SEO Hardcore

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div class=field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hiddendiv class=field-itemsdiv class=field-item evenpimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/penguin-panda.jpg height=331 width=520 //p
pI am already getting fake webmaster tool notification messages using the above subject line amp; the following message:/p
blockquotepHello dear managers of a href=http://www.seobook.com/http://www.seobook.com//a! My name is Olivia, and the issue I’m gonna to discuss is for sure not new, but really actual and complicated, otherwise your website and therefore business wouldn’t have lost their favourable positions. Yes, I want to talk about Google Panda and Penguin. These virtual beasts become more and more freakish. Don’t you think it’s time to pacify them? Google intends to clean its search results from poor content websites, low quality links and hype. Are you sure your website has nothing common with this stuff?br /
Our team has been constantly studying Google search algorithms. We have already faced the latest freaks of Google Panda 3.4 and will be happy to win back your top positions.br /
We will heal your website from:/p
ulli poor on page optimization;
/lili same content submission;
/lili low quality links to your website;
/lili absence of website moderation;
/lili black hat SEO applied earlier./li/ulpWe will make Google be proud of you with:/p
ulli high quality SEO strategy;
/lili backlinks from relevant resources;
/lili quality SMO;
/lililinks diversity;
/lili unique content for every submission directory;
/lili constatnt situation analysis and reporting./li/ulpContact us and you will get a reliable website healer, strategy planner and safe guard of your top positions./p
pLooking forward to your answer!/p/blockquote
pAnd Gmail is letting this stuff slide through the spam filters. Along with garbage like this:/p
blockquotepOur Web Site [the url] is definitely related to yours and by placing a link from your site to a Web page of ours, you may not only bring further value to your visitors but you may improve your search engine rankings potential as well. By NOT being what Google and other search engines refer to as a dead-end site or a site that does not link to other industry related and content sites, your rankings have a good chance of increasing for important keyword searches. We can explain this in further detail following a response from you./p/blockquote
pCreate FUD amp; some huckster will sell into your messaging with inbound spamming./p
pIf you ever wonder where the reputation problem of the SEO industry comes from, wonder no more./p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/google-vs-seo.jpg //p
pOne company in particular does a great job of riding these trends on through to their logical conclusion, then riding them a bit longer. And that company is Google./p
pOn a positive note, it great to see Demand Media had solid growth amp; a stellar quarter. They will plow that capital into a href=http://www.thedomains.com/2012/05/08/demand-media-reports-beats-expectations-sends-stock-soaring-spends-18m-on-new-gtlds/registering about 100 new domain strongextensions/strong/a. strikeNothing to worry about there. It’s not like/strike they were known to a href=http://www.seobook.com/demand-medias-ehow-com-using-interesting-expired-domain-redirect-seo-strategyredirect expired customer domain names for their link juice/a./p
pGood job Googlers!/p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/panda-google-engineer.jpg //p
/div/div/divdiv class=field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-4 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-abovediv class=field-labelCategories:nbsp;/divdiv class=field-itemsdiv class=field-item evena href=http://www.seobook.com/archives/cat_google.shtmlgoogle/a/div/div/div

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div class=field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hiddendiv class=field-itemsdiv class=field-item evenh2Negative SEO vs Sabotage/h2
pJust about any independent SEO worth their weight who publishes a number of websites has at least once hit a snag amp; been filtered or penalized. A person can say not me but how do they operate optimally in both the short term and long term if they never operate near limits or thresholds? But now that Google has begun actively penalizing sites for unnatural link profiles amp; tightening these thresholds, competitors have been giving one another shoves. Some of the most widely highlighted examples of emcrappy SEO/em were not attempts at SEO, but emintentional competitive sabotage/em./p

h2Why Many SEO Thought Leaders Remain Ignorant About SEO/h2
pRecently there have been numerous claims that negative SEO doesn’t work made by people who emshould/em know better./p

pMany of them don’t know any better though, due to a combination of being naive, trusting public relations messaging as being the truth, and a general lack of recent experience on smaller sites./p
pIf someone only… img src=http://www.seobook.com/images/stuporman-seo.png onmouseover=this.src=’http://www.seobook.com/images/stuporman-seo2.png’; onmouseout=this.src=’http://www.seobook.com/images/stuporman-seo.png’; width=320 height=450 border=0 align=right //p
ullidoes consulting for large corporate clients
/li
liworks in house at a big company/li
lipublishes a site about SEO and doesn’t build amp; market sites in competitive areas/li/ulp… it is easy to bleat on about how negative SEO isn’t generally possible except for weak sites. Sites that (allegedly) deserve to be hit amp; must (obviously) lack quality to be so weak./p

