1. Site Quality vs. Page Quality
Google is no longer “page” focused
The days of Google determining what will or won’t rank primarily based on page-level analysis are gone. Aka Panda.

2. Human Engagement Signals
Stole some slides from Rand Fishkin, showing Facebook shares are highly correlated with Google rankings
Google acquires PostRank, analytics service for the social web (with lots of historical data)
Google knows that no one is reading a page. So it doesn’t matter if your link is on that page.

3. Brute Force is Dead
Unnatural anchor text can hurt you.
Large volumes of exact match anchor text are not how people link in the real world.
- automated filtering
- automated correction

4. Extreme Localization
Google goes insane!
Oct-2010, everyone has a location.
Points out that he has clients with double-digit clickthrough rates at positions 9-15…because of the maps in the middle.

Change is Good.
- embrace it.
- find new areas of opportunities.

Our job is to understand human behavior while they are looking for information.

Read the leaked Google doc about raters guidelines.

Focus for the Agency
- learn to say no
- autonomous solutions
- new products/services to solve common problems

You can’t do it like you used to. Can’t give small wins more often. You need to have stellar results. Otherwise, you won’t grow as a business. And you’ll be stuck with those clients who pay you a lot of money and don’t listen to you.

Project lists that outline problems but also solutions.

Focus for the Client

- lose the tie!
- don’t be afraid to go rogue.
- proof-of-concept is the key
- embrace open graph and individual identities for your employees

Q&A:

- If you’re using opengraph and your site gets hit with panda, does Google then also apply that penalty to your profile?
- How are you talking to your clients about how to use Facebook right now?

Probably the best part about this PageRank update is that no one is really talking about it. I’m at PubCon in Las Vegas with some of the best SEOs around, and no one has even mentioned it. I’ve been wondering when the day would come where people would lose interest/fascination with PageRank. Are we there yet? Maybe.

Q&A Moderator: Michelle Robbins, Director of Technology, Third Door Media, Inc.

Speakers:

• Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street Journal
• Greg Boser, SVP of Search Services, BlueGlass Interactive, Inc.
• Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
• Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
• Todd Friesen, Director of SEO, Performics
• Stephan Spencer, Founder of Netconcepts, Co-author of The Art of SEO, StephanSpencer.com

This year we have one hundred and eight trillion years of SEO experience. Danny gives nice introductions.

Boser says that he’s not technically an SEO anymore. Yeah, right.

What are the most useful social share buttons?
— Bruce Clay says that the Google +1 button adds about 2 seconds to each page’s load time.
— Boser: There’s nothing worse than a site with social sharing buttons that all say zero.
— Alex says that all her blogs are on WP platform, and they do a lot of testing on which buttons are best for users.
— Vanessa: Be sure to monitor what the buttons add to your page speed. And there are also several things to look for when adding third party widgets. Check out the “perceived load time” for your pages after adding buttons.
—  Stephan recommends “High Performance Websites” and “Even Faster Websites”, by the author of the Y Slow plugin

How’s social sharing affecting traffic or SEO practices?
— Alex: not a ton of impact. Twitter has more impact, especially for breaking news stories (with use of hashtag clusters).

Canonical tag, index/nofollow on pagination? Discuss.
—  Todd: There’s the Google version and the version that works.
—  Vanessa: There’s actually two issues that get combined, and the issue gets clouded. Article pagination is one topic, and SE’s didn’t intend the canonical tag to be used in that case. Pagination in onsite search results is another issue. You could use a noindex on page 2 and 3 if you don’t want users to land on page 2 or 3. But Maile says that unique content on page 2 and page 3 could get you more traffic for keywords on those pages not on page 1. The other type is onsite search result pages. Vanessa says use noindex on these pages.
— Boser: We always use it on WP category pages. The cool thing about the canonical is that it can act like a 301 but Google gets to see the content.
— Bruce: Google may ignore the canonical or they may ignore the page itself. (Vanessa and Stephan dispute this.)
—  Boser proposes canonical tag tag. Brilliant.
— Stephan: noindex implies a follow, and it still passes link authority, which is a good method to keep pages from being indexed while still passing link juice. Also, Google doesn’t like internal search results pages showing up in their search results. Be sure to take your search results pages and make them look more valuable to users (while somewhat disguising them to SEs)

Schema.org stuff. Can we manipulate Schema.org tags? And how?
—  Boser: SE’s have gone full circle. SEs gave us meta data. Then they took it away. Now they’re asking us for meta data again. Predatory aggregation: these tags makes it so easy for scrape your data and then use it in the search results. There are some negative things about these tags.
—- Alex: We need to see how it really works, test it and come to conclusions about it.
— Bruce: The only reason I see you use it right now is if you are losing rankings on ambiguity search terms. I’m worried about the amount of code bloat from schema.org tags. 6 months down the road, I’m sure we’ll be here and no one is even using it yet.
— Stephan: I’ve been a fan of microformats for a while now, especially on real estate sites. It’s good for user experience.
— Todd: I thought Stephan would like microdata because it makes it so much easier to crawl names and phone numbers.

