com like they were a core part of  the main site. Clearly they’re not, as thousands of people operate blogs on that platform.”

Although Eric believes that Google is good at detecting what subdomains are all about, he still thinks it’s a safer move to keep your blog on your root domain.

The great majority of the time, Google will understand that your blog on a subdomain is really yours, which is why I say it does not make sense to move them. However, if you are starting a new blog, I recommend that you put it in a subfolder, not a subdomain.
	Eric Enge
	Founder & CEO at StoneTemple / @stonetemple

3.2 Sam Silverwood Cope from PI-Datametrics

In one of his articles on PI-Datametrics Sam addresses an issue where multiple subdomains start eating each other out in the serps, and often times competing with the main domain.

Although this only applies to the websites that use subdomains mainly as a form of posting content, this could be also the case for subdirectories.

But what I found interesting was the following thing:

As we’ve seen, Google used to offer up separate results for separate subdomains, so that multiple subdomains would feature in the SERPs. However, since this practice was ultimately being abused, Google now ‘scrunches’ those results together. This is a good example of everyone suffering from the practices of a very few.
	Sam Silverwood Cope
	Co-Owner at PI-Datametrics / @scopey123

This goes spot on after Eric’s post. The rankings on your subdomain could be affected by the fact that Google thinks your subdomain is some sort of third party platform and shouldn’t get the same authority as the root domain.

3.3 Stephen Kenwright from Branded3

Stephen wrote about this top in the summer of 2017. Although his article was more about TLD’s, he also covered subdomains a little.

He says that subfolders are almost always preferable over subdomains, except when the use of subfolders is impossible due to technical reasons.

I’ve worked with several brands who have experienced an increase in organic traffic when migrating from international subdomains to international subfolders – this usually occurs when there’s a lot of link equity in one or two countries and less-favored international sites are underperforming.
	Stephen Kenwright
	Strategy Director at Branded3 / @stekenwright

To better explain the quote, if a brand from the United Kingdom is marketed in the United States for a period of time, and a lot of links are gained on the main domain, other languages versions that are found on subdomains might see an improvement in their countries if they are merged into the main domain as subfolders.

He does however state that a merge is not easy to do, and there are also risks involved (like a drop instead of a grow).

3.4 Gianluca Fiorelli from MOZ

Another tweet that caught my attention was Gianluca’s:

I think @randfish will like a graph like this ⬇️. Results of moving a blog from subdomain to subfolder… pic.twitter.com/ACQOVpY0H0

— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) March 10, 2017

I decided to e-mail him, and he gave me a very detailed and compelling answer!

When it comes to the topic of subdomain vs subdirectories, I am not a “Taliban” and, as always happens in SEO, to the question: Are subdirectories better than subdomains for SEO?”, my immediate answer is: “It depends”.
	Gianluca Fiorelli
	SEO at I Love SEO / @gfiorelli1

Here’s why Gianluca’s detailed answer about subdomains:

“Generally talking, I think that subdirectories are the best option for many reasons:

1. You consolidate the authority and relevancy of all subdirectories in one main domain;
2. The positive benefits of each subdomain, now moved to subfolders, will have a direct influence for all the other subdirectories.

Moving a blog from subdomain to subfolder inside the main domain name is a classic example:

In fact – despite whatever Google says – all links earned by a blog in subdomain have a positive effect only on the same blog subdomain, and not on the root domain or on other subdomains of the same root domain name.

If we move the blog to a subfolder inside the main domain, the uplift in traffic and rankings is almost a mathematical consequence (you can use the tweet you linked in your email to reinforce my phrase).

Another good example is international SEO:

When we decide to target a new country market, the best idea is starting targeting it creating a geo-targeted subfolder, so to give it a first “authority boost” thanks to an optimized internal linking. Only when (and if) the targeted market starts offering valuable metrics in terms of traffic and conversions, then we can think in moving that subfolder to an independent domain name for better localization and more focused targeting.

However, there are cases when a subfolder may be not the ideal solution, mostly for technical reasons. An example can be a big Ecommerce website.

In that case, if the “separate domain name” option is not possible (i.e.: for branding reasons, being the branded domain not available), choosing to develop a version of our Ecommerce targeting a different county or language can be a valid solution.

Said that, albeit a personal preference toward subfolders vs. subdomain (and backed up by proof), all solutions have their pros and cons, and everything – at the end – should be deemed to something that goes further any SEO consideration: business needs.”

3.5 AJ Ghergich from Ghergich & Co.

Mr. Gherghich says that all of his clients are advised to keep their content on the root domain, so they can gain all the authority there.

I advise clients to hoard all domain authority and link equity on their root domain. I’ve seen many cases where sites have benefited from consolidating multiple subdomains to one root domain. However, I would be hesitant to move a long-standing subdomain that already ranks. You must take it on a case by case basis.
	A.J. Ghergich
	SEO at  Gherghich & Co. / @SEO

However, due to the volatile nature of this subject, all cases should be analyzed separately. Therefore:

• New sites should build on the root domain if possible
• Subdomains with little to no traffic should be consolidated to the root domain
• Subdomains with solid existing rankings should be hesitant to move to the root domain

AJ’s quote states multiple subdomains were consolidated to the root domain. In this case, an improvement in visibility might be seen because of the high amount of ‘new’ content the root domain is having.

3.6 Barry Schwartz from Rusty Brick

It seems like Barry kind of agrees with Matt Cutts and John Mueller about the subdomains thing. He actually wrote about this on Search Engine Roundtable.

And even his answers are quite short, I do appreciate the fact that he took the time to share with us his opinion on this. 

Do you think people should people use subdirectories instead of subdomains?

Doesn’t matter.

Is the effort of changing subdomain to subdirectory worth it?

No.

Does having one or another have any effect in the SERPs?

Doubt it.

I’ve asked many experts about this topic and very few replied. I really appreciate Barry’s answer, as I know he’s really busy keeping us all up to date on Google’s latest quirks and perks.

3.7 Cyrus Shepard from Fazillion Media

I had the honor to hang out with Cyrus this November during a great conference (GPeC Event ). SEOs and SEOettes, without further ado, I present you the gentleman of all gentlemen, Mr. Cyrus Shepard!

The Griffindor team applauding Cyrus’ entrance on John Williams’ music.

Do you think people should use subdirectories instead of subdomains?

“This question has been around for 10+ years, and is likely to be around long after I’m gone. The general consensus is that for most purposes, there are SEO advantages to using subdirectories over subfolders.

Google does its best to associate subdomains with parent domains, but it hasn’t always proved to be a perfect system.

Empirical evidence shows that oftentimes, moving content (such as a section blog living on a subdomain) to a subfolder often results in increased visibility, rankings, and traffic.”

Although a boost isn’t guaranteed and it’s far from perfect, the reverse (a boost when moving from a subfolder to a subdomain) almost never happens.
	Cyrus Shepard
	Founder at Fazillion Media / @CyrusShepard

Does having a subdomain or a subfolder affect how your site shows in the SERPs?

“There are 2 things to consider–both of them minor–about how subdomains and subfolders display in the SERPs.

1. If you have a long URL, Google may truncate it to fit in search results, which means part of your subfolder may not display in SERPs. That said, this is a very small subset of URLs. Subdomains, on the other hand, start at the beginning of the URL and are therefore aren’t likely truncated.
2. Since the subdomain shows before everything else, it’s the first thing visitors are going to see in your displayed URL. A branded or keyword rich subdomain could be of benefit here, but again, it’s a very small difference that in most cases won’t have a significant impact.”

Is the effort of changing subdomain to subdirectory worth it?

“The answer is… sometimes. Many sites go through expensive migrations to see no benefit whatsoever. My standard is this: if the content is thematically close, if there is a lot of interlinking between the subdomains, and the migration can be done with relative ease, it’s often worth the effort. Otherwise, if it’s not broken, no need to fix it.”

3.8 Michael Martinez from SEO-Theory.com

Michael is one of the few who strongly states that switching from a subdomain to a subfolder won’t help you rank better. However, he does have some really solid points, and that’s why I featured him last, because he definitely made me think twice before my final answer.

“Even when my friend Todd Friesen claimed that Salesforce saw an improvement (something like doubled the traffic) I was able to confirm through archive .org that they were using better internal linking structure for the subfolder — and theirs was the absolute BEST case study I have reviewed.”

Michael also properly ‘debunked’ John’s HotPads blog switch. He used web.archive.org to spot the fact that the subdomain wasn’t properly and prominently linked by the root domain.

Many people attribute the growth in traffic to moving their content from a subdomain to  a subfolder because they don’t think to take changes in navigation into consideration.
	Michael Martinez
	SEO at  SEO-Theory / @seo_theory

He states that he never came across a claimed improvement – where he was able to evaluate the before/after versions of the site – that could not be attributed to improved internal navigation. The fault with the SEO case studies is they don’t even mention such changes.

“People screw up their subdomains by not linking to them properly. In all the subdomain vs. subfolder case studies I have read, I have found the subdomains were receiving less link value from the main Website. Often PageRank Sculpting was involved. That is why it looks like moving to subfolders improves things, because people are less likely to attempt to sculpt PageRank these days.”

Well, the other stories I featured before did say that other changes were made, so they could also have had an impact on the outcome. The gain in rankings and visibility can’t be 100% attributed to the switch.

However… we still have Craig’s example, on which the internal navigation and linking was properly done. Or at least that’s what Craig states.

4. To Move or Not to Move, That Is the Question:

To move, or not to move, that is the Question:
Whether ’tis a nobler thing to grow my site as is,
Living with the fear of missing out on traffic,
Or to take arms and risk wasting time,
For what could be possibly nothing.

I should be a poet, shouldn’t I? Hmm… maybe not.

Why didn’t the change have effect on us, here at cognitiveSEO?

Well… First of all, there are very many factors involved in ranking a website. The competitors’ authorities, content, the quality of the product and so on.  This is yet another piece of proof that links still matter a lot in 2018+. 

Secondly, we only changed one page. ONE. Most stories there that show otherwise tested this with entire sections of their websites.

Another thing that can be taken into consideration is the fact that we’re still linking very much to our subdomain, which is 301 redirected to the subfolder, so at least part of the link juice that flows could be lost. Replacing all the links in the blog is time consuming and isn’t a priority for us right now, but we might consider it in the future.

Our story doesn’t prove that switching to root domains won’t help improve rankings. Nor do the others prove that you will gain rankings if you switch from subdomain to a subdirectory.

Listen to this video of John Mueller from Google and what he has to say:

If you want to put a blog on your main site in a subdirectory that’s fine, if you want to put it in a subdomain that’s fine, if you want to use a completely different domain that’s possible as well.
	John Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google / @JohnMu

Nothing new right? He’s saying exactly what Matt Cutts said back in his days as the Head of Spam at Google.

Well, listen to it again, more carefully. John is actually mentioning one more important thing:

He’s saying that you can put your blog on one domain, a subdomain, or a completely different domain and it won’t make an SEO difference.

So if I have my main website on domain.com and my blog on blog.domain.com it’s the same like having my main website on domain.com and my blog on anotherdomain.com? I don’t think so.

Basically, one domain, a subdomain or another domain have no SEO benefits one over the other. But they kind of act like separate domains.

This leads me into thinking that subdomains kind of act like separate domains most of the time.

In fact, it’s all Google’s fault for not providing a definitive answer. But if they provided definitive answers, then SEO would not exist.

Now it’s pretty obvious that root domains do pass some sort of authority to their subdomains, by default. A statement on the BlackHat Forums goes like this:

“It is my belief that main domains DO pass power to their subdomains. If you wanna test this in practice yourself, then go create 2 subdomain blogs: the first on wordpress.com and the second on whatever else free web 2.0 service you might like.”

That is probably very true. The WordPress.com subdomain is going to win/outrank the other web 2.0 service, because it has a lot more authority.

But my question is: Would you rather have your content published on yourname.wordpress.com, or on wordpress.com/your-name/?

Google has definitely made struggles into identifying and treating subdomains as subfolders when necessary. However, it’s not always the case. As Rand Fishkin said in his WhiteBoard Friday, Google MAY pass signals from the subdomain to the main domain. But that’s not a guarantee.

If you’re going to use your subdomain only for the entire site, then it won’t make a difference. The problem here is how authority is passed. If you want to have a blog or multiple pages, you’d better know what you’re doing and link to them properly. Also, consider the fact that the overall authority of the root domain might go down, as it’s not yet sure if subdomains pass link juice to root domains by default.

Conclusion:

Keeping all your content on the root domain is the best thing you can do on the long run, as you can guarantee hoarding all the authority in a single place. It’s just easier to handle from an SEO perspective, especially for a newbie. But if you know what you’re doing, and interlink properly, then using subdomains should be just fine.

I invite you into the comments section, where we can further debate this. Who knows, maybe our discussions will bring up something new.

The post Does Switching From a Subdomain to a Subfolder Improve SEO? Case Studies & Experts RoundUp appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Digital marketing influencers, be they men or women, are sizzling in this world of continuous change and wonder, and they have thousands, if not millions of followers who sip from their cup of knowledge while craving to be like them one day.  We all have our favorite professionals, and they’re both women and men, but today it’s gonna be all about women in marketing. 

We interviewed 20 influential women marketers and, boy, all the stuff they told us is exclusive! Needless to say, the lessons we’ve learned from them are, and undoubtedly will be, career-changing.

Learning is a never-ending process and us humans need to be in a constant development of both mind and way of living. Learning from others’ failures and success stories is what helps us take heart, be inspired, keep up the good work, and beat all odds until we reach for the stars.

Now, how many times did you think “Oh, I wish I knew all the hidden secrets that make a business work, especially now that I’m a beginner or I need it in my strategy. I need some guidance on X, Y, Z”. Now your wishes have come true, and the outcome is true gold.

We started off by sending emails to influential female digital marketers across the globe, and asked them:

If you were to recommend one digital marketing technique, what would that be? 

And the feedback was awesome! Amazing marketers, such as Marie Forleo, Gabriella Sannino, and Julie Joyce were the first ones to accept our invitation and share their knowledge and expertise with the whole world.

We thought of sharing with you the people who influenced and inspired us along our way as digital marketers. A few months ago, we published an article focusing on awesome workspaces that belong to great digital marketers. And given that we loved the experience, we decided to roll up our sleeves and do it all again, this time with a twist. 