h2The Risk of Labeling Spam/h2
pAs highlighted above, some of the most frequently amp; widely cited spam examples were not examples of spam, but examples of competitive sabotage. Thus anyone who recommends highlighting spam can potentially hose businesses that did nothing wrong./p

h2Why Many SEO Consultants Pretend Success amp; Cheer Brand/h2
pMost sites focused on search typically write a syndication of Google fluff public relations and/or are doing cloaked sales pieces claiming that the death of spammers is great because they and their clients keep becoming more successful. Its all fake it until you make it / fake it until you too are driven out of the ecosystem amp; pretend things are always getting better even when signs point the other direction. This is done for a variety of reasons:/p
ullinot wanting to lose access to Google
/lilisignaling you have experience working with big brands
/liliwanting to signal that you are a safe play in the marketplace/li/ulpNobody ever got fired for choosing IBM./p

h2Marketers Sell Whatever Google Promotes/h2
pIt is far easier to get paid to do nothing than it is to get paid to fight against the waves of the ocean./p

pSo long as Google keeps feeding macro-parasites trying to kill off smaller amp; independent players you can expect a lot of consultants to push themselves as being a good fit for the big brands that Google is explicitly designing their emalgorithms/em around promoting. However this trend won’t last forever. Many of those bigger sites are becoming ad networks amp; at some point Google will see that competitive threat for what it is. They will then decide the user would like a bit more diversity in the results amp; to see more smaller sites rank. /p

h2Most Businesses Must be Small/h2
p Much like wealth, a href=http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/publications/papers/Benoit.pdfbusiness distributions follow power laws/a amp; most businesses are small in scale. Sure build brand is a nice cure all, but building a strong brand requires scale. Not all businesses have the margins required to build brands. And businesses take time to grow./p

h2Quality vs Scale/h2
pScale amp; quality are not the same thing. Some businesses are intentionally kept small because their owners feel scale requires compromising on quality. Remember a href=http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/2012/03/olive_garden_review_marilyn_hegarty.phpthe Olive Garden review that went viral/a, or a href=http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/why-can-t-obama-bring-wall-street-to-justice.htmlwhat the biggest banks did to the global economy a few years ago/a?/p

h2Most Big Companies Start Off Small/h2
pSince going public in 1987, Fastenal has been the fastest growing public company. The company was started by a guy who was sorting bolts and nuts in his basement. Now that they are worth $13 billion they are virtually untouchable, but if 30 years ago online was a big sales channel amp; someone negative SEOed him his business could have been toast./p

pBig businesses come from small businesses, as does most innovation. However, if the underlying market is absurdly unstable that retards investment in growth and innovation in companies like a href=http://www.fastenal.com/web/en/99/our-historyFastenal/a: /p
blockquoteThe Fastenal story began in November 1967 when company founder Bob Kierlin opened the very first Fastenal store in his hometown of Winona, MN. The front counter was a salvaged door, about a dozen people attended the grand opening weekend, and the first month’s sales totaled $157./blockquote

pOne of the biggest failures of modern societies is a href=http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-s-socialism-for-the-richthe self-serving myth/a of emtoo big to fail/em./p

pstrongIf SEOs believe that size of a business is the primary legitimate proxy for quality, they should either hire thousands of employees or go get a job at Wal-Mart./strong/p/div/div/divdiv class=field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-4 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-abovediv class=field-labelCategories:nbsp;/divdiv class=field-itemsdiv class=field-item evena href=http://www.seobook.com/archives/cat_marketing.shtmlmarketing/a/div/div/div

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div class=field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hiddendiv class=field-itemsdiv class=field-item evenpBefore I get any emdrops of jupiter/em hate on the following…I was typing in training.seobook.com amp; somehow accidentally hit enter after typing train amp; when the URL completion didn’t work I got the following SERP./p
pIf you click the feature video link it does a YouTube video overlay. The other links lead into the relevant iTunes webpage./p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/larger-media-ads.jpg //p
pSuch media extensions have a href=http://www.reelseo.com/adwords-expands-media-ads/been in place for movies for quite a while now/a, but this is the first time I have seen them on music-related search results. In time one could expect similar ad expansions to hit other media areas like books, games, and maybe even other vertical search features. Google could possibly roll it out globally on brand searches as well at some point, allowing companies to offer intro videos (or even reviews of new product lines) directly in the search results./p
/div/div/divdiv class=field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-4 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-abovediv class=field-labelCategories:nbsp;/divdiv class=field-itemsdiv class=field-item evena href=http://www.seobook.com/archives/cat_pay_per_click_search_engines.shtmlpay per click search engines/a/div/div/div

