Penguin 2.0(4) update: It's Time To Care About Your Website

On May 22^nd, Google finished rolling out the second generation of its Penguin updates. Looking back at the first release of the algorithm in April 2012, the focus was primarily around webspam. Since then, there have been only iterations; with the bases being more like “data refreshes” as seen in the most recent update in October 2012. Now with Google Penguin update 2.0, the update is specific to the search algorithm of Google – and this time the impact will only affect around 2.3% of English queries, a decrease in comparison to the first generation of webspam (3.1%).

The update not only affects the U.S. or English-speaking countries, but is fully rolled out globally for other languages as noted yesterday in Matt Cutts blog:

“The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.”

This is surprisingly early. Especially because Cutts, who is the Head of the Google webspam team announced another attack on link farms, Over-Optimization, “Black Hat” and keyword stuffing in a recent video scheduled to release over the coming summer. It seems that Penguin 2.0 will just be the beginning as made known in the video announcement:

“We’re relatively close to deploying the next generation of Penguin, [...] Internally we call it ‘Penguin 2.0’, …and again, Penguin is a webspam change that’s dedicated to try to find black hat webspam, and try to target and address that.”

It’s only been ten days since the announcement on May 13^th of what to expect in the coming months and they have already rolled out 2.0 – ending the life of several pages with bad links. Cutts has stressed that the impact of the second-generation webspam update will have a much deeper and greater influence this time around. 

“So this one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0, and we expect it to go a little bit deeper in have a little bit more of an impact.”

After the first update we did a deep dive analysis into the impact Penguin 1.0 had in a posting called “Bad SEO” Update. In a similar fashion, we have analyzed our data for an in-depth look at understanding the impact of Penguin 2.0.

Who are the top losers from the Penguin 2.0 update? Our analysis uncovered whose SEO Visibility was seriously impacted, with sites like cheapoair.com, dish.com and the salvationarmy.com:

Domain	Cluster	SEO Visibility Current	Diff	in %
2dplay.com	games	8781	-12610	-58,95
lifed.com	business	11783	-15678	-57,09
dressupjunior.com	games	7965	-8719	-52,26
reeds.com	business	4000	-2430	-37,79
dailydot.com	blog/community	13783	-8059	-36,90
dressupgamesite.com	games	30248	-17616	-36,80
movie2k.to	blog/community	53685	-28446	-34,63
ets.org	business /edu	28496	-14575	-33,84
psychicguild.com	business	32019	-16361	-33,82
tvrage.com	blog/community	40808	-20269	-33,19
concerthotels.com	blog/community	19503	-8715	-30,88
cheapoair.com	price comparison	59613	-23950	-28,66
salvationarmy.org	blog/community	5504	-2577	-31,89
myplayyard.com	games	39099	-14747	-27,39
dish.com	business	59561	-22172	-27,13
forlocations.com	blog/community	84020	-30646	-26,73
1channel.ch	business	48854	-16778	-25,56
kporno.com	porn	77194	-56086	-42,08
4tube.com	porn	56000	-36604	-39,53
extremetube.com	porn	28222	-15850	-35,96
bangyoulater.com	porn	24547	-13147	-34,88
pornhub.com	porn	379467	-180123	-32,19
largeporntube.com	porn	73911	-28036	-27,50
xhamster.com	porn	248177	-92927	-27,24
tube8.com	porn	233411	-77958	-25,04

Conclusion

It’s not the update I was expecting. I thought that this Googles Penguin update would have had a bigger impact similar to Panda 1. But that didn’t happen. My first analysis shows that many thin sites, sites with thin links and especially untrusted links face the problem. In addition, some small business sites were hit because they haven’t taken SEO serious enough. Google itself confirmed that the impact wouldn’t be as high as many thought – maybe this is just the calm before the storm and the big update is really coming in the future. We will see. I will continue to keep you updated with our results.

If you’re interested in seeing if you were hit? Check your domain using our Searchmetrics Essentials Research Tool!

