Black Hat

Detected Unnatural Links Notice From Google

8 Comments
December 28  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

No we didn’t get a notice of detected unnatural links but more and more people are these days and I expect this to ramp up a lot more in 2012. As I’ve stated many times, I’ve got my ear to the ground and a lot of the webmaster/affiliate forums are bringing up threads with this message. Google’s war on link spam is like America’s “war” on drugs – it’s a big fat fail boat year after year. The biggest hole in their algorithm is the links although they don’t need to change that aspect entirely. The anchor text abuse is rampant and that’s what needs to be curbed or turned down a notch…something we’re actually seeing in our link analysis a lot over the past 8 months.

I’m writing about it today because I saw yet another thread started in Google’s Webmaster Help Central regarding a rather larger site getting this notice. It comes in your webmaster tools area and you definitely don’t want to be seeing it. There are still a lot of people who claim that links cannot hurt your rankings, there are also a lot of people who believe in all sorts of fairy tales. Google’s guidelines on link schemes clearly state that you can be kicked in the ass (loss of rankings) if you’re heavily gaming their algo.


Image Credit: http://searchnewscentral.com/20110629173/Latest/does-google-think-your-links-are-unnatural.html
 
This is what she looks like and for a lot of people I’ve spoken with, it doesn’t always follow with a decrease in rankings. I imagine your site is now under some serious watch from your big brother G so proceed with caution. From what I can tell, it takes a certain type of “link scheme” to trigger this message. The type I’m referring to is usually link exchanges as they’re really easy to spot and trigger an alert to Google. A lot of people these days are link spamming via article marketing, blog comments and forum profiles and I’ve only seen a couple cases where these links caused a problem. Those types of links are too easy to spam a competitor with, thus Google most likely won’t be causing a fuss from these links too much…I imagine they just eventually devalue them and move on.

Where I’d also be suspect is in a few other areas of your link profile. If your top anchor text are clearly gaming or a certain keyword then I’d be quite worried as a business owner. Half the time businesses hire some crack pot SEO firm and all they do is spam spam spam for certain anchor text links. A lot of companies have no idea what’s going on or if this were even a bad thing to have happen. Another area I always like to peep on is the distribution of links to pages besides the homepage. This is another area Google can easily calculate in their algorithm is something looks highly unnatural. If I were Google, I’d also take a look at the number of C classes that total the link profile, but that might just be a little too hard to determine by a machine if something’s awry.

Is Google passing value on the type of link? I’d put a lot of money on yes they are. If your link profile consists of only blog comments, how could they not determine something was going on. I’m a big fan of link diversity, but I’m also a bigger fan of creating something that encourages people to link to you…that’ll provide you with more than enough natural links.

Cases To Study

Via this Google search query:


 
That should give you folks a good idea of what they’ve been going after in the past year or two. Like I said above, I expect these messages to be ramped up in 2012 so make sure you’re really thinking about your current and future link marketing efforts and tactics. If you’ve seen this message and would like to tell your story, then feel free to do so in the comments below. If you’ve got this message and would like us to take a look at your website for free then get in touch via our contact form.

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Donations As A Link Building Tactic? Be Careful

2 Comments
May 6  |  Black Hat  |   Ryan Clark

A recent thread in GWC made me remember that donations are an often tactic used by companies with a lot of link money to burn. They’re usually pretty safe from Google’s clutches, but they’re also a huge risk. I was doing some backlink analysis for someone in a thread who had got stung with a -50 filter, and saw some not so good links. I was quite surprised to see a company of this high standards pulling this off, so I thought I’d make one public example for everyone to see. Google most definitely has taken notice to the page so it’s not really a secret, and it’s already out there in the public for anyone to see.

First up, let’s talk a little about why this is used as a link building strategy for a lot of big players. There are a lot of donations opportunities out there and usually they’re on very authoritative sites. Their donation pages are also not far off from the homepage, thus you’ll see a lot of companies going after these links. Sometimes it only takes a few hundred dollars to get a link from a really big foundation, open source project or a charity. For the most part, you’ll often see people drop well over $10,000 for a really link from a popular resource like this. Now that’s a scary link budget to compete with!

