Thursday, April 9, 2015

Link Risk Management: Are You Using This Critical SEO Tactic?

Link Risk Management: Are You Using This Critical SEO Tactic?

Columnist Stephan Spencer warns that if you don't regularly monitor your backlinks and proactively get rid of spammy ones, you could be risking it all.



Over the past five years, Penguin is arguably the Google algorithm update that’s had the greatest impact on webmasters. Since Google launched the first Penguin update in April 2012, hundreds of thousands of sites around the world have been penalized and have virtually vanished from the Internet (or at least their traffic has).
Webmasters the world over scrambled to clean up dubious links pointing to their sites. Even after going through this stressful, time consuming, and oftentimes frustrating experience, webmasters continue to search for more efficient and effective ways to keep their websites from getting caught in Penguin’s crosshairs as Google continually re-defines what constitutes a “good” link.
One vital concept in keeping your sites or your clients’ sites safe from the dreaded Penguin is that of managing the levels of risk within your backlink “portfolio.”

Introducing Link Risk Management

Link risk management is a natural outgrowth of the changes that have affected SEO in the last few years.
SEO is not just an investment in better visibility and higher rankings. SEO is the primary way to protect your Internet “assets.” Unfortunately, just like in most other spheres of life, people tend to wait for something bad to happen before they do something to protect themselves.
Do you really want to go through all the stress, time, and cost of recovering your site from a Google penalty? My advice would be, “better safe than sorry.”
You can insure your home or your car against damage, but how do you protect your organic web traffic? Link risk management is one of the ways you can insure your organic traffic — and the income that results from it — against Penguin-related damage.

Link risk management includes:

  1. Recovering your site from a Google penalty (if necessary)
  2. Protecting it from bad backlinks and “negative SEO”
  3. Building safe backlinks
  4. Making steps 2 and 3 a continuous process

Recovery

Only webmasters who were hit by a Google penalty know the stress and desperation one experiences before seeing a penalized website return in the search results. Many sites that depended primarily on organic traffic for revenue lost everything they had overnight, and their companies have vanished from the Internet.
Link Risk Management: Are You Using This Critical SEO Tactic?

Is it possible to recover from a Google Penalty?

Yes; whether you were hit by a Google manual or algorithmic penalty, it is possible to recover.
Google gives you an “appeal” with their Disavow Tool.  In theory, the procedure is actually pretty simple. Find all of your existing spammy or poor quality backlinks, put them in a disavow file, and upload it to Google Webmaster Tools.  After some time, your site should recover, and you will get some of your visibility and visitors back.
As I said, in theory, recovering from a Google penalty is pretty simple; in practice, it takes a lot of time and effort on your part. You could be looking at countless hours of work and frustration, which could extend to months of tireless effort, particularly if your first disavow attempt is rejected.
Following is the procedure for recovering from a Google penalty:

Step 1: Collecting Your Backlinks

This is not always easy because even Google provides only a portion of all your backlinks. The Google Webmaster Tools backlinks information is never comprehensive — so, if all you do is analyze just those links, you will never get out of the penalty box.
To collect and summarize all of your links, I recommend using multiple tools, because each tool covers different (though sometimes overlapping) parts of the link graph. I would include link data from LinkResearchTools (in particular, the Quick Backlinks Tool),Majestic, Ahrefs, Moz’s Open Site ExplorerBing Webmaster Tools, and Google Webmaster Tools.
Download links from all of these sources and then remove the duplicates before analyzing each link.

Step 2: Analyzing Your Backlinks

Before you even start analyzing your backlinks, you should learn which links violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines on linking. After that, you can start with your personal analysis.
This is not a huge job if you have just a few hundred backlinks. You can check each one manually, taking note of which ones come from spammy or irrelevant sites.
The problem gets serious when you have thousands — or even millions — of backlinks. There are tools available to help automate this process. My preferred solution is running the Link Detox tool from LinkResearchTools, then confirming its determination by hand-checking a random sample within each of the risk levels. I manually analyze a larger and larger sample size of links as the rating gets less “risky.” In other words, I look more closely at links rated “moderate” risk than those rated “deadly” risk.