So be it digital marketing, content marketing, or social media marketing, search engine optimization, and conversion optimization, it’s all here. And they’re all exclusive tips. *Please do note this list is not following a specific order; all these female marketers are equally inspiring and a massive asset to the global digital ecosystem.

1. Make Your Customer the Hero by Talia Wolf
2. Is It Obvious Your Site Is the Best? by Marie Haynes
3. Featured Snippets Are Paramount When Prospecting for Links by Debra Mastaler
4. Listen to Your Customers by Jenny Halasz
5. Make It Easy for Brand Advocates to Connect with You by Gabriella Sannino
6. Write Less, Promote More by Alexandra Tachalova
   
7. Identify Your Competitors’ Missed Opportunity by Ana Matei
8. The Consumer Is What Matters Most by Susan Borst
9. Providing an Omnichannel Experience Means Power by Ann Handley 
10. SEO Is Both Art and Science by Julie Joyce
11. Brand Management Should Be the Core of Marketing by Gabriela Lungu
12. Nail a Sale by Getting Your customer Open Their Hearts by Marie Forleo
13. You Have to Know Exactly What You Want by Adel de Meyer
14. Provide Your Audience with Quality Content by Lilach Bullock
15. Video Is a Great Way to Connect with People by Madalyn Sklar
16. Be a Voracious Learner by Rebekah Radice
17. Write Less and Write Better by Melissa Fach
18. Listen to the Client and the Digital Environment by Jaitrali Jhanjharya
19. Share Your Ideas by Dorie Clark
20. Pay Attention to Your Customer by Maia Novolan 

1. Make Your Customer the Hero by Talia Wolf

Voted one of the most influential voices in conversion optimization and with over 10 years of expertise, Talia Wolf not only has a name full of charm and mystery but also is the go-to expert to help your business grow and stand out from the crowd. She’s most known for her growth marketing, conversion optimization, and marketing leadership activity. Talia loves optimizing websites, create better user journeys and online experiences, and puts the customer first in every aspect. 

Thanks to her customer-centric approach and her vast knowledge of emotional targeting, landing page optimization, mobile optimization, persona marketing, and E-commerce optimization, she’s often invited to teach and coach on stages such as Google, MozCon, Opticon, Unbounce, GMIC, Search Love, ConversionXL, Learn Inbound, Conversion Conference, and a whole lot more. 

Besides being a trainer, speaker, and conversion optimization specialist and consultant, Talia Wolf also runs GetUplift, an agency that offers conversion optimization services, in-house training, workshops, and online courses. 

Talia’s Exclusive Tip

When asked to share a tip with us, she immediately agreed and here’s what she said:

If you make your customer the hero of the story and build experiences around what she really wants and needs, you’ll grow your company 10X.
	Talia wolf
	Conversion Optimization specialist / @TaliaGw

“While most of the world might tell you to be data-driven, the only way to truly succeed and grow your business is to be data-informed and customer-driven. 

Behind those screens are people, not browsers, devices or geographical locations. If you make your customer the hero of the story and build experiences around what she really wants and needs you’ll grow your company 10X”. 

2. Is It Obvious Your Site Is the Best? by Marie Haynes

A true digital marketing goddess, Marie Haynes has loads of experience as a Google penalty expert and algorithm analyst. Author of Unnatural Links – The Complete Guide to Recovery and a regular contributor to Moz and Search Engine Watch on topics such as Google Penalties and algorithm changes, Marie Haynes definitely knows her stuff and offers consultancy on her website mariehaynes.com. 

Marie is frequently speaking at Pubcon, SMX, and other conferences. She’s obsessed about Penguin, Panda, Unnatural Links and analyzing the reason for a site’s traffic drop. She enjoys sharing her wisdom with others, and she’s doing it wholeheartedly. 

When browsing her LinkedIn profile, a particular recommendation caught my eye and for good reason: “Google is hard. Marie is awesome. She knows her stuff, she works the details and you can take her deliverables deadlines to the bank”.

Marie’s Exclusive Tip

And here’s the proof:

Is it super obvious that your site is the best experience for users? If the answer to that is ‘no’, then what can you add that would make the answer ‘yes’?
	MARIE HAYNES
	Google Penalty Expert / @Marie_Haynes

“I feel that Google is getting better and better at determining the usefulness of a site. If you’re having trouble ranking well, take a good honest look at your competitors’ pages. Or, better yet, have an unbiased source look at your pages as well as theirs. What we want to ask is, “Is it super obvious that your site is the best experience for users?” If the answer to that is no, then what can you add that would make the answer yes?

In the past, for many people, the majority of SEO was about tweaking keywords and getting links. While on-page optimization and link acquisition is still really important, they are not the only factors to consider.

I find that so many site owners have a hard time seeing that their site is not the best of its kind. If you can find ways to make your site as helpful as possible, and more helpful than everyone else’s on the same subject, then over time, you should see some good wins”.

3. Featured Snippets Are Paramount When Prospecting for Links by Debra Mastaler

Debra Mastaler is impressive! Her marketing experience spans over 28 years and the expertise she holds makes her a link guru. She is one of the most well-known link builders in the world, helping Fortune 500 companies and a number of top search engine optimization firms in the USA, UK, and Canada achieve the best in their link building, SEO, and digital marketing strategies. 

Debra is a corporate speaker for SEMrush, link building consultant, and President of Alliance-Link, a company offering customers three unique marketing services: content marketing research, custom link building, and in-house link building training. Operating the company since late 2000, Debra Mastaler had previously worked with Anheuser-Busch in the marketing department for 15 years. Before that, she activated for four years in the Civil Service. 

Her agenda must be quite busy as she’s often guest blogging for Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and Search Engine Guide, guest speaking at Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES) and Search Engine Land and numerous training sessions and seminars on link building. Debra is also the Link Building Moderator on the exclusive SEOBook Community Forums. 

Debra’s Exclusive Tip

Both Debra’s career path and approach make her irresistible and authentic. After having once already benefitted from her vast knowledge, now she accepted the challenge again. 

Make featured snippets a primary target when prospecting for links.
	Debra Mastaler
	Corporate Speaker & SEMrush Link Building Strategist / @debramastaler

“Make featured snippets a primary target when prospecting for links. Backlink the sources linking to the featured snippet URL and do everything in your power to secure a link from the same sources.

Study the business featured in the snippet carefully, is there a way to partner with this site and benefit from their exposure? We can’t always influence how and where a search engine ranks a page but we can always try to capitalize on their results.”

Source: ducttapemarketing.com

4. Listen to Your Customers by Jenny Halasz

Professionals in the digital marketing industry call Jenny Halasz a visionary, and right they are! Having a wealth of knowledge and experience in SEO and PPC, copywriting, conversion optimization, social marketing, affiliate marketing, analytics, and digital marketing, no wonder Jenny’s so charming. 

With over 15 years of digital marketing experience, Jenny is at ease when teaching others long-term strategies, intuitive UX, and successful customer acquisition tactics. When she’s not writing, speaking, or engaging in strategies, tactics, and ethics in search, you can find her indulging in (who’d have guessed?) geeky stuff and politics. 

Jenny Halasz is the President and Founder of JLH Marketing, a firm where customers can benefit from hourly and monthly consultancy services on search engine optimization, PPC, Analytics, and other niches in digital marketing. The search support she offers, along with her blog posts, contribute considerably to Jenny’s customers’ and followers’ growth. In addition, she’s also a speaker and a signed-in contributor to Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal (#AsktheSEO), and Marketing Land on SEO and SEM topics. 

Jenny’s Exclusive Tip

Jenny seems to always be there when fellow marketers reach out to her to get those craved-for answers to their questions. It’s exactly what we’ve experienced as well. 

If you take the time to understand what questions your customers and prospective customers have about your product or service, you will set the foundation necessary for great digital success.
	Jenny Halasz
	President of JLH Marketing / @jennyhalasz

“Answer your customers’ questions in an accessible way. If you take the time to understand what questions your customers and prospective customers have about your product or service, you will set the foundation necessary for great digital success. If you make sure those answers are accessible on your website to users and search engines alike, you’ll create quality content that can be used to rank your site, which can be shared on social, and which will increase the conversion rate of the customers you do have.

By simply answering questions, you’ll have the opportunity to appear in answer boxes on Google result pages (SERPs), to rank for informational keywords, and to be known as an authority in the industry”.

5. Make It Easy for Brand Advocates to Connect with You by Gabriella Sannino

Gabriella is a proud Napoletana, a digital marketer like none other. Stepping into the world of marketing and advertising in the early ’90s, Gabriella’s expertise is definitely authentic and note-worthy. Known as an international organic SEO Content Strategist, global marketing analyst, speaker and project management ninja, Sannino has a strong reputation in the SEO industry.

Since “being ordinary was never an option for Gabriella Sannino”, as she’d say, she has also co-founded and owns Level343, an international marketing and SEO company based in San Francisco, California.

Gabriella Sannino is quite inspirational, thanks to both her career path and her life(style). Holding an Italian citizenship, she traveled the world from a young age to South USA, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. But when she set foot in San Francisco, she fell in love, both with the city and the marketing powers the city possessed. Given this information, we can definitely say that conventional is not quite her style. 

When she’s off-duty, she enjoys sailing, playing with her loved ones, and of course, living la dolce vita to bits. When time allows it, she whole-heartedly shares her knowledge with fellow marketers. Her favorite quote is: “There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line”.

Gabriella’s Exclusive Tip

When asked what was her marketing tip to share with the world, she wrote to us:

Don’t make your potential brand advocates hunt for ways to communicate! Keep the avenues open and the pathways easily defined.
	Gabriella Sannino
	International Marketing & SEO Consultant / @SEOcopy

“Connect the dots. Always, always connect the dots of the strategy you will implement. By that I mean, making sure that your website is tied into your blog and social accounts, which are tied to each other and so on. Again depending on your strategy, make sure you have the follow through and step-by-step to accomplish connecting the dots.

Why go to all the trouble to create a blog and then not link to it from your main site? The same for your social accounts. Why make them if you aren’t going to tell people about them? Why communicate with your readers, if you don’t have a strategy of what you are communicating and how you will capture those leads?

This may sound like a “duh” sort of tip, but if I had a dollar… we have so many new clients come to us that say, “oh, yes, we use Twitter,” or “yes, we have a blog,” but you wouldn’t know it unless they told you.

Don’t make your potential brand advocates hunt for ways to communicate! Keep the avenues open and the pathways easily defined”.

6. Write Less, Promote More by Alexandra Tachalova

Alexandra Tachalova has her charms. Having previously benefited from her wisdom, we remember how we’ve always appreciated the fresh and young approach she uses when tackling digital marketing and SEO topics. 

Alexandra is a digital marketing consultant from Saint Petersburg, Russia, and the Founder of the Digital Olympus Event conferences. She is a contributing writer at Moz, Entrepreneur, AHREFS, and Search Engine Journal. She has been a brand manager at SEMrush, activating as Head of Marketing Automation and Market Leader in competitive research software. Given she enjoys providing valuable digital marketing tips on how to create killer marketing strategies, you’ll frequently find her speaking at events such as BrightonSEO, SEMdays, Ungagged, SEOzone, SMX, and many others.

Tachalova has activated in the marketing business for more than five years, helping businesses improve their marketing tactics and campaigns, and boost their sales. Her extensive experience spans across many niches, such as customer relationship management, SEO, corporate communication and lead generation.

Alexandra’s Exclusive Tip

When asked to disclose some SEO tips, she told us:

I would recommend writing less and devoting more time to content promotion.
	Alexandra tachalova
	Digital Marketer / @AlexTachalova

“Don’t neglect content promotion. I’ve noticed that nowadays, many companies are extremely focused on content marketing processes. And that’s definitely a good investment! However, a lot of content marketers tend to skip the steps related to the content promotion. That’s a horrible approach since the majority of their work never reaches their targeted audience.

I would recommend writing less and devoting more time to content promotion. My tip is to start your content plan by writing a list of channels and influencers that can help you reach more relevant users, and will allow you to start getting traffic and leads from each published post”.

Source: www.webmarketinggroup.co.uk

7. Identify Your Competitors’ Missed Opportunity by Ana Matei

Judging from Ana’s hobbies and spirit, she’s definitely seeking to live a life that’s not boring, from both a personal and professional point of view. Her life experiences resemble her professional one, as they’re both rich, complex, diverse, and intriguing. A constant traveler, Ana Matei is the go-to digital marketer and SEO&CRO specialist to help online businesses optimize their marketing costs.

Ana plans and implements marketing campaigns with measurable results in both online and mobile marketing, sifting everything through her 11-year expertise in digital marketing, search marketing, and traditional marketing.

She’s also known as an SEO trainer who’s always focused, creative, and in a constant pursuit of self-improvement. Even her digital marketing blog is grounded in the idea of writing for her own benefit or relaxation, not only for others’. Also, she’s an advocate for writing for writing’s sake (this rings a bell regarding a French slogan from the early 19th century – l’art pour l’art).

Ana Matei’s specialties are digital marketing strategies, design strategies with user experience always in mind, optimization and conversion, social media marketing and search advertising, PPC, remarketing and retargeting, and analytics. She often writes on her blog on SEO and digital marketing.

Ana’s Exclusive Tip

No doubt she’s inspirational so she decided on sharing a few snippets of her marketing wisdom:

One of the best SEO techniques is turning in-depth research findings into the best possible landing page out there.
	ana Matei
	Digital Marketer and SEO Consultant / @AnaMatei

“One of the best SEO techniques is turning in-depth research findings into the best possible landing page out there. Finding your buyer personas and studying your competition are good places to start a research. But identifying a missed opportunity by your competitors or a trend before it gets trendy is pure SEO gold.

Once you find your content opportunity, the catch is to be able to put your findings on the best possible landing page. That means it has to be perfect in terms of design, tech, and copy, but also to address the psychological issues the customers are facing.

The mistake every newbie SEO does is creating that seemingly perfect landing page and leaving it as it is. That’s fine when you rank the first, and even then things won’t be fine for long because some competitors will try and maybe succeed at stealing your ranking.

The trick for getting long-term traffic and conversions is to optimize that page over and over again until there’s no better landing page on the web. It sounds simple enough, but it takes so much hard work and marketing research that few people actually put in the effort.