New Social Bookmarking Sites List of 2013

Hello Friends !! This is the complete new social bookmarking sites list - i recently reviwed these are 100% working

http://news.healthandfit.info/
http://news.naturalhealthcare.info/
http://news.suvonline.info/
http://sb.newnews.info/
http://news.starcelebrity.net/
http://news.fitnessgymclub.info/
http://news.onfitnessmagazine.info/
http://news.buynewcar.info/
http://news.topbeautyworld.info/
http://news.alltrafficservices.info/
http://news.exerciseprograms.info/
http://news.desiworld.info/
http://news.manews.info/
http://news.skincaretreatments.info/
http://news.healthstreet.info/
http://news.forexnewstoday.info/
http://news.motherandbaby.org/
http://news.beautycelebrity.com/
http://news.tourstripstravel.com/
http://news.healthynutritiondiet.net/
http://news.bodyfitnessbuilding.info/
http://news.fromhomebusiness.info/
http://news.organicbeautycare.info/
http://news.golfterms.info/
http://news.beautifulhair.info/
http://news.gymandfitness.info/
http://news.bestintv.info/
http://sb.newstodays.info/
http://news.socialmarkings.com/
http://sb.newsplanet.info/

Link Building's 11 Ways To Generate Real Treffic

Are you tired of building links the old school way? You know, the methods that require you to send out emails to thousands of webmasters begging for links. Don’t get me wrong, they still work well, but they get boring after a while.
So what other ways can you build links?
Well, there are a handful of creative strategies out there. Here are 11 fun ways you can build links without burning yourself out:

Strategy #1: April fools

April fools is coming up soon, so why don’t you leverage it to build links. You shouldn’t do an April fools joke that’s obvious, instead you should take a page out of TechCrunch’s book and follow their strategy.
They wrote a blog post on March 31^st a few years ago on Richard Rosenblatt’s yacht, which was called “The AdSense”. A lot of people believed the post was real and over 600 people tweeted about it and some even linked to it.
The key to creating a good April fools joke is to make it realistic. Do something the day before April 1st and go above and beyond to make it seem realistic. TechCrunch got Rosenblatt to record his voice talking about the post, which made it seem more realistic.
If you want your April fools idea to build links, it has to be good. You can’t do something mediocre.

Strategy #2: Interview experts

One of the easiest ways to build links is to interview experts. If you email someone on how great they are and how you want to interview them, it’s rare that they will say no.
I myself get asked to do around 4 interviews each week and I never say no. I’ve also emailed dozens of other people to interview them and it’s also rare that they say no… this even worked when my blog wasn’t popular.
So how do you build links when you interview an expert? Well most experts have a website, so once you interview them you can ask them to share it with their readers or even tweet and post it on Facebook.
I’ve found that over 90% of the time people will at least share the interview on Twitter and Facebook and over 40% of the time people will link to it from their website. One trick to boosting your link percentage chance is to look and see if people have a press page before you ask them for an interview. If they have one, the chance of them linking to your interview is over 95%.

Strategy #3: Infographics

This is my favorite method of building links, as I love making complex data easy to understand. Mint used this strategy heavily in their early days, in which they made complex financial data easy to understand through beautiful graphics.
We also do this at KISSmetrics as our infographics have received over 3741 links.
So what’s the key to generating links from your infographics? Well you first need to have an embed code at the bottom of each infographic so people can link back and secondly you should follow the promotion strategies in this blog post.

Strategy #4: Quizzes

You may know Matt Inman as the guy behind the Oatmeal, but most of us SEOs know him as the master of quizzes. He got his start at SEOmoz in the early days and then the started getting into link creation through linkbait.
He ranked Mingle2 for all of the online dating terms by creating viral quizzes such as: how many 5 year olds can you take in a fight. He then took that same strategy and got a payday loan site ranked for all of the payday loan related keywords.
Matt currently has quizzes on The Oatmeal and you should consider replicating the strategy if you want to build thousand of links. Just be careful as both his dating site and payday loan site got dinged by Google, but you shouldn’t have that problem if you follow these rules though:

1. The quiz needs to be related to your website – don’t try to create a quiz about fighting 5 year olds if you run a dating website.
2. Don’t use rich anchor text – at the end of each quiz is an embeddable badge that shows off your score, that badge shouldn’t contain rich anchor text. The anchor text should be the name of the quiz.
3. Link to your quiz page – don’t have the badges link to your homepage, they should link back to the quiz.