Step 3: Get Rid Of Low-Quality Links, Disavow The Rest

Once you’ve put together a list of “risky” backlinks, you should make every effort possible to get those links removed from their respective websites. This could mean manually removing links over which you have control, or reaching out to webmasters to remove links over which you do not have control.
After you’ve done all you can to clean up your spammy backlinks, you can put the remaining ones into a file and “disavow” them using the Disavow Tool in Google Webmaster Tools. This will signal to Google that you do not wish for these links to be taken into consideration when assessing your site.

Step 4: Waiting For Google’s Response

If you’ve receive a manual penalty from Google (i.e. a “manual action”), you will have to file a reconsideration request and wait for them to review it. This can take anywhere from several days to several months.
If you were hit by a Google algorithmic penalty, you will have to wait for the next Google algorithm update — which can take even longer than a reconsideration request response. As you may recall, we all waited for more than a year for the last Google Penguin update. Fortunately, it appears that Google now updates their algorithm continuously, or at least more frequently.
Recovery is possible, but it will cost you money, time, and stress. And even if you achieve a recovery, don’t bank on returning to pre-penalty traffic levels right away. Thus, your company may continue suffering significant financial losses. You may even face bankruptcy if your business only has an online presence and it depends primarily on Google organic traffic for its customers.
Protection
Just like with any kind of insurance, you hope that you never need it, but it’s better to be prepared than not. For webmasters, the “insurance policy” is to protect your site from the possibility of Google penalties — versus trying to recover from one after you’ve been hit.
The only way to keep your website safe and Penguin-proof is by proactively engaging in proper link risk management. This means keeping track of your backlink profile, regularly checking it for new links and removing or disavowing the spammy ones.

There are many reasons why you should constantly monitor the risk level of your backlink profile:

  • Even if you have successfully recovered from a Google penalty, your site is not immune to new Google penalties.
  • Your site gets new backlinks every day, and many of them come from bad neighborhoods.
  • Despite some controversy, negative SEO is real and is happening all the time. Someone determined enough to hurt you can destroy your reputation with Google — and thus, your organic traffic.

Building New Links

Monitoring your backlink profile and disavowing or removing poor backlinks is not enough. In addition to those bad links you remove or disavow, you must always be building or attracting new links.
By and large, we are responsible for most of the risky links in our own backlink profiles. The kind of link building Google has always wished us to engage in has always been difficult and time-consuming, and many webmasters didn’t have the time or patience to build high-quality links.
For years, SEOs built links that, while they may have increased rankings in the short term, were never intended by Google to benefit rankings. Many sites are now paying the price for that kind of shortsighted link building.

Basic safe link building techniques are:

  1. Create and promote: great content; revolutionary business models; stellar products, prices, or services; interesting news stories, etc.
  2. Find your competitors’ strong and healthy links. Analyze locations, connections and techniques they used. Replicate their experience and build safe links.
  3. Analyze potential backlinks and great places from which to get a link using professional tools.

Review Your Work

Link monitoring doesn’t have to always lead just to disavowing poor quality links. A good SEO will know when to disavow or undisavow a backlink. For any given subdomain, you can have only one disavow file in Google’s Disavow tool, but you can change it whenever you want. You can add new links or remove old ones that maybe were bad a year ago but now they are actually good (though this is fairly rare).
Your backlink profile is like a living organism. A bad backlink from yesterday could be a good backlink today.  For example, if you disavowed backlinks from de-indexed, infected, abandoned, or spammy sites, the link may no longer be considered spammy. De-indexed sites could now be indexed again. Infected sites may have recovered from malware. Abandoned and spammy sites could become clean and safe again.
It may be you have disavowed backlinks from link networks or from fresh sites. The the web changes constantly and it may be that from the day you disavowed a fresh link on a brand new site until now, many of these links could have become valuable (or at least not risky/spammy looking). Sites from link networks could change ownership and host location and no longer be part of the “network.”
It’s difficult enough to obtain new links. If you engage in effective link monitoring and you notice that a backlink is safe again, just undisavow it (remove it from your disavow file).