For a money page like this, using ads to get it just right helps with moving forward in the optimization process, especially for businesses offering services. With eCommerce, things are a bit easier because you can use the design part of that perfect product page throughout the site. Also, there’s more CRO than SEO involved in the process of optimizing an eCommerce site”.

8. The Consumer Is What Matters Most by Susan Borst

Susan Borst holds a wealth of wisdom and knowledge to share. She’s known for being intellectually curious about everything related to marketing, interactive, and media, traits that led her to whom she is today: a marketer named in “Top 15 People in NYC that are changing advertising that you need to know” by Alley Watch, a “Top 50 Content Marketing Influencer at CMWorld 2016” plus 2017 by TopRank, and a “Top 50 Marketing Leader over 50” by Brand Quarterly for two years running.

Susan is a Deputy Director and Lead for the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, but that’s not it: she’s also leading the social media, content marketing, native advertising, B2B and games advertising sectors, together with the mobile and local committees. No wonder she’s the bee’s knees in the content marketing industry.

But that’s not all; she’s also part of the judging jury for The Shorty Awards, the Content Marketing Institute Awards, and Native Advertising Institute Awards. Susan’s 20+ years of experience at top NYC creative agencies are undoubtedly a meaningful point of reference.

Susan’s Exclusive Tip

For the curious-hearted souls out there, Susan is half Icelandic, with a love for Swedish fish. When asked to share a nugget of Borst wisdom, she shared this:

It’s easy to get caught in the weeds of digital advertising, the formats, and technology behind it, and lose sight of what really matters: the consumer.
	Susan borst
	Deputy Director of IAB Mobile Marketing / @susanborst

“It’s easy to get caught in the weeds of digital advertising, and the formats, and technology behind it, and lose sight of what really matters…the consumer.

In a “mobile always,” “video everywhere” and “empowered consumer” world, consumer expectations on their devices can provide insights to help marketers develop advertising that breaks through without being annoying, one that is relevant without being creepy, all while balancing the need for more promotional messages vs. storytelling executions designed to reach consumers in more native ways”.

9. Providing an Omnichannel Experience Means Power by Ann Handley

Ann Handley is an exceptional woman marketer. We all know that already, as we’ve all read at least one of her books. She has authored and co-authored two books, namely Everybody Writes, a WSJ bestseller, and Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business, which is also a bestselling book on content marketing translated into nine languages so to please everybody who craved for it.

Speaking of writing, Ann is also a monthly columnist for Entrepreneur magazine, MarketingProfs, and LinkedIn, in the LinkedIn Influencer program. Ann speaks and writes about how you can step up your marketing strategy ways. In addition, it’s important we know that she started her career as a business journalist and editor. 

Besides being an inspirational writer, Ann Handley is Head of Content at MarketingProfs – a training and education company empowering marketers across the globe – keynote speaker at various events, and a digital marketing and content expert. She likes saying that she’s the company’s content bossypants, and this fits like a glove if we’re to think how she’s declared “waging a war on mediocrity on content marketing”. Ann was cited in Forbes as the most influential woman in social media and named by ForbesWoman as one of the Top 20 Women Bloggers.

Ann Handley is often referred to as a pioneer in digital marketing, as she co-founded ClickZ.com, which was one of the first mediums of interactive marketing and commentary. As for Ann’s off-work passions – we’d say it’s her kids, whom she calls “ridiculously amazing children”.

Ann’s Exclusive Tip

The omnichannel experience is everything.
	Ann handley
	Head of Content at MarketingProfs / @MarketingProfs

“The omnichannel experience is everything. In traditional marketing-speak, omnichannel means that we seek to give our customers a seamless and unified shopping experience across all channels.

Today omnichannel isn’t just a technology or shopping play. It’s more broadly the brand experience that a customer has with you across various platforms and channels, at every step of the way. It integrates technology, data, content, and communication across an organization in an effort to deliver a seamless experience to the customer or prospects.

When all those touch points are aligned, it’s a powerful thing. And when they aren’t, your customers and prospects end up feeling uneasy and disappointed at the mismatch between expectations and reality.

These are the three principles to create an aligned omnichannel experience:
1. Physical experience squared perfectly with the digital one.
2. Using voice and tone consistently across all channels and accounts to convey the brand.
3. Nail the bigger story – find the answers to your business’s whys. “

10. SEO Is Both Art and Science by Julie Joyce

Julie Joyce is a sweet fellow marketer, one that anybody would love to work with. Having previously benefitted from her wisdom, we are totally in love with her work and activity as a specialist in the field.

Julie is Owner and Director of Operations for the link-building company Link Fish Media Inc. and Co-founder of the SEO Chicks blog. After starting working in search marketing in 2002, she soon became Head of Search for a small IT firm.

She frequently contributes to Search Engine Land in the Link Week column, along with other note-worthy marketing publications, such as Search Marketing Gurus, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine People, and State of Search. She’s a pro at link building, SEO, SMM, technical project management, PPC, quality assurance testing, technical writing, and ASP programming. Therefore, reaching out to her to grow your buisness and empower your personal brand is the best step possible.

Julie’s Exclusive Tip

Without applying any preferential treatment, we loved her feedback manner the most. She seems very open and available when people ask for her opinion, and that is an asset. 

You have to look at the web as a human user and not just from a search engine point of view.
	julie Joyce
	Owner of Link Fish Media / @JulieJoyce

“I’ve always thought of SEO as being just as much art as it is science.

You have to look at the web as a human user and not just from a search engine point of view. You can get the rankings but that doesn’t always lead to conversions for various reasons. If you are relying solely on information that a computer system spits out, you’re ignoring that fact and leaving good opportunities on the table.

We have people who come to us and who ask for DA 50+ links, in any industry. They don’t care about relevance or traffic. They care about that number. We have clients who will turn down a relevant link on a new site that is getting a lot of social traction because the site doesn’t yet have a good DA. It’s very annoying to me when people can’t see beyond the numbers.”

11. Brand Management Should Be the Core of Marketing by Gabriela Lungu

Public relations veteran and creativity guru, Gabriela Lungu has it all: charms, skills, rich experience, proven results, and public recognition, in other words – she’s a marketing success and model.

Gabriela is a Romanian integrated creative leader, marketing and communications expert, consultant, trainer, speaker and facilitator. Previously a reporter, guest Creative Director at TBWA, CCO at Weber Shandwick, and Creative and Managing Director of Ogilvy PR, and CMO at Notino, Gabriela Lungu is now Founder at WINGS Creative Leadership Lab, a company focusing on working with high-potential creative people in the marketing and media industry while delivering a mix of consultancy, workshops and hands-on training on creativity and leadership.

Given her 20+ years of integrated experience in advertising, PR, digital and social media marketing, including 13 years of senior leadership, you’ll often find Gabriela speaking at international and local industry events. Her specialties are communications, marketing, and leadership, all seasoned with a handful of creativity, diversity, and inclusion.

Her track of proven records includes 150+ awards and nominations, including top international names such as Cannes Lions or Global SABRE. In addition, Gabriela was on the jury for some of the most important global competitions such as D&AD, Effie, SABRE, or Cannes Lions and activated as PR Jury Chair for Clio and Dubai Lynx.

Gabriela’s Exclusive Tip

Fascinated as we are by her expertise, we interviewed her too, and here’s what she told us:

Never forget that digital marketing is still marketing, and brand management should be at the core of it.
	Gabriela lungu
	Integrated Creative Leader / @GabrielaLungu

“Never forget that digital marketing is still marketing, and brand management should be at the core of it.

It’s easy to let ourselves excited by the immediate benefits of technology and data, and lose sight of building a long-term emotional bond with customers. No matter how good they are at using digital techniques, companies or products will always face bigger competitive threat and commoditization without a strong brand”. 

12. Nail a Sale by Getting Your customer Open Their Hearts by Marie Forleo

Often referred to as “the hurricane woman”, Marie Forleo is a marketing and lifestyle expert, bestselling author, motivational speaker, teacher, philanthropist, CEO at Marie Forleo International, her personal brand. Her energy seems to be evergreen and definitely contagious, and it looks like it came naturally for Marie to start educating and helping people become the person they most want to be. An unshakable optimist, she can’t help but inspire people on their way of making a difference and be their happiest, wisest, and most loving self. 

Marie Forleo is the host of MarieTV, a YouTube channel turned into a socially conscious digital empire that touches millions. Besides smashing the competition interviewing a whole array of cool marketing gurus and media influencers such as Sir Richard Branson, Seth Godin, and Oprah, she’s been also interviewed by Tonny Robbins and Oprah and has mentored young business owners at Richard Branson’s Centre of Entrepreneurship in South Africa.

Her website, marieforleo.com, is quite popular, reaching over 190k readers in 191 countries worldwide. A multi-passionate entrepreneur, she’s also leading dynamic training problems guiding individuals on their way to business and personal success. In addition, she’s the author of the bestselling book “Make Every Man Want You: How to Be So Irresistible You’ll Barely Keep from Dating Yourself!”.

Marie Forleo has always been insatiably curious about human potential. For as long as she can remember, Marie was in search of answers regarding what’s that thing that can make people happy, fulfilled and thriving, some succeeding achieving that against all odds. But people with questions as such can’t fit into a conventional box. And Marie refused to do it and set herself to not only get answers to her questions but also share them with and help others too. 

Marie’s Tip
 

Here’s an extract of Marie’s wisdom snipped from one of her MarieTV shows:

The best way to close a sale is by getting your customer to open their heart
	marie forleo
	Entrepreneur / @marieforleo

“I have a question for you: in life, all of us are always selling something, whether you sell a product or a service, or you work within a company, you gotta be selling something, but do you know what you’re really selling?

The fact is we’re rarely ever buying what we think we’re buying. So here’s an example: if I buy a necklace, what I’m thinking about is how that necklace is gonna help me express my own style [or other stuff]. So rather than just a piece of jewelry, I’m buying an expression of my style, I’m buying easy nights out, and I’m buying my future well-being.

Now, whether you sell with words, or images, or copywriting, or whatever, you’re gonna realize you’re gonna sell so much more and have your customers love their purchases if you can convey what they’re actually getting: the feelings, the benefits, the future memories. The best way to close a sale is by getting your customer to open their heart”.

13. You Have to Know Exactly What You Want by Adel de Meyer

This sweet and lively Aussie seems to have found the secret path to happiness. People working with her can easily see she’s an explosion of optimism, authenticity, and charm, both in writing, speaking and way of being. Adel de Meyer is a New Media Specialist, author, brand influencer, live streaming show host, mentor, and speaker. She’s also a contributor to The Next Web, Business2Community on influencer marketing, social media, and digital technology.

Adel de Meyer is an advocate for people’s need to be given a helping hand when willing to cut through the noise, rise above it and get heard. Being a true pro at social media magic, and also a solution-oriented problem solver, she often recorded series of podcasts with note-worthy marketing influencers, hosted online talks and worked with heavy names such as Madalyn Sklar, Peg Fitzgerald, and others. Thanks to her vast knowledge on using social media and technology, she easily captivates her audience’s attention and helps them grow their business.

You could easily say Adel is in a relationship with social media, which she wholeheartedly gives herself to. “I love my life being involved in this always changing world of Social Media because it brings me together with some of the most talented and ambitious people in multiple industries and all walks of life. What drives me in Social Media is the insatiable need to discover and push the boundaries of online interactions”, she confesses.

If you don’t take our word regarding her skill, maybe brands that trust her will make you give in: Adobe, Social Media Examiner, Hootsuite, Brand24, Hard Rock Hotel Group, Huawei, Cisco, Yelp, Marriott Group, and many others. If you dream big, work hard, overcome your limits, strive for excellence and always try to be better than before, you’ll have your life completely changed. No doubt. 

On a side note, Adel has passions many could relate to. She enjoys fashion and travel, tech, bubbles, coffee, and fine wines. Her inspiration derives also from nature, which she cares for deeply. She was born on Christmas Day and was the best present ever to her parents. Although an Aussi now, Adel was actually born in South Africa. 

Adel’s Exclusive Tip

You have to know exactly what you want to achieve, the problem you solve, and how you are going to communicate who you are to a global audience.
	Adel de meyer
	New Media Specialist / @AdeldMeyer

“These are my tips to have success with digital marketing: First of all, it starts with YOUR message, your target audience, and your passions. You have to know exactly what you want to achieve, the problem you solve, and how you are going to communicate who you are to a global audience. Then you need to establish a good brand identity, have a good professional website, and a well branded, active, and consistent social media profiles.

Clear CTAs, good landing pages, mobile optimization, and personalization is everything. Today’s buyer has more choices and options than they did years ago. So listen to them, because understanding their preferences and journey is vital. In addition, generating buzz helps with brand awareness, so that keeps your brand top of mind”.

14. Provide Your Audience with Quality Content by Lilach Bullock

Lilach is the go-to lead conversion expert if you want to step up your conversion game. Officially, she’s a digital marketing consultant and trainer, social media specialist, keynote speaker, and business owner at Lilach Bullock Limited. In a nutshell, she’s an exceptional and highly influential serial entrepreneur, and as a result, she was recognized as The Number 1 Digital Marketing Influencer by Career Experts, won the title of Social Influencer of Europe by  Oracle, and listed as one of the Top 20 Women Social Media Influencers.

Lilach Bullock is highly regarded on the world speaker circuit as the embodiment of Digital Intelligence, and renowned outlets, business publications and marketing magazines such as Forbes, the Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Prima Magazine, Social Media Today, BBC Radio 5 Live, the Guardian, and Wired feature her. Moreover, her books “Images that Influence”, “Twitter your Business”, and “Zero to Targeted Marketing: Talking To the Right People at the Right Time” have won the No.1 place on Amazon for Sales, Marketing, Small Businesses, and Entrepreneurship.

Given Lilach knows how much impact and many benefits social media can provide in launching a career and opening paths which otherwise would never have happened. Now she’s set to teach others the powers and nature of social media so that they’d grow their businesses, too.

She describes herself as an occasional diva and proud mum. When Lilach isn’t working, she loves spending time with her loved ones. In addition, she’s an avid fan of Zumba.

