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.
spunko2010 i was building links only contextual and some high pr forum and social bookmarking daily. article spun from WAC and KM. this is big hit for me.
To be honest, the update make no sense here either. Those that continue to rank are those I've spammed the most, and those that tanked... I was as careful as one can be with GSA and KM
@claus10 what I meant was, over the past 10 days Google has been asking people to use spam report for sites that are ranking due to spam, if those sites linking to the spam are now on a blacklist then maybe that is why you got hit, if they devalued them all...
@baba I am sorry to hear that. But I was there 10 days ago and it is possible (so far) to get the ranks back. it just sets you back 1-2 months.... I dont think Penguin 2.0 is a penalty only devaluation.
@spunko2010 yeah ok - makes sense, but then the rest of my sites should burn as well, since they are all using the same recipe. Perhaps they will burn soon who knows |)
@claus10 I don't think Google are consistent in each website. Hence why some spam is still ranking, and some useless 'authority' sites appear where they shouldnt.
I use indexification on all my sites. Some have tanked and some have improved, can't really see any conclusive evidence that their service is responsible.
@velocity were you doing the 'normal' tiered linking for all your sites? anything noticeable between the ones that have dropped and those that didn't, no matter how trivial it might seem??
Had a web 2.0 blown out of the water last night lol. Thankfully it was a smaller contributor. And I am grateful that it was a quick and decisive death, and not a slow death by 1000 cuts )
I think it is far wiser to have your own domains. I'm done experimenting with 2.0's.
I'm going to leave the ecom site that got burned a few more weeks and see what happens, but I think I'm going to end up starting again.
The only difference between that site and my others is that it is clearly ecommerce and we spend on adwords.
Other sites have similar SER campaigns and are holding up, others have been spammed to f**k and are also still doing well, but for what ever reason Google just hates that site, which is surprising as that is my whitest of whitest sites...
jsut curous has anyone seem a 1 pager web 2.0 that is being ranked on page #1 still? i'm looking through my niches the first page dominated by own domains.
Still noticing a bunch of wordpress.com and blogspot.com pages on top 100. Most of them have no links (according to ahrefs.com). You know, those pages with weird character like %$ Sale [Product Name], just to make the title unique. Very spammy pages. Those are working really well since Penguin 1.0 and obviously still working till now.
@Spunko2010 I am waiting a bit for everything to settle before I do a full analysis. As you have seen Google are still messing about right now, if you remember Penguin 1 it took a few weeks before it was worth trying to see what was going on. At a quick glance it seems some of my older sites got hit the worst, this maybe because they have a lot more links over the time. I did also notice some of my newer spam projects escaped unharmed!
@sonic81 my Spam web 2.0 still alive. Stopped link building after 7 days, and that's 2 month ago. Probably the most brute spampage I ever did. Even the onpage content is spun. no explanation for that..
@davbel - "whitest of whitest sites... " - I hear you! I've got a bunch of them not ranking. Good content, great layout, usability, everything that makes a good site...but no love on them. Complete mystery!
I also got hit recently in one of my sites, big time. Managed to stay under the radar with it since penguin went out, but now 14 KWs got kicked out of SERPs. I use multi tiered white hat project and couple of web 2.0 that I send black hat comments to them.
More then that, I've checked the verified URLs that SER generated for me, and a bit less than 50% of them were actually good links, other had error 404, 406 etc. Does that has something to do with that?
websites that where around before google have been virtually deleted from the internet << they get some traffic from advertorials<<< but they are against google rules because the only advertising that should be don e on the internet is on google...
Old websites with big amounts of content are being penalized because there content will be found by scrapers and posted else where<<< google fault for letting the scrapers find the website.... google fault that these old websites get spammy WHOIS and otheR bad automated links...
Why aint the government doing something?..... So if even established websites are going. and soon the only websites people will be able to find are amazon and ebay. in a sense you either pay for adwords or get deleted from the internet that googles aim.