Strategy #5: Personalized videos

Do you remember Elf Yourself? JibJab created that campaign for OfficeMax and hundreds of thousands of people Elf’d themselves. In which they uploaded a picture of their face and JibJab created an Elf video out of it.
At the end of the video, you were given a link that you can share with others or post on your blog.
According to Open Site Explorer, Elf Yourself has over 10,000 links. Not too shabby for a Christmas promotional video.
If you can come up with a creative video concept that allows people to personalize the video, you can leverage it to build links. People love sharing funny personalized videos.

Strategy #6: Sponsor an event

One of the simplest ways to build links is to sponsor an event. Conference sites list out each and every single sponsor and in most cases they link back to their sponsors.
This may not seem like a fun idea or creative link building strategy, but just think about this… you’ll be able to go to the conference.
If you work in the corporate world you may get a bit tired of working in the office, so it will be a nice for you to get a break by attending a conference. Plus, you’ll get a link out of it.
When getting links from conference sites, keep in mind that they maybe taken down in the future, which means you will have to continue to sponsor the event each year. The cost can quickly add up if you are a small company, but it’s fun to go to conferences.

Strategy #7: Sponsor a non-profit

I love the non-profit world because it’s a great way for you to give back to the rest of the world. If you sponsor a non-profit in many cases you can get a link back.
When I used to own KISSinsights we used to give away our product for free to non-profits and they would link back to us. We came up with this concept when a non-profit asked us for a free account in exchange for press on their blog.
The beautiful part about this strategy is that it doesn’t require an exchange of cash. You can volunteer your time, your products, or even services for a link. Whatever it maybe, I’ve found that non-profits are open to almost anything as they don’t have a big spending budget.

Strategy #8: Take some pictures

There are always people looking for images, especially high quality stock photography images. I myself don’t mind paying for images, but it can get expensive really fast.
If you have a really good digital camera, such as an SLR, you can go out there and take high quality photos of anything related to your industry. Then pop them up on a page on your website and let people know that they are royalty free images. Just make it a requirement that people need to link back to you if they decide to use any of your images.
The cool part about this strategy is that you are going to get highly relevant links, as people in your industry are most likely to use them.

Strategy #9: Scholarships

Ross Hudgens is an SEO that’s known for building tons of high quality EDU links. And he is doing so without spending much money… so how does he do it?
Well he creates scholarships related to your company. It’s a great way for you to give back and get links at the same time. For example, if you are a marketing agency, you could create a digital marketing scholarship in which you give 1 student $1000 a year.
Once Ross creates the scholarship, such as a marketing one, he would notify all colleges that have a marketing department about the scholarship. The end result is hundreds of EDU links as colleges will put it on their website to notify students.
The one thing you have to do if you want to create a scholarship is make it a “real one”. SEOs are trying to create them just to build links. Make sure it is legitimate; you have to give money away each year, and if possible try to help the winner of the scholarship out. For example, if I created a marketing scholarship, I would give away money and even provide the winner with a paid internship.

Strategy #10: Get press

The side effect of getting press is that you’ll build more links to your website. It’s rare that a site like Forbes would write about your company and then not link to it.
That’s just not user friendly, which is why reporters always link to you when they cover you or your company. If you want to build links, why not get press for your business or your entrepreneurial success?
Hit up your local PR agency and see what they can do for you. Or if you don’t have a ton of cash, learn how to get your own press or just use sites like Help a Reporter Out.
I myself just hire PR agencies like PRserve in which they run a pay per performance model. If they get you press, you pay. If not, you don’t pay a dime.

Strategy #11: Give away swag

Some people love free stuff. It doesn’t matter if it is expensive or cheap stuff, people love getting gifts. One person who talks about all of the free stuff he gets is Shoemoney.
Every Friday he takes a picture of him wearing a new t-shirt that someone gave him. He then blogs about the shirt and links back to the company who gave him the shirt.
Get creative and start giving bloggers swag. From shirts to hats, to items, to anything else that is related to your brand, just start giving things away. Not only will bloggers love you, but they will start blogging about your company and linking back to your website.