Lilach’s Exclusive Tip

Provide your audience with quality content on the platforms they prefer – this will help you attract more customers for your business.
	Lilach Bullock
	Lead Conversion Expert / @lilachbullock

“If I had to name one digital marketing technique that I recommend using, it would probably have to be content marketing – not only is it a highly effective lead generation tool, but it also helps with brand awareness, driving traffic, building trust, and nurturing leads; basically, all of the good stuff. 

It’s all about the quality – provide your audience with quality content on the platforms they prefer (blog, social media, and so on) and it will help you attract more customers for your business”.

Credits Anca Gavril

15. Video Is a Great Way to Connect with People by Madalyn Sklar

Ranked no.1 Houston Social Media Power Influencer and one of 50 Women Entrepreneurs to follow in 2017 by Huffington Post, Madalyn Sklar is already a social media hit. She’s very well known for her #TwitterSmarter podcasts where she’s interviewing leading social media and marketing experts in an active one-hour discussion mainly revolving around Twitter marketing. Besides hosting the Twitter Smarter chat on Thursdays, she’s also the anchorwoman for the SocialROI chat and co-host for the weekly Communities that Convert podcast with Kami Huyse.

Being a very passionate marketer and lively person, Madalyn’s motto is “Work smarter, not harder”. She wants to teach people the same strategy, help them get the desired results on social media, and make themselves heard on the social media channels. In a nutshell, Masalyn is a true community builder, smashing Twitter marketing expert, and authentic serial entrepreneur.

Madalyn’s Exclusive Tip

Madalyn is a pleasure to both talk and work with, and here’s the secret she disclosed to us about making your brand a success:

Video is a great way to connect with people because they can see you. They get to know you better in this medium.
	madalyn sklar
	Twitter Marketing Expert / @MadalynSklar

“My best digital marketing technique is video. I use video regularly on Twitter and Facebook. It’s a great medium for letting your community see that you are real and transparent. You can’t hide on video!

I host a weekly live stream video after my #TwitterSmarter and #SocialROI Twitter chats. I bring on the guest and we have a conversation that’s expanded from the Twitter chat. It’s what I like to call going beyond the 140 characters by using video.

I’ve become a big proponent of Twitter video, especially replying to tweets with a video. I started an initiative this summer called #VideoReplyDay where I encourage people to take time to reply to tweets with a video. It’s become a movement where a community was started by simply replying to tweets with a video. Video is a great way to connect with people because they can see you. They get to know you better in this medium”.

16. Be a Voracious Learner by Rebekah Radice

Listed one of the “Top 10 Social Media and Content Marketers” by Social Media Examiner and frequently featured on CBS, Onalytica, Social Media Examiner, GetApp, and Buzzsumo, Rebekah Radice is an award-winning marketer and strategist whose entrepreneurial roots, instincts and effervescent energy create a powerful magic blend for strategic business development and growth.

Rebekah is also an author, social media master, keynote speaker, CMO of Post Planner, digital marketing, and social media educator, and founder of Rebekah Radice Media and RadiantLA. Those who use Authority Matrix, the powerful personal brand building tool, should learn that she’s the creator. Many Fortune 500 leaders have used the tool and leveraged the employee influence and advocacy.

A true entrepreneur at heart, Rebekah the go-to person for those who learn the path to success and also the way they can multiply their successes. She’s able to utter that Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo magic spell that attracts leads and converts audiences and communities into clients. Her Social Success Academy training reveals her successful techniques, tools, and strategies for business growth. Her specialty is connecting online marketing with scalable business strategies to get the desired outcome and revenue.

In the early days, Rebekah Radice worked on morning radio, this helping her hone her skills at communicating, engaging, and reaching an audience. Now counting 20+ year marketing experience, she authored “Social Media Mastery: A Comprehensive Guide to Strategic Growth” and spoke to over 200 events including Social Media Marketing World, Inbound, and NATO International Summit.

Rebekah’s Exclusive Tip

No wonder we were quite hyped at the thought of getting a quote from her regarding the secret to digital marketing success:

Be a voracious learner.
	Rebekah Radice
	Digital Marketing Strategist / @RebekahRadice

“Be a voracious learner. Leaders are learners and the only way to stay ahead in the digital marketing world is to consistently innovate. And innovation comes from an open, clear, and creative mind. Make a commitment to add educational time to your calendar every day in 2018.”

17. Write Less and Write Better by Melissa Fach

Melissa Fach is a Community Manager at Pubcon and founder of SEOAware, blog editor at SEMrush and other publications, consultant writer, and keynote speaker at many marketing conferences. She decided to create the consultancy agency, SEO Aware, in 2008, after gaining experience, blogging and creating a name in the online marketing industry. Her substantial experience in community management, social media, and customer service led her to provide training on social policy setting for companies, social media management, and customer service via social.

She helps entrepreneurs and brands alike to create effective content based on well-grounded research, goals, and targeted audiences, all customized to their company’s needs and scope. It’s important to note that her creative marketing ideas come from reading people easily, understanding their wishes, and what triggers them to trust a company enough to buy.

Grand names fill Melissa’s previous experience and make her shine even more: Associate for Community and Editing Teams at Moz, Editor and Community Manager at AuthorityLabs, and Managing Editor at Search Engine Journal. Therefore her expertise is truly worthy of mention, given that she knows how to play with social media, content marketing, search engine optimization, blogging, community building, blog management, and website development.

When she’s not talking about work, she’d tell you she’s a cat slave (we feel her), Star Wars fan, non-cook person, and her hobbies are home decor and reviewing real estate.

Melissa’s Exclusive Tip

Focus on the outstanding. Write less and write better.
	melissa fach
	Social Media and Marketing Consultant / @SEOAware

“I would say one of the biggest problems I see right now and have for years, is fluff content as a whole in this industry. There seems to be very little focus on SEO, audiences, conversions, and how articles/content will be shared in different ways via social media platforms. All of these things should be figured out BEFORE you write anything. It is obvious when something was written strictly for an SEO goal; without value, this kind of content isn’t going to help you even if you rank well for it.

There is no reason to create content just so you have it. You have to plan each piece of content based on which audience(s) you want to reach, what goals you have for each piece of content, how you will use it in social to further your goals, and how you are hoping to rank. This takes a lot of time and effort, but it is better than wasting time and resources on content that brings nothing to your company. Without showing some kind of ROI for your work, your job becomes expendable.

And please run your content through Grammarly and/or the Hemingway App before publishing it. You can’t create trust and sound authoritative and professional without good writing and grammar.

My motto: Focus on the outstanding. Write less and write better.”

18. Listen to the Client and the Digital Environment by Jaitrali Jhanjharya

An all-time remarkable marketer, Jaitrali is a charming specialist and strategist with a name already built both nationally and internationally. She is  Digital Marketing professional with over 16+ years of experience in search engine marketing, digital marketing, movie, and entertainment marketing.

Recognized as one of the Top 10 Women in Indian Digital Media Industry and with an extensive know-how of digital and entertainment marketing, Jaitrali Jhanjharya definitely lives by her motto “I set my own goals. I am my own competition”. People who worked with her highly appreciated her for providing the right environment for genuine guidance, nurturing talent and addressing team development needs.

A passionate and noteworthy mentor, Jaitrali’s records encompass strategic planning, creative development, media planning and buying, interactive marketing, research, database/direct marketing, sales promotion, visual merchandising across leading Indian and global brands, and with rich experience in leading cross-functional teams.

Worthy to say that Jaitrali has exclusively invested in the Interactive and Digital space in the last 12 years. She is a passionate digital professional who fell in love with digital marketing, as she’s fascinated about how this industry is in constant evolution and change, day-by-day.

When she’s off work, Jaitrali indulges in listening to music and sipping that magic potion called coffee. Besides that, she feels that sarcasm flows naturally in her case, as it’s usually either white or black for her. She loves to be challenged and this is, again, a true reflection of her following her motto – given that battling with your competition means accepting challenges.

Jaitrali’s Exclusive Tip

Do not assume that just because a particular idea worked for a previous client, it will work wonders for someone else too. In the digital scenario, the landscape changes dramatically and sometimes drastically, therefore in both cases you have to listen to the client as well as the ever-evolving digital environment.
	Jaitrali Jhanjharya
	Digital Marketing Expert / @Jaitrali

“Listen and Don’t Assume – Most times when we meet a potential client for the first time or go and pitch to one on their turf, there is tons of white noise going on in our head. The prospect of adding this client to our list gives us both goosebumps as well as delusions of grandeur. So my tip here is to drop the daydreaming and put the horse before the car, and instead LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN, and with experience you will learn to pick out what’s important from what is said and left unsaid. Each brand has its own unique set of expectations and thus it requires a unique mix of solutions and platforms. Do not assume that just because a particular idea will work for an earlier client, it will work wonders for someone else too. In the digital scenario the landscape changes dramatically and sometimes drastically, and in both cases you have to listen to the client as well as the ever-evolving digital environment.

Be Kind and Realistic – Remember, if you are dealing directly with a client and not with his/her digital marketing team, you have to understand and accept that most clients may have the money and a vision but they will know precious little about what they want or what you can actually do for them. All they have is a dream, a hope which they want YOU to give a concrete shape to. So be patient, take it step by step and do not promise the world. The approach there must be to put a regular monitoring system in place and help the client assimilate and understand numeric and data. This will help create trust and consensus.

Content and Innovation Rule – As they always have and always will, we have come a long way from clicks to stickiness and developing OTT and VOD platforms across the globe. Today every person with a smartphone is a universe onto themselves and each one wishes to be chased and wooed. I’m sure I don’t emphasize that to chase and woo you need to be innovative and often create stories that engage and hook. Invest in your own storytelling skills and in developing this aspect amongst your teammates.

The Power Of The Written Word – Throughout my career, I have found the written word to be a very very powerful tool and that is why I cannot stress upon enough for every young and old practitioner of any school of thought or trade to `Put It Down In Writing’, take minutes of meetings, use a Dictaphone if you have to but please document everything. It helps keep professional relationships streamlined and simple.

Get Out, Get Real – Over the years I have realized that we as digital marketers and innovators spend more time surrounding ourselves with AI (Artificial Intelligence) rather than living breathing people who really are the cornerstone of everything we wish to achieve. So go out more often…if it’s the young you are after, then go to coffee shops and go-kart, if the business czars and czarinas are your target audience then socialize with them. Do what it takes to get out there…because the REAL is out there and this means success.”

19. Share Your Ideas by Dorie Clark

Dorie Clark is a perfect instance of the has-it-all marketer. Keynote speaker, marketing consultant, author, Harvard Business Review contributor, strategy consultant, and Business School professor, Dorie has worked with famous brand and companies such as Google, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Yale University, Fidelity, The World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. She’s a marketer and motivational speaker meant to help others take control of their professional lives and get themselves heard in the world. 

Dorie’s specialties are marketing, branding, strategy, media relations, management consulting, speaking, and management consulting. New York Times described her as an “expert at self-reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives” and that’s no wonder given her activity in the industry is grand. Her books “Entrepreneurial You”, “Reinventing You”; and “Stand Out” are widely known, having already been translated in many languages such as Russian, Arabic, French, Chinese, Korean, Polish, and Thai. Her 2015 book, “Stand Out”, was named No.1 Leadership Book of 2015 by Inc. magazine and one of the Top 10 Business Books of the Year by Forbes.

Clark writes her articles and studies on marketing, business strategy, and branding, often contributing to Forbes and Harvard Business Review publications. Having worked in the past as a journalist and presidential campaign spokesperson, and producer of multiple Grammy-winning jazz album, Dorie is a strong presence in the writing industry.

Besides that, she teaches for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, as well as Babson College Executive Education, Smith College Executive Education, IE Business School in Spain, HEC-Paris, and the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business.

Dorie’s Exclusive Tip

If you don’t share your ideas, no one will know if they’re any good.
	dorie clark
	Marketing Strategist & Speaker / @dorieclark

“Develop original content. One of the principles I teach in my Recognized Expert course is a simple but powerful one: if you don’t share your ideas, no one will know if they’re any good. If you want to make an impact beyond the handful of people you work with most closely, you’ll have to start writing and speaking about the ideas that animate you, and that you believe are worth spreading. Whether it’s blogging, podcasting, or sharing thoughts on your company’s internal social network, there are a variety of ways to get the conversation started and ensure your voice is heard”.

20. Pay Attention to Your Customer by Maia Novolan 

Maia Novolan was the one who laid the bases for mobile marketing in Romania back in the ’90s while launching the first interactive mobile apps used by the Media Pro Group in their marketing, search advertising, and social advertising strategies designed for the online audience. Having studied marketing and PR and graduating a Master’s Degree in Economics in Bucharest, today Maia has 15+ years of experience in the industry as an Interactive Marketing Strategist (mobile, online and digital signature.

Novolan is also the Managing Director of Syscom Digital, a noteworthy company on the Romanian digital marketing playground, one she founded in 2009. A good while, she’s been the only woman entrepreneur in the digital marketing world.

Maia’s Exclusive Tip

When asked for a digital marketing strategy worth sharing with other too, she told us so:

You can lose your brand advocate or user in the fraction of a second.
	Maia novolan
	Mobile Marketing Specialist / @MaiaNovolan

“Everything revolves around the customer. 

More than ever, digital marketing is about the consumer (user). You need to step up the game and be up-to-date, be more connected, interactive, and attractive. And this is because you can lose your brand advocate or user in the fraction of a second”.

So why women?

Interviewing people in the industry is our specialty. We love to hear digital marketing tips from renowned professionals and get better at what we do. And women marketers have always seemed to add finesse to this industry – they know how to fight and win, but also how to connect deeply and create art.

Marie Forleo, a true thought leader in the marketing world, said once:

I want to change how women think of and feel about marketing. It not only helps women get the results they want, but marketing brings out our best human attributes: true listening, compassion, honesty, and a spirit of service.
	MARIE Forleo
	Marketer & Host of MarieTV / @marieforleo

Should you have been in for some proper tasty treat, you have now dived deep into the freshest digital marketing tips ever, all coming from note-worthy professionals in the niche.

Truth be told, you’ve reached the Cornucopia of all digital marketing tips and magic spells out there and we’d recommend you make great use of it to boost your online presence and brand marketing.

Now, what female digital marketers inspire you and why? What’s that evergreen content marketing lesson you learned from them? 

