Zoidberg gets angry when you don't remove your links to his site.

Well, it’s official – the Google Penguin updates are costing me money. Thanks a lot, Matt Cutts! Just kidding. It’s actually kinda funny.

The Backstory: I have a few Web 2.0 properties that I don’t really care about. I never post new content on them, and I never update them. Ever. Really. I never ever even look at them. But a long time ago in a land far, far away (circa 2005), I signed up for Text-Link-Ads because I thought maybe I could make some extra money by selling links on these properties that I don’t really do much with. And wouldn’t you know – I’ve been making about $25-$50 a month for the past several years from those sites. It’s been a lot of fun. I mean, it’s nothing to brag about, but it is some extra money. I’ll take it! [BTW just to be clear, I would never ever sell links on yourseosucks.com because I actually like this site and I don't want any ads/paidlinks on it simply because I don't want anything screwing up this really crappy design I've got going here.]

Every few months, I’ll get a ‘link requested’ or ‘link cancelled’ email from TLA, and I LOL because it’s still funny to me that anyone would want to buy a link on any of my crappy sites that altogether get maybe 20 visitors each month. I shouldn’t laugh when they cancel their links, but I do because it’s funny to me that they bought them in the first place.

Most of the time when a link is cancelled, I leave it live on the site. I rarely take links down. I simply don’t care enough to actually go update those sites. So whoever bought links from me and then cancelled – you are probably still getting links on my sites for free. Not a bad deal, right? Wrong! It is a bad deal. Because now we live in the age of Penguin, and Penguin is rabid for bad links.

For the past 15 years, the SEO world has profited on the fact that Google likes links. Now it’s time to profit on the fact that Google Penguin hates bad links. It’s like everything has been reversed, or maybe it’s like everything has come full circle. I don’t know. I’m not good with analogies and metaphors. But I do know this: smart, opportunistic SEOs will use Google’s hatred of bad links to make even more money.

That’s right, folks: LINK REMOVAL IS SERIOUS BUSINESS. I predict that the next few years will be marked by a massive rise in the number of link removal services offered by independent SEMs, SEOs, and agencies alike. I don’t typically make predictions, so I’m kinda nervous about that one. But seriously, take a look at this email I got from TLA:

Link Removal Request Email from Text-Link-Ads.com

After the 5th day and 3rd notification we will remove your site from the marketplace!

Wow. That is serious! I’ve never received an email like that from TLA. Like I mentioned earlier, I always leave the links up – even after the person stopped paying for them. Maybe I’ve missed these email before, but I’ve don’t ever remember seeing an email from them with an ultimatum like “Take them down or else!” I feel like they are bullying me. Yeah. This is link removal bullying. Well, not really. But they’ve definitely taken a new approach to link removal requests. On the bright side, the email included a complete list of all the links I’ve never taken down. So I guess I’ll set aside some time to remove all of them. And there goes my $25-$50 per month that I was making. Thanks again, Google Penguin. Now how am I supposed to buy all those +1′s each month?!?

Now let’s get back to link removal and link removal services.

My theory: Text-Link-Ads.com didn’t change their link removal policy just because they had nothing better to do. Well, maybe this has been their policy all along, and I’ve never really noticed. Or maybe this is just the first time they’ve ever decided to enforce it. It doesn’t really matter. Regardless of the cause, this is the first time I have ever received an email about it. And this email was obviously catalyzed by the Google Penguin updates.

There are a ton of webmasters, link builders, and SEOs that are really scared of the Penguin. It is only logical that the same people who have been interested in building links are now interested in removing them. So, not only does a company like TLA have to provide  a high level of service and support in the acquisition of links – they also have to add a new level of service and support dedicated to the removal of links (when advertisers stop paying publishers for the links).

As noted earlier, when advertisers cancelled links on my sites, I just left the links up. I didn’t take them off my sites. Did that cost me money? Sure. Was I giving something away for free? Yeah. But I didn’t really care enough to spend time updating my sites every time a link was cancelled. It just wasn’t worth it to me. But now, with this new policy from TLA, I’ve got to remove links when they are cancelled…OR ELSE!

In the end, I think this is a good move on the part of Text-Link-Ads.com. Over the years, I have enjoyed using their services. Any time I’ve needed additional support, their customer support team has been very quick to respond and very helpful. So this new addition to their service makes me happy as a publisher. Ultimately, if you’re buying links from anyone, you should be able to have the links removed whenever you want.

I have worked with enough link publishers to know that they don’t really specialize in link removal. In fact, in my experience, the removal of links is the one thing that most link publishers could care less about, especially the link publishers who specialize in building private network links in bulk. I mean, seriously: how do you expect someone to remove 100,000 links? Even if they are on private networks, it’s pretty much impossible. It’s even more impossible when the links were built in comment threads, profile pages, and articles that were built on sites not owned by the link publisher. So really, good luck with all of that. But that is exactly why I think it is a good thing that link publishers are taking the time to create processes that make link removal an easier thing to manage.

