I don't use GWT.. why give Google more info? And even if I did have actions, I'm unlikely do ever use a Disavow tool.
The only time and the only blog I do have that uses GWT, I did get a manual penalty "unnatural link building" which I didn't actually do.. I simply wrote back and said I did not, show me what links and how am I going to control what comes in to me. Please remove this.
Within 2 days they removed it. They can't prove it. And I'm not going to run around doing their work for them.
Anyway... to answer your question. Once, a long time ago and I don't use it anymore.
@bestimtoolz Quote "The strange thing is also I have several web 2.0 (EMD) which are still on top3 on main keyphrases ,they were also linked exclusively by GSA SER, not so hard as others but this shows me the random factor is the part of the game and we shouldn`t try to find any logic inside of this what happened. The only sure thing is we should randomize everything as much as possible to not leave any footprints, thats for sure."
@bestimtoolz and other Guru's any best practices to avoid leaving footprints?
No offense, but I don't believe at all their is a randomization factor for the sites in the top 3 unless its personal search preferences. Google has to deliver the best results they can at the top or it will hurt their bottom-line. I do agree about not leaving footprints.
catchallseowww.catchallseo.com <- Disposable Emails NO MORE!
I have been affected bad with some of the sites. Most of the sites there were on top 3 spots are still under 100 for the same keywords. I am not sure if it was penalty or just a SERP shuffling from google.
Its all about authority. I've seen my share of the top 3 getting hit with penalties and updates, but 9 out of 10 times the top 3 NEVER get touched because once you secure one of those slots, you are granted authority.
Want proof? Look over any keyword in SERPWoo over any time frame. I personally have 2.5 years of data on this, but here is an example ( everything in the red box is 4th-20th, and always more volatile than 1-3 )
eliquid. I agree. As Ron metioned earlier buffer sites are the best way to go for risk management to your money sites. I was fortunate enough tocome out mostly unscathed on this update as well as last years Panda expect for my EMDs which didn't make any money regardless. Looking at the data on my end I see a significant correlation between topical relevancy, authority, and ranking. Meaning .... the more topically relevant and unique your backlinks are and the greater your anchor text variation the higher you will rank.
e.i. - Target keyword is gardenia cambogi
T1 articles need themed around gardenia cambogi instead of a generic articles on weight loss. This is why Article Builder sucks for T1 creation. You get the most generic, overused content to use for your T1s that everyone else is using. Google wants links from authentic and expertly content.
Your T2s don't need to be as focused but they should be high quality. The more unique they are the more domain authority will pass through your tiers. This is why people which spun T2s usually get slapped and those with more natural tiers with higher uniqueness and relevancy do better.
I guess this is common sense. Unfortunately, this is where automation tools just don't cut it. Unless you can import a bunch of manually written and relevant articles into SER, auto generated or spun articles will never beat the real thing and always pose a greater risk.
I still use SER but I'm certainly a bit more cautious how I use it. It's still a wonderful and highly effective program.
Relevancy is the new page rank. That's my take on it.
EMDs and PMDs, have been on the list of Matt Cutts for a long time now. I recall that 6 - 8 month ago he mentioned that both EMDs and PMDs will no longer have the same significance and that Google will see it as a possible spamming attempt, especially if the sites using them are relative new. In the opinion of Google more and more spammers are using them to gain an unfair advantage by using such domains.
For me EMD or PMD are not a main factor in this update , they simply hitted domains that have GSA or any other tool links . This update its quite different from the past ones , they really targeted very well websites with spammy links. This is my opinion and this is ofc what is happening in MY niche(s) .
I do not concur with EMD/PMDs being penalised, my experience with various sites is lack of consistent velocity of link building and 1 page T1 Web 2.0's is a BIG NO.
Until now, i dont see that they hit sites that used GSA or any other tool kit.
Google really does not know what they are doing.
I saw yesterday many sites ranking high with no clear explanation. Or they are building massive spam links or Google are just randomly playing with the results.
I dont see sites with spam links falling down and authority sites in the first places of the results, thats not what i found. I see some strange results with no explanation.
Explain me, per example, how can this site, are in #10 and the second one are in #25. There is no content explanation, no more keywords in text or internal links. In fact site in position #10 is more poor in content.
The site is no even in the Majestic million.
Now lets see the second site, tyhat is 15 positions away.
Position #25 does not looks like a penalty, but cant find any explanation to this examples (i put one examples, but i had seeing many many many others).
Maybe its Google dance (mad dance), otherwise everything is nosense.
I even compare the G+ and facebook likes and the second one have thousands and the first one has nothing.