The post Exclusive 20 Digital Marketing Tips from 20 Top Amazing Women Marketers appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

As we all know it, Google is not a fan of websites that don’t comply with quality guidelines and don’t offer the best user experience. So it may be that the structured data abuse to mark irrelevant content can potentially hurt your site. If you’ve been hit by a spammy structured markup penalty, you know what I’m talking about. If not, you’ll understand what you need to do in the following lines.  

All your questions will be answered today. You’ll find out how a spammy structured data looks like, how to remove and avoid a penalty and if there are any repercussions. 

It all started with a question on Google Webmaster Central office hours hangout. Plus, we’ve seen a lot of discussions many times before from people around the internet saying their structured data is removed from search engine results. You can find questions on Twitter, Reddit or social media in general, forums (including Google Webmaster Forum), blog post comments and so on. 

We decided to take the matter into our own hands and find out if there is such thing as spammy structured markup penalty, how to avoid it, and if it has any impact on rankings.

1. How Does Structured Data Work?
2. Does Spammy Structured Markup Penalty Really Exist?
3. What to Do If You’re Hit by a Structured Data Penalty?
4. How to Avoid a Spammy Structured Markup Penalty?
5. Will Structured Markup Action Kill My Rankings?

1. How Does Structured Data Work

Structured markup data is used by a website to make Google understand better the content on a page. Furthermore, it can improve the appearance of a page on search. The main purpose of the structured markup data is to offer an organized search experience to the user. Google Search also uses structured data to show rich result display, as you can see in the following screenshot.

Nonetheless, on Google Developers there is an explanatory note, saying that:

Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results, even if your page is marked up correctly according to the Structured Data Testing Tool. 

There is the situation where your rich snippets might not appear even if they are set up correctly. That happens because Google knows the users might not be interested in that information.

Nonetheless, every now and then there is someone who wants to exaggerate and take a lot of space in SERP with redundant information.  And that’s why we probably have so many Google guidelines. 

Basically, if you want to display rich snippets in Google, you need to observe the Structured Data Guidelines and your site needs to comply with the Webmaster Guidelines.

Google Developer is the place where you should find all the answers. There you have instructions, a list of all the featured snippets, errors, and guidelines. There are a lot of common causes of structured data manual actions. Let’s take into consideration the next examples of good practice and bad practice.

Spammy Structured Data Examples

Reviews are a widespread practice, maybe one of the most used rich snippets. If you search on Google for “best vacuums reviews” at some point will find this site:

At first sight, it doesn’t send a spammy signal, but if you take a second look at the reviews and the title tag, you’ll find out that there might be more products on the page. After you enter the site, you’ll find a list of vacuums. Each of them has a different set of 5-star rating.

That’s not making any sense. How are those five stars from the SERP calculated? At the bottom of the page there is some sort of an explanation box:

But in the end, what do the 5 star ratings in SERP exactly mean? Because the explanation box shows only 3/5 stars, not 5/5 as featured on Google. It abuses the rich snippets reviews, it is misleading, and it violates the Structured Data Guidelines.

The page mentioned above has a lot of bad snippets integration:

The first one is the fact that the site wrote those reviews (as you could see in the title – “We rated this vacuums”). Google explains very well that the reviews must come from customers or unpaid users and under no circumstances by the site.

Snippets must not be written or provided by the business or content provider unless they are genuine, independent, and unpaid editorial reviews.

Another one is the fact that the reviews need to be assigned for a single product/service, not for all of them. For example, “hotels in Madrid,” “summer dresses,” or “cake recipes” are not specific items. And of course “pet hair vacuums” is not very specific.

Provide review and/or rating information about a specific item, not about a category or a list of items.

Structured Data Testing Tool is the easiest way to view a result from your data and check if you set them right.

Groupon has some bad usage of markup data for a page with Amazon coupons. For example, if we use the testing tool, we can see that a link was marked instead of the name of the offer.

The guidelines assert very clearly that the name of the product has to be text, the name of the product itself, not the name of the company, the manufacturing, the description of URL.

Correct Structured Data Examples

After all these bad examples we deserve to see a good implementation of structured data markup as well.

Booking.com has good implementations for the accommodations. In the screenshot below, you can see that we’ve searched for a specific hotel, and it has 4 stars out of 5, the number of reviews and the price. 

If we look on TripAdvisor, we will see the same number of stars and reviews. For the price, TripAdvisor gives an average value based on the aggregator websites mentioned as partners.

2. Does Spammy Structured Markup Penalty Really Exist?

According to Google, spammy structured markup penalty exists. On Webmasters Forum there are a lot of people that received a message in Search Console; Manual actions saying that the website’s schema code is spammy and it violates Google’s quality guidelines.

In the screenshot below you can see an example of such a message:

In June 2017, Jonh Mueller talked about spammy structured markup penalty. See below the message he received in the hangout:

Recently, we’ve been hit with a penalty for spammy structured data and we’d like some advice so we can adhere to the guidelines going forward. The guidelines are a little fuzzy in this area, as most of our pages are service categories.

The viewer also mentioned that he tried to fix the problem using Google‘s guidelines and searched for advice from experts and agencies to get the penalty removed and featured snippets on SERP once again.

Some other thing he did was to look at other sites that have implemented the structured markup successfully. It confused him even more because some of these other sites seemed to be further away from the guidelines than him.

John Mueller’s recommendation for all topics regarding structured data was to ask help from the experts on Google Webmaster Forum. There are a lot of them with more experience regarding the policy for structured data. If there is somebody to offer some good piece of advice, it would be them, for sure.

He adds:

I wouldn’t look how other sites are implementing structured data. If you think they’re getting away with spammy structured markup, doesn’t mean you could do too. Rather think what you could do to comply with our policies.
	John Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google / @JohnMu

We searched for the user on Google Webmaster Forum after we identified his question in the hangout comments area on Google +. We saw his question on the forum and found what experts were suggesting.

The page he gave as an example with a spammy markup data is a list of multiple businesses (mechanics). As mentioned before, he violates the guidelines, and that’s probably why Google marked the review snippets as spammy.

An expert on the forum even gives him an example of good integration:

Create reviews snippets for a specific service provided by the business (mechanic in this case). You could mark up Service type and then you could nest LocalBusiness (AutoRepair) via the provider property.  

We’d recommend creating a dedicated page for each service and then mark up the reviews. It is very important to use product schema markup format with caution.

When using review markup, the main topic of the page needs to be about a specific product or service. You should absolutely not use review markup on a list of products/services, articles, a list of items, etc.

It might create a misleading or deceptive search experience to the user if the markup is not visible on the page. Here’s what Google says:

Marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that is outside Google’s structured data guidelines will bring you a Manual penalty.
	Google support

In case Google sees structured data doesn’t comply with the standard, then it reserves the right to take manual actions. As a result, Google has applied actions to the affected portions of your site, which may affect how your site is displayed in search results.

Actions that affect how your whole site is displayed are listed under Site-wide matches. Actions that affect how only part of your site is displayed are listed under Partial matches.
	Google support

3. What to Do If You’re Hit by a Structured Data Penalty

An ideal solution would be to have no manual webspam actions found on your site.

Yet, if you do have spammy markup data, you’ll most likely receive a manual penalty. In this case, there are some things you should know.

Firstly, look for a ray of light, keep your fingers crossed, knock on wood and carry real rabbits’ feet on your keychains.

Leaving the joke aside, the first thing you need to do is set up the markup on your site according to Google’s structured data guidelines.

After you check your markup to see if there are any errors or warnings, you need to fix them. Mostly the errors are about incorrect schema markup.

The process is relatively simple; it requires changing your markup data on the appropriate page, updating or deleting it if it’s not applicable. The final step is to submit a reconsideration request.

After that, you should wait for Google’s answer is. If you follow their recommendations, Google’s penalty should be removed.

It really depends on whether Google will show the rich content or not. Google doesn’t show all “rich cards” of all websites. It has to be relevant for the user and related to the search query.

Use a checklist to make sure you don’t forget any step for a well-structured data usage:

• Open the Manual Actions page in Google Search Console;
• Expand the Site-wide matches and Partial matches sections to see exactly where the problem is;
• Follow Google’s general quality guidelines and Google’s structured data guidelines;
• Check the most common causes of structured data manual actions to understand what you need to resolve;
• Fix the issue and republish the page;
• Submit a reconsideration request.
• Wait for results and follow the Manual Actions page for updates.

4. How to Avoid a Spammy Structured Markup Penalty

I know I’ve said it before but the easiest way to avoid a structured markup penalty would be to observe Google’s guidelines and stay off the spammy radar. But as we all know it this doesn’t happen all the time.

Another suggestion would be to test, test and once again test. Google Structured Data Testing Tool is the one and only help to determine the accuracy of your schema used on your site. Lastly, if you have a hint of a possible unnatural Schema markup send a message to Webmaster Central Help Forum and seek for guidance.

Some of the things you could do to avoid a spammy structured markup penalty are:

• Have relevant, engaging answer/result for user’s search queries;
• Use structured data for visible content only;
• Check and fix any warnings with Google’s testing tool;
• Use different markup for the pages within your website;
• Integrate mark up data for events only, not non-events (for example Last minute trip to Niagara Falls);
• Have reviews written by genuine customers or unpaid reviewers and not by the site or business.

5. Will Structured Markup Action Kill My Rankings?

Another hot topic regarding the spammy rich snippets is “ranking drops”. Is it for real? Does spammy structured markup kill Google rankings?

In the same hangout, I mentioned before, John Mueller said that, in most cases, the site’s ranking might not get affected by the loss of structured markup data.

His exact answer was:

In practice, if the structure data team takes action on a site it will get affected only the rich snippets. So, the spammy structured data doesn’t affect the rankings of a site. The rest of your site is still normally shown in search.
	JOHn Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google / @JohnMu

John explained in another hangout that Google turns off the rich snippets until they can be trusted again. The penalty won’t downgrade the site’s traffic.

Rich snippet themselves don’t give you ranking boosts. So it wouldn’t kind of make sense to demote a site in rankings if they are doing something wrong with rich snippets.
	JOHn Mueller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google / @JohnMu

HOWEVER, the tricky part is that losing the rich snippet might lead to losing traffic as well. 

A business owner said in the hangout that his site experienced 10% dip in search traffic because he lost the rich snippets.

Another example of a ranking loss after the manual action for spammy markup was discovered by two digital marketers, Daniel Rapoport Porat & Doron Wolffberg, and posted on YellowHead.

They said it all happened because of a wrong implementation of the markup data when they had no background about how to do it right. That’s how they got a manual penalty and left without the rich snippets. And they say that because of the penalty, the traffic suffered:

Source: yellowheadinc.com

After they resolved the issue and updated the code once with the help of users from Google’s forum, their traffic worked its way to the normal level, rising up from the dead. They had a beautiful penalty recovery.

Source: yellowheadinc.com

Is it a smoke gun or it is for real? For sure we should listen to what Google says and trust the rankings of a site won’t drop because of spammy structured data. This doesn’t mean that someday Google won’t change the statement.

Conclusion

Following our guidelines will help you avoid Google’s dance and have relevant answers in SERP for users’ search queries. If by mistake or by any chance you wanted to fool Google without being caught, expect not less than having rich snippets removed from SERP. If implemented correctly, Google’s rich snippets can improve the user experience on site, giving additional information, it can lower the bounce rate and sometimes improve conversion rates. 

The road to correctly used markup data is easy, but you have to do your work first. Read Google’s documentation, seek for guidance on the forum, if you have troubles implementing the schema.org. Follow Google’s guidelines and mark up the content correctly. Then wait for Google to read it and decide whether it will go live or not. 

The post Everything You Need to Know About Spammy Structured Markup Penalty appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Well… it’s because often times, unethical competitors prefer to blow in somebody else’s candle so that they can shine brighter. Instead of working more on their websites to improve user experience, some webmasters attack competitor sites with unnatural, spammy links, or even DDoS (Denial-of-service).

In search engines, this is referred to as negative SEO.

Grab your coffee and check out everything you need to know about negative SEO. 

1. What Is Negative SEO?
2. The Types of Negative SEO You Should Watch For
3. How to Prevent a Negative SEO Attack?
4. How to Know If You Have Been Attacked and What to Do in Case of Negative SEO Attack
5. What to Do in Case of Attack
6. How to Protect Your Online Reputation
7. Conclusion

What Is Negative SEO?

It’s a rarely discussed topic within webmaster and SEO professionals’ communities. I don’t think it should be that way, as negative SEO is a risk you should always prepare for, even before launching a website for your company.

A negative SEO attack implies a malicious attempt of another individual to harm your website rankings. It can be a competitor’s act but, at the same time, it can be an act of vengeance from someone who wants to harm you for other reasons.

Negative SEO attacks are basically Black Hat SEO techniques so obvious that Google has to penalize them. But it’s not done on your competitors’ website. It’s done on yours, so that you’re the one who gets penalized.

Thus, they try to push you out of the search engine ratings for important keywords, so that they can rank above you. Many times, your business relies on those keywords.

The tricky thing with these attacks is that they are very hard to differentiate from a classic black hat link building tactic. Even for Google. You could do black hat SEO, and then blame it on someone else. That’s why sometimes, even if innocent people disavow links, the penalty sticks.

At first, people would spam your site with porn or payday loan links, with keyword rich anchor texts. Today, tactics can be a lot more complex.

When can this happen? It may be happening right now or even after a few years of successful branding and website rankings.

The Types of Negative SEO You Should Watch For

Here are the most important types of attacks you should be aware of. You cannot take actions against negative SEO unless you know what to look for and how the attacker is trying to lower your page rank using unethical practices.

1. Off Page Negative SEO

A negative OffPage SEO attack means that the attacker tries to affect your website without directly interfering with it. It’s very popular and easy to do, as the attacker doesn’t have to be the website owner. Here are some of the most common negative SEO spam attacks we know of:

• Link farming – pointing low-quality links to your website. Sure, there will always be bad links to your page. There is no harm in that, it’s normal. However, you can be affected when somebody starts linking back from interconnected sites known as link building farms and keeps doing it constantly. As a rule, these links use a specific anchor which can be one of your most important keywords. Thus, they try to fool the search engines that, in fact, you are trying to manipulate rankings in search results. The anchor may also be a keyword that is not related to your website but instead, it may be harmful to it. For instance, the attacker may use „spammer” as an anchor and if successful, rank your page high in search engines for this specific word.