Site owners who were negatively affected by Google Penguin must come clean. Google Penguin will continue to have updates, and at some point, ALL site owners will have to come clean about their links and linkbuilding history. How many of the bad links do you need to remove? Well, according to this post and this thread, the answer is 85% of the inorganic links need to be removed before you submit a reinclusion request. I’m not sure if that’s a solid number or if it will work for any situation. At any rate, Google wants to see you at least trying. In fact, at SMX Seattle last week, Matt Cutts said that he’s actually had webmasters sending in screenshots of their please-take-down-my-links emails to link publishers. Matt’s point: he wants to see some effort.

So good luck and Godspeed with your link building…err…removing!

SMX Advanced 2012 (Seattle)

It’s time for ASK THE SEOs with:

• Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land (@dannysullivan)
• Q&A Moderator: Jonathon Colman, Internet Marketing Manager, REI (@jcolman)

and Speakers:

• Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street Journal (@seosylph)
• Greg Boser, SVP of Search Services, BlueGlass Interactive, Inc (@GregBoser)
• Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc. (@bruceclayinc)
• Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)
• Todd Friesen, SVP, SearchFanatics (@oilman)
• Rae Hoffman-Dolan, CEO, PushFire (@sugarrae)

What the hell is going on with Penguin?

VF: It’s nothing new at all, it’s just doing a better job. But now it has a name.
AB: It was just confusing because it had a name.
GB: It’s a broadscale implementation of things that they had been doing manually for a long time. The biggest takeaway is that it’s a behavioral adjustment filter. They don’t want you doing that stuff any more. It’s the cousin of Panda, which was a lot about high volume low quality content on your site. Penguin is about high volume low quality links to your site from sites with no human interaction. So if you’re doing that – stop it!
TF: It’s like Google is saying now: We’re not going to let those bad links help you, and now we’re going to penalize you for it.
BC: We have a penalty audit now. People who didn’t want to spend on SEO to do it right, didn’t. And now those are the people who are complaining about getting hit by Penguin and/or Panda. The people who were hit by this were the people who were taking shortcuts year after year after year.
GB: Describes the concepts of footprints and what looks normal and abnormal.
VF: There are positive and negative ranking factors.
TF: We’re back to the Google Dance.
BC: Many of you, in about  3 months, when the next update comes out…will not be immune.
GB: Take it as a warning to dig through your closet and  get rid of your bad links.

Can authorrank reflect positively on the authority of your site as a whole?
GB: Yes. It seems to work for Barry Schwartz. Google is pushing to get everyone into that environment. The real value is the whole package.
RH: For clickthrough rate, the one that has a picture next to it – that’s the one that gets the users’ attentions.
TF: And you’re searching for something in your industry,
the picture is often going to be someone you know.
GB: I don’t typically notice the domain if i see a picture. So you can hire writers and take advantage of their trust and authority.

IP Sniffing:
VF: I would never tell you to show something different to bots than to users.

Paid inclusion:
DS: I’ve never ever seen anything like this where they’ve taken a major search property and said now you’ve got to pay to be there.
TF: I used to work for  PositionTechnologies, who actually invented paid inclusion for Inktomi/Yahoo. I’m a big proponent of paid inclusion. But what Google’s doing is not what you’re thinking when you think of paid inclusion. Google isn’t going to do it like Yahoo. It’s only going to be affordable for the top 5-10 brands.
GB: If you’re a 3rd party aggregating site and/or comparison shopping,  you’re in a dying model. Google has been cannibalizing those because Google wants to be that 3rd party aggregator. You need to adjust your business model because it’s just going to keep going: travel, education, comparison shopping, it goes on
RH: I’m afraid of when Google does it with local…which will be like local paid inclusion. Give it away for free, and then once people are used to that income, start charging them for it.
BC: The search results page is changing. It’s now everything. a product directory, ppc, etc… We’ve seen instances where for some searches there are only 4 organic results. And sometimes only one organic listing above the fold. It’s going to be hard for Negative SEO to work because it will get really expensive. And it will get really really expensive to spam. If Google can’t make the top 4 organic results free of spam, then they will not be able to make money on ads. So they had to lean on everyone in order to get rid of the sites that aren’t contributing to the quality of the search results.

WTF is Matt Cutts saying that +1′s are not a good ranking signal?
VF:  Their official blog post says that it will be looked at as a ranking signal.
BC: The +1 is a ranking signal if the people who +1′d a site are in your circle.
DS: I don’t care what Matt says, I see the evidence with my eyes.
BC: They lost a lot of access to a lot of the places where people do hangout and share stuff (FACEBOOK!). Google will always be about analyzing the social connectivity of the web. You can fake links and social signals, but it’s hard to fake them both and have them line up. I’ll take a facebook share over a Google share any day of the week because that’s real people sharing stuff.
TF: Google demoting pages based on having no +1′s? No one has the balls to remove the +1′s from your site.
BC: I have buttons on my sites. I took all the counts off. It’s just buttons now. I don’t need to show them. People have stopped putting bookmarking buttons on their sites. Why is that?