Panda? Help?…
— Boser: If you got hit, c’mon. There’s been a lot less anger about this algo update. If you got caught by Panda, you know why and you just gotta start over from scratch.

Danny gives each panelist a site:
—  Boser: Look at backlinks and see if that content ever developed any backlinks (eHow). Is there stickiness? Does you content generate backlinks? If not, you need to address that.
— Stephan: I would acquire some sites with high link authority, semi-abandoned, not well monetized, etc…
— Alex: Identify pages that have content, are relevant but don’t get clicks. Focus on those pages where there is potential.
— Todd: It’s a cleanup project. You gotta go through your site and clean it up.
— Bruce: Restructuring templates and pruning off weak pages are the best things you can do for the short term.
— Vanessa: You have to re-think your entire site. It’s not going to be just one thing.

What scares you about Google lately? From an SEO perspective? But also, what do you like about them?
—  Boser: Other than the fact that they’ve gone from organizing the world’s information to wanting to own the world’s information… But seriously, he likes how Google tells you when you have been punished.
— Bruce: I have a particularly paranoid vision of Google.  I see Google moving into Local very strong. And then I see Google moving into the news. Like producing the news. Scary.

Links and tweets as ranking factors?
—  Boser: it’s a corroborated signal that goes along with the other signals. If you have a wave of activity from trusted people on twitter, it will spill over to other sites.
— Todd: It goes back to following:follower ratios and identifying the authorities on Twitter. It’s the next thing of getting to the front page of Digg.
— Stephan: Going viral is not in a vacuum. There’s a lot of signals to make things legit.
— Vanessa: None of us actually care about ranking. We just care about getting people to our site.

Do you think social signals will become more important than links?
— Stephan: I don’t think so. We’re going to end up in a world with highly sophisticated AI, and the link graph will be the underlying reason for a page being deemed important.
— Vanessa: Links have been so big because for a long time, they were the only signal. Now there are a lot more signals.
— Boser: Connectivity will never go away. The Web is all about the hyperlink, and that connection gets stronger with social.
—  Bruce: Much like a link graph, a trust graph will become even more important.
— Alex: Social media gives the SE’s a much larger pool to pull from. Links only come from people with websites. Likes and tweets comes from a much larger group of people than just people with websites.
— Todd: I was up for the keynote…only the last 10 minutes of it. Ranking is going to start going away because I see someone’s face in the FB widget on a website. That gives me confidence as a consumer.
— Alex: One thing that I hate about Google is that they consider Wikipedia as a news source.
— Danny:  You know what – I want full link reporting on any site. Blekko has great tools, too, but I want it from Google.
— Stephan: I am not happy with Google playing ‘Hide the Banana’. I think they are going to get more and more into health information. What could be really interesting is the merging of SEO and genetic/health data. Cuz you could send in your DNA to get sequenced and organized. I think they’ve made great improvements in their local algo and Google Places.
— Todd: Something I like about Google —> Google’s given me a hell of a career for the last 10 years.

Lightning round:

• Anchor text over-optimization? YES! Don’t go crazy with it.
• Digg, Reddit? Does anyone even care anymore? No.

Final thoughts:

Danny: I want to do a panel where you guys run a search engine. I’m trying to get Matt Cutts moderate a panel of SEOs.

Q&A Moderator: Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street Journal

Speakers:

• Jonathon Colman, Internet Marketing Manager, REI
• Kavi Goel, Product Manager, Google
• Steven Macbeth, Group Program Manager, Bing Search Quality, Microsoft
• Todd Nemet, Director, Technical Projects, Nine By Blue
• Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc.

This is one of my favorite sessions each year, primarily because Maile Ohye typically gives us some good easter eggs. And I like when Vanessa Fox laughs at dumb people, which she does in most other sessions as well. Anyways, let’s get started already!

