Advanced Link Building Training - Tim Grice - Brighton SEO

Advanced Link Building Workshop

Advanced Link Building
Workshop
by Tim Grice


Contents
• SEO Landscape
• Penguin & Unnatural Links
• Removals and Reconsideration

• Crafting the Perfect Profile
• Brand Anchor Text & Variation
• Negative Profiles
• Editorial Discretion

• Link Building Strategies
• Advanced outreach
• Budget SEO
• Integrated Strategies


SEO Turbulence


Google’s On-going Clean Up
• Toolbar PageRank Launched
2000

• Florida Update - The Death of Keyword Stuffing
2003 • Cassandra – Death to Hidden Links and co-owned domains

• Austin Update – Hidden Text and Meta Tag Stuffing
2004

• Jagger Update – Devaluation of low quality links (reciprocal links & link farms)
2005 • Nofollow to control outbound links

• Vince – The Brand Update
2009 • Rel Canonical – Duplicate Clean Up

• Bing & Google Confirm Social Signals are used in Algorithm
2010 • May Day Update – Sites with low quality thin content seemed to affected

• PANDA!!
2011

• Unnatural Links / Penguin / Blog Networks
2012


SEO Changed
• Low quality content is actively being penalised
• Unnatural links are been devalued and causing penalties
• Anchor text manipulation is being actively penalised

Google are getting better at detecting quality and removing spam


Unnatural Links

1

2


Slight Difference

• Penalty Applied 2 – 3 weeks after the message
Message 1
• Links have to be removed and Reconsideration submitted

• Less serious, may see slight drops in key terms
Message 2 • Should endeavour to remove links and monitor rankings
• Consider reconsideration if rankings/traffic don’t recover


Penguin
• The Over Optimisation Algorithm
• 3% of queries affected
• Aggressive anchor text
• Unnatural link patterns/signals
• Aggressive on page tactics
• Keyword stuffing
• Hidden text
• Manipulative redirects
• Cloaking
• Manipulative Content


Combating Unnatural Links
• Look for low quality follow links in your profile that pass weight
and/or anchor text

• Unnatural Links 1 – All links to be removed and reconsideration to
be sent via Webmaster Tools

• Unnatural Links 2 – Identify spam links, remove, apply
reconsideration only if you have seen negative impact


Link Audit


Link Classification


Is this link manipulative?


Unnatural Links Hit

• Rankings relying on low quality links will all drop
• Most severe penalties hit with the first batch of messages
• Removing links + Reconsideration is the only way to recover


Additional Considerations
• Build high value editorial links with brand anchor text

• Use branded email address if possible

• Use pseudonym email address for particularly spammy sites,
as a social/PR backlash is possible


Penguin – Link Spam Algorithm
• Targets web spam tactics that have been against Google’s guidelines for years

• Looks for unusual linking patterns

• Links in spun or scraped content

• Aggressive anchor text strategies

• Devalues rankings for keywords that have been aggressively targeted


Penguin Hit

• Specific keywords lose rankings
• Anchor text manipulation is a significant factor
• Remove links and wait for algorithm to update


Removal Process

Contact
Whois Hosting
Form


Reconsideration Advice
• Only submit when you have removed 80% of identified links or more

• Attach Google doc that displays the effort made to clean links up

• Attach challenging email exchanges

• Show evidence of contact e.g. email addresses


Link Penalty Recovery


Reconsideration Recovery


301 Redirect?
• Will help recover in the short term

• If links aren’t removed penalty will pass 3 – 4 months later

• May consider 404ing redirecting problem pages away from the domain

• Always last resort


Is SEO Dead?


Comment
Spam

Article Content
Marketing Spinning

SEO
Text
Strategy Fake
Link Ads Reviews

Blog Forum
Networks Profiles If this is your strategy, YES!


The Right Strategy


Locations Optimisation
Video Optimisation Outreach

Schema Content Strategy

Blogging
SEO
Authorship
Strategy

Image Optimisation Technical SEO

Social Google +
Editorial Link Building


Your Strategy Has To Change


Link Building Isn’t Enough…


Link Profile Architecture
• Building links with editorial value

• Perform outreach to facilitate content/social strategy

• Remove poor links

• Balance anchor text with keyword variation

• Actively build brand links


Negative SEO?


Advice From Google
• They see a slightly different version of webmaster tools

• Links can take months to be re-crawled and ‘neutralised’

• All requests are manually reviewed

• Google work on a sample of links (you have to remove from this sample)


Google Webmaster Hangouts
https://sites.google.com/site/we
bmasterhelpforum/en/office-
hours


Summary
• Remove duplicate/low quality content

• Remove spam links from your profile

• Send in reconsideration if you have been negatively affected

• Adopt an editorial link building strategy with a high editorial threshold

• Clean up anchor text manipulation and balance profile with brand signals

• Adopt a more holistic strategy incorporating all search products


Crafting the Perfect Link profile


Brand Anchor Text


Variation


Domain Authority Spread


Paid Links?


Natural Profile


Link strategy
The only way to future-proof your link strategy is to make links a natural
by-product of your normal marketing strategy

As you might expect, this isn’t easy. How many links does your marketing
strategy deliver every month at the moment?

