SEO Werkt!

As you know, Wikipedia nofollows all their external links, so links from Wikipedia should have no impact on your rankings – be it positive or negative.

A WebmasterWorld thread have some SEOs disagreeing with that.

Some are saying because there are so many Wikipedia scrapers out there, when you get a link from Wikipedia it can hurt you.

A Junior WebmasterWorld member explained his case:

My recently relaunched website has been featured in Wikipedia as a ‘resource’ on a very relevant page. I have no idea who did this but I was obviously thrilled at first that somebody felt my website was relevant enough to appear there.

This seems to have caused no end of problems on Google, however. Because my website’s brand name is also a popular keyword in its niche (it is an EMD, but a short one) that is the keyword that this indivudual used on Wikipedia. My problem is that there are dozens if not hundreds of websites that scrape Wikipedia and now my keyword appears as anchor text on those websites.

It seems that Google has penalised me for this because from their point of view they see dozens of links with the same anchor text. Because my website is relatively young this makes up a large proportion of the link profile and I don’t think this looks natural.

I guess if the scraper remove the nofollow and if the site has very other links to it, outside of the scrapers, I guess it can hurt.

But this all seems a bit farfetched and I suspect there is some other issue.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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Related posts:

1. Vertical Measures Presents Link Building Tools for Success June 10th
2. Vertical Measures Named Top Link Popularity Firm by topseos
3. Vertical Measures Presents Google Analytics and Conversions Webinar May 13th

by Nick Stamoulis

The “new and improved” Digg launched the other week. And while I’m not going to get into the pros and cons of the new design, one very important thing to mention is that all the old links from Digg’s past, approximately 14 million of them, are gone. I had been wondering for several weeks in the time leading up the Digg revamp what was going to happen to those old links and now we know. While I can hope that they’ll be “reinstated” down the road, the loss of 14 million links (essentially overnight) got me thinking–what would happen if other popular link sources were to vanish? How many site owners would lose their link portfolio and SEO along with those links?

When it comes to link building, it’s essential that site owners diversify their links as much as possible in order to protect their long term success.

Sometimes link building techniques become black hat.
For a while, link exchanges worked as a great link building technique. You get a link, I get a link and everyone wins. Except one day the search engines decided link exchanges were pushing the boundary of “acceptable” link building and decreed them to be black hat. Just like that an entire segment of link building was, at best, much less valuable and at worst, a danger to your site. This is one critical reason that site owners need to diversify their link portfolio. We cannot predict what changes the search engines are going to make or what link building tactic is due for the chopping block next. You don’t want to risk the majority of your link profile being devalued because the one link type you were counting on is suddenly a red flag for the search engines.

Recent search algorithm updates have targeted back link profiles.
The latest Google update, Panda, targeted web spam tactics like keyword stuffing and over-use of exact match anchor text, but it also went heavily after sites with “unnatural” link portfolios. Keep in mind that a few bad links aren’t going to undo years of good SEO, but you have to look at it like a seesaw. Once the scale starts tipping towards the “bad” links you run the risk of incurring a penalty should the algorithm catch up with you. By diversifying your link portfolio you help minimize this risk (provided you diversify by building quality links from a variety of sources). The more quality link sources you have in your profile the better your site will stand up to search engine scrutiny.

You can’t control what other sites do.
How often do you really go through each and every link in your profile to see what has become of those sites? A site that used to be a great source of a link might have undergone a bit of an identity crisis and no longer be as relevant as it was when you got that link. A great blog might have been sold to a new owner and gone from high quality content to article farm. The point is you can’t control what happens to other websites, but you are still connected to them via that live link. The more you diversify your link portfolio the more insulated your website becomes from any changes on other sites that provide you those inbound links. One good link gone bad won’t have as dramatic an impact when you’ve got a dozen other quality links making up for it.