Vanessa claims there is going to be a lot of “bonus things” in this session. #awesome

This panel is packed with awesome people. Now they are getting into schema.org talk. It’s fun to see Google and Bing people talking about schema.org. These two dudes seem to be friends. Dogs and Cats! Living together! 40 years of darkness! Earthquakes! Volcanoes! …and that’s the end of my Ghostbusters bit. Anyways, schema.org looks like it might be big. Like MySpace big!

Now I’m watching a schema.org video. WTF is going on! This is awesome. Content in Context. So it appears that schema.org is a structured meta data foundation that will serve us potato salad.

Holy crap! Schema.org talk has overtaken this session. The session is no long stuctured at all. It’s just a bunch of questions. Getting tough to tweet and blog. And now they are talking about the new author tag from Google that was announced today.

At any rate, here are some of the questions:

• If they are moving to microdata? will Schema.org effectively make microformats obsolete?
• What do we do with the schema.org tags and standards? Do we go back and mark up our entire site?

Oh wait. The schema.org talk was only part of the session. So I guess now we’re back to the original session topic. Up first is Maile Ohye.

Maile Ohye is going to talk about Internation SEO issues:

• Considerations for international expansion of your site
• Before you start, ask yourself if you can really support that site.
• Key factors:
• Flow chart: Language or country/region
• Language focused expansion: en.domain.com, put site on gTLD or ccTLD if you can afford it
• Country focused expansion: language still remains a factor. Multiple languages in one country. Currency, shipping, local laws.
• Can you get ccTLD for your site?
• example.ch/de
• example.ch/fr
• Check out United Airlines site. Maile mentioned that they “are doing it right” (I’d take her word and use their site as a model)
• No cloaking! Lots of sites do this. Don’t.
• Shareable URLs.
• Indicated language/country in the URL (example.com/fr/welcome.html)
• Matching URL structure. (ie. www.example.com/country/ for all countries)
• Helpful language/country crosslinking
• Provide user ability to navigate to their desired language of choice
• Site load times factor in
• Geo metatags not used by Google with web search? (Well, what are they used for? #confusing)
• Duplicate content ice cream: on different ccTLDs, duplicate content shouldn’t be a problem

Next up: Jonathan Colman

• “I’m like you. I’m also a non-developer.”
• Jonathan hit a homerun with his rel=canonical tag idea, and he increased his pages indexed while eliminating a lot of duplicate content.
• He saw massive increases in pages indexed, while also seeing a 96% decrease in duplicate content.
• Now it’s Vanessa and Maile addressing what Jonathan talked about. Maile does not recommend what Jonathan does.
• I’m really confused now. I feel bad for Jonathan. He’s a badass. And I hope his site doesn’t get blown up this week by Maile.

Next up: Todd Nemet

• Really long redirect chains, unintentional referrer cloaking, IIS issues, robots.txt issues, IDS blocking Googlebot
• Redirect chains:
• Crawlers give up after too many redirects
• AdWords adds even more redirects
• Cloaking:
• By referring URL
• By user agent
• By IP address
• IIS browscap cloaking – look it up
• IIS error page handling:
• creates 302 chain out of the box for 404 pages

Then the Q&A was all about rel=canonical stuff. I’ve heard it a hundred times before. Google created a monster when it created the rel=canonical tag.

Q&A Moderator: Jeff Ferguson, CEO, Fang Digital Marketing

Speakers:

• Michael Hayward, CEO, ROI Labs
• Jennifer Lopez, Community Manager, SEOmoz
• Sean Percival, Vice President, Online Marketing, Myspace
• Elle Shelley, VP Social Media, Zog Media

Up first is Michael Hayward:

• Challenge 1: We need a Twitter strategy.
• Commerce and lead generation
• Customer service and complaint monitoring
• Reputation management
• Promotional messaging
• Trying to monitor everything becomes a nightmare for scalability.
• Challenge 2: Online Publishing Reality: niche publications don’t develop an online audience; advertising can’t be sold
• Future of Four Seasons Magazine
• Advertising support
• Online presence
• Can’t just PDF your magazinge and be successful
• However, the online value-ad is a competitive necessity
• Challenge 3: Trying to reach customers earlier in the buying cycle
• Reaching into the top of the longtail of travel search
• Homepage overload: new spa, new restaurant, new chef, latest promotion, destination guides
• Search to the Rescue:
• Tweets contain: brand, top of the tail terms, built a custom link shortner (fshr.com), deep link into magazine with tracking variables built in, editorial calendar set up to a year in advance based on when articles go into magazine and then get tweeted
• Good point about scheduling tweets months and months in advance, based on seasonal peaks. Optimize frequency with search in mind.
• Search traffic from search has grown over 50% in the past 4 years; all other traffic sources +5%
• Now ranking for non-travel terms