Social: Do you think it’s an important thing to be doing for search? If you don’t have an audience, should you be getting an audience?
BC: CopyBlogger’s idea is get an audience first and then figure out what to sell them. Build the audience first. RSS is supposed to be dead, but RSS and metrics like Alexa and how many comments you have…we find that type of content does really well.
VF: You want an audience because you want an audience.
BC: Investing in a big audience is secondary to sales. You’ll invest years in getting an audience and building loyalty.
AB: The only social strategy we have (wallstreetjournal) is Google.  We probably wouldn’t even be doing Google+ if there wasn’t all the markup stuff you can do.

Danny goes on an EPIC rant about link building!

BC: If any linkbuilding thing you are thinking about and it has a name, don’t do it. If it’s a site with a link building service, don’t do it. Google doesn’t not want linkbuilding to be a standalone thing. It’s something that happens after you do other stuff. With that said, it makes it much harder. Now you got to build engaging content on other sites for new audiences. That content on your site does nothing for you.
BC: If anybody has a video of Danny, you’re going to get links.
VF: It’s marketing. You want SEO to be integrated into your business, so when PR people talk to reporters, they include a link back to your site. I still see this all the time where there is a PR move and the news sites don’t link back to your site.
TF:  There are still things that work. But those are the things that we don’t like to talk about because there are Google people here – and they are taking notes. We are working on arms-length linking.
BC: Don’t say “we” because I am not. Some companies were forced to compete or die. And now that gap that Google had between what they said and what they can do is very small. They are walking the walk now. They can catch you. I’m a marketing guy more than an SEO.
AB: Go where Google’s trying to go, not where they are now.
TF: Skate to where the puck’s gonna be.

Closing Comments
BC: No matter how safe you think you are with links, if you look at your link inventory, the thing that will happen is google only remembers the bad links. Everybody in this room probably has 10% of their inbound links that are on the edge of getting you in trouble. Start addressing those now.
AB:  Don’t chase search. Chase your audience. And our audience is growing internationally. Language tag. Geo-locations tags. And an href tag.
TF: Not a lot to add to the content and links thing. In light of penguin and panda, companies are hiring link auditors. Be honest about ALL your links. Also, does bounce rate influence rankings? Probably not. But if you have a high bounce rate, fix it because you’re losing money every single day. Get focused on rankings and conversion.
BC: Dirty little secrets. Social signals do not generate backlinks. If you’re doing content marketing, do it on sites with big audiences. Loyal site members are the people who link to stuff. Great content on your site is not going to do anything for you.
RH: Use schema.org markup on your sites. And use rel-author to increase clickthrough rates to your sites. Second, stop looking at your rankings and start looking at your traffic. Start keeping records of which keywords are converting.
VF: I’m going to agree with Todd. You have to make sure you are solving peoples’ problems and that they are converting. That in turn will help you rank.

Danny via @stncmp: Are we supposed to skate to where the links are? Funny

SMX Advanced 2012 (Seattle)

Adam Audette, President RKG (@audette)

Noindex Pagination Requirements

- pages 2-N annotated with noindex

rel-prev / next

Check out zales

Check out betterjobs.com

Check out analytics (entries for paginated pages)

rel-canonical tag can interfere with rel prev/next tags

Keep in mind

- pages with rel next/prev can still be show in results
– but this is an extreme “edge case”
– can optionally use noindex
- use of rel next/prev consolidates signals

Cool techniques: Target uses a hash on their paginated URLs (Quora and Twitter does this, too)

Downsides:

- solves nothing for decreasing crawl overheads
- labor intensive and error prone

Canonical Action

Use rel-canonical to signal the preferred URL, not as a shortcut

Internal link signals should be consistent

Next Up: Jeff Carpenter from Petco

They had a messed up situation.

Results:

- 13% increase in conversion from natural search traffic
- reduced amount of pages indexed in SERPs

Maile Ohye from Google

2009: worked through issues of pagerank sculpting

2010:  zappos and faceted navigation issues, exponential number of URLs to crawl

2011: launched improved URL parameters in Webmaster Tools

2011: REI using rel-canonical for non-duplication issues
– Google launched rel-prev/next 5 months later
– helped us identify more sequences than we detect ourselves (2012 statistic)

URL Parameters in Webmaster Tools

Assists understanding parameters to crawl site more efficiently
- for URL removals to remove certain documents

URL Parameters is a hint (not a directive like robots.txt)

Advanced Feature
- some sites already have high crawl coverage as determined by Google
- improper actions can result in pages not appearing in Search

Issue: inefficient crawling
Step 1: specify the parameters that do not change page content (session id, affiliate id, tracking id)
- likely mark as “does not change content”

Step 2a: specify parameters that change content

Step 2b: specify Googlebot’s preferred behavior

This puts a lot of control in your hand.

Sort parameter: changes the order the content is presented

Option 1: is the sort param optional throughout entire site?

Option 2: Can googlebot discover everything useful when the sort parameter isn’t displayed?

If yes, go with crawl no urls

Sort parameter: same sort values used sitewide

Option 1: are the same sort values used consistently for every category?

Option 2: When user changes the sort value is the total number of items unchanged?