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div class=field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hiddendiv class=field-itemsdiv class=field-item evenh3Huge Update/h3
pGoogle recently launched their strikewebspam/strike Penguin update. While they claim it only impacted a href=http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.htmlabout 3.1% of search queries/a, the 3.1% it impacted were largely in the commercial transactional keywords worth a lot of money category. /p
pBased on the number of complaints online about it (a href=http://www.change.org/petitions/google-please-kill-your-penguin-update-lthere is even a petition!/a) this is likely every bit as large as Panda or the Florida update. A friend also mentioned that shortly after the update WickedFire amp; TrafficPlanet both had sluggish servers, yet another indication of the impact of the update. img src=http://www.seobook.com/images/cards/the-penguin.jpg height=447 width=320 align=right //p
h3Spam vs OOP/h3
pOriginally leading up to the update, the update was sold as a href=http://searchengineland.com/too-much-seo-google’s-working-on-an-“over-optimization”-penalty-for-that-115627being about over-optimization/a. However when it was launched it was given no pet name, but rather given the name of the webspam update. Thus anyone who complained about the update was by definition a spammer. /p
pA day after declaring that the name didn’t have any name Google changed positions and called the update the Penguin update./p
pWhy the quick turn around on the naming?/p
pIf you smoke a bunch of webmasters amp; then label them all as spammers, of course they are going to express outrage and a href=http://searchengineland.com/did-googles-search-results-get-better-or-worse-119469look for the edge cases that make you look bad/a amp; promote those. One of the first ones out of the gate on that front was a literally blank blogspot blog that was ranking #1 for emmake money online/em./p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/make-money-online.gif //p
pAs I joked with a href=http://www.bluehatseo.com/Eli/a, emif it is blank then they couldn’t have done anything wrong, right?/em /p
pAnother site that got nailed by the update was Viagra.com. It has since been fixed, but it is pretty hard for Google to state that the sites that got hit are spam, blend the search ads into the results so much that a href=http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-resultsusers can’t tell them apart/a amp; force Pfizer to buy their own brand to rank. If that condition didn’t get fixed quickly I am pretty certain it would lead to lawsuits./p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/viagra-serps.jpg //p
pGoogle also a href=http://searchengineland.com/penguin-update-peck-your-site-by-mistake-googles-got-a-form-for-that-119698put out a form to collect feedback about the update/a. They only ever do that if they know they went to far and need to refine it. Or, put another way, if this was the Penguin update then this is GoogleBot:/p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/cards/bat-mite.jpg //p
h3So Worried About Manipulation That They Manipulate Themselves/h3
pWhen I was a kid I used to collect baseball cards. As the price of pictures from sites like iStockphoto have gone up I recently bought a few cards on eBay (in part for nostalgia amp; in part to have pictures for some of our blog posts). Yesterday I searched for baseball card holders for mini-cards amp; in the first page of search results was:/p
ullia big ecommerce site where the review on that product stated that the retail described the quantity as being 10x what you actually get (the same site had other better pages)
/lilia user-driven aggregator site with a thin affiliate post made years ago amp; attributed to a site that no longer exists
/lilia Facebook note that was auto-generated from a feed
/lilian old blogspot splog
/lilia broader tag page for a social site
/lilia Yahoo! Shopping page that was completely empty/li/ulpimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/yahoo-shopping1.gif /br /
That blank Yahoo! Shopping page is also what showed up in Google’s cache too. So I am not claiming that they were spamming Google in any way, rather that Google just has bad algorithms when they rank literally blank pages simply because they are on an authoritative domain name./p
pThe SERPs lacked expert blogs, forum discussions, amp; niche retailers. In short, too much emphasis on domain authority yet again./p