Below you can see an example of link farming from one of our clients who received more than 15,500 spammy links in just one month through a negative SEO campaign. In just a couple of month, Carvaka started to experience a drop in traffic and in rankings, going from the first page on the fifth page. 

• Search engines do not like duplicate content. Instead, websites that are proving to be informative and original rank higher in search results. Can this turn against you if someone tries to harm your overall ranking? Yes, it can, and it is not even complicated. The attacker has nothing more to do than copy – paste your website content all over the web, thus creating hundreds and thousands of duplicates up to the point search engines will start ignoring you.
• Forceful crawling. It’s important for Google bot to be able to access your website in order to index your pages and update your ranking constantly. However, if it is unable to crawl your website, you may have a problem and it is not a small one. Although rare, there are attacks that are trying to crash your website so that the bot will not be able to access it anymore.
• Fake social media profiles. A competitor or any other person, who might want to hurt you or your business, may also do it by means of social media. How? By creating fake social media profiles, maybe even under your own name and spreading false or hurtful information through them. Some of your customers or followers may be fooled by these false profiles and affect your business in many different ways, mostly negative.
  Example of attack: Robert Neu, owner and founder of wpbacon.com, a WordPress podcast website, discovered a farm link attack with the specific anchor text „porn movie” on his page.

As a consequence, he ranks higher now for these specific keywords than any other keywords that until recently were relevant to him.

2. On Page Negative SEO

Negative OnPage SEO attacks are more difficult to implement because they involve hacking your website and getting access to its administration panel. However, you should be aware that such attacks can occur at any time, especially if you are not updating your CMS regularly, thus leaving it vulnerable to external access through scripts and other hacking software. How such attacks can hurt your website and implicitly your business?

• They can modify your content: I’ve seen it many times, especially on websites powered by WordPress that were not updated for a few months or even years. Sometimes the hackers are running scripts from the “header” or “footer” templates while other times, they just post some articles that at a first look may appear as if they were published by a website administrator. You think you would notice if someone modifies your content? Well, in some cases it won’t be difficult at all. However, some attackers may disguise their content under different scripts in the HTML file such as “display: none”. In such cases, you will not know anything until it will be too late unless you look at the HTML code once in a while. It is very difficult to do so however, should you manage several websites that comprise thousands of templates and script files.
• They can get your website de-indexed: How? By changing your robots.txt file from the server. Not everyone can do it but if they are committed to harming you, they might hire a professional hacker to exploit vulnerabilities from your hosting and/or content management system.
• Complete hacking of the website: We’ve all seen at least a couple of hacked websites. Usually, an attack of this sort completely replaces your website with another web page that may contain a message, some visuals or nothing at all.

How to Prevent a Negative SEO Attack?

Sometimes, attacks appear out of nowhere and you can be a victim, regardless of how prepared you are. However, it’s better to be prepared just in case, because this way you can reduce the chances of being hacked or attacked to a minimum. Here’s a list of the most important steps you can undertake towards security:

1. Stay up to date: Consult with specialists, read the news, stay connected to a few web masters’ online communities. Knowledge is power. You don’t need to learn to be a coder or a hacker but instead, to have at least basic information about how you can be attacked and what to do in such a case.

2. Secure access to your website: Start with your hosting. Limit access to your files. Then, secure the admin section of your website. Use passwords and usernames that are impossible to guess by others and change passwords from time to time just to make sure they are not discovered, guessed or leaked by your employees. Also, if you are using WordPress, change the default database prefix “wp_” with a random prefix, so that it will be harder or even impossible to guess by someone from the outside. Finally, if you are working with remote located personnel, never send them login access details by email because mail boxes may also be hacked.

3. Update your content management system regularly: WordPress and other popular CMSs are constantly updated in order to correct bugs and vulnerabilities and prevent exploits and hacks. If you are running a customs content management system, it will probably cost you to make updates whenever a vulnerability is found but they are money well spent. The costs of recovery from a negative SEO attack on your website are exponentially higher. Also, if you are using plugins with your CMS, update them as well and try to limit their use to just a few. Verify the sources of these plugins and only install scripts compiled by trusted companies.

4. Check your network security regularly: All the computers from your office may be vulnerable to attacks if they are not properly updated and checked from time to time. They are all important but you should treat with special care the computers that have direct access to your server and the website’s scripts. Check for malware all the computers that will be part of your office network before they are connected for the first time and then regularly, along with the other devices. Also, use an encrypted SSL protocol for your website.

5. Check if your site is properly indexed: Check your rank from time to time with tools such as Rank Tracker that can be programmed to verify your website regularly. You should be concerned if your website suddenly drops from the search engines’ results. If it happens every time you check, you may have a problem.

6. Check your site’s loading speed: If you notice that your website has become suddenly slow and the loading time has increased despite the fact that you didn’t install any new plugins, contact your hosting provider. Even if the problem is not related to the hosting services, they may be able to tell you why this is happening, where the problem is located and so on. Sometimes, it may be quite hard to check every file from the server but if you know where to look, you might find a malicious script – if such a script exists – way quicker.

7. Verify for duplicate content: Use tools such as Copyscape and determine whether or not you have been a victim of a negative SEO attack of this sort. In some cases, the removal of the copied article will be enough. However, if you want to be thorough, you may need to contact Google and file a copyright infringement report.

The report is available in Google’s webmaster tools and you can access it here.

8. Monitor your link profile growth: Verify how many websites link back to your website, how the back linking grows and the number of referring domains. If the backlinks are suddenly starting to grow exponentially, verify if they are legit or not and take immediate action in case you are suspicious. If you do not pay attention and let an attack to take its course, it may be too late to take action once the damage is already done.

9. Limit file uploads to only the necessary files: This is a major concern. If you have the possibility, prevent direct access to your system root and to uploaded files. Set up an upload folders outside your root directory and create scripts to get access to them to the website or to your users. Some web hosts will help you in this matter. If not, talk to your webmaster for support.

10. Don’t let the search engine index your admin pages: Also, make sure your administration panel and its adjacent pages are not indexed by the Google bot or other search engines’ bots. Apply the required settings in your robots.txt file. If you don’t know how to do it, ask a webmaster to do it instead. When the admin pages are not indexed, it will be harder for hackers to find them.

This will only be possible with a custom CMS however, as WordPress, Joomla and other free CMSs available today have specific addresses to their admin panel.

11. Make regular backups: It’s easier to just re-upload a database in case an attacker hacked your blog than delete all their posts manually. Also, if some scripts were installed in your files, it’s better to have your original files at hand, to replace the affected files or to compare the codes. Backups will also be helpful in case an update breaks the site.

12. Monitor your backlinks: You will get regular updates on your website profile, the websites that are linking back to you and, at the same time, the status of your competition. With the cognitiveSEO Tool you can set up alerts for new links and know exactly when an attack starts and how big it is.

How to Know If You’ve Been Attacked and What to Do in Case of Negative SEO Attack

One of the biggest problem you may face when dealing with negative SEO attacks is that most of the times, when they are noticed, it is already too late to repair the damage immediately. Usually, a company or a webmaster becomes aware of such attack after being punished by a search engine or after a significant drop in organic traffic. However, there are a few things you should look for and act immediately after you are aware of them. Here’s a list of the most reliable signs of a negative SEO attack:

1. You notice a suspect number of unrelated links coming from unreliable or unrelated sources. For instance, if you have a SEO related blog in English and get hundreds if not thousands of links from gaming, porn and other unrelated websites, mostly not even in your own language.
2. Significant web traffic changes. I am referring, of course, to lower organic traffic rates and not sudden increases which can happen due to a influencer pointing a link to your site.
3. Sudden changes in your website’s usability. The loading times for each page increase.

What to Do in Case of Attack?

Well, prevention has been the best cure known to mankind since the dawn of civilization. I have already talked about this topic in the previous chapter so I am only going to state here some important tips you should follow after a negative SEO attack:

Use Google Webmaster Tools: Register your website and use the tools regularly to monitor your links. You will know immediately if your site was hacked, penalized or infected.

Disavow links: Matt Cutts and John Mueller recommend the Disavow Tool. Fortunately, Google has made things simple for webmasters who are suspicious about back links to their websites. You can use this tool available in Webmaster Tools in order to disavow all the links you find and seem to be unnatural for your website. As long as you do it in time, you will not face major problems. However, you can do it also after you become aware of a negative SEO attack. If you do get penalized before you manage to disavow the bad links, the reconsideration request can take longer, especially if it was a manual penalty. The cognitiveSEO tool can help you quickly generate disavow files that can be easily uploaded to Google.

Commit to Protecting Your Online Reputation

The easiest way to protect yourself or your business from negative SEO attacks is to continuously work on your online reputation. What does this mean?

1. Register your name or brand as a domain: In other words, if you want to build a personal brand, buy the domain that is closest to your full name. Do the same thing if you want to protect a brand or a business. Thus, you will prevent other people from stealing this important property from you.
2. Create social media profiles on all social media platforms: Even if you are not a regular user on a specific platform, it’s better to register an account in your name or brand in order to prevent others from doing the exact same thing. Post regularly on some of the most engaging social media communities for your industry.
3. Encourage online reviews: People trust other people’s inputs about specific products, services or website. Therefore, the more reviews you have, the smaller the chance to be put down by an attack. Sure, they can do some damage but the reviews will still be there after an attack and you can use them in order to reclaim your position and not lose many customers.
4. Invest time in a content marketing strategy: The greater your online influence in a specific industry, the easier it will be to recover from attacks and make a great name of yourself and your company. Content marketing attracts more followers, more customers and more relevant backlinks to your website.
5. Create a powerful brand: The more powerful your brand is, the harder it will be for someone to destroy it. Start with your logo and continue by creating great visuals for your website and social media profiles. There are several professional tools available online that will help you design your logos and banners such as Bannersnack.

Use it to start building your brand. Then, take care of your content which should be at the same time valuable and professionally written. Don’t neglect your customers and fans, maintain all lines of communication open and make sure every single question they ask gets answered as soon as possible.

Conclusion

There are many ways in which someone can negatively affect your search engine rankings and even hack your website for the same purpose. We’ve learned a few things about negative SEO throughout this article and hopefully, we all know how to avoid such attacks or at least what to do afterwards. Awareness is the key and knowledge gives you power.

Stay up to date with everything that happens and check your website regularly and I am sure you will keep your website and your brand safe from the outside influence.

What do you know about negative SEO attacks? Were you attacked by competitors in this way? How did you managed to restore your rankings and maybe, your credibility? Please tell me more of your related experiences in the comments section available below. I am more than eager to learn more about this topic and I am sure our readers are searching for new data as well.

About the author:

Robert Katai is a visual marketer, blogger and content strategist at Bannersnack. He is also a professional banner creation app for designers & marketers and passionate about visual marketing, Instagram, content marketing. He is always up-to-date with the latest trends.

The post How Negative SEO Affects Your Brand & What To Do If You Get Attacked appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

It is not science per se. It is just sweat, practice and A/B testing based on your data and real data examples. Startups fail at SEO because they aren’t prepared or do other rookie mistakes, but in the next few minutes you’ll find out how to steer away from them.

Failing can give you a real sense of what works out for you and what doesn’t. Startups fail because they take the wrong approach, don’t know their audience or overlook making a market research, bringing a product to an oversaturated market and so on.

Discover all the reasons why startups fail at SEO. Learn from the others’ experience. Find out the best examples of startups SEO failures and find out how you can get better from today’s article. In addition, learn what makes a startup successful.

It’s filled with peppery examples, appealing explanations, and strong SEO solutions.

1. Selling to the Wrong Customers Profile Will Kill Your Startup
2. Believe SEO Is Just a One Time Thing Will Make You Lose 92% of Your Audience
3. Not Scaling Your Results Gets You Only 50% of Your Goals
4. Ungrounded Overconfidence Will Leave You Stuck in the Pivot Phase
5. Not Knowing Your Target Will Bring Higher Costs and Fewer Users
6. Choosing an SEO Company That Will Rank You First in One Week Will Tank Your Ranks Definitively
7. Having a Slow Loading Website with Bad User Experience Can Decrease Conversions by 100%
8. Targeting Misleading Keywords Will Bring Zero Traffic to Your Website
9. Not Using Marketing Tools Won’t Bring You SEO Opportunities
10. Using Old School SEO Techniques Will Get You a Google Penalty
11. Building Low-Quality Links Gets You 25% Search Visibility Fall
12. Over-Optimizing Anchor Texts Sends an Alarm Signal to Google 
13. Not Adapting Your SEO Strategy to the Evolving Industry Will Crash You
14. Having Unrealistic Timeframe and Budget Means Game Over
15. Poor Content Investment Makes You Lose More Than 67% Leads
16. Writing Low-Quality Content for Another Purpose Won’t Bring You Any Leads

1. Selling to the Wrong Customers Profile Will Kill Your Startup

One of the major reasons why startups fail is selling to the wrong customers. It all comes to your audience. You’ll never have to bleed out customers.

Your audience must be on the top of the list. They are the ones who will use your product or services. Your business should revolve around them.

There are a lot of startups that don’t know their audience, which their purchase flow is, their interests or other behavioral characteristics.

It’s exactly like when you would like to invite some friends to dinner but don’t know their preferences. Do they eat pork? Does anyone have food allergies? Does anyone eat vegan food? You need to know this information before you start preparing the meal.

Calxeda, the company that started to provide computers based on the ARM architecture for server computers, had a problem regarding their audience. They moved faster than their customers could move, having problems getting in line with their level of knowledge. They started acting faster than their customers’ understanding.

We moved with tech that wasn’t really ready for them – ie, with 32-bit when they wanted 64-bit. We moved when the operating-system environment was still being fleshed out – [Ubuntu Linux maker] Canonical is all right, but where is Red Hat?
	Calxeda testimony

Wrong customers don’t see value and they won’t come to your site and eventually won’t buy. If you focus too much on the best channels to reach your targets you won’t succeed either.

Selling to the wrong customers will kill your startup.

The mistake startups do is focusing on channels rather than target customers. They start their marketing backwards: Channels > Segmentation > Customer > Message.

What Is the SEO Solution For Not Targeting Your Customer Profile?

To improve your chances of success you need to start your online strategy in reverse.  

