IF you where ranking before this update DONT CHANGE ANYTHING YET... wait till your site stay in 1 place, its too early yet.. almost every site will dance with this update, 1 of my main moneysite was 10, then 6, now its 9... let it dance and wait, 1 week, then take action.
For me it's a devaluation not a penalty. And guess what? themed backlinks coming from niche related sites are now very powerful and more important than ever!. Even if it's low quality backlinks like footer links or whatever. So take care guys and start building links on themed sites as soon as possible.
I have 3 new competitors went from no where to top 5 results on page 1 after this update and they only have a very few themed niche related footer backlinks !!!
No , I don't tick this. I use a huge 100k keyword list. If you want to find only related sites then make your own huge LSI keyword list and import it to SER then tick " at least 1 of my keywords must be present on the site".
Another option I didn't try is " always use keywords to find target sites " , maybe you can give this one a try as well. but I'm not sure about the results though.
If you tick "at least 1 of my keywords must be present on the site" or "always use keywords to find target sites", you get a warning message stating that a lot of sites will be skipped.
well, thats a descision you have to take. you need to consider if you like more links of unrelated niches or less links that better target your niche. noone can help you with that. just try and gain experience.
Thanks for the heads up. For some reason I checked all of the following but don't have a huge keyword list. Spunko2010, do you recommend unchecking all of these?
- Collect keywords
from target sites
- Use collected
keywords to find new target sites
- Put keyword in
quotes when used in search queries
The ranking on my pages are down from 0 to 10 positions. I focus on ranking my inner pages and I am thinking I have not enough home page links. I am going to check the data more closely. I have social media signals for all my sites. Not sure what natural links to home page vs inner pages should even be?
@Glennf, you really need to understand SEO. Keywords in quotes is an exact match (for purposes of SER) and limits the search results that can be found by a factor of 100. Please, just do what I say.
I say this with all sincerity - this forum is not intended to help you learn SEO. You had better be hitting other forums and courses to learn this material. It just distracts from the purpose of this forum, which is more intended to help answer questions about GSA products, not SEO fundamentals.
We all start somewhere, and that is cool. But you can't buy a Ferrari and expect the dealer to teach you to drive. It just isn't fair.
@glennf I'm really not the best person to ask for advice post-Penguin 2.0!
A question for @ron and others though, if you don't select any of these options:
- Collect keywords
from target sites
- Use collected
keywords to find new target sites
- Put keyword in
quotes when used in search queries
How many keywords are you using in your list? I had those enabled for T2 and T3 and it has made a big difference by turning them off (for the worse - my campaigns are slower). So I use my verified/submitted list to try to make up the numbers again, but aren't I running the risk of having the same old sites linking after a while, so Google might spot that too?
@ranknow I haven't read any solid evidence but anecdotal stuff on this forum seems to imply those who were hit didn't have enough homepage links. I've since setup a specific project for that (to my homepage only).
For the contextual I will put some seed keywords in GKWT, and I will iteratively de-dupe the results. So I keep throwing in generally related keywords till I get a good sized list.
On the bigger one, I just use crap I found on the internet. The main thing I look for is the general absence of long tail phrases. So generally speaking, the more single or 2 word phrases the better.
With all that said, on the contextual I will probably not do that anymore and use a general list. The issue previously was that SER used your keywords for tags - so it was very important to have related keywords in the list for contextual projects. Now, that is all taken care of with the slick little toggle @sven put in there to use anchors text for tags. So I will be changing my approach when I have time this week to stick in the 100,000 keyword list I have. Then all projects will have the same keyword list.
spunko2010 Been thinking and googleing the home page vs inner page concept. I could not find much. I kinda think its the opposite for a small site. (Which most of our sites are small me thinks.) Most people naturally linking to a small website will just link to the home page. Cause its small and you can easily find what you want. Yes with wikipedia you would link to the page more often but most of our sites are not (;lol) wikipidia.
The other think I noticed from some guys with increased rankings post May 23 is they have wider tier 1 types of links.
with more keywords you will scrape more websites... = more links.... with this feature you can use tags as anchors to have related tags on social networks profiles, and you can use 100k generics keywords to scrape the shit out of google.
@ranknow my problem was that I had built 30 projects each with 10-15 links to that inner page. I had about 10 links in total pointing to the homepage. I could be wrong but I think Google needs to see not too many and not too little links to the homepage.
More of my problem I think was that I was letting GSA collect keywords for all my tiers pre May 23rd, and this led to irrelevant / non contextual links. But then @ron was hit by Penguin 2.0 and did not do this, so who knows?
@ron I think I misread your post but you find 100k keyword list on the internet?
