2. What are we talking about?
Gaming sites have a difficult task in the post-Penguin world
Having a website does not make you link-worthy
• How it has worked in the past
• How it works now
• What can we do to make you white-hat link-worthy?
5. As a long-term strategy
this categorically does not
work anymore
6. “It is not the strongest species that
survive, nor the most intelligent,
but the ones most responsive
to change.”
Charles Darwin
Image: http://www.chelseafcblog.com/2012/02/19/fa-cup-chelsea-1-1-birmingham-city-oh-my-god-charlie-darwin-where-are-you-now/
11. What is Penguin?
“Using advanced computer science
techniques such as machine learning and
neural networking, algorithms can create
new and improved algorithms based on
observed results”
Christopher Steiner
– Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our
World
17. Return to Search
You have a few seconds to get
the visitor’s attention and
persuade them that they have
arrived at a site that will answer
their query.
If they go back to Google, that’s
a negative signal.
18. Usability & Conversion
If a website is difficult to use…
If the homepage fails to clearly state what
a company offers and/what users can do
on the site…
If users get lost on a website…
If a website's information is hard to read
or doesn't answer users’ key questions…
…they leave
19. Mobile affects user experience
+100%
MOBILE
CONVERSION
+51%
MOBILE
CONVERSION
+20%
CLICK
THROUGH RATE
+28%
TRAFFIC
INCREASE
20. • How and where do we acquire new visitors and traffic to the site?
• Search engine organic traffic (SEO)
Acquisition
• Search engine paid traffic (PPC)
• Referrals
• Affiliates
• Once someone is on the site how to we keep them there?
Engagement
• Content
• Social
• Ensure that users engaged with the site can quickly and easily buy/signup/convert
Conversion
• Design
• Development
• Content
• CRO
• Once someone has bought how to we encourage them to buy again and promote our site?
Retention
• Search
• Retargeting
• Email
Google Listens To This To Feed Back To Acquisition
• Search – to keep people coming back
Return to Search
• Social
26. This gives you two key benefits
#1
Gets you in the conversation
#2
Makes you worth talking about
27. Old style links
Pros
Cons
Easy
Google will devalue
10,000+ per day
Google will spot patterns
Cheap
Google will penalise
You may have to outsource (£)
Boring?
28. Creative linking
Pros
Cons
Google CAN’T devalue
Expensive?
Referral Traffic
Time consuming
Social Shares
1 link per day/week/month
Brand Exposure
Need buy in from others (PR, Social,
All done in house
creative, developers)
Exciting
38. Pornhub – “Big Data”
•
•
•
•
Use easy to get data (Google Analytics)
Present in an easy to use format
Create eye catching sound bites
Rinse and repeat
http://www.pornhub.com/insights/pornhub-united-kingdom/
42. PR & blogger outreach
By storing all players’ results in the quiz we
were able to release the data to journalists
and bloggers to generate links and
coverage.
Working with fan sites we were able to
increase plays for individual teams, by
placing a link on one Crystal Palace fan site
we were able to drive over 1,200 plays of
the game overnight.
45. Reddit
Using Reddit’s self serve advertising across general football and team related
sub-reddits we were able to reach over 20.5K people within just one week with
$15.
54. Your new link strategy
• Create something to talk about
• Promote to a relevant audience
• Be a part of the conversation
55. Don’t worry about…
•
Link anchor text
•
•
Keyword relevance
•
•
If the content is related to commercial terms, the anchor text will
generate itself
Create content to be proud of sharing, not content to boost rankings
Target pages (unless it’s based on link worthiness)
•
Build your brand, build overall site authority, rankings will come