2013 ALGO HANDLINGBrian McDowell – Director of Search Intelligence

THE CONDUCTOR TEAMWHO WE ARE• Founded in 2006

• Located in New York, San Francisco and Charlotte

SEO LEADERSHIP• 150+ pieces of SEO thought leadership in 2012

• C3, the largest user conference in enterprise SEO

• Dedicated to raising the profile of search marketers

SEO LEADERSHIP• Supporting SEO success for over 2000 leading

brands

• $4.5B in SEO revenue under management

• 18TB of SEO data collected weekly

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AGENDA SLIDE

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN AN ALGO HITS HARD?

WHAT SHOULD YOU BE FOCUSING ON

HOW DOES GOOGLE BUILD USE CASES

WHAT IS THE PENGUIN ALGORITHM

HOST CROWDING IMPACT

16,000 VISITS LOST PER DAY

2.75% CONVERSION RATE

$25.00 REVENUE PER CONVERSION

$11,000.00 DAILY CONTRIBUTION LOSS

$4,015,000.00 ANNUAL CONTRIBUTION LOSS

-15% SITEWIDE CONTRIBUTION LOSS

16,000 VISITS LOST PER DAY

2.75% CONVERSION RATE

$25.00 REVENUE PER CONVERSION

$11,000.00 DAILY CONTRIBUTION LOSS

$4,015,000.00 ANNUAL CONTRIBUTION LOSS

-15% SITEWIDE CONTRIBUTION LOSS

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Latest Updates to Note• Panda

• Penguin• Exact Match Domain

• Above the Fold

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PENGUIN ATTACK ON WEBSPAMAvoid the following techniques:• Automatically generated content

• Participating in link schemes

• Cloaking

• Sneaky redirects

• Hidden text or links

• Doorway pages

• Scraped content

• Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value

• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords

• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware

• Abusing rich snippets markup

• Sending automated queries to Google

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

GOOGLE SNIFFERS

Large data sets are needed to build automated processes.

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EVERYONE WANTS TO BE #1• There are multiple spam reports

available to help Google identify tactics / networks.

• Paid Links

• Objectionable Content

• Malware

• Copyright Issues

• Personal / Private Information

• Phishing

• Rich Snippets

• Abusing Google Products

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en

Google Reconsideration Requests provide a

wealth of data.

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GOOGLE DISAVOW TOOL

• Provides a proactive approach to cleaning up a bad link profile

• Is a portal for Google to build a smarter engine for link spam offenders

• Last resort when unable to remove a link manually

• Matt Cutts describes the history and reasoning behind managing links using the Disavow Links Tool (see link below)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA

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PENALTY <> FILTER• Penalty the result of manual action

taken against your domain/page

• A penalty most often is associated with a warning or description in Google Webmastertools

• Penalties often carry with them an expiration date

• Reinclusion requests have a chance of getting you back in good graces

• Usually correlated with a drastic drop in rankings or indexed pages

• Filters are determined by a mathematical weighting operation

• Filters are constantly being adjusted

• Thresholds can be tripped somewhat arbitrarily with little notice

• Filters can tend to have a higher success rate of recovery then penalties

• Major algorithm changes impact filters on a larger scale and often require deeper strategic changes

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“The problem in defense is how far you can go without

destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without”

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Look at your backlink profile now. Ask yourself if the link or linking page is…

•Relevant

•Indexed

•Overly Advertorial

•Cloaking or Redirecting

•A Niche Authority

•Sitewide

•Sidebar or Footer

•In content blog post, press release, directory, forum signature

•Does the linking page have an established backlink profile?

NOW IS THE TIME FOR DEFENSE

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CHECK YOUR LINK DISTRIBUTIONS

• Penguin 1.0 focused on the homepage or root domain

• Penguin 2.0 can focus on individual pages

• Check on a sitewide basis and also at the page level

• Make sure deep pages are also getting some link equity

• Diversify your link portfolio as much as possible

• Build advocacy instead of links

http://visual.ly/google-penguin-20-algorithm-update-may-2013-infographichttp://moz.com/ugc/google-penguin-antispam-algorithm-testing-and-analyzing

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HOST CROWDING

http://www.conductor.com/blog/2013/06/how-penguin-2-0-levels-the-playing-field-data/

The host crowding update completely changes the way we manage content syndication.

Preferred URL tracking is a necessity!

This release also opened the doors for affiliates and partner sites to compete for branded terms. No longer can we accuse Google of being biased towards big brands.

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CONTACT US

BRIAN MCDOWELLDirector of Search Intelligence

@Conductor

facebook.com/Conductor

info@conductor.com

www.conductor.com

@Brian_McDowell

linkedin.com/in/mcdowell