The second one says it has no title, but i visit the site and the title was there, so i guess it was some Majesticseo mistake.
When you compare the sites you have that were hit badly with the sites that are still in the top 10, how does your link profile compare? I mean take a serious look. Does the new top 10 have legitimate, high quality links from authority sites? The kind of links that you say to yourself, I'll never be able to get links like that. I'll bet they do.
Does your site have these type of links? I'm not talking about your so called "high-quality" contextual links that you built on parasites & 2.0's, I'm talking about links from real sites in your niche that are considered true authorities. Links in articles on respected news sites etc.
In my niches, the top 10 all have these links. One of my sites ranked #1 for a long time in a very competitive niche. I'll just say that I had sites like Equifax, Experian, TransUnion and others sitting below me for the better part of a year. This last update dropped me down to the bottom of page #1.
My site has a handful of legitimate authority links, but the majority were medium to lower quality (No GSA). So I'm tending to believe that when those lower quality links discounted, it took me from the top spot, but it wasn't bad enough to take me from the first page. This is a quality site with 100+ pages of original content, social, etc.
With this update, sites that had more links on the lower quality end than on the medium to good quality were probably hit the hardest. Some of my other sites followed this same pattern. None were EMD's mind you.
Here's the other thing I noticed. Most of the top 10 results that I'm looking at are internal pages of authority sites, blogs, news sites. The pages that are ranking don't have lots of backlinks, just a handful of really quality links. They're ranking mainly off the domain authority. There I see an opportunity. I'm not going to spell it out, but if you can find a way to duplicate some of the authority those pages are pulling, and then do some decent quality linking to your page, I think you've got a hell of a good chance at competing, if not taking over some of those pages. You might even be able to get away with a little quality + a lot of low quality. Who knows.
I could be way the hell off on all of this, but this is just what I'm coming up with in the past week since the update.
42k are not fresh, are total backlinks. In fact in the past years it has 116 k and now it have 42k.Read carefully.
You are reading wrong.
With 67 backlinks you cant be on #10 in a medium competitive keyword???
CERO edu and gov backlinks beat almost 1k edu and gov backlinks? In what world?
If you look at alexa or majestic seo rank, the 2 site is in the top 100k sites for years and the other never show up and never receive any good ranking before and i guess that this #10 position is just a madness of Google Insane Dance.
The site 2 has a 5 years history, in the past it has more backlinks that now. And it always has being in the top #10.
The site 1 does not exist, does not have backlinks (not to mention the difference in edu and gov backlinks) and suddenly for a few hours climb to top 10, just to fall again in a few hours to nowhere.
I saw this many times in this past days. And it happends always after Google new algo... and after a few days they detect the mistake and every comes bacj again to normality.
This guy Matt does not know nothing about SEO, they just move in the darkness things to simulate and after all the noise everything get to where it belongs.
The 67 backlink site goes to the darkness back. All of them.
If you look even more deep you will find that this 67 backlinks are junk.
I cant disclousure the name of the site or its urls, but believe me that its crazy.
Make you own experiment and you will find out.
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If you look at "real estate", a very competitive keyword, the #1, #2, etc. have more than 1 and a half million backlinks.
And suddenley the #5 have 7k backlinks.
The #1 its on Alexa 1600 position, the #5 is on one million 700k poisition!!
And suddenly the #6 comes to normality. Its on 3k Alexa's position.
Every search i do i find this. And every Google algo does the same trick: just crazy things.
All I can say is you still don't have something figured out, I linked directly to my money site in a somewhat competitive nich with GSA and I didn't move at all, I stayed right at between 9 - 13 (place not page). Never got to one, but I just started building the link structure to this as of a few months ago.
I do do some odd things which could be considered unethical. Like say I'm trying to rank for a certain keyword, lets say "GSA search engine ranker", i'll search for it on google and link the #1 site in the article for the phrase I want to rank for, and then later in the article I'll link to my site with a standard link. I was I couldn't get penalized because it's not linking to me, and apparently I was right. Nothing happened to me. now that I mentioned that publicly in a forum i'll probably never do it again because I know how that works, I do several things, most of which I'll never mentioned publicly or even privately, only some, once you start telling people then everyone knows and welp, it won't work anymore.
I didn't hand write a single article, I used spun content from kontent machine and I haven't been touched by this update. I also had a 3 tiered structure, actually more than that, but I did things against the grain intentionally to not look like I was doing it. I'd make tier 1, and then i'd make tier 2, then i'd combine the links for both tier1 and 2 so they both became tier one and then i started linking to tier 1 again with a new tier2. That's kind of like a tier 3, and then I linked to that ontop of it. 4 tiers, not hit at all. The thing is though, I only had 70 article/social in tier 1, about 190 in tier 2, and then i only got to about 220 in the tier 3 but I don't think I'm going to keep building links onto tier 3.
