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Turbo-Charging your SEO & Link-Building Strategy

by Patrick Altoft

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Disavow Toolhttp://b3.io/b3disavow

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What I’m talking about• Future of SEO• Checklist for your site• Site audit - homeandgardengifts.co.uk• Site audit - tripomatic.com

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Do people love you?It’s unquantifiable, tough to explain to clients & impossible to make a business case for but love is slowly & steadily becoming part of the Google algorithm

Google can tell whether people love your website & is rewarding the most loved websites with higher rankings.

Panda downgraded sites that people didn’t love – why wouldn’t Google reward sites that people do love?

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How can Google understand love?Hundreds of user engagement signals are analysed and fed into an artificial intelligence algorithm

The algorithm learns how to detect whether users love a site or not (probably with the help of seed sites)

Remember, Chrome has 33% market share & Analytics is in use on over 10m websites

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How artificial intelligence shapes the algorithm

New algorithm• Based on what we know

about sites that are loved, do we think that people love your site?

Old Algorithm• Let’s score you on various

trust signals & see how you perform

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Great sites are winning in 2012• Doing SEO for a great site is 10x easier than doing SEO for a mediocre site• For most companies this is the difference between success and failure in an SEO

campaign

Panda?

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People love John Lewis

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People love M&S

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What can I do?• Want to know how Google sees your site? Just

ask your visitors.

• Every site should be permanently asking for feedback from different groups of people

• Adopt a mantra of continual improvement & use survey scores as a KPI

• http://qualaroo.com

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10 Minute Checklist1. Searchmetrics to see if the site was affected by any updates2. Seroundtable.com to find what that update was3. Opensiteexplorer.com to see if link profile is over optimised4. Does the site have duplicate content5. Does the site have low value pages6. Do the product pages add value

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Homeandgardengifts.co.uk

Looks a great site

Has 114 linking domains

Used to rank pretty well

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SearchmetricsData shows a big drop in rankings 16th to 23rd June 2011 – Panda 2.2 was June 18th Also a big drop between 3rd & 10th May 2012 which coincides with the time Google handed out link penalties & devaluations

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Link profileOn first inspection the link profile looks OK as there is lots of brand anchor text and not much use of keyword links

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Link ProfileOn closer inspection we can see what the problem is – most of the links are from directory style sites

The vast majority of directory sites are bad links and need to be removed from the link profile.

The only way to recover from this is via a full link audit & removal of 95% of the bad links

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Content CheckThis is the first product page I loaded & it has a product description of 32 words.

This is nowhere near enough for me to want to buy it or for the search engines to be able to say the site is a quality resource

Other product pages have a similar amount of content

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Duplicate ContentInsert a string of text from the product description in quotes into Google

You should see no other sites using your descriptions

Here we see 12,800 results

Not only are the product descriptions short but they are duplicate content too

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ReviewsIf you don’t have a user review strategy – why not?

This site has space for reviews but doesn’t have enough

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Questions & AnswersWhy wouldn’t you do this?

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Moving forwardsThis site has been penalised twice and will probably continue to be penalised by future updates unless it is aligned with what Google wants an ecommerce site to be.

This is what has to be done at a bare minimum to recover & safeguard the sites future

• Link audit & removal of 95% of bad links (use disavow tool)• After this you will probably need to build (quality) new links to replace those

lost• Have a team of product experts rewrite the product descriptions up to 300

words taking care to really add value and make them useful to visitors• Implement a strategy to get more reviews• Add Q&A to the product pages and encourage staff to add popular Q&A

content

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Patrick@branded3.comhttp://www.branded3.com/

Questions?