At the end of the day, diversifying your link portfolio is essential for long term SEO success, as well as for the protection of your website. It’s never a good idea to put all your SEO eggs in one basket, nor do you want to give the search engines any reason to suspect “unnatural” link building.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

There is an interesting WebmasterWorld thread just kicking off on an old topic of should you go with an exact match domain or go with the branded domain?

It is not a new topic, it has been discussed for years. We’ve probably covered it here a few times before. But since SEO and Google’s algorithms change over the years, it is good to revisit the topic.

The question is, if you want to rank for [blue widgets] and you are starting a new site, should you go with a domain name that matches the keyword phrase, i.e. bluewidgets.com or should you go with a branded domain such as somerandomdomain.com?

Of course, it depends on your strategy.

Bill Hartzer commented in the thread said it depends on the length of the domain name you can find. He wrote:

If it is a three keyword phrase, them you are better off with a shorter domain. If it was one or two keywords then I would go for the exact match.

Ifwidgets.com is not much better, you might be better if you choose a short brand able word instead.

Netmeg said he’d always go with a branded domain approach:

I don’t think it’s going to have much bearing on the success of your site in Google. Go with branding, or whatever you think your users will remember.

I agree, it depends on your plans. Is it a short term plan? Is it a long term strategy? What domains are available? What can you work the brand around?

Of course, having a domain with the keywords in it is helpful. People link to you by your domain name. I.e. people link to my business saying RustyBrick because that is my company name and domain name. So it helps with anchor text to have a keyword rich, exact match domain. It does sometimes and often appear that Google likes to rank exact match domain names in the search results – but not always.

What do you think?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Image credit to ShutterStock for puzzle pieces

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Google’s Cutts Explains Untrusted Link Notifications
  On July 20th, Google sent out a batch of new link notifications that scared the webmaster community. Google then informed us we can relax about those notifications because they are ignored links that don’t specifically hurt your site.

  Still, there was a lot of confusion…

• Google Touts Their Olympics Results
  Google’s home page has a unique logo each day for a different Olympics pushing searchers to their Olympics results. Google’s head of search…
• SEOs Eagerly Waiting A Penguin Refresh
  It has now been over 9 weeks since we had a Penguin refresh and SEOs and webmasters are getting antsy.

  They want to know when the next Penguin refresh will be. Typically Google pushes out Panda and possible Penguin updates every 3-6 weeks but it has been over 9 weeks now…

• A Keyword Competitive Tool Based On Links & Anchors
  This morning Majestic SEO launched a new tool to measure the competitive nature of a keyword or keyword phrase.

  The tool looks at the number of sites using that anchor text across the web as well as the title of the pages…

• Google Maps Tries To Find Your Current Location
  Google added a new feature to detect your current location on your desktop computer.

  I tried it this morning and it was smart enough to tell me I am in the state of New York…

• iPhone Wallpaper For Google Panda Victims
  I was playing around with some wallpapers for my iPhone yesterday and I stumbled on a Panda theme that looks like an SEO designed it. There are a ton of angry Pandas in this theme ready to pounce on

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Google Failed To Delete UK’s Street View Personal Data, and Now ‘In Breach’ Of UK Data Privacy, WebmasterWorld
• Google+ With 110,7 Million Visitors Worldwide In June …, Morten Myrstad – Google+
• Cheer on your team by changing your profile picture to the flag of your choice, WebmasterWorld
• Google launches fiberoptic internet – 1 gigabit, DigitalPoint Forums
• Questions to Ask at Google-Fiber Announcement, Hacker News

This morning Majestic SEO launched a new tool to measure the competitive nature of a keyword or keyword phrase.

The tool looks at the number of sites using that anchor text across the web as well as the title of the pages…

On July 20th, Google sent out a batch of new link notifications that scared the webmaster community. Google then informed us we can relax about those notifications because they are ignored links that don’t specifically hurt your site.