pPart of the idea of the web was that it could connect supply and demand directly, but an excessive focus on domain authority leads users to have to go through another set of arbitragers. Efforts to squeeze out micro-parasites has led to the creation of macro-parasites (and micro-parasites that ride on the macro-parasite platforms)./p
h3SEO-based Business Models/h3
pNow more than ever SEO requires a href=http://directmatchmedia.com/googles-trust-us-penalty.phpthreading the needle/a: being sufficiently aggressive to see results, but a href=http://www.seobook.com/patiencenot so aggressive that you get clipped for it/a (a href=http://www.seobook.com/negative-seo-outingand hopefully building enough protection that makes it harder for others to clip you/a). That requires a tighter integration of the end to end process (tying efforts into analytics amp; analytics back into efforts) amp; a willing to view SEO through a broader marketing lens amp; throwing up a number of hail marry passes that likely won’t on their own back out but will give you a lower risk profile when combined with your other stuff./p
pAnd your business model is probably far more important than your SEO skill level is. Imagine running a consulting company for a lot of small business customers for a few hundred Dollars a month each, based on stable rankings amp; then dealing with a tumultuous update that hits a number of them at the same time. And then they see an older (abandoned even) competing site of lower quality with fewer links ranking and they think you are selling them a bag of smoke. These sorts of updates harm the ability to do SEO consulting for anyone who isn’t consulting the big brands. Yes many people made it through this update unscathed, but how many of these sorts of updates can one manage to slide through before eventually getting clipped?/p
h3The Unknowable Future/h3
pAs search evolves, invariably anyone who is doing well in the ecosystem will at some point face setbacks. Those may happen due to an algorithm update or an interface change where Google inserts itself in your market. If you never get hit, it means you were only operating at a fraction of your potential. If you consistently get hit, you might be aiming too low. a href=http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1Many trends can be predicted/a, but the future is unknowable, so set up a safety cushion when things are going well./p
pThis year Google has moved faster than any year in their history (massive link warnings, massive link penalties, tighter integration of Panda amp; now Penguin) amp; the rate of change is only accelerating. Go back about 125 years and a emcandle wick adjuster/em was cutting edge technology marketed as brand spanking new:/p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/wickadjuster.jpg //p
pBlekko has a decently competitive search service which they manage to run a href=http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/25/the-anatomy-of-search-technology-blekkos-nosql-database.htmlfor only a few million a year/a. As computers get cheaper amp; Google collects more data think of all the different data points they will be able to layer into their relevancy algorithms. In some markets a href=http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/23/current-status-of-the-browser-wars/Chrome has more marketshare than Internet Explorer does/a amp; Android is another deep data source. And they can know what user data to trust most by tracking things like if they have a credit card or phone verified on file amp; how often they use various services like Gmail or YouTube. Google+ is just icing on the cake./p
pAt the same time, they need to improve. As the search algorithms get better, a href=http://allthingsd.com/20120216/twitter-robots-instant-stories-no-humans-required/so do the business models/a that a href=http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/all/1exploit them/a:/p
blockquotepI asked Kristian Hammond what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. “More than 90 percent.”/p/blockquote
pThere will be many more casualties in that war./p
/div/div/divdiv class=field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-4 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-abovediv class=field-labelCategories:nbsp;/divdiv class=field-itemsdiv class=field-item evena href=http://www.seobook.com/archives/cat_google.shtmlgoogle/a/div/div/div

