We use about a 50% ratio now across our various sites. That means, I am dropping 50% of my 'links' to my homepage. We are more focused these days on domain authority and social signals than promoting landing or inner pages. Our inner pages always rank higher for their keywords than the home page, but they move highest when our domain authority is strong or trending well. Depending on our site, we have from 40 to 2,000 inner pages.We compete against some great seo's, probably quite a few reading this post :-) and we have been holding our own over the years.
SER is a very good tool, but it is limited. You should use it to help speed things along, popping a quick 10 - 15 tier 1's is a good thing. But that is really about it other than spamming out some blog comments, etc. If you are spinning articles and spamming, you are down a dead end and you will get hammered by G, if you haven't already. IMO.
We have access to a lot of good seo, non-published, opinions. Almost all of them are focused on social. That does not mean dead account 'likes' or eggs on Twitter. It means 'engagement' which means conversations. If you take the time to build an audience and converse with them, it all falls into place.
Think of it this way, if your site has 500 uniques a day, and you blasted out 30,000 spammed links, what do you think Google is going to do to your site? They track it all and it won't be pretty. If you build out 30,000 engaged followers rather than spam links, you will own your niche. Period.
Anyone who seo's is a blackhat. All of us. Why not takes the time away from spamming and put it toward social and make yourself bulletproof? Social will not go away. Platforms might, but clearly social is hear to stay.
My two cents.
Re: you recent climbing, great! Good content will always rank.
@viking Some of what your suggesting, goes the opposite of what many members like @ron here do and make a decent living at.
SER is a very good tool, but it is limited. You should use it to help speed things along, popping a quick 10 - 15 tier 1's is a good thing. But that is really about it other than spamming out some blog comments, etc. If you are spinning articles and spamming, you are down a dead end and you will get hammered by G, if you haven't already. IMO.
I would listen to @viking. He makes a lot of highly credible points.
When you treat a niche with a passion and an interest, you do exactly the things that he outlines. There are certain seo things you do to help with authority, but your focus is to mainly engage your niche and create a following.
That means that he is committed, and that is a very good thing.
Quite honestly, the whole affiliate thing gets kind of old. Chasing rankings, looking for the best tool, working on backlinks and spins, a penalty here, a penalty there, etc. It sometimes gets like that game "Whack a Mole", lol.
I can tell you with 100% honesty that the best time I had in 15 years of doing all of this is when I had actual products I was marketing. It felt real. It was real. And because it was a real business, I did things differently to get the word out and cultivate interest.
Yes, I make a living doing this, but it doesn't mean that I disagree with these other methods. In fact, I like them and I give them five stars.
The best of all worlds is to market real products, grow the business, build a ton of credibility and respect in social circles, dominate the rankings, and make a bunch of money - the perfect plot.
@ron great post. I do believe as well, that there is potential in both approaches, and like you say having both rankings and social credibility are the perfect plot. What made you get out of selling your own products? If that's what you really enjoyed, then why not head your business back in that direction?
@ron thanks for the kind words! I have learned a lot from your posts and look forward to reading more.
I had an interesting conversation yesterday. This is going to be a bit fuzzy on the details, but the point will be detailed. So, I have a friend, who works in a Fortune 100 company, who I have employed in the past to do some web dev, and seo projects. He gets this job about 6 months ago as a marketing manager, and by hustling works his way into a leadership role on the digital team. Long story, short....he sits in on all digital meetings with partners and vendors. Mind you, this is a company with a multi-million dollar digital budget. Anyway, he meets a lot with Google. Sorry no big secrets here, but an interesting tip - he told me to start using the webmaster disavow tool. A LOT.
Of course, most of us are hesitant to bring our sites to Google's attention (for whatever reason), but he was pretty clear that his understanding from the horse's mouth was this was a very good practice to do. In fact his company, now has their seo team not building links, but disavowing links.
Just a quick tip into what someone with a lot more resources and information than us is doing in seo right now (June 2013).
What I am willing to bet though, having worked for multi-billion $ corps, is that Google is very interested in this guy's advertising budget. I am 100% confident that there are two sets of rules for the disavow tool.
I would never use that tool as an affiliate. Never. Pure admission of guilt.
Whereas on the corporate side, you can easily plead the case that you outsourced, you thought the workers were doing 100% whitehat linkbuilding techniques, but they screwed us, etc. etc.
Do you see how that works? There's money at stake for Google in that scenario. So they allow 'plausible deniability' for the big dogs.
I won't touch the Disavow tool. I agree with @ron, for authority sites sure but for new, small sites I think it's too risky.
On another note, I think my site is a one-of-a-kind as is a highly useful service, but it's getting the word out. I'm competing against multi-million dollar companies so my plan is to use SER to get the numbers up, then hopefully the rest will fall into place as more people discover my site and I could ease off using SER. However that plan changed on May 23rd when Penguin 2.0 hit and I got knocked back about a month.