Still, there was a lot of confusion. So over the weekend, Google’s Matt Cutts posted a detailed blog post on what these notifications means. He wrote:

In less severe cases, we sometimes target specific spammy or artificial links created as part of a link scheme and distrust only those links, rather than taking action on a siteâs overall ranking. The new messages make it clear that we are taking “targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole.” The new messages also lack the yellow exclamation mark that other messages have, which tries to convey that we’re addressing a situation that is not as severe as the previous “we are losing trust in your entire site” messages.

Cutts Says Do Not Ignore The Links

Matt Cutts said do not ignore the links despite what we thought Google told us to do on that Friday.

These new messages are worth your attention. Fundamentally, it means we’re distrusting some links to your site. We often take this action when we see a site that is mostly good but might be might have some spammy or artificial links pointing to it (widgetbait, paid links, blog spam, guestbook spam, excessive article directory submissions, excessive link exchanges, other types of linkspam, etc.). So while the site’s overall rankings might not drop directly, likewise the site might not be able to rank for some phrases. I wouldn’t classify these messages as purely advisory or something to be ignored, or only for innocent sites.

On the other hand, I don’t want site owners to panic. We do use this message some of the time for innocent sites where people are pointing hacked anchor text to their site to try to make them rank for queries like [buy viagra].

Anyway, Matt goes into more details on the Google Webmaster Blog.

A WebmasterWorld thread has Tedster saying he would still focus his time and resources on other things and not go after removing links in this link unharmful notifications.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The URL of a webpage is an important factor as far as search engine optimization is concerned. Right after the title tags and meta description, a meaningful URL is considered a strong signal towards the “intent” of a page because, apart from Anchor text, a URL is the only parameter that can be used to [...]

This morning Majestic SEO launched a new tool to measure the competitive nature of a keyword or keyword phrase.

The tool looks at the number of sites using that anchor text across the web as well as the title of the pages. They said you can type a keyword into our home page instead of a web URL and start to see how many web pages use the phrase in the Anchor Text or in the title of a URL or a domain.

Here is a screen shot of the output, click on it to see it larger:

They also allude to soon being able to see the domain names using the anchor text the most. They said, “we are constantly developing” when the question was brought up.

I am not big into writing about tools here because (1) I don’t use tools and (2) then I get hundred emails from tool companies that I didn’t write about. Only reason I wrote about this today is because I spotted a Google+ post that is being talked a lot within the community and it is somewhat slow this morning.

Forum discussion at Google+.

Posted by dohertyjf

Last Friday, I did a Whiteboard Friday called "Smarter Internal Linking." If you have not yet watched it (I do show some graphs and stuff, so you'll probably need to watch and not just listen), I'd recommend doing so first before reading the rest of this post.

The goal of this post is to clear up a few misconceptions that I saw in the comments, and to show you exactly what I mean about sitewides that could be problematic both now and in the near future for over-optimization algorithms and filters.

Footer Links Are Not (Inherently) Bad

One question I saw a few times was about if we should use sitewide footers at all. My answer to this is "absolutely!" Footer links can be awesome for the user experience. Especially in the growing world of mobile surfing of the Internet, there is an increasing need for good navigation at the bottom of websites that allows users to navigate to a place on the site that makes sense, without necessitating scrolling back to the top of the page.

Footer links like SEOmoz's are fine, as they point people to the most important and useful pages on the website. People expect to see them there:

Zappos does this as well, though interestingly they do not have the same footer on the homepage as they do on their category pages (take a look at the homepage and this category to see the difference). They are not overloading you with anchor text and taking you to irrelevant pages from every page, though. Their main footer is large, yes, but contains useful links for the user.

And according to SearchMetrics, their SERP coverage is up and to the right -

The Problem is Scale

Footers like these become an issue when they are scaled out across a full website and also into microsites. This is a common practice for large sites, especially in the travel/hotels/tourism industries.