I can say openly that we’ve employed the tactic, but we did a few things different. For one, there was in no way any specific anchor text used. Secondly, the donations were made because they were open source software that the company relied on heavily to do their business. Lastly, the company only donated to three open source projects and that was the end of that….oh and I believe we sent the staff beer and pizza one day but we didn’t net any links for that!

Ok so what’s a really bad example of donation giving for inks? Sadly it comes from my favorite flavor of Unix, NetBSD. These folks most likely allow certain anchor text variations mainly because they need the money to go on, and they have one hell of an authoritative website. This means a lot of people will pay big bucks for a “proper link”, and that is most likely too much money to turn down. Times are tough, I understand! I doubt NetBSD would ever get penalized either, more so just have their donation pages devalued a lot. This still works out for them as they’d get the donations and the buyers would never know if those links were duds.

Naughty Naughty!


So most of you would cringe when you saw this, and just imagine what a Google web spam engineer would do? It really surprises me that some of these large companies let their link builders get up to this! Either that or they’re not in the know of what’s bad or good, and they’re just throwing heaps of money at a SEO firm. You’ll most likely see a ton of results, but one day you could have the carpet pulled out from beneath you. No on wants to wake up one day with their rankings gone, so be very careful in what you do.

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Panda Update Is Working For Us Against OneWayLinkBuilder.com

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April 20  |  Black Hat  |   Ryan Clark

OneWayLinkBuilder.com has been scraping not only our blog content, but Vertical Measures blog as well. I’ve asked many times through many streams and nothing was done about it, well, not until Panda anywho. We’ve implemented Google’s original source meta tags, blocked the scrapers via .htaccess but that didn’t stop them there. They take our content fully, rip out the links and the images which is really down right rude.  Since Panda is supposed to throw down thin, duplicate and weak content, I was glad to see it working so well for us.

Well I had to write about it since we weren’t getting anywhere trying to stop them from scraping. I even offered to let them take an excerpt but at least provide a link back to our original work. I filed a DMCA request with Google months ago and that did absolutely nothing, so it’s nice to see the Panda update doing its job. I know a lot of people think it’s done nothing but screw things up even worse, but here’s a real world example.

The original source implementation seemed to be doing an ok job, but not great. For the longest time we’d still see the scraped posts ranking within the top 10 search results. While it wasn’t hurting our rankings or image at all, it is just frustrating to see someone stealing your written words, and the links within them. I’d also hate to think a potential client would think it was their work, and end up wasting their time getting links that are most likely a waste of their money. With that in mind, just taking a look at the links they’ve built, you can see quickly this is not a consultant you want to deal with.

Post Panda Results?

 

I am pleased to see that the blog results are now what they should be, something I’ve demonstrated in the picture below. This is exactly what Panda was intending to do, so we’re all pleased that something has worked in our favor. I know not everyone is pleased, and I’m very aware that a lot of scraper sites are still outranking original content producers out there. That has been very evident if you look at all the inquiries in Google Webmaster Central.

So there’s a bit of hope for our team and hopefully folks out there dealing with scraper sites. If you’re seeing the opposite still with your content, pipe up here in the comments and let’s get a discussion going. We’re always more than happy to offer our advice and hopefully that leads to some answers for your problems.

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Link Building Freelancer Threatens A Client!

2 Comments
March 22  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

I was doing my morning help over at Google’s Webmaster Central and came across this somewhat scary post. I imagine many of you have hired a freelancer from one of “those” sites in the past, and I imagine most of you learned an important lesson. Those freelancers are mainly building junk/spam links, and it shouldn’t surprise you. While I imagine this happens more often that I’d like to know, there was some great info by a Google employee on the topic of spam links. To cap the post up for you first, this is what the site owner had to say;

I hired a freelancer to build links for my site, all white hat and above board.  However when I came to check the links they were not very good quality and half of them were missing.  After a dispute via Freelancer I agreed to pay half and he accepted that.  Over the next couple of days he has sent me many emails saying that he would remove the links I paid for if I did not pay the rest of the cash for this month.  I said that was not fair as I have paid for the links he has built. Now he has come back saying if I do not pay he will send 2000+ bad links to my site and wipe it from the search engines… I didn’t know what to do so I just paid him.