If yes, choose only urls with value x

Sort Setting

Narrows: filters content on the page by showing a subset of the total items

Specifies

Translates: almost always crawl every URL

Paginates: displays a component page of a multipage sequence

Multiple parameters in one URL
- imagine all URLs begin as eligible for crawling, then apply each setting as a process of elimination, not inclusion

Q&A

When there’s a low quality set of content (like content that got hit by Panda), don’t redirect it or rel-canonical it. Just 404 it. Maile agrees because often those 301s are hard to maintain. And a redirect is not going to help you beat the system. If it already is low content, it’s not going to pass any value.

Rel-canonical can be used as a good discovery signal. Now that’s interesting.

SMX Advanced 2012 (Seattle)

Cindy Krum, CEO MobileMoxie (@suzzicks)

Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers Wherever They Are

1. Separate MObile Pages

- Mobile speficic design templates and content
- user agent detection, redirect from desktop to mobile

2. Responsive Design

- dual purpose pages for desktop and mobile
- same URLs for both versions

3. Mixed Solution (RESS)

Case Study: Info-tainment

DUST – duplicate URL same text

Mobilization Engine was creating lots of DUST

Kills the efficiency of the crawl

Since not all pages were mobilized, not all pages were redirected to a mobile version
- desktop pages still ranked in mobile search

Mobilization engine not caching and compressing pages correctly

- update feeds sent to the mobile engine to include SEO tags
- better server rules to reduce DUST
- Canonical tags up to the desktop URLs

Case Study: Doctor Directory

Mobile CMS driven templates in limited beta; wanted responsive design

Had launched hand-templated ‘m’ site but not happy with it

Beta mobile site does not contain directory pages
- concerned that deep pages would not get crawled or indexed very well

Current desktop pages too big to use responsive design effectively
- how many roundtrip DNS requests have to be made?

Move forward with current m. beta launch
- rely on UA detection and redirection from desktop to mobile
- test success and track performance
- New smartphone bot will get around the need for directory pages (eventually)

Smartphone bot relies on desktop rankings

Start a resp design with serverside components

Case Study: e-commerce site

Improve mobile rankings to drive more mobile shopping and sales

Desktop content ranking really well in mobile search

Wap & smartphone sites

Clean, light mobile pages with mostly good redirects

Inconsistencies between robots.txt, canonical tags, and XML sitemaps

Javascript Error message was the first thing indexed and cached – became a description tag in SERPS

Misdirection – desktop pages ranking well & redirecting to blank error pages

Only 6 pieces of unique anchor text on the entire site

Almost all links on the site (internal links)  have no anchor text

Fix parsing error in redirection rules

STOP JS ERROR indexing by adding bot specific instructions

Changing linking on DIVs to linking on images and anchor text

Hard to get lots of ecommerce rankings on one search
- pushing Universal Search Results & App Results in Google to own more of the mobile SERP page

Improve social interactivity on the mobile content
- better profile page rankings for the brand
- good for future of mobile search

MobileMoxie tools: SMXA2012

Bryson Meunier (@BrysonMeunier)

Mobile search will surpass desktop search in a matter of years…not decades

Many paths to mobile SEO

Desktop vs Mobile

Responsive Design

Smartphone, Tablet optimized

Site that works well on all devices

Disagreements within Google

Matt Cutts said mobile sites don’t cause canonicalization issues

Google Webmaster Team selected Responsive design for maintainability

Different search behavior requires different content to achieve user goals

Case study: Arby’s

Some categories need dedicated mobile sites

What content appears in smartphone search results?

Tested code validation, mobile usability and pagespeed and 37 total factors

Validation is key? Only 1 site validated, so it’s not true that you need to be validated.

Mobile usability/page speed is helpful? — 65% of sites in sample actually failed W3C’s Mobile OK test

72% got a score of bad (ready.mobi)

Linkbuilding is unnecessary? — Linkbuilding is necessary even though it is mobile

dotmobi helps? — not true. Distribution of TLDs resemble desktop distribution of TLDs.

Mobile sites help ranking? — 64% of sites in the site had mobile content…a mobile site or responsive design or both.

How do top sites approach mobile SEO? Top 100 SEMrush sites response to smartphone googlebot crawl”

- 83% redirect or reformat
- 10% not crawled
- 7% no response

What they do?

-  60% redirect to mobile URL

71% of top 100 SEMrush sites have a mobile URL, 10% have no mobile site

Data-driven mobile seo best practices

1. understand differences between what mobile user wants vs desktop user wants

2. build a mobile homepage at m.domain.com OR build a mobile first responsive design driven site if goals are same

3. Don’t block mobile URLs with robots.txt. Use canonical tags for duplicate URLs and redirect smartphone URLs to smartphone Googlebot but make mobile homepage unique to appear for mobile navigational searches

Next Up: Pierre Far from Google (@pierrefar), webmaster trends analyst

Smartphone sites and Google search

Recommendations for building smartphone-optimized sites

First choice: mobile site on same URLs or on different URLs

Are you going to serve same HTML or different HTML?