We haven't really purchased anything on the social side. Just a LOT of engagement. Sorry to be vague here. Our primary social platforms = facebook, reddit, pinterest, twitter. We started building our base two years ago. We made as many connections as we could in our vertical. Now we use post transaction social tools which work great. i.e. screen pop up offering coupon on next purchase if they share their current purchase on FB, Twitter, etc. That post on FB generates an additional coupon for that customer's friends. It goes viral, which is what you want.
Re: Tier 1's. You only want at most 10 - 15 Tier 1's per project. Then you go up on Tiers, and start new Tier projects as well. The further you get up the pyramid, the looser you can get with the link types. We now create very deep spintax and limit to less than 10 Tier 1's. It is a lot more work for sure, but you want a lot of diversity. We are also seeing much improved benefit by doing about a 50% load onto the homepage of our sites, rather than focusing on landing pages. Common sense stuff, but that is what is working right now.
We use GSA tools and a few others to speed things along a bit, but there really are no shortcuts to getting to where you want to be online (unfortunately)
For the most part, about 90% of our pages are fully recovered post update. It looks like some of the 'newer' pages are having issues. Not bad ones, just lagging a bit. Will continue to update as to what we see working, but it looks like social signals is making a difference right now.
@viking - thanks for sharing that post! What sort of home/inner ratio are you thinking works best? Just for me most of my site is inner pages (like 300 of them with good content that I'm trying to rank), so no matter how I cut it, more links to inner pages and seen some nice ranking climbing recently.
Comments
and also +1 @ron
For me it's a devaluation not a penalty. And guess what? themed backlinks coming from niche related sites are now very powerful and more important than ever!. Even if it's low quality backlinks like footer links or whatever. So take care guys and start building links on themed sites as soon as possible.
I have 3 new competitors went from no where to top 5 results on page 1 after this update and they only have a very few themed niche related footer backlinks !!!
I mean niche related though. If your site is about cars go for links from cars sites.
No , I don't tick this. I use a huge 100k keyword list. If you want to find only related sites then make your own huge LSI keyword list and import it to SER then tick " at least 1 of my keywords must be present on the site".
Another option I didn't try is " always use keywords to find target sites " , maybe you can give this one a try as well. but I'm not sure about the results though.
Where is the 'find keywords on other sites' option located? I don't see this in the options tab page.
Is that really a good thing to do?
But where is 'find keywords on other sites' option located? I don't see this in the options tab page. I want to make sure it's not checked.
I think you need that checked if a particular keyword phrase in the keywords field has a space in it.
@Glennf, you really need to understand SEO. Keywords in quotes is an exact match (for purposes of SER) and limits the search results that can be found by a factor of 100. Please, just do what I say.
I say this with all sincerity - this forum is not intended to help you learn SEO. You had better be hitting other forums and courses to learn this material. It just distracts from the purpose of this forum, which is more intended to help answer questions about GSA products, not SEO fundamentals.
We all start somewhere, and that is cool. But you can't buy a Ferrari and expect the dealer to teach you to drive. It just isn't fair.
A question for @ron and others though, if you don't select any of these options:
How many keywords are you using in your list? I had those enabled for T2 and T3 and it has made a big difference by turning them off (for the worse - my campaigns are slower). So I use my verified/submitted list to try to make up the numbers again, but aren't I running the risk of having the same old sites linking after a while, so Google might spot that too?
@ranknow I haven't read any solid evidence but anecdotal stuff on this forum seems to
imply those who were hit didn't have enough homepage links. I've since setup a specific project for that (to my homepage only).
For the contextual I will put some seed keywords in GKWT, and I will iteratively de-dupe the results. So I keep throwing in generally related keywords till I get a good sized list.
On the bigger one, I just use crap I found on the internet. The main thing I look for is the general absence of long tail phrases. So generally speaking, the more single or 2 word phrases the better.
With all that said, on the contextual I will probably not do that anymore and use a general list. The issue previously was that SER used your keywords for tags - so it was very important to have related keywords in the list for contextual projects. Now, that is all taken care of with the slick little toggle @sven put in there to use anchors text for tags. So I will be changing my approach when I have time this week to stick in the 100,000 keyword list I have. Then all projects will have the same keyword list.
The other think I noticed from some guys with increased rankings post May 23 is they have wider tier 1 types of links.
I have this program called KeywordMapPro to generate keywords but don't use nearly as many keywords, only 100. Maybe should look for more.
More of my problem I think was that I was letting GSA collect keywords for all my tiers pre May 23rd, and this led to irrelevant / non contextual links. But then @ron was hit by Penguin 2.0 and did not do this, so who knows?
@ron I think I misread your post but you find 100k keyword list on the internet?