With all the Google search algorithm changes, you will never know when and where your site will appear in Google search results. According to Google’s John Mueller, the search engine giant rolls out hundreds of  SEO updates to its core algorithm throughout the year. Nothing scares more than the unknown. There were times, when we knew menace by sight, we were given a heads up on upcoming updates and knew how to recover from them.  Now Google search is frequently invaded by a legion of search algorithm updates, which are like Agents Smith who keep order within the google search ecosystem by eliminating SEO threats assumed to be coming from humans’ never-ending desire to implement black and grey-hat SEO techniques. Welcome to the Google Search Matrix.

What is a Google Search Algorithm Update?

Google Search Algorithm Updates were originally designed as filters to track down and penalize websites that flooded search results with low-quality content, link spam or which provided a poor user experience. In the course of time, Google changed its manner of rolling out updates. As a result, some of the algorithm changes run on a real-time basis, others are integrated into the core ranking algorithm with no new refreshes or public announcements on new updates from Google.

There have been so many SEO updates released by Google over the last 15 years, that you might get confused.

Google Updates Related to Content Quality

November 2003 – FLORIDA UPDATE. This was one of the most noticeable updates that blew out the high rankings of some e-commerce sites and product affiliates like a hurricane. A lot of websites lost their top rankings and even disappeared from the search index itself. Among the key aspects of the Florida Update were:

• The SEO filter that was activated when the over-usage of search terms was detected;
• Stemming which helped to rank websites based on the matches to the search terms.

February 2004 – BRANDY UPDATE. This update resulted in the expansion of Google’s index, a better understanding of context and the consideration by Google of synonyms of search query terms. There was also an increased focus on anchor text relevance and close attention was paid to your backlink neighborhood quality.

May 2010 – MAYDAY UPDATE. As a precursor to the Panda Update, it penalized a lot of websites for using thin content.

February 2011 – The beginning of the PANDA era. The first Panda Update targeted websites which provided low-quality, thin and duplicate content.  Panda 1.0 affected 12% of search queries. Since then, this most important content-quality update has survived 26 tweaks and refreshes. The last update made Panda part of the core algorithm.

August 2013 – HUMMINGBIRD UPDATE. This content-quality SEO update was aimed at understanding a searcher’s intent and the context behind a search query. Made up of more than 200 SEO factors which affect both ranking and search, Hummingbird was designed to deal with conversational and voice search queries which are mostly popular on mobile devices. The update gave a boost to semantic SEO.

Google Updates related to Links Quality

April 2003 – CASSANDRA UPDATE. Cassandra was the first Google Update designed specifically to filter link spam. These were hard times for websites that built links from co-owned domains and hid links and text in order to manipulate their rankings.

May 2003 – DOMINIC UPDATE. The SEO community assumes that this update changed the way Google counted backlinks.

January 2005 – NOFOLLOW UPDATE. These were rainy days for black-hat SEOs and webmasters as Google, in cooperation with Microsoft and Yahoo, introduced the nofollow attribute in order to fight with spam.

September-October 2005 – JAGGER UPDATES. Google rolled out this series of SEO updates to filter low-quality link schemes, like paid links, reciprocal links and links built with the help of link farms. The updates took 3 months to fully roll out.

April 2012 – The beginning of the PENGUIN era. Google initiated a war against link spam. Penguin 1.0 affected 3,1% of English search results. Over-optimization, spam links, keyword stuffing were the reason of website penalization.  The next major and heavyweight Penguin Update (2.0) was rolled out in May 2013 and affected 2,3% of search queries.  On September 2016, Google released a real-time Penguin 4.0 Update and backed it into Google’s core algorithm. The key difference of Penguin 4.0 was that it re-indexed and re-evaluated sites in real time, demoting only specific pages with spam signals on them.

Google Updates related to Mobile Search Quality

April 2015 – MOBILE-FRIENDLY UPDATE. Dubbed as Mobilegeddon, the Mobile-Friendly update was not actually a penalty update, it just favored those websites with better rankings which were SEO friendly on mobile screens. Optimizing for mobile search has become paramount, and tools like the Website Audit can ensure your site is fully optimized for mobile users, addressing the critical factors that influence mobile search ranking.

Google Updates related to Local Search Quality

October 2005 – LOCAL MAPS UPDATE. Google merged two products, Local Business Center and Google Maps into one complex in order to simplify local search.

July 2014 – PIGEON UPDATE. Local SEO changed dramatically after the launch of the Google Pigeon Update. By improving its location and distance ranking parameters, this had a huge impact on both Google Maps and traditional Google search results. Among the most significant changes was the boost in rankings for local directories, such as Yelp, TripAdvisor etc.

September 2016 – GOOGLE POSSUM UPDATE. The new local search update was designed to filter out local search spam, specifically in Google Maps results.