Responsive web design

Dynamic serving

Responsive web design

Same HTML
+ Same URL
++ CSS Media Queries

With responsive web design, there is an efficiency win because we don’t have to crawl your site with all of our different crawlers.

Please let all Googlebots to access all your HTML

Responsive web design tips

- Max width 640px

- Allow all bots

Dynamic serving

Different HTML
+ Same URL

Separate mobile site

Different HTML
+ Different URL

We need you to annotate these pages (relationship annotation)

rel-canonical from m.domain to www.domain

on www.domain.com rel-alternate

It’s a URL-level annotation

1. rel=”alternate” in sitemaps

2. Vary HTTp header if you automatically redirect (this is another signal to Google)

3. If not, understand trade-offs and pitfalls, and implement correctly (if you can’t get it right, use responsive website design instead)

Q&A

Pierre says ranking factors are same on mobile for desktop. I’m not going to say anything definitive because I know you guys will break it.

SMX Advanced 2012 (Seattle)

So you rolled out the Penguin update…is it a penalty?

MattCutts: Panda was designed to clear out the crap between really nice content and really bad content. Content that fell through the gap.

Penguin was designed to tackle webspam. Penalty is a manual action done by the webspam team. Penguin was not that. Penguin was an algorithmic change. We don’t think of Penguin as a penalty. We have over 200 signals for ranking. Penguin is another signal.

Penalty is a manual slap. Penguin was algorithmic.

If you get manual action against your site (ie a penalty), then you’ll get an email in webmaster tools 99% of the time.

So if you get an email about an action taken against your site, you’ll know that it was a manual penalty, not an algorithmic one.

WPMU site issue.

Blog networks. Negative SEO.

If you get an email from Google in webmaster tools and you don’t take action, you will get penalized eventually.

Do links still work as democracy of the web?

Douglas Adams wrote, “Space is big.”

Google Webspam Team doesn’t use Google Analytics data as a signal. – CONFIRMED

Google Reviews rich snippets spam?

We need to see earnest, good faith effort to remove those bad links.

If you can’t get rid of the bad links to a page, should you just get rid of the page?

We have taken down tens of thousands – maybe hundreds of thousands – of sites for doing bad stuff.

It’s early days of Google+.

The beauty of being on Webmaster Tools for so long, I’ve been yelled at a lot. I’ve had time to develop a thick skin.

3 coolest things in search right now:

1. Knowledge Graph – I like that you can get an overview of things

2. I’m really excited about the fact that we’ve been pushing for more transparency.

I’ve gotta take 10,000 steps before I go to bed tonight.

[I'm tired of blogging today. Check out @VirginiaNussey's You&A recap over at BruceClay.com]

SMX Advanced 2012 (Seattle)

Michael King @ipullrank

iacq.co/toolspullrank3

javascript – codeacademy.com

python – udacity.com

• ScreamingFrog
• Scraper for Chrome
• HTTPFOX
• Pagespeed plugin

Keywords

• Yahoo Clues
• Keyword Eye
• Soovle
• Ubersuggest
• Scrapebox
• Adwords API Excel plugin seogadget

Content ideas

• GoFish at ipullrank.com
•  SEOGadget Google Docs Tool
• Facebook Recommendation Demo (a widget for your site, based on content that is already popular on a site)

Excel Tools

• SEOTools by Niels Booma

Link Research

• Link Research Tools
• Link Detective

Competitive Analysis

• Searchmetrics Essentials

Analytics

• Keyword level demographics
• Track Social Networks Users are logged into
• Google Analytics Debugger

Personas

• Facebook Ad Creator
• Facebook Insights
• Doubleclick Ad Planner

Link Building Guides

Brand Fans

• SimplyMeasured (download twitter followers)

Infographics

• dipity
• storybird

OpenGraph Helper

Wirify

Rankings

• GetStat.com (and stat codex, track a lot of different words for many different brands)
• FollowerWonk
• Outreachr
• Knowem.com
• MentionMapp
• IFTTT
• Rapportive
• Boomerang
• Buzzstream
• Zemanta

Merry Morud from aimclear (@merrymorud)

What are my goals?

What are my KPIs?

How big is my circle? Degrees of separation?

Where can we associate conversations?

To what extent was my content exposed?

What types of content received the most exposure?

How did users engage?

What are the demographics?

Facebook Insights:

Post-level data.

Find out what people hate. Lifetime negative feedback.

Tools?

Page management

Manage multiple accounts

Social listening

ecommerce

Robust analytics

Reporting

Button & URL analytics

Bitly

ShareThis

AddThis

Free

Location demographics

Identify influencers

Assign welcome messages

Janrain – social and opengraph site tool

Google Social Interaction Analytics

Social Monitoring Tools

Social Mentions

TrackUr

Twitter Tools

The Archivist

TweetReach

Page Management Tools (Tab/Contest):

CrowdFactory

Wildfire

Shoutlet

PageModo

Vitrue

Facebook:

Hootsuite

MediaFunnel

Buddy Media

Awareness

Lithium

Sprout Social

Social Powerhouses:

Sysomos

Radian6

Raven Tools

Next Up: Rhea Drysdale (@rhea)

Finding the right tool for you.