Takeaways:

1. Use twitter as key driver of SEO strategy
2. Magazine became part of the the SEO strategy
   – advertising now subsidizes search
3. Use the Magazine to carry general/inspiration content

Next up is Elle Shelley from ZOGMedia:

• “Just as search was in 1998, social is today.” – Jeff Herzog
• Tip 1: Integrate into Strategy
• Be organized, Work backwards with content, sprinkle short AND longtail keywords
• Customer Continuum: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Transaction, Advocacy

Oops. Gotta run. Sorry.

New Periodic Table of SEO (2011)

Moderator: Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan)

Speakers:

• Matthew Brown, AudienceWise (@MatthewJBrown)
• Duane Forrester, Microsoft (@DuaneForrester)
• Jeff MacGurn, Covario (@yerrbo)
• Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz (@randfish)

The session starts with Danny reviewing the old periodic tables of SEO…from 1998, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011. Nice little SEO history lesson. I think I even heard him mention the Florida update. #vintage

Jeff MacGurn is up first. Leads off with a philosoraptor meme image. A redditor? We can smell our own. He works at Covario. Cites some big study/analysis they did. And then spends a minute or two explaining correlation between causation.

Technical SEO factors:

• Page size
• URL character length – not much correlation
• Flash navigation – not much correlation
• Session IDs – strong negative correlation on rankings when present
• Dynamic parameters in URLs – not much correlation
• Proximity of page to root directory – not much correlation
• Page load time – surprisingly strong correlation

Content Factors:

• Keyword Emphasis – not so much
• Keyword in title tag – strong on Yahoo/Bing
• Keyword in Meta Desc tag – not so much
• Keyword in H1/H2 tag – strongly correlated overall
• Keyword in H3 tag – not so much
• Keyword in image Alt tag – not so much
• Keywords in URL – strong positive correlation

Links:

• Internal link count – very little correlation
• External link count – marginally better than internal link count
• Keywords in the anchor text – waning, but still slight correlation
• Hub Links – Very strong, one of the strongest factors of all examined factors in the study. ie – Having links from sites that link to relevant group of site

Takeaways:

• Look for differentiating factors in your landscape
• Links from Hubs
• Page load time
• Keyword in URL
• H1

And next up in Rand Fishkin. You’ve probably heard of him. He’s about to throw Jeff under the bus. Oops! Jeff kinda got unlucky because Rand wasn’t scheduled to be on this panel. Sorry, Jeff. You were a worthy competitor though.

It’s pretty clear that in the realm of SEO data analysis, @randfish is king.

• 2011 data has changed a lot. Link factors fell from 65% to 45%. Whoa! Again, this is a survey. But still.
• Google’s use of ranking features in the future: usage data, social signals at the domain level, social signals, analysis of perceived value to users
• Big one: #of linking C-blocks
• # linking ip addresses, linking root domains, subdomains, followed links
• linking root domains with partial anchor text
• Exact match anchor texts are on the way down in terms of value
• # of linking C-blocks to page more important than domains
• Exact match domains: Matt Cutts said at PubCon 2010 that they will not value exact match domains as much. Rand’s data shows that Matt was telling the truth. Nice work, Matt. Exact match domains are not as valuable any more.
• Is Google evil? — Lots of Google adsense slots? Strong negative correlation with rankings.
• Don’t link to Google.com! It has negative correlation. Microsoft on the other hand is slightly positive.
• Do you use Google Analytics? If so, slight negative correlation.
• Number of external links on the page shows positive correlation.
• Social media factors – #of Facebook shares, Sum of FB shares, likes and comments
• # of Facebook shares – highest single positively correlated metric for rankings (present for 61% of pages ranked in the top 30)
• Facebook shares are predictive of links. Nope. They are not correlated.
• Maybe FB shares are correlated with some other factors Rand’s not looking at, but he acknowledges that. Could be things like site speed.
• Don’t try this at home, kids — Don’t misuse or misattribute correlation data.