If you sit back and wait for links to arrive you won’t get enough to rank


Relationships
Most agency/client link building relationships work like this

Corporate
Comms Linkbuilding

Media
Public Affairs
Relations

Agency
Client PR Onsite Keyword
SEO
Strategy Optimisation Research
Strategy
Internal
Blog Outreach
Comms

Other SEO
Crisis Comms Social Media projects

Client does some great stuff over here Agency does some other stuff over there


It should work something like this
Marketing

Media Blog Social Crisis Internal Public
Corporate Comms SEO
Relations Outreach Media Comms Comms Affairs

SEO
Links Links Links Keywords Links Links Links
Training

Technical Reputation
SEO Management

Every marketing task can be performed by the client or the agency – usually an agile agency will
fill the gaps where the client doesn’t have in-house resource


Tweeting


Editorial Discretion

“I would draw a little bit of daylight between paid directories that
exercise no editorial discretion and those like Yahoo, who have a
high editorial threshold.”
Matt Cutts - Feb 2012

We need to be focusing on building links that very few people can get,
links that clearly show editorial discretion has taken place.


Doesn’t matter if links are paid, it
matters how they appear.


Sharing Links
• Good content always gets more shares than links

• Social shares should be built at the same time as creating links

• Links acquired should be shared

• If a piece of content doesn’t warrant a share, it doesn’t warrant a link


It’s not about quantity…. anymore


Link Quantity


Link Building Strategies


Outreach Process

Create Begin
Niche
Mutual Outreach Evaluate
Profiling
Benefit Campaign


Breaking Down A Niche
Example – Film and movie bloggers:

• Film news
• Independent film
• Horror
• Action
• Film reviews
• Film making

A single generic approach simply wont cut it across all of these niches, we
need to tailor our outreach to each mini-niche


Shared & Linked To Articles
Why do we need this?

The most important element of the profile

If we know what articles are shared and linked to – we can tailor our content
and outreach hooks around this

There are a few ways this can be done for different budget sizes…


Open Site Explorer


Turn into a table and sort by social metrics or link metrics – note down both


SearchMetrics

These are the top, socially visible posts

Great indication as to the content that the niche wants


BuzzStream
Store contacts and send emails through BuzzStream


Possible Template
Hi [name],

I hope all is well.

I am currently representing [client x] who are [client info].

We’re actually a big fan of your blog over here, and we saw that [post x] was a real winner for you guys last year
with almost [x shares] on [SM platform], we liked it so much that we wrote a follow up piece to see if it could get
close to [post x] in terms of popularity on [SM platform], which would give you guys some great exposure in
that platform.

Let me know if you’d be interested and we can send it over for you to have a read through.

Many thanks,
Joe Griffiths


A More Generic Approach
Hi [First Name],

I hope this email finds you well. I came across [primary website] and I really love it!

I manage [client x’s] blogger relations where we’re looking to connect with key figures in the [niche] blogosphere, a
community that is very important to us.
So much so that we’re hosting an exclusive, invite only Google+ Hangout [event description] We would love to extend
this invite to you and ask for you to cover this on [site name] where we will supply you with a video of the Hangout
and ask you to share your experiences with your readers.
Please RSVP back to me and I can get you booked in 
Hope to hear from you soon!

Best regards,
[Name]
Blogger relations


Press Release Strategies


Press Release Results


Are they worth it?
• Use as part of a brand anchor text strategy

• Push out in line with other outreach activity

• Only publish content that is genuinely news worthy

• There are better ways to spend cash (consider cision point)


Link Wheel… With a Twist
Guest
post

Guest Guest
Post post
Authority
Publisher Target Website

Guest Guest
Post Post


Advertorials


Newspapers Penalised?
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/why-did-my-pagerank-go-down/#comments

• If below a PR the site is likely penalised

• Check quality of sponsored/advertorial type content

• Ensure your content is high quality and links naturally


Infogr.am
Create an Infographic in minutes

You could offer to visualise posts that were popular
in the niche by using the social data from the profiles

If that doesn’t work data is also freely available at
lots of governmental websites

Keep links natural/brand


Leveraging Links
• Interviews

• Images

• Translation

• Commentary

• Giveaways

• Flattery

• Sharing


Examples
• Bingo – Mummy Blogger Awards

• Trailers from Cinema Chain

• Expert opinion – financial spread betting

• Data trends from diamond retailer

• Backup Plugin for Wordpress


Low Budget SEO
• Have to move away from focussing on quantity

• Bi monthly outreach / link building (you don’t have to do it all in 1 month)

• Make use of white hat networks


Guest Post Friendly?
Have guest posts been posted previously? If no, it indicates they aren’t open to receiving
articles and a different approach (or awesome outreach) is needed


Write for us

+


Authority Publisher

Brainstorm Publish on Seed out to Monitor
Get Buy In
Ideas Authority Site Bloggers Alerts/Links


Our news strategy

Base content around current
events

Comment and react to industry
changes and news

Incorporate your social
activities into you content


Recommended Tools


Summary
• Bad links have to be removed
• A natural link profile should be crafted
• Link building should be a bi-product of wider marketing activity
• Links acquired should have editorial value
• Find something to leverage
• Low budget white hat SEO is possible
• Invest in the right tools


Questions?
Tim.grice@branded3.com
http://www.branded3.com/
http://www.seowizz.net/
@tim_grice

Advanced Link Building Training - Tim Grice - Brighton SEO

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