Epic Fail Tool Case Study

Actual Cost of Tool (the “Switch Cost”):

• New CMS
• Internal time
• agency time
• loss of sales due to drop in organic traffic
• agency seo audit and consulting
• travel down to see the client
• internal team morale and productivity
• turnover
• missed opportunities

Tool Selection Criteria

1. Access

• Is the tool accessible by windows and mac users?

2. Cost

• Is there a cost for additional users or features?
• are there limits to data usage?
• is the tool free?

3. Usability

• Is the tool easy to use?
• does the tool have a robust help section?

4. Privacy & Intellectual Property

• Does the tool protect your personal data?
• Does the tool protect data submitted through the tool?

5. Resource Management
6. Added Value

• Can the tool be easily replicated?

The Business Case

Tool Value – (true cost + risks)

SMX Advanced 2012 (Seattle)

First up is Marty @aimclear

Brand Identity Feed

The SEO stuff doesn’t have to do with SEO

Offering strong incentive for existing community classic social advertising and PR hooks: product updates, deals, offers, commercial plays, hr news, etc…

It’s not about fancy SEO changes

Use classic feed marketing tactics

Alltop – go to Alltop and find your site and reach your users

Internal relations: start by wiring up internal stakeholders

Get to know the media: bloggers, tv journalists, publishers, newspapers, radio jocks, circle subscriptions as seo targets

Run facebook ads to people who are in your niche

Customer service: intersection of commerce and seo

The best SEO is a product that doesn’t suck

Celebrate community: where your business lives

Sync with publication calendar

Blog headlines and serial concepts – then returned to aimclear with client feedback

AJ Kohn has written about optimizing Google+

More aggressive participation
- set community based KPIs
- Active participation to serve and delight
- Research and proactively engage users
- social ads to build circles
- give, give, give, give, give
- network w/ competitors’ community

@aaronfriedman from Spark

Buy ads on Facebook

Don’t plagiarize

Don’t neglect your network

Don’t use generic images

Be creative.

Be useful and helpful.

Tactics

• Twitter longtail suggestion
• opengraph optimization
• “tweet what you want” code

tweet the longtail. First, find the keywords. Second, look at the social data (socialmention). Next, develop content. Have a list of users for outreach. Grow your network.

OpenGraph Optimization. Sample of 300 webpages. The OG meta tags content is sometimes empty.

OG titles: 95 characters

OG desc: 297 characters

Put some code in your twitter button: p class “tweetThis” – change you message the next day

Engines are more social – THE RISE OF ENTITY SEARCH

Engines are creating a new database, a non-text database

It’s about understanding concepts through words

verbs, action attribution, frictionless sharing

Entities are the sections in the SERPs

Be excellent to eachother and relevant for what you want to be known for.

The future of entity search is interest-based demographics

What I tell you I am interested in defines me

Social data is your attributes

Klout and Peerindex and mentionmapp are already defining you based on your interest and influence

For now:

Focus on rel-author
- This will play a huge role in entities

Focus on quality content
- Develop according to what users are looking for

Spend time growing your userbase

Next up is @rhea CEO at Outspoken Media, Inc

The future of search is personalization.

The business case for personalization.

Google Personalization methods Oct. 2006 seobythesea.com

Google Now personalizes everyone’s search results Dec. 2009 by Danny on SELand

Factors:

• Location
• Search History
• Social Search

Check out google.com/history to see your search history

Google allows you to connect accounts. And they crawl that profile and they start to see the network.

How does google track your friends?

- GMail
- Interactions you have with other people on google products
- Connected accounts
- Links
- Friends on other sites who connect to you

2 primary signals to identify you:

- similarities between your accounts and profiles
- similatiries between your connections

Creepy!

PostRank, now Social Reporting in Google Analytics

- Conversions
- Sources
- Sharing

Measure personalization in GA

Rhea shows 41% of OM traffic is signed into Gmail

Amit Singhal: secure search was the key to personalized results

Rhea thinks ‘not provided’ would let us deconstruct personalization, and it would be much easier to game

Google doesn’t want to take over Facebook, they want to enhance search with the search graph

The BIGGEST LIST OF TACTICS!

Write geo-targeted content (location specific organic keywords)

Use schema.org markup language (Schema informs freebase, which then is used by Knowledge Graph)

Offline networking to build relationships

Identify networks where if you get in a car wreck, you probably also need a chiropractor, a mechanic, etc…

Make your site mobile friendly.

Targeting for multiple languages.

Local search.

Write great relevant content.

Submit data through Freebase.

Setup authorship – it improves clickthrough.

Brand thought leaders.

Publish content often.

If you are not on facebook publishing content, you are a dumbass.

Create community account logins. Let people login on your site through Facebook.

Use gmail for login.

Use events to drive queries.

Create and post to Google+ page

Setup Google+ Direct Connect

Increase your Google+ followers

Use LinkedIn to identify your network

Use facebook login for comments

Create long and short tail content (check out hubspot for resources)

Engage community like SEOmoz — threaded comments, vote on comments (ego bait)

Q&A

Marty,with personalization, do you still use rank checking tools? – Nope.