And now it’s @MatthewJBrown from AudienceWise. And he also uses a reddit meme in his slides. I know what he does at work.

• Points out to put FB Like buttons on every single page on your site. Not a button for your brand’s FB page, but a FB Like button for all your products, categories and URLs
• User averages of FB likes, shares, comments, tweets, linkedin shares, etc…
• Make sure to check out schema.org
• Localization: the online brand killer?
• Check out Google Suggest for keyword suggestions rather than the Adwords keyword tool
• Use Advanced Web Rankings with Proxify
• Get on board with Twitter, FB, and Google +1

Q&A:

• Duane Forrester: I agree with some of what I’ve seen. Some of what I’ve seen has me scratching my head. And I’m a little bit humbled about how close everyone is.
• Rand asks Matt about localized results. Give me data for 150 keywords from 50 different data centers/cities. Gets complicated.
• When we look at all these factors, are we not looking about the human use? – Rand says the two are merging more and more. Jeff says they are one in the same. Duane says Bing is looking at what the user is experiencing.

Good news, everyone!

Did you hear? Google lifted the -50 penalty on Overstock! Yep. It’s true. Surprisingly, no one really cares. Oh sure, it’s made the SEO news cycle over the past couple of days, but it certainly isn’t causing the same hysteria as when Google was bitch-slapping Overstock, JCPenney and Forbes back in February for their involvement in the filthy evil world of paid link building.

I’m actually surprised I haven’t had anyone ask me about the Overstock penalty being lifted. It hasn’t even come up at lunch or at the water cooler. Nope. People are just too cynical. We all want to slow down to look at the gruesome car wreck, but no one slows down to get a good look at the vehicles being towed away. “Oh hey – let’s slow down to look at a happy ending!” Mark that under ‘Things that you’ll never hear’. People don’t care about happy endings. People want to watch the tigers (Google) devour the gladiators (websites) in the Colosseum (the Internet).

Back on February 24th, I saw the Overstock story, and I decided to do a little research. I wanted to know what kind of impact the Google penalty would have on Overstock’s rankings. And I also wanted to know how long such a publicized penalty would last. So I did what any SEO would do — I found roughly 500 non-branded keywords that were driving a ton of organic traffic to Overstock.com. On Feb. 25th, I ran a ranking report. Sure enough, nearly every keyword had gone from ranking in the top 10 to ranking in the 50′s and 60′s.

Google's -50 Penalty on Overstock.com has obviously been lifted.

Yesterday, when I saw the news about the penalty being lifted, I ran a ranking report on the same keywords. As you can see, the penalty has been lifted. It’s undeniable:

Before & After: Google Ranking Analysis & Comparison for Overstock.com

Just look at that. Damn! I know it’s the NBA playoffs, but that is the biggest rebound I’ve seen in a long time! Going from 27 position 1 rankings to 265? Wow. That is amazing. Google really does have the power to ruin your day if they want to. But Google also forgives. So that is good.

And now, how about I upload an overly long JPG file that shows you all the keywords and their respective rankings? Well, okay. I suppose I can do that.

Overstock Keyword Rankings: Before and After the Google Penalty

So there’s that. I guess that post really wrapped up nicely. Or not. Not.

BTW I think it’s awesome that Overstock.com sent out a press release to announce the Google penalty had been removed. Online press releases are a great tool for reputation management….and link building! Aside from the obvious irony, I think it’s pretty ballsy for Overstock to use this announcement to build more links to their awesome o.co domain. Well done, indeed.

Interesting note from the SEWatch article:

The toll of the Google penalty on Overstock.com: a 5 percent drop in sales and 32 percent loss of organic traffic.

Wow. I’ll have more on that later.

Additional coverage:

• http://www.seroundtable.com/overstock-google-penalty-13004.html
• http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2011/02/overstock-overstocks-edu-links-and-google-schools-them.html

From the WSJ article:

Overstock’s pages had recently ranked near the top of results for dozens of common searches, including “vacuum cleaners” and “laptop computers.” But links to Overstock on Tuesday dropped to the fifth or sixth pages of Google results for many of those categories, greatly reducing the chances that a user would click on its links.

Aw, c’mon. That doesn’t even make sense. Does the media know anything about SEO? And really why does the media continue to put SEO in the same bucket as aggressive, super awesome link building tactics? Because really, most SEOs wouldn’t know the first thing about coming up with awesome link building campaigns like the one that Overstock has been using. Granted, Google caught them. But that is always the risk of a great link building campaign, especially one that drives a disproportionate number of .edu links. That’s where they went wrong.