I almost think google knows you guys try to get too precise with things instead of doing things that don't make any sense. If you have 3 tiers of articles and they all link to other articles and end up at up at the same place I think it's pretty obvious, but if you mix things in with it like the article and social profiles and don't ever use typical GSA default comments, profiles, I think at least in my case I'm ok. I think if you use the default profiles, comments, or anything that comes with GSA you will get nailed, that's how they find you I think.
I mean look at Negative SEO there is such a debate about it, some people claim they can blast someone with unspun articles with the same keyword and it doesn't do anything to their site. I think GSA still works fine if you can find the middle between the idea behind Negative SEO and the idea behind all of these wonderful perfect looking tiered structures that are getting nailed.
Wasn't hummingbird about social signals? So if you build all these tiered links to your money site, and the only thing in the entire structure that has any social signals, (facebook shares, google +'s, etc) is the money site, isn't that a bit suspicious. I mean if you have all these high quality articles linking to each other, shouldn't they all have social signals?
Traffic, isn't it really ODD if you have all these articles that nobody in the world visits? No traffic no nothing, all linking to the same site? Shouldn't your articles that link to your website also get human traffic as well?
Another good thing to consider A bunch of well written articles linking to a site with 0 social signals and 0 human traffic is suspicious.
That is my 2 cents, I don't know what I'm doing right but I'm doing it right I just went to #3. I like to kind of say what i'm doing without completely saying what i'm doing so that experienced people figure it out and try it and not noobie noobs that are going to spam anything I say into oblivion and ruin the method.
I approached it from the perspective that backlinks and onpage SEO is what tells google what you should appear for, and social signals and human traffic is the new "juice"
You guys should start playing with these two things on your tiers and see if it makes any difference, but slowly, not throwing 2000 google +'s into it at once, naturally, see if it makes a difference.
Oh just slowly build one tier, and then provide human traffic / social signals to it. A link without any traffic/social signals in my opinion is a useless link.
My opinion on this update is that they've finally rolled out the expected changes that have been discussed over the past year or so - in short they are comparing the number of visitors to your site to the number of inbound link. EG a site with 100 links being created every day but only getting 50 visitors to that page every day, so the links are obviously shit.
For those who don't use Google Analytics, remember most people use Chrome now... I have no proof this is what this update is about, but I suspect it is. And even if it isn't, I'm sure they'll do this one day. Perhaps someone should figure out how to block this from happening
I dont know if it just me or people are just not figuring out why using tools like SER now wont work. This is simple guys, dont you thinks that google do not know how to detect a link coming from an spammy site and devaluated the juice from that site ?, the pattern are so easy to program in an algo...
1) sites got trillion OBL
2) most of its article are themed to spammy queries
3) gets hundred of auto genereted content every day (google does know how to detect it.., want a test?, put some giberrish content with some adsense ads in it and see what happens)
4) the domain probably is on some noob's disavow list
Google on this updated adjusted some links value on their algo... they devaluated links from web 2.0 that have litte to not moderation on them like fizzlive, xfire etc. Also why in the world would google valuate links from web 2.0 freshly created with less that 5 article, not social movement but then magically got hundred of hundred of backlinks pointing to them? thats a clear sign of spam and its easy to detect as it's whats every mom and their son is doing atm, why in the world would google gives some value to a link like that?. Another thing i noticed on this update is that EMD and PMD got devaluated even further. I think the key to rank know truely relay on having links that nobody can get that easy, thats why PBN are working flawless at the moment, thats why they will continue to work no matter what.
Link list seller killed the fun for all GSA SER users, when one of these list get released sites get hammered like there is not tomorrow there goes to the anus your beloved link that took your time to scrape it and 2-3 month later is on one of these ser list.
Another thing that is always a key to my success is not having my website on some shit host like Godaddy. Do a reverse IP check on your domain ip? Do you have 1000 websites showing on the same IP for that server? why would Google consider your website quality if you don't, because you pay $4.99 a month for hosting.
I will not ever try to seo a site that doesn't have a dedicated IP, or at least < 15 sites on the same IP. All the major companies do it, and if I"m going to be successful, I'm mimicking as much of what they do as I can
Your sites speed is VERY important, and more so now than ever. Every little thing counts, if you have a slow loading website, forget about it, fix that first. I always recommend using a cloud front network, personally I use amazon S3 and amazon cloud, google can tell you're using that when they crawl your page, that makes your website look like it's higher quality.