So here we have a sticky situation. Luckily for him, freelance link builders are cheap and he was able to bite the bullet. So I could stop there and we could all contemplate the thought of this happening to our business. First of all, don’t hire a freelancer from “one of those sites”, and stick with well known companies in the industry (cough cough). This is your business we’re talking about here, and no one should be held hostage for links!

So on to the next point of topic in this discussion. A lot of the people said don’t worry about it, those spam links can’t hurt you. This had me a little flabbergasted to say the least! Clearly, some of these consultants have never had a client with an anchor text filter penalty. I’ve heard this time and time again, that spam links cannot hurt you at all so don’t worry about it. I have never shared this thought, and we’ve dealt with so many inquiries from people with those exact penalties. Needless to say, I was pleased when a Google employee piped in on the conversation;

Google doesn’t penalize a site for having spammy links to the site unless we can tell that this was part of a link scheme.

-thejack (Google Employee)

So there you have it, a real world example of the dark side of marketing. This should also clear up any questions you had about getting hit by bad links. While it might be frustrating to see a competitor over take you in the short run, a quality marketing plan will prevail in the end.

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Google Owned Like.com Outranked By Content Scrapers Post Panda

1 Comments
March 18  |  Ecommerce SEO  |   Ryan Clark

We’re currently in the middle of submitting a clients feed to a few product comparison search engines, and I stumbled onto something slightly amusing. Like.com, which was acquired by Google, has a bunch of (really lousy) content basically to just internally link their key product pages. While I know this has been in place long before the big G got in there, so it’s more of just an amusing blog post to peek at. By the recent Panda update, the content on the site would be defined as a content farm, and I kind of think Like.com got hit by the update. As it stands, most of that content has been scraped and is currently outranked but low quality article sites and blogs.

The site has been slowly going down hill anyhow, and the only point in time it saw any real action is when Google announced the purchase. I’m surprise this hasn’t been cleaned up yet, but I imagine they just used the technology elsewhere. That domain has some serious potential though, so feel free to let me at it Google if you don’t have the time(tee hee). I checked around 10 “articles” that are up on the site and ended up with the same result as you can see in this next image below. Sometimes, I didn’t even get Like.com back as a result in the top 30 listings, something I found a little strange.

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JCPenny Caught With Paid Links?

1 Comments
February 12  |  Black Hat  |   Ryan Clark

I just enjoyed reading the long and well done report by the NT Times on the black hat hi-jinx JCPenny has been tangled up in. I don’t need to chat much about it as they went 5 pages deep into uncovering what was going on. JCPenny, by the looks of their Alexa, did quite well this last holiday season!

This is a good warning to all big brands not to game their links and stay away from any anchor text filters…something JCPenny is still stuck in by the looks of it. While it was reported they got slapped up into the 70′s, I’m now seeing them back in the 30′s, but there’s no traffic to be found there. JCPenny could have also been setup in this situation. Of all the huge brands we’ve worked with, they’d never have to resort to tactics like this to get those kind of results. While it’s not easy, these companies most definitely have the budget to do it right.

Just 7 percent of JCPenney.com’s traffic comes from clicks on organic search results, she wrote. A far bigger source of profits this holiday season, she stated, came from partnerships with companies like Yahoo and Time Warner, from new mobile applications and from in-store kiosks.

This is also great for them, any this should be similar for any large company. We always tell our clients to NOT have all their eggs in one basket, especially in case something bad happens. If you’re still relying 100% on search, it’s time to start looking at Facebook storefront options, a strong Twitter presence and get mobile in one way or another.