Building a ton of .edu links is dangerous, as it’s so easy to see those links in a link report. In fact, if most of your links are coming from .edu sites, you might as well have a parade to announce them to Google! Too many of those links too fast – and your history! Well, I’m sure that Overstock.com enjoyed several months (maybe years) of top results from this type of link strategy. Good for them. And thank Jebus they didn’t blame it on their SEO agency. Because that would be really lame.

The point is: In today’s Google, you’ve got to be *REALLY* smart about your link building. Not too fast. Not too slow. Diversify your links. Don’t get thousands of crappy links (aka the SearchDex method), but don’t get too many too-good-to-be-true golden .edu links (aka the Overstock method). In fact, I think we all remember one of the recurring themes from Goldilocks. The third try was always “just right.” For her, that worked out great. But for us SEOs and link builders, we don’t get three tries. We need to make it right the first time.

Laters haters.

PS. Google, I think we all would really like to know how much is too much? The 2 most recent stories involved link building methods that are downright flagrant. Are you not de-listing these sites because they are ‘too big to fail’? Sure, you are probably scaring other companies into thinking that link campaigns are a bad idea. But me thinks that the blackhats out there are loving the fact that you are not de-listing these major brands. Juts sayin’…

"Paid links are the ManBearPig of 2011." - Al Gore

First, rewind to this past Saturday when that New York Times article came out. The NYTimes ratted out JCPenney to Google for buying links. Yep. It was a massive news story involving black hattery and Google. It went viral in the digital marketing world. Everyone has read it or at least heard about it by now. And it really made JCPenney look like the bad guy. And their SEO agency, Searchdex, got as much negative PR as I’ve ever seen an SEO agency get. They were fired immediately by JCP. Sucks for them. While JCPenney will bounce back after the Google penalty is lifted, I’m thinking SearchDex might be better off if they changed their name and rebranded completely.

Basically, with that NYTimes article, Google equated paid links to ManBearPig and scared the hell out of a lot of paid link buyers and would-be paid link buyers. I’m sure that most companies called their search agencies to ask about the article, and I’m sure that most search agencies were not looking forward to those calls. That article made us all look like we are evil blackhats, especially if we buy paid links. Regardless, I’m certain that a lot of link campaigns were ended this week. It’s just a theory. I don’t actually know. But I’ve heard of the bell curve. And I know that most people tend to have a kneejerk reaction about pretty much anything that scares them. To that end, Google scared a lot of people into discontinuing their link campaigns and/or not starting new ones. Again, I can’t prove that. But whatever. It makes sense to me.

Google really needs to affect both sides of the link-buying equation. Now that the people buying the links are scared, the next step is to go after the websites that are selling the links. But what does Google do if a site is selling links? In the past, we would notice the PageRank of the publisher site drop from a PR5 to a PR4 or something like that. In some cases, I saw PR4 sites drop down to PR1. That was pretty harsh. But a lot of websites that were selling links didn’t have the first clue about PageRank. They were just mommy blogs, news sites and magazine-style blogs. But that was like 3 years ago. Today, it’s different ballgame.

Nowadays – well, really in the past few months – I have caught a couple of news stories about Google contacting websites suspected of selling links. In one case, the site owner flat out denied ever selling links. I’m not sure what ever happened with that one. But in today’s Forbes case, the site owner was none other than Denis Pinsky, the Digital Marketing Manager at Forbes.com. He was asking about which links were paid, as if he couldn’t find them. Maybe this guy really didn’t know. He seemed concerned enough to post about it in a public setting. What kind of SEO would do that?! Maybe that’s his alibi! Sheesh. I just wish someone would admit it already. As Barry Schwartz pointed out in his post on serountable.com (with pictures to prove it), it’s easy to see where Forbes wis selling paid links.

In both cases I linked to, the site owners received this message in the Google Webmaster Central Account:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.forbes.com/,

We’ve detected that some or all of your pages are using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which are available here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. For more information about our linking guidelines, visit

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356&hl=en.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

The lesson here: you should be checking your Webmaster Central accounts every day. If you see that message, you probably need to take down the links you are selling. Well, I can’t say that. What if you are selling links to…oh I dunno, a top insurance agency, a massive computer manufacturer, and a major fashion brand for thousands of dollars per month? Would it be worth it to have your PageRank dropped and/or lose some of your rankings if you kept the link and made thousands of dollars per month? That’s your call. Do the math. Ask an economist. I think it’s something like “the marginal benefit must outweigh the marginal cost.” I was never good with graphs about guns and butter. But for most cases, if you get that message from Google, you should probably remove the paid links from your website and submit a reinclusion request.