Google Updates related to User Search Experience Quality

July 2003 – FRITZ UPDATE. With this update Google switched from monthly index refreshes to indexing on a daily basis. This was a great improvement for the average search experience because Google started to return fresher and more accurate results.

June 2005 – PERSONALIZED SEARCH UPDATE. Another enhancement in the user search experience was the usage of search history in order to deliver more personalized and relevant search results.

August 2008 – GOOGLE SUGGEST UPDATE.  Search experiences were improved to a greater extent thanks to Google Suggest which eventually evolved into Google Instant.

August 2010 – CAFFEINE UPDATE. This update was designed for users and with the help of users. Everyone was invited to test the new infrastructure of the Google search indexing system and leave feedback. The key features of the Caffeine update were an expanded index, faster crawling and real-time indexation. As a result, Caffeine provided 50% fresher results than with earlier updates.

December 2010 – NEGATIVE REVIEWS UPDATE. The update changed the way websites are ranked based on experience provided by users.

June 2011 – GOOGLE SCHEMA UPDATE. This SEO update aimed at enriching search results by allowing users to optimize their structured data with the help of Schema.org.

November 2011 – FRESHNESS UPDATE. The update affected 35% of search queries, mainly time-specific ones. As a results, Google started to pay closer attention to fresh, regularly updated content which portends a good user experience. Searchers were now regularly filtering searches for content from the past hour, day, week, month or year.

May 2012 – KNOWLEDGE GRAPH UPDATE. This update provided direct answers to common questions about specific people and places and other subjects. In the long run, the Knowledge Graph feature evolved into Knowledge Graph panels.

In the next post we will give some advice on how to recover from Google Penalties, provided to us by a former Google Employee.

The post The Google Search Algorithm Matrix: The Timeline of Crucial SEO Updates appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Intro:  “Since the dawn of time, a secret war has been waged between two species (Penguins and Possums)… Throughout the millennia, they have kept their battle confined to the shadows; however, one brazen act has escalated this conflict to a fever pitch. As the (SEO) world careens toward Armageddon, every human on the planet will soon be forced to CHOOSE A SIDE!” (The excerpt and the image are taken from PvP, by Sebastian Kadlecik).

It seems that Google decided to create another beast and start a fight between the newly born Google Possum and our old spam fighter buddy, Penguin 4.0, for the title of the most significant Google Update of the year. If you noticed a spike or a fluctuation in your ranking history trend starting at the beginning of September, you may have been involved in the war of two species for supremacy in the Google search universe.

Tip: Keep a wary eye of the overall trend of your website rankings after every Google update rollout by using the WebCEO Rank Tracking Tool (Historical Data Report)

(click on the image to see a full version) 

Let’s take a closer look at the nature, surroundings and key targets of these beasts and the ways to keep safe from their major updates:

File on Google Possum:

Nature: Google’s Possum update is a new local search algorithm update designed to filter out local search spam from the Google Map search results.

Date of Attack: September 1, 2016

Surrounding:  3-pack and Google Maps search results.

Key Target: Even though possums are not aggressive animals and are afraid of human beings, they can do considerable damage to your website results when provoked. It means that business listings found in the 3-pack and Local Finder search results which are irrelevant to a searcher’s query (or which provide duplicate listings), can be filtered out from the local search results.

If your website meets the following criteria, your listings may get into the filter funnel:

• Businesses that share a physical address with a similar business. Even if your business is not associated with the other business at all, Google may still consider this as a duplicate listing and filter it out.
• Businesses located close to a city center are now losing some ground to listings for businesses located further out, which were once penalized for not being in the center.
• Businesses which have not optimized for localized terms and long tails may no longer rank high in 3-pack and Google Maps search, depending on the wording of the search and physical location of the searcher.

How to avoid the bite of the Google Possum:

The Google Possum iteration doesn’t penalize websites, it just filters them out. If you checked your local rankings and found that, having been earlier ranked in the top of 3-pack and Google Maps, you are now found in a place where even a dead body can’t be found…then the sneaky Possum has found your business.

From all the tactics mentioned above (changing locations can be challenging), the only thing you can do is to revise your keyword list, do some detailed localized keyword research and optimize your website pages for local terms. Follow this step-by-step Quick Start Guide to run a quick SEO audit for your site and see how it stacks up. If even this doesn’t work, place a clove of garlic or scatter mothballs around any area where you have noticed possum activity:)

Tip: Use the WebCEO Local Rank Tracker to monitor how your local target audience sees your business listings in the Google 3-pack or Maps search.

WebCEO provides the ability to add country specific search engines, its mobile versions and a specific locality (state, city, Zip Code) in order to get location-based search results emulated to your clients’ location.