Conclusion

It’s no longer optional to monitor the risk of your backlink profile continually. Yes, it can be extremely difficult and time consuming (especially if you do it manually), but I assure you that dealing with the fallout of a manual or algorithmic penalty is a lot more difficult and time-consuming.
The web is ever evolving. Google regularly changes the rules of the game. You can choose to adapt, or you can stand by and watch your organic traffic disappear. You can’t afford to be blind to the risks. Insure your organic traffic by instituting link risk management.



Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Google Bolding Answers, Not Just Queries, In The Search Results

Google isn't just bolding the search query now, but also the answers to your search queries.

Google is now bolding answers in the search results, not just the query or the synonym of your query in the search results.
For example, if you search for [what color is the sky] or [the average age of a college student] or other queries that would return answers at the top of the page or in the search results, you would see Google bolding the answer.
In the first example, Google is bolding blue and red colors in the answer in the knowledge graph box, but also you’d find these words bolded in the actual search results below:
Here is the second example:
Here is a screen shot showing a standard search result with the number 25 bolded in the snippet:




Tuesday, April 7, 2015

How to Choose Good Digital Marketing or SEO Training Institutes in India?

Tips to Choose Good and Best Digital Marketing or SEO Training Institute
There are few details you need to pay attention before choosing the best digital marketing and SEO training institute in major cities(Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and so on). Here are few tips that will help you to do so:
1. Your SEO Trainer or Digital Marketing Trainer:
The first important thing to be noted while choosing the best SEO training institute or digital marketing training centers is the expertise of your trainer. So all you need to be concerned about is the search engine techniques, digital marketing, pay per click and social media your trainer will be covering in the training program. One tip to learn about the trainer is to check online profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn and so on of your trainer. You need to ensure that your trainer has an active online entity as SEO and internet marketing is all about promoting products and services online.
2. The position of your training institute’s primary keywords in search engines
SEO helps websites to rank better in search engines. This implies that your institute should rank better in all the search engines, right? So the simple method is to check if the institute’s primary keywords appear within the top three search results. For example, for SEO training in Chennai, when you search for the term “SEO training institutes in Chennai” or “Chennai SEO Training” or “SEO training in Chennai”, your training institute’s website need to appear within the top search results. If this is the case, it means that your people excel in their business and you can check in social media presence and other stuffs. for the same factors we need to analyze for searching digital marketing institutes.
3. Experience in training
It is always wise to choose training centers that are there in this field for maximum number of years. This is because they would have established their credibility already. However this does not mean that the new training institutes are bad. A group of Digital Marketing professional or SEO experts who were professionally doing their digital marketing and search engine optimization may decide to launch a training institute.
4. Read testimonials from past trainees
It is best if you could contact the previous trainees of the training institute you are about to choose. But when you do so, try to contact as many people as possible. If you are unable to contact them directly, try to read their testimonials in Google. At least one or two might have published their experience in the training institute. If many people recommend the institute, go for it.
5. Training Fees
There are few Digital Marketing or SEO training centers charging very high fees claiming that they are the best in the town. Such centers even charge about twenty five thousand rupees for a one week course. On the other hand, few other centers offer reasonable rates ranging from seven thousand to fifteen thousand rupees a week. However, fees structure of a training institute should be considered depending on the quality of the course and the duration.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Social Media Makes Up Nearly A Third Of All Referral Traffic, + More Stats

Social software company Shareaholic argues that the shift from search to social is here with the release of a new set of data that reveals social media referral traffic is up 22.71% from this time last year.

In total, in December 2014 top 8 social networks drove 31.24% of overall traffic to web sites. These networks include Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Shareaholic’s Q4 Social Media Traffic Report, released today, includes a year-over-year as well as a 3-year trend analysis. The report is full of of stats that illustrate social media’s role as a traffic driver over the past several years.
Here are some more highlights from the report, the following stats are comparing data from 2011 to data from 2014.

Facebook’s share of traffic grew 277.26% (from 6.53% to 24.63%). Americans are also spending considerably more time on Facebook, from 15.5 minutes per day in 2011 to 42.1 minutes per day in 2014.