Lastly, I want you to know how I really feel about Google and paid links:

1. Don’t be afraid of buying links. Be cautious. Just make sure you’re not dumb about it. For more information on dumb link campaigns, read that NYTimes article again. SearchDex pretty much lays out a path to dumb that anyone can follow.
2. In general, it’s okay to sell links on your personal site(s) because, hey, your site isn’t home to a major brand. Plus, your personal site is probably just some side income anyways, right? However, for your clients’ sites: NEVER sell links on your clients sites. No no no no never ever ever! If they are looking for additional revenue, take the selling links option off the table before the discussion ever starts. The last thing you need is to be doing a great job at SEO and then your client’s site gets hit with a penalty for selling links. If that happens, you are just spinning your wheels with any SEO you do for them.

Well, how much longer will the paid links saga drag on this week? I don’t know. But if something else happens, maybe I’ll write about it!

Happy selling….err, I mean buying! Or do I?!?! Mwuaaahahahaha!

"Savor the flavor, cause it sure as hell won't happen again." - Ray Zalinsky

1. JCPenney

JCPenney just pulled one over on Google. The word ‘epic’ gets overused on the Internet today, but I’d say this event was truly epic. With the help of a paid link campaign (put together idiotically but effectively by SearchDex), JCPenney dominated Google’s algorithm and spam team. It was complete and total domination. Matt Cutts even admitted to the New York Times that he and his team missed the entire link campaign. But now that Google has punished JCPenney, what should JCP do now for SEO? I’ll tell you: absolutely nothing.

Here’s the deal: Google has admittedly taken “strong action” against JCPenney. The only thing that JCPenney can do is take down the links and fire their SEO agency. Taking down the links will hopefully help to get the penalty lifted sooner. Firing their SEO agency was just to save face. “See Google, we got rid of that blackhat SEO agency. So we’re cool, right?”

JCPenney has no control over when/if Google will lift the penalty. And even with the punishment from Google, JCPenney.com is still ranking in the top 100 for a ton of highly competitive keywords. That indicates that their current whitehat SEO strategies are probably decent and effective. They should get rid of any shady on-site SEO methods, and they should continue their basic SEO 101 processes that are already in place. The strong JCP brand name and the millions of quality links will help JCP regain its rankings soon enough.

My advice: Take the thousands of dollars you were paying SearchDex for their SEO consulting services and take the thousands of dollars you were paying for the paid links – use that money for something else! How about reputation management? Or PPC? Or social? Or display media? Or maybe all of the above. I wouldn’t spend one dollar on SEO until the penalty has been lifted. Time heals all wounds. Just wait it out.

"Need a little wind here." - Tommy Boy Callahan III

2. SearchDex

Man, they do need a little wind here. I must say that I’m kinda bummed out for SearchDex. I mean, seriously. They delivered results to a client who was desperate for rankings. I’d wager my favorite guitar that JCPenney was fully aware of the benefits *and* possible risks inherent with such a massive paid link campaign. And while I think they bought links on some of the spammiest, low rent, and trashiest websites, I’ve gotta acknowledge SearchDex for one thing: they were the masterminds behind a paid link campaign that delivered amazing results to a massive retailer during the holidays. (Note: If you’ve ever worked with a Fortune 1000 retailer, you know that some of them make 80%-90% of their yearly revenue in the holiday season.) SearchDex delivered results. And that’s the truth.

Additionally, I’m bummed out for SearchDex because they were ratted out by a journalist who got tipped off or had a hunch. (BTW there are a lot of people asking how that journalist got tipped off. I’d also like to know!) I don’t like seeing other SEO agencies or even other SEOs get kicked in the nuts by a national media website just looking for a way to sell a story to the masses. Just think: Once the writer found out the story involved Google, it was game over for SearchDex and JCPenney. The writer could spin the plot to include a major retailer taking advantage of Google via a “link scheme” (who even says that?!?). Jeez. It makes me want to puke. And to do it in such a way that makes Google look like the good guy. And to make searchers look like innocent victims caught in a sinister plot to rule the online world via better rankings. Barf.