If this is a normal webpage -

This is an example of a homepage from a major hotels chain -

The architecture looks like this, which is a completely standard architecture -

But if you scale this out to a sitewide section, such as in the hotels site above, then every page becomes like a homepage linking with optimized anchor text. And often these links are irrelevant and don't add value to the user.

Here is an example of interlinking gone crazy -

Microsites/Franchises Can Be Dangerous

I recently came across a site that also has many third-party franchise sites. Each of these sites is built off a template (which is not necessarily an issue) and provides local content specific to the area where the franchise is located. Each of the sites, in my opinion, adds value to the user.

Here is an example layout of those sites, with the problem area (in my opinion) highlighted -

When you take this out to scale, the linking between the sites (and all of the links shown in the microsite example are sitewide) begins to look thus:

Think Taxonomy

The best way to steer clear of these over-linking issues that could and probably will get you into trouble, is to categorize your pages. Inside Distilled, we often talk about these categories as "page types", but basically we're talking about the different levels of the pages on your site. Some examples are:

• Homepage (a category in and of itself);
• Category pages;
• Product pages;
• Product detail pages;
• PPC landing pages;
• Blog posts.

One thought as to how to improve your internal linking, but in an algorithm-update-friendly way, is to interlink between the different levels in ways that make sense. The ultimate best answer would be to create an internal linking schema or algorithm that allows you to link to these pages automatically depending on how you best decide the pages fit.

You'll end up now with linking that looks thus, with all of the pages pointing in being pages in the same geographical category:

Parallel Internal Linking

As I said in the video, it doesn't make sense to link to all of your important category pages from every other category page, as this is bad from a user perspective. If someone is looking for a Washington DC hotel, they're not interested in seeing London hotels probably. If someone is looking for London hotels, they are probably not interested in Orlando hotels, but they might be interested in Paris or Munich hotels.

Now we need to figure out how to segment. To categorize this specific site, I'd use  the following taxonomy:

• Continent;
• Country;
• City;
• State (if US and applicable);
• Category or hotel

Then, pattern match the continents, then countries, then cities. If we do this, then your London hotels page could like this way, with links in the sidebar to Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, etc and not links to Orlando and Atlanta -

ccTLD Internal Linking

A tip that I gave in the video is to link between your relevant pages on your ccTLDs (.co.uk, .fr, etc) to the relevant page on the other TLDs. Using this methodology, we end up with the following structure and linking patterns instead of the craziness seen above:

How Do I Test This?

As with any blog post you read, you should take the advice with a grain or two of salt. I don't care who writes it, you need to do your own testing and competitor research to find out what is working and then how you can stay competitive while also not putting your website in danger.

Do Your Competitor Research

I found the principles talked about here by doing a deep dive into how competitors are getting their rankings (this is one factor of many). I found how they are linking and compared that against their traffic to see how it is trending.

You need to do the same. I recommend starting off with your most competitive term and reverse-engineering their strategies, looking specifically at external links, internal links, and content. You might find that you are being beaten because they have superior useful content. Or maybe you'll find that their internal linking is better, and you can learn from their strategies.

Work With Your UX Team or Developer

Now, depending on the size of your company, you might have a dedicated UX team. If you're working on the scale that I am talking about here, you need to have a UX team, even. Get them to help you categorize your pages and levels, and then work with them to create mockups using a tool like Balsamiq (the tool I used for the illustrations here).

Start off NoFollowing Links instead of Removing

Some people in the comments on the Whiteboard Friday recommended starting to test this by nofollowing your excessive internal linking instead of removing links. I think this is a good place to start, on a small sample of your pages, so that you can test the potential gains or losses experienced through these strategies.

Ultimately though, if these strategies work for you, then you will want to create new page layouts so that your categorization can help you effectively interlink. Slapping a no-follow on these links is only a band-aid, as we are also concerned about conversions and not just rankings.

I hope this helps to clarify some of the points I was making in the video. If you have more questions (and I hope you do now), please leave them in the comments!

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