But it goes to show that automated tools like gsa ser are the only way now.
Anyone else get blown to position 250-350 from first page?
If anyone has had a similar experience to me I was wondering if any of your websites have returned?
It looks like a Google Dance at first glance, but then I've read so much about other people disappearing on the same date that I think it can't be a coincidence now. Oddly Google bot is all over my websites like everyday...
I was hit on May 20th, lost most ranks, slowly I am recovering. Some KWs just dont seem to recover at all though.
My problem KW i mentioned above is now sitting in position 12. It's gone from 3 > 9 > 11 > 30 > 38 > 12 in 2 weeks.
Just remember that it's a link devaluation not a penalty, so it's possible to get it back presumably.
@content32 you are assuming that Google checks every single website and webpage they crawl for unique content. When they say unique content, they probably don't mean stuff being rehashed. They know that good content is rewritten, lifted, blogged, tweeted etc and like with tiers I doubt they verify each blog post or article for uniqueness. Too much processing would be involved. When Fatt Cutts drones on about unqiue quality content I think he means well-written things that people use. If a new website appears with very few IBL and no authority then maybe they check that for uniqueness, it would make sense. But I doubt they penlize older sites for not having unique content - after all it was created first.
I have not used the Disavow tool. In my experience Google has never helped me, whether I have done a white hat website or a blackhat website. Never trust Google :P
Guys my ranks are recovering now. Yesterday was a good day for traffic, hasn't been that high for about 10 days.
I know how it feels to lose your ranks but it does appear at least in my case you can get them back. I reckon what's happening is, as I said before, Google is devaluing all the sh*t loads of domains that people have reported in the past few weeks (either through Disavow tool or Penguin 2.0 spam report). Hopefully they won't make it a regular occurence, imagine if they did this every day :S
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.
article spun from WAC and KM.
this is big hit for me.
@baba I am sorry to hear that. But I was there 10 days ago and it is possible (so far) to get the ranks back. it just sets you back 1-2 months.... I dont think Penguin 2.0 is a penalty only devaluation.
Had a web 2.0 blown out of the water last night lol. Thankfully it was a smaller contributor. And I am grateful that it was a quick and decisive death, and not a slow death by 1000 cuts
)
I think it is far wiser to have your own domains. I'm done experimenting with 2.0's.
The only difference between that site and my others is that it is clearly ecommerce and we spend on adwords.
Other sites have similar SER campaigns and are holding up, others have been spammed to f**k and are also still doing well, but for what ever reason Google just hates that site, which is surprising as that is my whitest of whitest sites...
Also I found out the sites did NOT have hidden whois.... It was a JV. Lesson learned....
My problem KW i mentioned above is now sitting in position 12. It's gone from 3 > 9 > 11 > 30 > 38 > 12 in 2 weeks.
Just remember that it's a link devaluation not a penalty, so it's possible to get it back presumably.
@content32 you are assuming that Google checks every single website and webpage they crawl for unique content. When they say unique content, they probably don't mean stuff being rehashed. They know that good content is rewritten, lifted, blogged, tweeted etc and like with tiers I doubt they verify each blog post or article for uniqueness. Too much processing would be involved. When Fatt Cutts drones on about unqiue quality content I think he means well-written things that people use. If a new website appears with very few IBL and no authority then maybe they check that for uniqueness, it would make sense. But I doubt they penlize older sites for not having unique content - after all it was created first.
I went back to Magic Submitter and my old high quality web 2.0 strategy then I will blast them with SER on tier2.
Also I will try doing some social signals as much as I can. Hopefully this will help recovering the keywords.
I know how it feels to lose your ranks but it does appear at least in my case you can get them back. I reckon what's happening is, as I said before, Google is devaluing all the sh*t loads of domains that people have reported in the past few weeks (either through Disavow tool or Penguin 2.0 spam report). Hopefully they won't make it a regular occurence, imagine if they did this every day :S