The more that ppl submit "bad" links to the disavow tool, the more we will all be affected.
The problem we have is that there are too many ppl within SEO (and I don't mean anyone here :-) ) who really shouldn't be allowed to even turn on a computer, let alone be involved with something such as SEO.
I disagree with the comments not to use the disavow tool, With Google there is no pleading, If it was you or someone you hired and they built bad links, Google do not care, after all you hired the guys right...
The disavow tool is a great tool to help clean up a site for example if you took on a client and the firm before messed up, or your site is getting hit by spammer or your competitors it helps stop the effects. Yeah you might of built the bad links but Google cant prove this and you cant prove you didn't, but at least your taking active steps to clean your site up which Google will notice.
While in some respects i agree with Vikings post in others i dont, I recently took on a client thats in the light bulb niche.. There's not a cat in hells chance i could create a social page and attract users to engage.
For most niches it works, but for others it does not.
SER is a great tool. it does what it does and very well. The main problem is user error. If someone submits poorly spun content thats the users fault and not any discredit to SER. Think outside the box when using SER and your onto a winner.
"Think of it this way, if your site has 500 uniques a day, and you
blasted out 30,000 spammed links, what do you think Google is going to
do to your site?"
While your example is extreme and in this case yes shows signs of major spamming, Dont forgot all the direct traffic and referral traffic from other sites which generate backlinks, Not all backlinks come from visitors who found a site via Google.
It tells Google that a certain site or type of link is SPAM. Now what do you think they do with that information? They use it to identify and filter out all the other SPAM just like it.
If you use the disavow tool and you are using automated link building, you are an idiot! Plain and simple.
As far as big brands with 100MM budget using it, well that's a different story as big brands are treated differently. They always have been.
If your site has been hit, build another one and start over. Trying to "convince" Google that you are not a spammer, by telling them about the spam links pointing to your site is laughable at best. They dont give 2 shits about you or your site. They care about revenue and that comes from ads! Period!
@meatplow as far as I can tell, Google only downgraded links they didn't penalise sites in as far as not letting them recover ranks. In my case I am slowly recovering.
@sonic81 I will share what I have changed, basically adding social signals and doing stuff there on FB and Twitter and also sponsored blog posts. I really hate all this cr*p I can't wait to outsource it. Although already today I have +25 likes so that's all good.
Also increased my relevant links in SER by tuning the search engines and KWs. No more irrelevant KWs hopefully, except on T3. I also blocked .on.kr and .co.kr I recommend everyone does this, for some reason Korean sites are really spammy.
Apart from that not much different. As I said I don't think Penguin 2.0 could permanently penalize tiered linking.
Ok, I have seen most people say that Penguin 2.0 was only a link downgrade. However I have an issue...
Pre-Penguin 2.0 one of my main subpages was number 3 in Google for a really big KW. At that point in time I had only done 10 or so web 2.0 manuals to it, and built links to them via Tiers as normal.
On May 23rd it slipped down to position 14. Since then it's dropped by 1-2 positions a day and now sits on Page 3.
Around May 23rd I started doing a dripfeed of new SN/web2.0/articles, about 5 a day at most.
Just wanted to ask... Should I a) keep going with what I am doing, as Google might move my site up further again or b) stop building links for now for this page?
What's weird is I have always done 3 KWs for this but only ever ranked 1 KW. The other 2 have not appeared anywhere in first 5 pages....
i think it's too early to tell. one thing i learnt from panda/ penguin 1 is not to jump to conclusions when rankings drop. seo blogs will come out with data we just have to be patient.
incidentally i haven't noticed any ranking jumps since penguin except usual noise i.e. my usual seo efforts haven't seen any visible chances in rankings.
is everyone else the same? i'm wondering if google has done their weekly refresh yet or is it delayed because of penguin rollout.
What's more interesting is that both his site and Cyrus Shephard's both tanked after using the disavow tool...
Still early days yet and Dr Pete mentioned something on Twitter about Mozcast forecast being v stormy today, so perhaps Google is making some more changes?
I got hit big time as well. Didn't get hit 10 days ago.
Interesting thing is, those that I use indexification.com on almost all tanked while the rest.... Well they are still in business. I've applied same technique to all projects (minus using indexer). Only contextual links to moneysite with KM content.
Maybe Google have dropped all value from the links that people submitted to them in the past 10 days? I have not, as yet, seen anything - but I was hit badly 10 days ago.
Comments
I would listen to @viking. He makes a lot of highly credible points.
When you treat a niche with a passion and an interest, you do exactly the things that he outlines. There are certain seo things you do to help with authority, but your focus is to mainly engage your niche and create a following.
That means that he is committed, and that is a very good thing.
Quite honestly, the whole affiliate thing gets kind of old. Chasing rankings, looking for the best tool, working on backlinks and spins, a penalty here, a penalty there, etc. It sometimes gets like that game "Whack a Mole", lol.