Start with the customer, make a profile for your buying personas, then continue with the segmentation process, create the message and select the right channels. If you defined your customers’ profile, but the channel you reach out to them is not the right one, you’ll lose them.

When you finish those steps you will be prepared, you’ll understand your customers. You’ll speak the same language. But your job is not done yet. You have to set the right goals.  

Follow the targeted social profile. Let’s say your customers are mainly on Twitter and your social activity takes place on Facebook. You should be where your users are.

For example, Get Vero’s social media strategy focuses more on Twitter. You can see in the next screenshot that their articles get more shares on Twitter. That is the secret: become famous through what you write about way ahead of who you are.

Multi-channel promotion is also an option. But stick to 3-5 social accounts. Adapt your message to each channel.

Another thing you could do is ask for feedback from your prospects. Spend enough time talking with customers to find out how you can improve your business.

2. Believe SEO Is Just a One Time Thing Will Make You Lose 92% of Your Audience

Believing SEO is just a one-time thing is a definitive reason for failure.

Don’t set and forget. This a vicious mindset for every goal you make. Set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely) objectives and then follow their evolution, take a decision based on them.

Always have continuity for everything you do. Never let things unfinished because you’ll not evolve. That is a mistake that even older firms do.

SEO is what you do to push your website on the search engines. If you’re not there, you don’t exist.

There was a saying: The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search results. Lots of studies say only 8% of searchers end up on the second page of Google. More than that, the total of average click-through rate for top 10 queries is 208%, meaning users click more than twice on the first result page.

What Is the SEO Solution For Not Having Continuous Monitoring?

It is important to make an SEO strategy you have to follow. If you don’t have the knowledge for it, hire or collaborate with a trustworthy party. Make an SEO audit and invest (time, money) in SEO because you need to make it to the first page.

Use audit tools such Site Explorer for a quick analysis. If you want something more complex use cognitiveSEO or call a hard working Pro.

Make a blog, where you post new and qualitative content on a weekly basis or a period of your own.

Take, for example, the help desk software GrooveHQ, that has created a link profile in the tech and business industry using mostly blogs. Another great thing they did was to build anchor text that is extremely specific besides the branded ones.

Their accurate way of building online presence helped the startup to develop a steady and valuable growth.

Groove HQ has an excellent content strategy because they worked to offer catchy content, grab bloggers’ attention and have a great social strategy in place. It was the safest SEO strategy to ensure nothing came back to haunt them.

3. Not Scaling Your Results Gets You Only 50% of Your Goals

Not keeping track or results of poor accountability is another SEO startups fail.

Pursuit results in every goal you make. Results must be measured no matter what. Otherwise, you can’t learn anything. Make sure you mark your key milestones. During your product development process, you have to establish which are the most significant points. 

If you don’t do that you’ll never know how much you’ve invested and you won’t be able to make a comparison with the outcome. Eventually, you’ll lose focus and this will kill your startup.

The postmortem company MyFavorites has a story you should learn from. The initial idea of MyFavorites was showing and telling your favorites, but in the end that was all: an idea.

Steve Poland, the founder of postmortem MyFavorites said:

When we came back from SXSW, we all started losing interest, the team was all wondering where this was eventually going, and I was wondering if I even wanted to run a startup, have investors, have the responsibility of employees and answering to a board of investors, etc.
	Steve Poland
	Currently the Managing Director of Z80 Labs / @popo

And he didn’t go on with it.

A successful entrepreneur will set aims, test hypotheses and evaluate the results.

An SEO plan can include lots of activities that you need to break into tasks, set a timeframe for and organize. This way you can have a bigger picture.

What Is the SEO Solution For Not Scaling Your Results?

A clearly defined road map, with tasks assigned to specific team members, can consolidate and enhance your SEO strategy. There are lots of tools for that: Meistertask, Trello, Blossom and much more.

Use tools such as Google Search Console, cognitiveSEO, Google Analytics for tracking data and your SEO activity.

Setting goals in Analytics and Google Adwords can help you see if the strategy and SEO campaign you’ve conducted is the right one to fulfill the target.

4. Ungrounded Overconfidence Will Leave You Stuck in the Pivot Phase

An SEO expert /consultant’s job is to understand the role of the clients, to deliver what has been promised and to educate them in terms of what SEO can and can’t do for their business.  

Not being able to see the bigger picture is another startup SEO failure. Usually, this happens if the entrepreneur is overconfident in his knowledge but doesn’t know SEO. And it can easily turn into arrogance and therefore another startup fail, even if you have the best business plan of all.

If you may, please learn from other mistakes. Keith Nowak, the founder of what had to be Imercive, a social media marketing company that provided branded instant messaging applications, says on this site:

We were caught mid-pivot – half way between a strategy we knew wouldn’t work and one which we believed could be successful but was not able to be aggressively pursued.
	Keith Nowak
	Founder and CEO of Ten Thousand / @keithbnowak

He continued with the explanation about his postmortem Imercive experience, saying:

We were extremely frustrated at not being able to properly go after our new strategy and every day that passed without meaningful progress was one step closer to the failure of my first company. Even though we put everything we had into getting through this phase we were never able to make it through the pivot.
	KEITH NOWAK
	Founder and CEO of Ten Thousand / @keithbnowak

What Is the SEO Solution For Ungrounded Overconfidence?

Work on your weakness or collaborate with somebody who sees the bigger picture. A good couple can make a “big picture” person and somebody who’s detail-oriented. Find out who you are and start working on your approach so you can fulfill the plans.

Look for trends using Google Trends or search for news in your industry, subscribe to feeds to get the freshest insights.

Use BrandMentions to get notifications with different mentions you’ve set up so you can be aware of what your competitors or other companies are doing.

Listen to Google Webmaster Central and Hangouts to hear news, get new features insights and find out what other changes happen inside Google. Or search for summaries with the most intriguing SEO facts exposed on Google Webmaster Hangouts.

5. Not Knowing Your Target Will Bring Higher Costs and Fewer Users

Not segmenting your SEO efforts to target customers with the highest potential Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is another reason why startups fail at SEO.

Don’t conduct link building techniques on sites with thin content such a web directories of all sorts of websites that have a list with links. Don’t try and build links on all kind of sites that are not related to your industry or sites that are too general.

The wider the audience, the larger the SEO costs of attracting them on your website.

The sad and real fact is that many startups assume which their target is. You wouldn’t believe, but some startups think that because they are developing the next app, all the smartphone users are in their target.

They couldn’t be more wrong. There are so many different types of smartphone users that you can’t count them even using your both hands.

As Mayank Jain writes in TalentPad’s post-mortem:

We failed because of our inability to figure out a scalable solution, which addresses a large enough market in India. One of the things that our entire team has been passionate about is making a big impact to a wide-ranging audience. We could not figure out a way to achieve that.
	Mayank Jain
	Tech Entrepreneur / @jainmayank_943

TalentPad was a marketplace for technology recruitment.

What Is the SEO Solution For Not Knowing Your Target?

Create a name for yourself. Start building a reputation and create awareness around your name and your business. Make a connection between them.

You can start by creating relevant content to your niche and write on websites that are newsworthy and have lots of viewers. This means to go narrow and deep. Work on from there.

After that bring them to your blog. Here, create content and share it on other platforms such as Inbound.org, GrowthHackers, Medium.

I bet that there are many other tools and platforms you could use to get the word out, but that it’s up to you to find them since they are targeted by the industry or type of activity.

More than that, you can appeal to amplification techniques to reach a wider audience and multiply your links by hundreds.

6. Choosing an SEO Company That Will Rank You First in One Week Will Tank Your Ranks Definitively

Among the reasons why SEO fails might be because you collaborated with cheap SEO “consultants”.

How many times did you hear a cheap SEO freelancer performed black hat SEO and poor link building on a website?

How many sites did you hear complaining about the fact they got penalized for this? Make sure you don’t do these kinds of mistakes.

Just a few days ago we had a client who was saying he was struggling to clean his site of a bad vicious collaboration in the past.

The company used a cheap “specialist” to do SEO and made a mess on the previously good SERP with a terrible and absolutely dreadful link farm.

Being new in the business and needing to do SEO so that people will find you in Google is hard.

What Is the SEO Solution For Choosing Shady Companies?

You have a lot of options for this SEO failure. Have a well-structured approach before you contact somebody. Learn a few SEO basics to understand what you have to do next. Do your homework and be prepared. Take your time for a thorough job. Acknowledge one or more of the next solutions:

• Start looking for trustworthy references.
• Analyze the payment method: never work with SEO consultants that put a price on a link. For example, the cost per link e 1 euro, etc.
• Look at their portfolio, if they have any or ask for one.
• Ask for an SEO plan. See if it is transparent. A renowned expert won’t disclosed his tactics in detail but for sure will tell you which strategies to follow so they can fulfill your goals within a timeframe.
• Look for references. They shouldn’t have a negative image on the internet.
• Ask for a list of past clients. Vanessa Fox, author of Marketing in the Age of Google says a reputable SEO consultant shouldn’t be afraid to show a brief list of his clients.
• Test them by using tricky questions. For example, ask them whether they can bring you on the first position in Google. If they says yes, you should run and never look back. It is impossible to guarantee a number one in any search engine. 
• Make sure you establish a way to communicate with each other in a way that fits you both.

Besides all the solutions above, you need to keep track of the evolution of your website. To do that, use Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools or other tools mentioned before.

When you finish the collaboration, you should have ownership of all the optimized content you paid for.

7. Having a Slow Loading Website with Bad User Experience Can Decrease Conversions By 100% 

Another internal reason why companies fail at SEO is the fact they don’t have a good website. A good website means a good structure, a fresh design, a natural user flow, fast loading speed time, a non-spammy looking with all kinds of ads, scalable font. Pay attention to the technical SEO elements. 

Having a slow website speed could drastically decrease conversions. Dom Perignon Champagne made this mistake by compromising content for an appealing website design. Studies showed that if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, the customer will forget about your page.

Their web design was a big failure since you had to wait more than 40 seconds for the website to load the first time, 38 seconds the second time. And then the page was so crowded with vague options, showing a lack of good site architecture. This is a big NO NO!

Source: onboardly.com

What Is the SEO Solution For Slow Loading Websites?

Don’t bring any revolutionary changes because you think it would look good. Don’t change the natural flow and the habits people have. An architecture that changes the customer journey can mess up all the SEO efforts.

Look at your competitors and understand what their site architecture is and look for patterns. Work from there to build a better website.

Do your research and think like a client, not like a business owner. For this job you also need a good UX designer. He will have a professional look and he will understand the users better.

Matthias Metternich, co-founder of Believe.in, an online fundraising service for charities, says it better in an online interview:

Good advice is generally relative, but our tip is to look beneath the surface and beyond the interface, through to the problems that pervade the systems we lean on day in and day out. True disruption happens on a systemic level – after which ingenious interfaces and design make simple, elegant and beautiful what were complex problems that few ventured to solve.
	Matthias Metternich
	Matthias Metternich / @MMetternich

You can improve your website by applying a few changes to your slow loading landing pages:

• Use Schema markups to structure the data on the website. Schema.org helps you to organize the website like a few maps so that Google understands better how your website works.
• Create internal linking for a qualitative on-page search engine optimization.
• Keep a short and friendly URL structure.
• Use redirects for broken pages.
• Use breadcrumbs to help with navigation.

8. Targeting Misleading Keywords Will Bring Zero Traffic to Your Website

One of the many reasons startups fail at SEO is the use of the wrong keywords. Choosing the best keywords can be an exhausting job especially if you don’t know that much about SEO or you are in a highly popular niche. Use a keyword research tool for suggestions.

Be careful whether you chose short or long tail keywords. Look at the keyword difficulty, and chose those that have low competition, are easy to achieve and don’t have huge search volumes.

Use the language of your audience. There is a difference between table linen and other table cloths. 

There are differences between different geographic locations. If your business focuses on local targeting, then your SEO strategy should be based on local keyword targeting.

It shows in a way when you’re searching for best SEO tool in www.google.ca and www.google.com. Google is giving a lot of emphasis to the local SEO. So this is another important aspect you should take into account.

Another mistake is to make a bad choice of word order. Let’s say you offer transfer services from and to the airport in New York. You must be very careful with your choice of word position. Otherwise, you could mislead the reader and create misunderstandings.

From the example above you can see that the “auto service new york” is not really a happy choice. It can be misinterpreted with car services in New York, as you can see from the suggestions list Keyword Planner tool gives.

If you really want to use this keyword, optimize your content for multiple keywords or the content that it isn’t important in generating revenue.  

What Is the SEO Solution For Misleading Keywords?

Use Keywords Planner to get the best fitting keyword match. Look for long-tail keywords to get near the first 10 positions. Don’t be too specific, though.

One of the best tactics is to do keyword research to boost organic traffic on your website.

The next thing you should do is choose the topic, write about it and place the keyword phrases naturally within the same word-field. Use related keywords — Google uses LSI — Latent Semantic Indexing, a natural language processing that determines the relationship between terms and concepts in content.

Try Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions or Ubersuggest for that keyword ideas.

Search for the targeted keyword and Google will show you suggestions as you can see in the next screenshot:

You’ll see an extended list at the end of the page:

You shouldn’t neglect localization in SERPs so you won’t miss on local search opportunities.

Next, go through all the steps regarding the on-site SEO optimization: place the keyword in the title tags, meta description, image alt descriptions, URL structure.

9. Not Using Marketing Tools Won’t Bring You SEO Opportunities

Not using marketing tools is another SEO fail experienced by startups. It is a known fact that the marketing tools can be a lot of help in the first phase of starting a business.

Digital marketing tools can help you achieve your goals in your marketing strategy. The right instruments are real assets to get ahead of your competitors.

If you don’t use them, you won’t be able to see the results you’re anticipating.

Using tools is a good start because if you’re new they can lead you the way and you need support.

Not using marketing tools is like driving an old car blindfolded on the highway.

If you want your SEO effort to succeed you have to use tools. At least the standard ones: Google Analytics, Google MyBusiness, Search Console.

What Is the SEO Solution For the Lack of Marketing Tools?

Search for tools that have been tested and used by others. You can search for experts to see what are they using and get insights.

Feedly created a list of specialists and their best choice for tools and platforms on a certain topic such as marketing, social media marketing, search marketing, inbound marketing, brand marketing, content marketing, SMB marketing. This is just an example. I bet you can find many others.