Pinterest’s share grew 684.86% (from 0.65% to 5.06%). However, Pinterest’s growth has hit a plateau — to continue growing its user base the report suggests the social network needs to “shed its isolating for-women-only image” and develop more mass-market appeal.

All six remaining social networks (Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, G+, LinkedIn, YouTube) saw their shares decline, making up less than 2% of web traffic. YouTube was decimated, losing 94.76% of its share (from 0.24% down to 0.01%). The report suggests that Facebook’s auto-play videos have led to YouTube’s sharp decline of referral traffic.

As for traffic from the other social networks, that’s on the decline as well. Since 2011, Google+ and LinkedIn have both lost one third of their share of referral traffic, Reddit’s share is down by half, and Twitter’s share has roughly stayed the same.
Here’s a chart of each network’s share of referral traffic over the past three years — you can see Facebook killing it, Pinterest rising and then flattening out, and all other networks hovering around the same place.

Friday, January 23, 2015

Tips to Use Whats App in PC

Tips to Use Whats App in PC

Whatsapp is very popular application but it is strange that it cannot be used on PCs and most of tablets. There are many methods to use whatsapp on PC, one of them is to use with “BlueStacks” emulator. Many people did not like this method. Millions of Computer users were requested alternative for this. As a response of this whatsapp team released a web application to use whatsapp in PC without any software. For this chrome browser is enough.
Tips to Use Whats App in PC
Here the tips to help you more,
  1. This facility only applicable for Android, Windows, Blackberry mobiles not for iphone’s said by WhatsApp Team.
  2. First, you need to download the latest whatsapp application from application store or you can update the application.
  3. Then in PC open the Chrome Browser and go with https://web.whatsapp.com/ there you find with QR code
  4. In your Mobile, Open the WhatsApp Application -> select the WhatsAppWeb option, then QR scanner line opens.
  5. Then Scan the QR code which shown in browser and that’s it.
  6. The Next few seconds your chrome browser reflects WhatsApp as in your phone. All the options are on the phone, the facilities are in the web application.
  7. To access whatsapp in pc smoothly, your mobile should connect with the internet.
  8. Desktop notification facility also available.
  9. With this you only have options to share images and web camera access not for to share contacts, audio, locations.
  10. The biggest plus of this web application is that everything on the Internet is much easier to see and share in the WhatsApp.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Revamped Search Engine @ LinkedIn

New Search Engine:
LinkedIn were revamped its search engine to help users better. This Search engine has revamped in accordance to get faster search results and to get relevant results. LinkedIn new search engine available now, it can save its members more than a year of collective time spent searching.
Here the list to highlight changes,
  • Results Based On Connections
LinkedIn will now populate its search results based on what it believes is most relevant to you based on your connections, groups, and companies.
  • Search Beyond Your Connections
For the first time, LinkedIn is giving its free members the ability to search outside of their group of connections. This used to be a premium feature.
  • Personalized search results
LinkedIn will personalize search results based on the information you have provided in your profile.
  • Surfacing Users’ Content
Now when you perform a search, LinkedIn may surface content other users have uploaded to the network, such as blog posts and SlideShare decks, if its relevant to the search.
These changes are “just the start”, the company says, and we can expect more developments coming from LinkedIn throughout the year.

Read More>>>

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

3 Messages Your Rankings Are Sending

Tracking keyword rankings in Google can be one of the most fun and frustrating parts of SEO. When we see movement for those phrases that are the "Big money, big money, no whammies, no whammies, stop" keywords, it’s a good day. But when day after day those words still linger off the first page, it can make you want to chuck it all and go back to an analog world.

But sometimes, we spend so much time looking at ranking reports for what we want to see that we miss the forest for the trees. If we only listen for what we want to hear, we may not pick up on what is actually being said.

Sometimes keyword reports, especially the extended ones from tools like SEM Rush or SpyFu, that give you more than just the phrases you’re looking for have a bigger story to tell. At least they do if you know how to read between the keywords.