Conclusion

The possibilities of link building are endless. You can build links in many different ways, you just have to be creative. What I’ve learned over the years is the best link builders are the creative ones.
Just look at Matt Inman, no one would have thought that he would rank a site for online dating, but he was able to do it in a matter of months because of how he built links.
All you have to do is think outside the box as the list above is just scrapping the surface. What other creative ways are you building links?

Think Like Google To Get Rank

With billions of searches happening every day, and over 65% of the search market, it’s a obvious that you should be paying attention to Google.  Knowing how the search engine works, what it looks for, and how it plans to evolve are all important to understand if you want to stay ahead of your competition.
By thinking like Google, you will not only learn what makes the world’s largest search engine tick, but how to improve your site for higher rankings as well.
But before we get into that, you need to first understand how search engines work:

How searches work

When you do a search, you may not realize that in the background, thousands of channels, programs and scripts are working to get you the answer within milliseconds.
Google has prepared a great interactive infographic that simplifies and explains how search works. Of course, many changes have been made to this formula over the years, especially as some sites try to game the system and artificially inflate key factors that Google looks at, such as: back links, domain age, and social marketing efforts.
Although no one but Google knows exactly what’s in each algorithm or even how many there are that make a site rank where it does, you can find some good information by looking at what Google has done previously.
It’s important to remember that Google is only as good as the service it provides.  If people make billions of searches, but don’t find what they’re looking for, they’re far less likely to trust them or even worse, use them again.  So it’s in Google’s best interest to give people what they want.

Clues from the past

One way to tell where Google’s going is to look at where it has been. SEOmoz has a list of Google’s algorithm changes since 2000, in which they note all of the minor and major changes in the search engine’s indexing and ranking changes. There are a few common threads that you’ll notice:

• Google is always trying to think one step ahead of spammers and scammers by identifying sites known to harbor malware and devaluing sites that use outdated techniques such as keyword stuffing, doorway pages and invisible text. This shows that you shouldn’t jut avoid these tactics, but also other spammy tactics as they won’t last long. Any quick solution that you can use to boost your rankings probably isn’t wise because Google’s history has shown, that it won’t work forever.
• Google has always felt that content is king, but over the years people have tried to game the system by producing mediocre content. From fighting duplicate content to useless content, Google continues to promote content rich sites that provide readers value and they eventually push down sites that don’t have great content. Your goal shouldn’t be to write tons of content, but instead you need to focus on higher quality content, as those pieces tend to gain more backlinks and rank higher throughout their algorithm updates.
• Links have always been a huge part of rankings and it seems that it will continue to be that way. Over time webmasters have figured out how to build links, but the ones that are still hard to game, are links from relevant authority sites. If you are planning on building links, go for quality and not quantity. As long as your links are relevant, they aren’t keyword rich you should do well in the longrun. The concept of links is also changing… links from social media sites, such as tweets can help. Co-citations may also help your rankings in the longrun.
• When you’re serving billions of pages a day, there’s a clear focus on speed.  Not only has Google’s index updated quicker with the introduction of updates such as Suggest and Caffeine, but sites speed is a major factor that affects the relevancy and conversion rate of your site.  Site speed is just one of 200+ known algorithmic factors that Google takes into account when ranking your site. If you want to boost your rankings, consider optimizing your load time. Just look at how I doubled my traffic by improving my load time.

Another way to keep your finger on the pulse of the search giant is to take a closer look at what it’s currently involved in.  SEO by the Sea highlights interesting features and information from Google’s patent filings.  From Google glasses to leveraging rich snippets, you can learn a lot about the future of Google from these posts.

Likes and Dislikes

I’ve already shared a few notable things that Google dislikes: spam (comment and otherwise), malware, duplicate content, low quality inbound links, a high number of outbound links and so forth.  But what about what Google likes?