SearchDex probably lost clients over this. Some of their employees are probably worried about their jobs. And it’s all because the story made them out to be the scapegoat for JCPenney. The New York Times article put the cross-hairs on JCPenney.com, and that’s not really shedding lights on just how many major companies run paid link campaigns. While the writer interviewed a person who manages paid link campaigns, the take-home message was: most companies don’t buy links because they are afraid of getting caught, and most of them don’t have the “deep pockets” to buy links anyways. Well I’m here to let you know that if you are in a competitive industry and if you are being outranked by massive brands, it’s partly because 1) their sites have more authority than your site and 2) most of your top competitors are buying links. Believe me. It’s happening.

All SEM & SEO agencies will take the high road on paid links. After all, if you publish your client list on your website, you better have an official stance against paid link campaigns. Otherwise, you are inviting Google (and journalists, too!) to investigate your clients’ backlink portfolio. After the NYTimes article, I expect everyone to come out of the woodwork to talk shit about paid links. But really, we are living in a time where the “natural link” is pretty much non-existent (on the most popular websites and blogs). Even social networking sites have opportunities for paid links. For example, if I want to, I can purchase links via pay-per-tweet. I can also buy links on Facebook via innocent-looking status updates. It happens, and your most aggressive competitors are doing it. Trust me on that one.

"Look out. I've got cat-like speed and reflexes." - Tommy Boy Callahan III

3. Google

The twitterverse is rife with people tweeting about how you punished JCPenney and about how the SearchDex people are a bunch of blackhat SEOs. However, in my opinion, the most glaring part of this story is how your algorithm and spam team missed this link campaign. How does any of this scare me away from buying links? I think Google knows that there are some links they simply cannot find with an algorithm. But even as Google’s detection methods get better, the mice will still find a way to get the cheese. But for now, at least Google can discount the obvious links. Or can they?

I think we can count on Google taking a deep look into the JCPenney paid link campaign, specifically the actual domains that were being used. It’s probably safe to say that those domains will not pass link juice any longer. In fact, some of those domains may get the death penalty themselves. Some of them are so spammy. It wouldn’t surprise me to see many of those domains de-listed by Google. It also wouldn’t surprise me if Google was able to detect a large portion of the massive network of spammy sites selling links – just using the JCPenney domains as a starting point. Using the SEOmoz tool, I found about 1,800 unique domains linking to the ‘dresses’ URL on jcpenney.com. I’m sure Google can find more than that. They have a few more resources than I do. Godspeed, Google. I fully support you ridding the web of crap. (Just please be lenient with this site. I’m really trying hard to make it good.)

On a conspiracy-related side note: I’m wondering if this entire story was planted by Google . Paid links are causing havoc with organic rankings. Was this whole thing one gigantic scare tactic for would-be link buyers? If it was, congrats. I’m sure there are a lot of companies that will suspend/end their paid link campaigns the moment they read the story. And honestly, maybe that will make it a lot easier for agencies in general because now pretty much every SEO agency can cite the NYTimes story as the reason not to buy links. That certainly will make life easier for some people. But then there are the people on the other side of the equation. Those SEOs will continue to buy links. Only now, they have less competition. Maybe this is a situation where everyone wins!

4. TNX.net (and its link publishers)

I probably shouldn’t even mention TNX.net on my site. Oh well. I guess I don’t really have anything to lose. Anyways, this is the link broker that the New York Times articles mentions by name. They have some stats on their homepage. I copied them on Sunday and then again today:

February 13, 2011:

• Users: 149,807
• (daily growth: +0.07%)
• Sale speed: 10,009 Links/Hour
• Pages in TNX database: 54,446,383
• Text link ads sold: 15,701,150

February 14, 2011:

• Users: 150,009
• (daily growth: +0.08%)
• Sale speed: 9,118 Links/Hour
• Pages in TNX database: 39,258,838
• Text link ads sold: 15,465,090

While the number of pages in the TNX database has dropped by 15 million, the number of links sold has increased by 300,000. I guess the NYTimes article was good for business at TNX.net. Maybe SearchDex and TNX can team up to provide link sabotage services. It’s pretty obvious that it could work, right? I kid. I kid. But there you have it. A big story runs in the New York Times about how buying links are against Google’s guidelines – and now TNX.net has sold even more links. Gosh, I love SEOs. Always keeping it classy and playing it safe. Good times, indeed.

"I'm gonna go get directions to our next huge embarrassing failure." - Richard Hayden