The one major thing JCPenny could improve on is of course much better product descriptions. If you were a smaller ecommerce site with a weak link profile and brand presence, then you’d be trumped. This is where having such a big company comes in really handy, but don’t feel invincible.

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Content Scrapers Outranking Your Website? You’re Not Alone

1 Comments
January 27  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

As I went off yesterday about Google going after content scrapers and low quality websites, I also should have gone into this topic a little more. Our site gets scraped by a few sites and while it is getting better, I’m still finding posts I wrote a week or two ago getting outranked by the scraper site. This pisses me off to no end, and I don’t need any more stress in my life that’s for sure.

Matt Cutts has stated, below on video for good measure, that in most cases it won’t hurt your site. He also stated, that it can help out a little if the scraper site links to your site. This is all fine and dandy, the problem I have is all the scrapers I’m dealing with are not linking back, they’re stripping my links and they’re even hot linking my our images. I’ll go into how to attempt to put a stop to that below without having to hire some h4x0r to DDoS the living stink out of their server….not that I would ever recommend that lol.

On our end, from my constant checking, I’ve noticed a few things that I thought would have helped beat out the scraper sites. Google has mentioned that Facebook Likes and Retweets help rank your content, but even after 50+ likes on a content piece, and about a dozen ReTweets I didn’t notice much. I still need to measure what threshold levels are in place for that style of marketing to take effect. I’ve even submitted the best of the content to Digg, Reddit’s SEO section and a few other bookmarking sites we have built up properly.

So about two weeks ago we started using Google’s two new meta tags for content producers which is supposed to tell Google it started here first. If you’re using WordPress, I’ll spare you the time reading my post and you can just go ahead and install WP Original Source and never think about it again. I will say that we’re seeing a huge improvement with our content ranking very well, and our main scraper isn’t even registering in the SERPs anymore.

Some other advice I can give out here is get a few internal links pointing to your content when you can. I’ll even try and see what older, indexed content we have that is on the same topic and find a way to add a link in. Make sure you’re also using a related posts plugin if you’re a blog, just like the one you’ll see below this post. Every little bit helps, but if that’s still not working you can always file a DMCA complaint with Google and their Webhost. Sadly, when I tried this nothing at all ever happened, but I wish you better luck.

Last but not least, this is another good reason to grow your social profiles properly and of course, bigger and better! Having more and more people Retweet and Like your content is only going to help in the long run, even if we didn’t see any movement with it at the moment. This can also lead to Twitter apps picking up your content, and as I’ve mentioned before, most of them follow their links and we see almost lightning quick indexing because of it. I’ll also take this opportunity to BEG you all to Follow us on Twitter because we’re awesome.

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20,000 Links For $250 Please – What The F$%!

1 Comments
January 25  |  Black Hat  |   Ryan Clark

For those of your who enjoyed taking a gander at the hilarious post we wrote in November titled “Can I Get 5000 Links Please“, I bring you an even better one. The freelancer sites are littered with the craziest link building offers one can find. No legit company in the world would be out trying to snag deals like this, but instead these are affiliate marketers going after spam links. This one in particular caught my attention on Twitter and made me almost choke on my coffee here.

The request is for 20,000 links in about 10 days time….riiiiiight. They also state they all have to be dofollow and white hat techniques only. Oh an the best part, they only want to pay a max of $250 USD. While the offer is getting bids from the usual outsourcing companies, there’s no way this guy is going to have his project met in a white hat method. I cannot stress this enough to some of the big brands out there that come to us wanting something like this.

I feel sorry for Matt Cutts and his team having to combat the tens of thousands of websites out there trying to link spam like this, so I’ll be sure to buy him a beer the next time I see him. Keep in mind when it comes to getting a lot of links, do it over time, do it right and don’t spam. We are firm believers of quality over quantity, so build strong relationships on line and the good links will follow over time…not 10 days. The freelancer link builders are only going to get your company caught up in an anchor text filter, or even worse, complete de-listing from Google.

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