• Authoritative content – not just good content, but content with backlinks from relevant authority sites and reviews from peers. An easy way to build links to your content is to follow the steps in this blog post. Also content that contains at least 2000 words tends to rank higher than content that is shorter.
• Cornerstone content – this is information that serves as an often-linked-to resource from other sites. It’s content that doesn’t need to change often because it’s so complete and so relevant that it only need minimal maintenance to stay that way. The Advanced Guide to SEO is a good example of this and it will continually get more and more traffic each day, as it is the most thorough guide to SEO online.
• Social signals – Google measures social networks differently and pays attention to diverse signals.  Votes (likes), shares, posts and bookmarks are just a few of the criteria Google looks for. The more social shares your content gets, the higher you will rank. This is especially going to be more important as Google spends more time and money on Google Plus.
• Personalized experiences – a big trend Google is going after is personalizing their search and product experience to each user. From mobile devices, in which their investing billions of dollars in, to personalized search, Google wants users to receive experiences tailored to their needs. If you can adapt your website to the needs of users, you are likely to rank higher in the longrun. From using responsive design, to tailoring the experience based on history, like Yelp does, it’s all about offering a unique experience to each user.

If Google is so smart, why does _______ still work?

Your search engine ranking may be below a site that you’re 100% certain uses black hat and other underhanded techniques to rank where it does.  This begs the question, if Google is so smart and so advanced, why do some of these techniques still work?
The answer is because Google’s index is delicate.  They don’t want to mistakenly sandbox quality sites or generate false-positives as they did when they declared the whole internet to be full of malware in 2009.
Google’s engineers are hard at work trying to figure out how to maintain a balance of quality results without the changes wrongly affecting sites who have done nothing wrong. So instead of stooping to your competitions’ level, if you use ethical white hat tactics, you’re likely to rank higher in the long run.
From what I’ve seen over the years, sites using unethical tactics may rank high for a few months or even a year or two, but eventually they get caught. If you focus on producing high quality content, and building legitimate links, you’ll eventually rank higher than the people who are taking the quick and easy route. I myself used to take the quick and easy route and ranked for terms like “web hosting” or even “online poker” really high, but eventually Google caught up to me and others and penalized us over time.
Slow and steady really does win the race in the game of “Google”.

Tools of the trade

Another way to get more insights about Google is to use the tools they provide. One of the most important ones to checkout is Webmaster Tools. Here are some of the things Webmaster Tools can tell you, which should give you insights on how Google thinks:

• Page speed – Google used to have page speed data in Webmaster Tools. They now send you to their PageSpeed program, which shows you that they feel load time is important. The reason Google feels page speed being important because they noticed a correlation in which when they rank sites that load slowly, people use Google less frequently.
• Errors – no search engine likes sending people to a site with errors. Google lists out all of the errors they find on your site that you should fix in Webmaster Tools.
• Search queries – if you are trying to figure out a trend on if your traffic is going to go up or down, just look at how many search query impressions you receive. The more you get, the more traffic you should receive. So if you make changes to your marketing strategy and the number of impressions go up, you should do more of it. If the number of impressions goes down, you should do less of it.
• Valuable content – through the use of sitemaps Google will tell you how many pages they are indexing on your site. This should show you what the search giant thinks of your content. If they are indexing a lot of your content they probably feel it is more valuable compared to if you only have very few pages indexed.
• Messages – this is my favorite feature in Webmaster Tools is the messages area. Google will tell you what they see wrong with your website and this is where they will be sending you warnings as well.

If you want to get an understanding of where Google is going and how to adapt with their changes, it is essential that you use Webmaster Tools.

What’s next for the search giant?

Using the programs and services above, as well as other features like Google+, you can get a good understanding of where Google is moving towards. Facebook has been slowly trying to take a bit of Google’s market share by going after search and rolling out their own ad network, but Google continues to adapt and fight back.
You may look at Google Plus and consider it a nice try, but a failure on their part.  But that’s only because you maybe comparing it to Facebook in terms of popularity.  Google Plus is becoming more and more integrated with the things we use every day, similar to Facebook’s universal login.  Recently, they started promoting brands’ Plus pages and showcasing their +1 buttons as a way to encourage more companies to embrace Google Plus.
Beyond Google+, there’s also the Knowledge Graph, Google’s answer to Facebook’s long reach in the social sphere.  The Knowledge Graph collects and connects the who, what, where, when and how of social with search.

Combine this information with the social community and Google Maps, and you get Google Now, a personal assistant for Android smart phones that hopes to “make you a local, anywhere” by giving you the right information at the right time.  This includes sports scores from your favorite teams as they’re playing, the latest train schedule while you’re standing on the platform, and flight details from the moment you reach the gate.  The more Google Now knows about you, the better its recommendations.