The sites I have that are on my dedicated servers (I do hosting so I rent my own servers) have not been hit one smidgen by this update.
I always use premium quality theme forest templates when making my websites, google can also detect the footprint of these templates, and not some cheap free shit from Wordpress, and definitely not nulled trash that contains back links to the person that nulled it. Do major companies use free templates or do they have their own designed? Theme forest is a good medium.
All my sites are all amazon cloudfront enabled, they all are wordpress sites using theme forest templates, and not a single one of them got dinged by this update. I was directly linking to them with GSA too.
Comments
I had 6 sites. 3 got manual actions in the past 2 days, and 1 didnt but tanked anyway. Weird.
I've already redone 3 of them, doing the 4th now. Do you get any sort of warning in GWT?
@spunko2010 -
I don't use GWT.. why give Google more info? And even if I did have actions, I'm unlikely do ever use a Disavow tool.
The only time and the only blog I do have that uses GWT, I did get a manual penalty "unnatural link building" which I didn't actually do.. I simply wrote back and said I did not, show me what links and how am I going to control what comes in to me. Please remove this.
Within 2 days they removed it. They can't prove it. And I'm not going to run around doing their work for them.
Anyway... to answer your question. Once, a long time ago and I don't use it anymore.
Are you saying #25 looks better than #10? And does #25 have 42,397 "fresh" backlinks?
If so, sure looks spammy to me vs the one that has just a few. I'm surprised it's #25 and not #225
He who pushes the buttons fastest wins in video games but he who has the most backlinks does not win the SEO game.
Maybe I didn't understand what you were trying to post. If so, I apologize.
I do do some odd things which could be considered unethical. Like say I'm trying to rank for a certain keyword, lets say "GSA search engine ranker", i'll search for it on google and link the #1 site in the article for the phrase I want to rank for, and then later in the article I'll link to my site with a standard link. I was I couldn't get penalized because it's not linking to me, and apparently I was right. Nothing happened to me. now that I mentioned that publicly in a forum i'll probably never do it again because I know how that works, I do several things, most of which I'll never mentioned publicly or even privately, only some, once you start telling people then everyone knows and welp, it won't work anymore.
I didn't hand write a single article, I used spun content from kontent machine and I haven't been touched by this update. I also had a 3 tiered structure, actually more than that, but I did things against the grain intentionally to not look like I was doing it. I'd make tier 1, and then i'd make tier 2, then i'd combine the links for both tier1 and 2 so they both became tier one and then i started linking to tier 1 again with a new tier2. That's kind of like a tier 3, and then I linked to that ontop of it. 4 tiers, not hit at all. The thing is though, I only had 70 article/social in tier 1, about 190 in tier 2, and then i only got to about 220 in the tier 3 but I don't think I'm going to keep building links onto tier 3.
I almost think google knows you guys try to get too precise with things instead of doing things that don't make any sense. If you have 3 tiers of articles and they all link to other articles and end up at up at the same place I think it's pretty obvious, but if you mix things in with it like the article and social profiles and don't ever use typical GSA default comments, profiles, I think at least in my case I'm ok. I think if you use the default profiles, comments, or anything that comes with GSA you will get nailed, that's how they find you I think.
I mean look at Negative SEO there is such a debate about it, some people claim they can blast someone with unspun articles with the same keyword and it doesn't do anything to their site. I think GSA still works fine if you can find the middle between the idea behind Negative SEO and the idea behind all of these wonderful perfect looking tiered structures that are getting nailed.
Traffic, isn't it really ODD if you have all these articles that nobody in the world visits? No traffic no nothing, all linking to the same site? Shouldn't your articles that link to your website also get human traffic as well?
Another good thing to consider
That is my 2 cents, I don't know what I'm doing right but I'm doing it right I just went to #3. I like to kind of say what i'm doing without completely saying what i'm doing so that experienced people figure it out and try it and not noobie noobs that are going to spam anything I say into oblivion and ruin the method.
I approached it from the perspective that backlinks and onpage SEO is what tells google what you should appear for, and social signals and human traffic is the new "juice"
You guys should start playing with these two things on your tiers and see if it makes any difference, but slowly, not throwing 2000 google +'s into it at once, naturally, see if it makes a difference.
Oh just slowly build one tier, and then provide human traffic / social signals to it. A link without any traffic/social signals in my opinion is a useless link.
For those who don't use Google Analytics, remember most people use Chrome now... I have no proof this is what this update is about, but I suspect it is. And even if it isn't, I'm sure they'll do this one day. Perhaps someone should figure out how to block this from happening