What are your thoughts about buying personalization? It sounds really shady.

SMX Advanced 2012 (Seattle)

@moniquethegeek, Thunder SEO

Data mining in Pinterest

bit.ly/pinterest-bookmarklet (via @aaronfriedman) – Find out who is pinning most often

PinReach: research people on Pinterest

Pinpuff

Sleuthing

twitalyzer & twrtland

Next Up: Marty Weintraub, CEO @aimclear

Marty! He’s the best.

facebook.com/aimclear

Facebook is a glorified email list.

Facebook is a subscription list.

Brand pushes to users. Users have conversations.

1. Brand posts on page.
2. Subscribers see it.
3. Subscribers might engage it. Might like, share, comment.
4. Conversations break out.
5. But their friends don’t ever see it and interact with it.
6. Conversations used to jump the wall. But that doesn’t happen anymore.
7. Facebook limited the ability for conversations to “jump the wall”
8. Sponsored stories in feed: Facebook makes you pay to jump the wall now.
9. Sponsored stories are now in the feed, so they get like 5% clickthru rate.

First, start content on site that you own, with OpenGraph implemented, so it looks good when you post it to Facebook. When you make a FB ad for the post, target it to groups and job titles and niche sites

Page Post ad (first degree), FB at large, expensive, site and wall traffic, likes
Page Post Like Story (Second degree) – inexpensive, traffic to site, few likes, target friend of friends
Page Like Story (second degree) – expensive, traffic to wall, many likes, targets friends of anyone who has ever liked your page

Pay what you have to pay. Target your seed groups.

Have an open minds about the parts of FB that might actually be dangerous.

Brent Csutoras, Kairay Media @brentscutoras

Viral traffic & networks

Social tactics, concepts, philosophies

Content marketing still works. Better than it ever has before. It’s harder now.

SEJournal: 80k visits from stumbleupon, 170 pins on pinterest

Topix.com

Tip 1: be prepared to succeed
- dedicated person or team
- understanding of targeted social media communities
- established accounts and networks
- plan for what happens after success
- never know what will succeed or fail!

The biggest wins I’ve ever had were the ones I thought would never succeed.

WeirdAsianNews – run by Brent

Tip 2: monitor your site in social
- got 200,000 visits in one day from reddit
- bookmark a search on all social networks, check them every day

Tip 3: Reddit… For Realz
- don’t worry about accounts
- silent bans and filters
— new to reddit
— new to subreddit
— account filtered
— domain filtered
— manual approval
- checks (while logged out)
— view profile for page not found
— check new section
* logged in by not on main page

Know the subreddit rules
- TIL has to be two months old
- bestof is only for reddit links
- NSFW needs to be nude
- WorldNews excludes US news

Pinterest

- Pinterest cares about the account
- focus on your network
- #tags for search
- weekends and evenings

StumbleUpon
- network tree/popular algorithm
- build network appropriately
- share with network strategically to get positive votes

stay very active
- show up on /content/

Choose categories & Tags strategically
- run stumbleupon ad campaign
– helps whitelist your domain
– identify related tags
– learn subscriber nunbers

Tip 5: what I’m not saying

- I won’t say certain things in public, so if you have any questions, ask me.

Vince Blackham (@vinceblackham), Director of Social Media at 97th Floor

Why you should be on pinterest.

Visual content is king.

Pinterest users don’t like data, so infographics don’t work.

Size matters!

Incorrectly-sized pictures give no reason to click on the image to get to your site.

Shoot for <5,000 px tall/long

Large header, clear steps.

DIY’s and How-To’s have shown the most success.

Peak hours: 4pm-11pm is a good time to target

stop thinking linkbait. Start thinking resourcebait. How can I get people to my site? How can I get them to buy? To interact?

Use tineye to check for attribution.

Q&A

Why no talk about Google+?
- Brent: I’m a little weary about playing with a Google account.
- Marty: Make no mistake, PR, social media & SEO have all been mashed together.

Brent, can you talk a little bit about subreddits and specific topics?
- There is a subreddit for everything.
- Pay attention to the second clicks in social.
- We don’t care about the 100k visits. We want the people who will come in and sign up and/or buy.

New up and coming sites?
- TheFancy
- TheFancy is all based on products

More paid links drama?!? SERENITY NOW!

It’s been a little over a year since the last big SEO scandal hit the news, so I guess we were due for a big story. And what do you know – IT’S ABOUT PAID LINKS! Good lord. Are we still outraged about people buying links? WTF, man. Get over it.

The SEO industry is full of a bunch of amateurs right now. They think buying links is a black hat strategy. LOLz. If they knew anything about blackhat tactics, they would know that blackhatters are not paying for links. Not in the traditional sense anyway. And not good blackhatters. Blackhat SEOs are much more intelligent than spending all of their time building links. They write software for that. Also, while blackhat SEOs operate in the gray area of SEO and Google’s guidelines, many of them also tend to operate in the gray area of the law. Furthermore, they are more interested in making money than giving it to someone else for a crappy link.