Siftery is a specialized site that shows you the products that are most recommended by other companies like yours.

You have to log in and see for each company the list of products they use for everything they do.

Here you can see alternatives for each product and the list of users that use a specific tool.

AlternativeTo is an example of a platform you could use to find alternatives to different websites, tools, and products.

Find new websites launches on Product Hunt to be up to date with everything that’s going on.

If you want to find specific companies and people Crunchbase is a powerful choice. You can find valuable information from each search.

10.Using Old School SEO Techniques Will Get You a Google Penalty

Ever heard of black hat SEO? Stay away. There are many ways to damage your website if you follow that.

Using outdated techniques is an SEO startup failure. I can understand that being new into the business you can fall into taking all kind of shortcuts just to get higher and faster on the first page of Google.

Expedia experienced a visibility drop from 773,776 to a low of 551,548 after they created a WordPress theme with a keyword rich footer, which is a 2008 – 2009 SEO technique, now counted as an unnatural link building technique.

Mediaup, a web design agency from Germany, got hit by Google’s algorithms because of an unnatural link profile. 

As you can see in the picture above, they’ve encountered a big drop in rankings.

Based on this information gathered from the cognitiveSEO tool, it’s no big surprise that more than three-quarters of all links were low quality or have no authority.

What Is the SEO Solution For Old School Techniques?

To recover their ranking, they started reviewing their backlinks to see how many were unnatural or suspect.

They classified their anchor text to see how many were brand, commercial and misc.

After a thorough link analysis, they disavowed the bad links and sent the file to Google.

If you don’t want to be in the position when all the damage had been made, you should be careful what technique you are applying to your business. It is better to prevent than to correct.

Stay on top of the game. Use a mentioning tool such as BrandMentions to receive notifications for your topic of interest. Read the latest news from the industry.

11. Building Low-Quality Links Gets You 25% Search Visibility Fall

A low-quality link uses link schemes techniques, which include:

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

In 2014, Expedia experienced a decrease of 25% search visibility after building low-quality links using link schemes. This came up with a manual penalty from Google.  

At first, experts thought it was a negative SEO attack, but after a thorough research, it appeared to be exactly the opposite. Their link profile was loaded with links on private blog networks, sponsored low-quality articles, and WordPress Themes with a hidden link to www.expedia.com etc.

Their spammy campaign was based on old school SEO techniques such as using black text on a black background as you can see in the picture below:

source: cdn.linkresearchtools.com

Another example of a startup that experienced a drop in search visibility because of toxic links is Houzz.com. Houzz is a website that gives information about architecture, interior design and decorating, landscape design to help you achieve home improvement.

They did a thorough analysis of the website, first looking at the period when they had the drop on multiples traffic analysis websites, then trying to see if it was negativ SEO attack. After that they preview all the links to see how bad the situation was.

They had “4 waves of toxic links” mostly from third parties. They received lots of low quality links, on spammy websites from China with a high amount of keyword-rich anchor texts and an aggresive keywords strategy amongst lots of other issues.

I guess the team has resolved their issue and they are trying to get the search visibility they had back. They experienced almost 36% drop in search rankings and now they have a stady evolution.

What Is the SEO Solution For Low-Quality Links?

First of all, build links in compliance with Google’s Quality Guidelines. There are other significant aspects you should have on the top of your mind:

1. Build links on influential domains. Having a natural link profile link means to have a higher distribution of links with no influence because the internet has a larger number of websites with low domain authority. Take the example below:

It is mandatory to have links on high influence domains so you can have a natural link profile.

2. Depending on your industry and your the type of activity, you should have links to similar websites from websites in that category. In the picture below you can see for sure that the websites are in the tech industry. 

The links coming from .edu websites are highly appreciated. They give a high value and trust.

A bad example for the tech startup above are the links coming from Adult websites. There is no connection with those links. If you don’t want that type of links you need to disavow them or check the website before getting a link there, to avoid future surprises.

3. Set a clear webpage type. If you want awareness in the blogosphere then build links in blogs. Web directory links aren’t in style now. Don’t go in that direction. Aim higher.

4. Earn links that are positioned in a short paragraph of text. Having links in a group of links is never better because it is not considered qualitative content.

12. Over-Optimizing Anchor Texts Sends an Alarm Signal to Google

Back in the old and wild days of SEO, over-optimizing anchor texts used to do some magic and get websites rank higher in SERP for those specific keywords. But things have changed in the past few years.

Another lesson by Google Penguin that we taught is never excessively optimize the anchor texts. If you’re a rookie, you might fall into the mistake. It is considered to have an unnatural profile if you have more than 40% commercial anchor texts.

Listen to what Joshua Ballard from Paradox Marketing says about the correct use of anchor texts:

Think of anchor text as the ‘sign on the door’ that Google’s bots can read before hitting a new web page, which allows them to already know roughly what they can expect when they get to the other side. Google then uses this as part of how they understand and therefore rank your content for various keywords.
	Joshua Ballard
	Founder at Paradox Marketing / @BallardJoshua

Keyword-rich anchor text is another mistake you should never experience. Using a paragraph of text as anchor text can trigger a flag. Take a look at the next screenshot:

Source: billmetzgerplumbinghuntingtonbeach.com

All your anchor texts should look natural. Review them and see what improvements you have to make. Google devalues websites that have backlinks with anchor texts that excessively use money keywords.

Accordingly to Microsite Masters, websites that had money keyword for anchor text in 65% or more of their inbound links were penalized by Google.

What Is the SEO Solution For Anchor Text Over-Optimization?

You have to accept the prohibition against over-optimized anchor text. Even though there are startups that fail the test of natural anchor texts, there are others that succeed.

HelpScout is a living example. When it started, the help desk software focused on using match anchor text and only a few commercial anchor texts such as “help desk system” and “affordable desk system”.

Now, their anchor text distribution is manly focused on the domain name – Help Scout.

Source: https://explorer.cognitiveseo.com/?u=buyautoparts.com&m=*U*#section/4

13. Not Adapting Your SEO Strategy to the Evolving Industry Will Crash You

Google is continuously adapting in the online environment. Too many people (especially those who are new in the business) look where Google has been instead of looking where it is heading. 

There comes a need to adjust and evolve. 

Not adjusting your SEO strategy to the evolving industry will come back to bite you on the bum. How could you manage your business if you don’t know what’s happening in the world? 

It is like walking blindfolded with your hands in your ears on the highway. It is dangerous!

What will happen eventually? You’ll lose revenue, money, investments, website traffic, opportunities and put your business at bankruptcy risk.

At first, your eyes should be wide open and seek for the best option. Decision makers look straight at the tactics and implementations and forget about the analytics, goals and strategic planning. Then developers and designers don’t really understand the importance of organic results and the list goes on. 

Do you know many websites have been penalized by Google because of bad SEO techniques? A lot of that is because they were using old methods and didn’t stay up to date with the information considering that will go on just fine like they did before. 

Google estimated that the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree. 

What Is the SEO Solution For Unsuited Strategies?

First, don’t do it. Second, you can start by subscribing to newsletters from Google or newsworthy websites that offer industry insights. Follow experts on Twitter. Use social media to engage with people and get real updates on changes that happen in your industry. Social signals have the power to influence SEO if it follow a smart strategy.

If you’re a fan of GrowthHacker, you can stay up to date if you follow some great minds there, too. There is also Inbound.org, where you can do the same.

There are also a few things you should be following rigorously:

• think on a granular level;
• integrate social media into your SEO strategy;
• don’t hurry to implement your strategy.

There are great examples of business that recovered when they started following the pieces of advice and recommendations from Google. Who would believe that a Google penalty can help other websites?

Buyautoparts.com is an example of a website that had an impressive recover from a Penguin penalty because they learnt it the hard way.

Source: https://explorer.cognitiveseo.com/?u=buyautoparts.com&m=*U*#section/4

After they adapted their SEO strategy to the new change of algorithms from Google, the website experienced 320% increase in search traffic.

14. Having Unrealistic Timeframe and Budget Means Game Over

Did you decide to implement an SEO strategy for your startup but didn’t set a realistic timeframe and budget? You’ll sink faster than the Titanic. Most of the entrepreneurs want immediate results with minimum efforts and forget about this.

Not having a budget can lead to careless costs on things that maybe weren’t mandatory and you can easily run out of cash. That’s how you lose control of your spending and don’t know how much you have to gain back.

Not measuring your expenses and income is another mistake.

The timeframe can help you have a perspective and choose the best time for launching. You can be too early or too late.

SixDegrees.com was supposed to be the original social network, but people weren’t ready for it in 1997 when it started. The name was pretty smart. It came from the game “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” and the idea that we’re all six degrees away from everyone on Earth.

What Is the SEO Solution For Dealing with Unrealistic Timeframe and Budget?

There are lots of ways to build an SEO strategy on a limited budget, too. You just have to choose the ones that suit you.

A set budget can help you stay focus and a well-established timeframe can keep you up to date and let you know where you stand in every moment. And you’ll avoid running out of money. 

You can ask a few experts to test your product first. Create a teasing campaign on social networks.

Make your launching day even more special by promoting it on ProductHunt. Sign up your product and let people review it. Gather opinions and feedback from your users. Create a relationship with them.

ProductHunt can be really helpful if you know how and when to use it. Hey – a mobile app created for the sole purpose to communicate with people around you just to talk and not to find a partner.

The launch on ProductHunt was a hit. 99% of the users that downloaded the app came from ProductHunt. They even had a lot of activity, as you can see in the next screenshot.

Source: medium.com

15. Poor Content Investment Will Make You Lose More Than 67% Leads

Haven’t you heard about business owners who wanted to start a company with few investments and have employees with the same dedication as them, working for the minimum wage?

That is not the solution. Think smart. Set your priorities.

Working with the wrong team can also screw up your startup and increase your failure rate. Hire intelligent people with knowledge and abilities in copywriting who understand your vision and value it. Invest in your employees because they can grow along with your startup.

Content goes hand in hand with SEO. Onpage optimization and content are best buddies. Being at the first attempt might be hard for you to make investments.  

SocialMediaB2B says that B2B companies with a strategic content marketing generate 67% more leads than companies that don’t. So can understand why it is good for you, not to mention it is vital to invest in content creation.

What Is the SEO Solution For Poor Content Investments?

Invest time and money. Don’t be cheap. Use the possibility to do guest posting or create valuable pieces of content on platforms where you have the possibility to become a contributor. And then promote it and amplify it.

Take for example Anthony Kosner, designer, developer and contributor to Forbes. At first, he was a magazine designer for Time Inc., Conde Nast, McGraw-Hill and then moved to content marketing strategy. He has managed to have more than 400,000 unique visitors at the moment.

Sticking to topic knowledge, facts-gathered content is the key to successful SEO. That type of content will always be ahead of everything is published online. That’s what Anthony aimed for and that is how he succeeded in having so many readers through contributing.

Learn from the SEO success story Buffer had. Leo Widrich, the co-founder, used a good growth hack technique. He started writing content about Twitter, how to get followers and how Twitter can help your SEO.  Then he reached out to other blogs to see if they were interested in reading his content or if they were interested in similar topics.

Write for the influencers. Write for the people who influence your potential customers.
	Leo Widrich
	Co-founder Buffer / @LeoWid

He started creating relationships. He gained his audience through guest blogging and after 10 months, Buffer had over 100,000 users.

This is a type of startup you can follow to see the factors for success, for understanding their SEO strategy, for acquiring customers in the end. 

16. Writing Low-Quality Content for Another Purpose Won’t Bring You Any Leads

Not writing valuable content might lead to an SEO startup failure and harm your website. You don’t write qualitative content, you don’t rank.

Content marketing fails when content fails to serve the purpose of the brand. Grabhouse is an example of a content marketing failure. The startup was designed to be a real estate listing portal. Instead, they started to write content and ended up a viral content magazine.

Its content was more appropriate for Buzzfeed or a similar website, but not for Grabhouse. That’s how the business failed. They gathered lots of views and visitors but didn’t collect sales.

What Is the SEO Solution For Low-Quality Content?

Jeff Bullas explains the importance of organic traffic came from qualitative content.

So long form content is now a key component for serious content marketers.  SEO traffic is often 50% of the attention for a blog post. Over half this blog’s traffic comes from organic search.
	Jeff Bullas
	Founder at JeffBullas.com / @jeffbullas

The solution here would be to have an integrated content marketing plan to gather users from everywhere.

Leadpages, an automated software, had a very well-planned content marketing strategy. Their blog was updated regularly with fresh content together with an email marketing campaign to hook the readers and users and get them on the website.

This technique helped them grow from 0 to 15,000  subscribers over the course of a single year. Great numbers!

Leadpages also offers webinars and tutorials for its platform.

There are other approaches. Buffer, for example, based on long and in-depth well-researched articles to generate more traction on the social media platforms.

When you decide to plan your content strategy establish what makes you different and explore the differences, set the goals and engage with your audience.  

Conclusion

Failure hurts. Nothing new here. Learn from the biggest mistakes others did and take the solutions to improve your SEO efforts.

There are a lot of SEO startups failures, but do you know how to recover from a loss? If you listen to all the SEO solutions proposed, you’ll find the right way to do it. It not so much a beginner’s guide, but a list with smart marketing tips and bad usage of SEO for startups strategy to understand what you must avoid.

Don’t start your business blindfolded. Look at others, spy your competition. Do some reverse engineering. You can also find a lot of case studies of successful startups. Be one of them instead. Learn how a startup succeeds in SEO by following the good practices. Look for bootstrapped startups and learn from their experience.

Searching for business models and creating the best one isn’t enough. 

Make use of the marketing tools you’ll find on the mesmerizing land of the Internet. Think and overthink the SEO strategy. Then act! Set SMART goals, track them and see what you have to improve.

Even though there were unfunded startups that managed to survive, it better to set a budget with at least a few financial resources to allow you to make some moves and hook customers. Invest, invest and invest. Collaborate with trustworthy people and don’t use outdated tactics. 

Have a strong content marketing strategy which you follow rigorously. Always do SEO. You need to have a dedicated person for that.

Create a team that you can work with and can achieve what you set forth. And in the end, search for quality achievement in everything you do, don’t accept shortcuts and cheap work.

The post 16 Reasons Why Startups Fail at SEO and How They Can Recover appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.