Dominant Theme of Relevance

Looking at the kinds of phrases you rank for can be a huge message about how a search engine interprets your most relevant concepts. If there is a large ratio of your ranking phrases that are based around one prominent theme, that is a strong indicator of the topics on which your site is most trusted. If there is a common subject among dozens of keywords, that can represent opportunities and areas of weakness.


On the opportunity side, if a theme is strong, and it’s an important theme for the site, you can work on focusing other signals around that. By creating additional content, links, and digital assets to enforce that perception of authority on a topic, a site can strengthen its position.

As a top-ranking site in a niche, there is also the value of perception. Having strong Google rankings surrounding a theme can help influence others regarding your authority. This can extend to media outreach including press releases, social media interactions, and even print materials. Promotions that encourage potential visitors to "Google a prominent keyword" for which you rank well can also capitalize on that prominence.

The scope of your ranking phrases can also indicate a weakness in relevance. If you are not ranking well for a major theme of your business, then it may be time to consider creating more signals surrounding that subject.

Where You Need New Content

One of the biggest clues you can read from a keyword report is where you should focus efforts around content creation. Content creation can support existing relevance or enhance authority where relevance is lacking. It can also help indicate where a user experience might be incomplete.

When Google ranks a site for any given keyword, it is a result of multiple on- and off-page factors being weighed to determine which pages should be served to users as a result of a search. Google is not wholly infallible in this endeavor. Sometimes a page that ranks for a keyword is not necessarily the best or most appropriate. In other circumstances, a page may rank for a phrase but not fully serve the user intent. By examining your keyword rankings for these situations you have the opportunity to better present information on the pages that rank or expand your content to provide a better, more comprehensive page that should rank.

Competition and Co-Citation

Studying your keyword rankings can also help you determine new competitors, and new strategies for SEO. Most businesses have isolated a core of key competitors who may bid on the same phrases or may appear together in the SERPS for several different searches. Outside of that, an expanded analysis of keyword rankings can reveal additional businesses that may be on the rise, or may be utilizing tactics that can be learned from.

A newer site that has become competitive in the long-tail may have structural, content, or optimization tactics that can be implemented on your site. They may also represent successful off-site marketing campaigns from link-building, marketing, or networking. While we may focus on who ranks alongside us for the head terms, evaluating the broader field on longer phrases or queries which tend to get less attention may reveal new information that is useful.

Also, evaluating the scope of rankings can reveal websites that aren’t competitive that may be ripe for partnerships or co-citation. Another site that ranks below you but does not target your customers could be a good site to work with on an initiative or just to link to. Linking to similarly relevant, but not competitive, websites enhances the comprehensiveness of content, but may also send additional signals of relevance to search engines.

Filtering keyword reports to a small section of phrases can be useful when it helps quiet the noise a bit. But it can also keep us from hearing things we need to know. It is absolutely worth examining and considering the implications of the entire volume of ranking phrases, at least on occasion. There are messages within that report that can be applied to strategic development and competitive analysis. There is subtext in a ranking report that deserves to be understood because it may be those quiet suggestions that help bring forth some of the best new ideas.

Read More>>>

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Google Doesn’t Know When Super Bowl 2015 Starts (Yet!)

Why hasn't Google provided the correct answer for the Super Bowl start time when year-after-year, it has been an issue for them?

 
Super Bowl

Go ahead, ask Google [when does the super bowl start] or [what time does the super bowl start] and Google will give you the date and time for last year’s Super Bowl. Last year’s Super Bowl was on Sunday, February 2nd at 6:30 p.m. ET. This year, it is on Sunday, February 1st.
This query has been the target of publications for years, in order to rank well for it so they can gain clicks, impressions and ultimately ad revenue. It has been notorious for SEO efforts by publications and Google knows it, but year-after-year, the issue persists.
Danny Sullivan documented how publications are targeting the Super Bowl start time for ranking purposes for years.
It is interesting that the correct Google Answer is not provided in these queries but rather only a knowledge graph pulled Google Answer that shows content from a publisher with the wrong information.
When you search [when is the super bowl], Google is able to give the correct answer:

But not when you search for [when does the super bowl start] or [what time does the super bowl start] as illustrated above and here


 Read More>>>

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