It’s pretty clear that the SEO industry has an abundance of  ignorant SEO noobs. They actually have no idea WTF blackhat SEOs are doing these days. Paying for links is blackhat? Shut up and get back to your title tags and robots.txt files.

As far as calling out iAcquire – no shit iAcquire has a linkbuilding component to their business! They bought Conductor’s paid link business, and everyone knows about that. Big deal. Do a little research (i.e. go to LinkedIn), and you’ll find that iAquire’s co-founders are Joe Griffin and Jay Swansson. These guys have been in the game a long time. Joe founded SubmitAWebsite and the search agency at Web.com. He was also a VP at iCrossing. And Jay Swansson used to work at Text-Link-Ads. He knows all about effective link building. These are two smart dudes who have a track record of producing results. Now everyone is under the impression that iAcquire is some evil blackhat company. That is a gross reduction of their company.

And Mike King – that guy is a fully registered SEO badass. He is the kind of person that most SEOs wish they could be. He’s got mad skills as a coder, developer, SEO, speaker, and blogger, and it’s like someone fine tuned his brain to be an SEO. If you’ve ever heard him speak at conferences, you’d see what I mean. Also, Mike is someone who shares a lot of information about modern SEO strategy. Take a look at his post on SEOmoz.org called ‘The Noob Guide to Link Building‘. Yeah. That’s some good stuff right there. I’m really not sure why Mike was even mentioned in Josh’s post.

Link building is not a bad thing. If I was approached by an SEO that didn’t have a linkbuilding strategy, I’d be like “GTFO! NOW!” Go ahead and call it ‘inbound marketing’ – it’s a service that everyone needs. It’s integral to SEO. It’s basically digital PR. Nowadays, ‘inbound marketing’ is the safest word in SEO. Some people use it as an umbrella term that covers paid link building, but it covers so much more than that. And here’s a shocker: nearly every aspect of inbound marketing involves getting links, and getting links is going to cost money. Press releases don’t write and distribute themselves. Someone has to connect with influencers and bloggers. Guest posts don’t write themselves. Building links is an art, and it can take on 100′s of forms. But at the end of the day, you’ve gotta do it if you want to succeed in organic search today.

Here’s a little secret: Every good SEO has a good link builder. Never forget that. It’s the reality today. But now that Penguin and Panda are out, a lot of SEOs are scrambling to find new linkbuilders and new linkbuilding tactics. A lot of the HPBL networks got nailed, and now those network owners are going even more private. And believe me: shit is about to get really expensive because the cost of intelligently building links on private networks is going to skyrocket. Content has to get better. Hosting has to get more sophisticated. And they’ve gotta erase any and all footprints. There can be no evidence.

Ultimately, with PageRank becoming less and less of a ranking factor, gaming it with links will increasingly prove less valuable over time. There will always be paid link networks, but eventually paid links will become too expensive to produce, manage, and maintain (for most link buyers). All the money will move over to content generation and social media, where buying Likes and Tweets and +1′s is much safer and affordable – and effective! But that’s an entirely different post. I’ll save that for some other time.

On another note: I’ve seen the term ‘myopic SEO’ flying around Twitter today. Myopic should not have a negative connotation. That isn’t fair. Some SEOs are myopic by nature because that’s how they survive in their niche. They are nearsighted because all they care about is making money RIGHT NOW! Today even! Those SEOs are probably some of the most industrious, entrepreneurial people you will ever meet. But guess what – they are not out there sharing their secrets, and you’ll probably never meet them.

In the past, SEOs would share their secrets at conferences, in forums, on blogs, etc… But around 2009/2010, SEO went back underground, and the people who know how to make quick money sealed their lips (and/or their keyboards). Oh sure. You may still catch people blabbing about their victories on forums here and there, but DM any of those forums’ senior members, and they’ll tell you that the forum is full of noobs and that it’s nowhere near what it used to be in terms of content. And if someone on a forum goes public with a strategy that works, 99% of the time all the readers will go out and beat it to death.

So if you’re not the myopic SEO, you probably fall into the group of SEOs who is interested in sustainable SEO. In reality, this bucket is where most SEOs reside. They promote the idea that SEO is a longterm strategy, where good guys finish first in the SERPs and Alt tags make a difference for your rankings. Sustainable SEO means that you are most likely working for a client where you are fitting into a larger marketing machine. You can’t act alone, and if you do something dumb, you could end up costing yourself and/other people their jobs. SEO for this group is a longterm strategy, and you’d better get buckled in because it’s going to be a long flight.

Sustainable SEO is the place where you have to be really smart about link building. You might even call it white hat link building…which is kind of an oxymoron. It means that you need to be smart about your link building strategies. 2011 was an amazing year for building links via private blog networks. You can’t rely on that any longer. You also can’t only go after unbranded anchors. You’ve gotta diversify. When it comes to paid link building, there’s a lot of stuff to consider these days. Do your research and be smart. You don’t want the Penguin catching you.

BTW here’s a great post Danny Sullivan wrote about all of this. I’m really looking forward to Aaron Wall’s blog post about all of this.

Well, that’s my rant. Smell ya later.

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?