I can tell you with 100% honesty that the best time I had in 15 years of doing all of this is when I had actual products I was marketing. It felt real. It was real. And because it was a real business, I did things differently to get the word out and cultivate interest.
Yes, I make a living doing this, but it doesn't mean that I disagree with these other methods. In fact, I like them and I give them five stars.
The best of all worlds is to market real products, grow the business, build a ton of credibility and respect in social circles, dominate the rankings, and make a bunch of money - the perfect plot.
What I am willing to bet though, having worked for multi-billion $ corps, is that Google is very interested in this guy's advertising budget. I am 100% confident that there are two sets of rules for the disavow tool.
I would never use that tool as an affiliate. Never. Pure admission of guilt.
Whereas on the corporate side, you can easily plead the case that you outsourced, you thought the workers were doing 100% whitehat linkbuilding techniques, but they screwed us, etc. etc.
Do you see how that works? There's money at stake for Google in that scenario. So they allow 'plausible deniability' for the big dogs.
I won't touch the Disavow tool. I agree with @ron, for authority sites sure but for new, small sites I think it's too risky.
On another note, I think my site is a one-of-a-kind as is a highly useful service, but it's getting the word out. I'm competing against multi-million dollar companies so my plan is to use SER to get the numbers up, then hopefully the rest will fall into place as more people discover my site and I could ease off using SER. However that plan changed on May 23rd when Penguin 2.0 hit and I got knocked back about a month.
The problem we have is that there are too many ppl within SEO (and I don't mean anyone here :-) ) who really shouldn't be allowed to even turn on a computer, let alone be involved with something such as SEO.
I'm literally shaking my head >:P
The disavow tool is a great tool to help clean up a site for example if you took on a client and the firm before messed up, or your site is getting hit by spammer or your competitors it helps stop the effects. Yeah you might of built the bad links but Google cant prove this and you cant prove you didn't, but at least your taking active steps to clean your site up which Google will notice.
While in some respects i agree with Vikings post in others i dont, I recently took on a client thats in the light bulb niche.. There's not a cat in hells chance i could create a social page and attract users to engage.
For most niches it works, but for others it does not.
SER is a great tool. it does what it does and very well. The main problem is user error. If someone submits poorly spun content thats the users fault and not any discredit to SER. Think outside the box when using SER and your onto a winner.
"Think of it this way, if your site has 500 uniques a day, and you blasted out 30,000 spammed links, what do you think Google is going to do to your site?"
While your example is extreme and in this case yes shows signs of major spamming, Dont forgot all the direct traffic and referral traffic from other sites which generate backlinks, Not all backlinks come from visitors who found a site via Google.
If it's the latter then how are you discerning which links to remove and which to keep???
It tells Google that a certain site or type of link is SPAM. Now what do you think they do with that information? They use it to identify and filter out all the other SPAM just like it.
If you use the disavow tool and you are using automated link building, you are an idiot! Plain and simple.
As far as big brands with 100MM budget using it, well that's a different story as big brands are treated differently. They always have been.
If your site has been hit, build another one and start over. Trying to "convince" Google that you are not a spammer, by telling them about the spam links pointing to your site is laughable at best. They dont give 2 shits about you or your site. They care about revenue and that comes from ads! Period!
my sites recovering slowly slowly..
Also increased my relevant links in SER by tuning the search engines and KWs. No more irrelevant KWs hopefully, except on T3. I also blocked .on.kr and .co.kr I recommend everyone does this, for some reason Korean sites are really spammy.
Apart from that not much different. As I said I don't think Penguin 2.0 could permanently penalize tiered linking.
Pre-Penguin 2.0 one of my main subpages was number 3 in Google for a really big KW. At that point in time I had only done 10 or so web 2.0 manuals to it, and built links to them via Tiers as normal.
On May 23rd it slipped down to position 14. Since then it's dropped by 1-2 positions a day and now sits on Page 3.
Around May 23rd I started doing a dripfeed of new SN/web2.0/articles, about 5 a day at most.
Just wanted to ask... Should I a) keep going with what I am doing, as Google might move my site up further again or b) stop building links for now for this page?
What's weird is I have always done 3 KWs for this but only ever ranked 1 KW. The other 2 have not appeared anywhere in first 5 pages....
I would like to add a letter to your list.
z) if you make zero from SEO.
:-S
What's more interesting is that both his site and Cyrus Shephard's both tanked after using the disavow tool...
Still early days yet and Dr Pete mentioned something on Twitter about Mozcast forecast being v stormy today, so perhaps Google is making some more changes?
) and more importantly multiple traffic sources.
my one site was #3 not disappear from serp.
Interesting thing is, those that I use indexification.com on almost all tanked while the rest.... Well they are still in business. I've applied same technique to all projects (minus using indexer). Only contextual links to moneysite with KM content.