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div class=field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hiddendiv class=field-itemsdiv class=field-item evenh3Excessive Complexity amp; Unintended Consequences/h3
pSergey Brin a href=http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/15/web-freedom-threat-google-brinrecently said/a:/p
blockquotepYou have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive. The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation./p/blockquote
pHe was talking about Facebook, but those words are far more applicable to Google./p
h2A Social Experiment/h2
pIn the movie Dark Knight a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4GAQtGtd_0the Joker ran a social experiment/a where he offered 2 boats full of people the opportunity to save their own lives by blowing up the other boat. The boat full of criminals threw the button overboard amp; the other boat also decided not to push the button./p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/frog-apple.jpg //p
pOf course taking someone’s life is more extreme than taking their livelihood, but if you do the latter it might create stress and/or other issues which in effect lead to the former. Some people who see their income disappear might have a heart attack, others might have marriages that soon falls apart, leading into a spiral of depression and substance abuse amp; eventually suicide. Others still might have employees that get laid off amp; end up heading down some of the same scary paths – through no fault of their own./p
h3Negative SEO Goes Mainstream/h3
pAnyone who outs or link bombs smaller businesses (small enough that Google punishing them destroys their livelihood rather than a href=http://www.benzinga.com/news/earnings/12/03/2392793/overstock-com-blames-surprise-loss-on-google-penaltyjust giving them a bad quarter/a) is a _______. Anyone who advocates outing or link bombing such businesses is an even larger _______. /p
pWhy?/p
pWith all of Google’s warning messages about abnormal links they have built the negative SEO industry in a big way. In some instances those who are not good enough to compete try to harm competitors. I received emails amp; support tickets like the following one for years and years…/p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/we-cant-rank.png //p
p…but the rate of demand increase for such services has been sharp this year. Every additional warning message from Google creates additional incremental demand./p
pAnd this is where outing a competitor makes one a total and complete _______ of a human being. /p
h3A Recent (amp; Very Public) Example of Negative SEO/h3
pDan Thies mentioned that it was about time that Google started hitting some of the splog link networks./p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/about-time.png //p
pAnyone who knows the tiniest bit about the social sciences could predict what came next./p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/firey-death.png //p
pIn response to his Tweet, someone signed his site up for some splog links amp; Scrapebox action. Now a href=https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/chit-chat/Azfly-iRtLshe is getting warnings about his unnatural link profile/a. Dan didn’t intentionally violate Google’s guidelines, but he a href=http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/became a convenient target/a:/p
blockquotep15th March – Dan Thies posts smug tweets to Matt Cutts and pisses off the entire internet.br /
18th March – seofaststart.com – blog posts started – anchor text seo seo service and seo bookbr /
22th March – seofaststart.com – 1 million scrapebox blast started – 100% anchor text Dan Thiesbr /
26th March – Dan Thies posts in Twitter that he has received an unnatural links message.
/p/blockquote
pSince then Dan has installed a new template amp; his rankings tanked. Is it the template or the spam links? Probably the spam links, given how many other sites have got hit for using too much focused anchor text./p
ulliWill the site stay tanked? If so, now Google’s approach to anchor text amp; link spikes allows independent websites to get torched in a few weeks for a few Dollars.
/liliOr will the site come back stronger than ever with the help of the spam links? If it does, then how long is it before people start accidentally spam blasting their own websites amp; posting a public case study about burning a competitor on a forum, then citing that forum thread in their reconsideration request?
/liliIf the site quickly comes back, will that be due to a manual intervention by a search engineer, or from an algorithm more advanced than some people are giving it credit for being?/li/ulpWhen asking such questions one quickly arrives at another set of questions. Is it the web that is broken? Or is it Google’s editorial approach that is broken? strongIf the observer breaks the system they observe, then the observer is the problem./strong/p
h3The Bigger Issue/h3
pThe bigger issue isn’t the short term trends for SEO related keywords or Dan’s site (he will be fine amp; a href=http://www.seobook.com/word-of-mouth-marketingrankings are not that important for sites about SEO/a), but the big issue is that if this can happen to a decade old website then this can happen to literally anybody./p
pPiss off a …/p
ullicompetitor
/liliSEO
/liliweb designer
/liliweb developer
/lilibusiness partner
/liliblogger
/liliblog reader
/liliformer customer
/lilifreetard
/liliex-friend
/lilibitter family member
/liliinsert any classification or category you like
/lilietc. /li/ulp… and risk getting torched./p
pWhen you out someone for shady links, you can’t be certain they were responsible for it. They could have had a falling out with a consultant or business partner or another competitor who wanted to hose them. Or their SEO or webmaster could have been non-transparent with them./p
pThen you out them amp; they might be toast./p
h3White Hat, Black Hat amp; ________ Hat SEO/h3
pAny of the ________ who promote competitor smoking or competitor outing as somehow being ethical or white hat never bother to explain what happens to YOU when someone else does that to you. /p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/everything-asbestos3.jpg //p
pstrongSketchy marketers can make just about anything look good at first glance. No matter how shiny the package in concept, it is hard to appreciate the pain until you are the one undergoing it./strong/p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/pants-on-fire.jpg //p
pBuilding things up is typically far more profitable than tearing things down amp; if SEOs go after each other then the only winner is Google. Literally every other participant in the ecosystem has higher risk, higher costs amp; is taxed by the additional uncertainty. Sure some of the conscripts might get a bit of revenues and some of the white hat hacks might gain incremental short term exposure, but as the marrow is scraped out of the bone, they too will fall hard./p
pimg src=http://www.seobook.com/images/beware-fraud.jpg //p
pGoogle is betting that the SEO industry is full of ________. If our trade is to worth being in, I hope Google is wrong! If not, you will soon see most of the quality professionals in our trade go underground, while only the hacks who misinform people amp; are an unofficial extension of Google’s public relations team remain publicly visible. /p
pThat might be Google’s goal. /p
pWill they be successful at it? /p
pThat depends entirely on how intelligent members of the SEO industry are./p
/div/div/divdiv class=field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-4 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-abovediv class=field-labelCategories:nbsp;/divdiv class=field-itemsdiv class=field-item evena href=http://www.seobook.com/archives/cat_google.shtmlgoogle/a/div/div/div