Scan your ranking report in order to see if your business shows up in the 3-pack or Google Maps for any of your target keywords.

File on Google Penguin 4.0

Nature: Google Penguin 4.0 is the 4^th attempt to purge Google search of spam and low quality links. This is the last iteration of its kind, as there will be no more Penguin updates in the future.  Google has integrated the web spam algorithm into its core search engine algorithm in order to make it run on a real-time basis.

Date of Attack: September 23, 2016

Surrounding:  Google universal SERPs.

Key Target: Web pages with the smell of spam signals. Even though Google has rolled out a new iteration, the technology remains the same. Google still punishes websites which do not follow Google’s search quality guidelines.

Be sure that you don’t abuse them yourself:

• Your website pages should be FREE of links coming from low-quality and irrelevant third-party websites.
• You website link profile should NOT be built with the help of paid and reciprocal link building (excessive sponsored articles and guest posts, link exchanges etc.).
• You anchor texts should NOT be over-optimized with generic terms, non-descriptive and irrelevant keywords.
• Your website pages should NOT contain unnatural, low-quality or hidden links embedded in widgets
• Your website should be FREE of sneaky redirects (showing different or irrelevant content to users with the help of doorway pages, cloaking).

How to avoid the bite of the Google Penguin:

The 4^th iteration of Penguin is not as scary as its predecessors. Actually, the SEO community forums report minimal fluctuations have occurred in rankings that were caused by Penguin 4.0. The reason is in its granular effect where it devalues single web pages which spread spam. Thanks to its real-time effect, you won’t have to wait for your devalued page rankings to be improved after you disavow toxic links. Google refreshes the algorithm often:

“With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we’re not going to comment on future refreshes.” – Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Must Read: How to Keep Your Backlink Profile Ever Clean>>

 Summary

For now we can see that the Google Possum update will have a greater impact on local search rankings compared to the effect of Google Penguin 4.0.

Have you been hit by one of the updates? If you withstand the attack, feel free to share your insights in the comment section.

The post Google Penguin 4.0 vs. Google Possum appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Giving birth to a new-born website is much like giving birth to a child. You want to shout out its name to everyone and spread it all over the web. And this is the moment you should be really careful in order to avoid common mistakes. The main mistakes are trying to speed up website indexation and trying to gain too many inbound links too quickly and in an unnatural way.

Over the past decade, one of the more popular SEO practices has been to promote sites by means of the submission of websites to all kinds of search engines and directories. This is now considered a passé SEO tactic. Google, after all, understands and is scornful of site owners who manipulate and control their incoming links in an “unnatural” manner. In some cases, submitting a website to directories is considered bad manners and a spammy black hat tactic. Commonly, Google doesn’t even pass any credit to links from many online business directories and search engines. In 2014, Yahoo went ahead and withdrew its own directory submission service.

Here are some grave website submission mistakes you should avoid in order to keep your website from being de-indexed and penalized.

1. Getting a website submitted to low-quality junk directories.
2. Generating links on free irrelevant web directories.
3. A massive automated submission of a website to dozens of directories or search engines in a short span of time.
4. Choosing a wrong or irrelevant category in a web directory.
5. Business listings on multiple directories submitted with the exact anchor text and description.
6. Business descriptions of a website on directories which are keyword stuffed and which look too promotional.
7. Massive link submission to the home page of a website.
8. Submitting a website to reciprocal exchange directories.
9. Submitting invalid or broken links.
10. Massive article syndication via article directories.

In the next few months we will enter a new, real-time Penguin era and we will have to review our strategies of link building and content marketing. The first thing you should reconsider is the submission of all kinds of content, which was traditionally considered to be a fast and easy SEO tactic to boost your rankings and build backlinks to your site.

If you want to stay ok with the search quality guidelines when submitting your website, URL or website pages to third-party listing or directory sites, you should be aware there are light and dark sides of content submission. Your SEO future depends on what side you will choose.

Common sense recommendations on how to stay on the light side of website submission.

The best mantra for a profound website submission strategy would be: Go an inch wide and a mile deep.

Sitemap submission. If you want to speed up the discovery and indexation of all your website pages by search engines, start with generating and submitting an XML sitemap to the major search engines like Google, and Bing.

Human editors review and verification.  Penguin-proof link building should imply a mostly human-edited process.  Consider only those submission sites which approve submissions via editor verification and approval.

High PR and niche specific submission platforms. To boost your brand awareness and referral traffic with no harm to your site rankings, select high PR and niche specific business directories. Choose a relevant category, subcategory. There are several trustworthy and SEO-friendly business directories like DMOZ, OPN, etc that are still used by people and bring referral traffic.

Content submission with the Nofollow attribute. By assigning a rel=”nofollow” attribute to links you submit on third-party submission sites, you give a deliberate signal to search engines not to give a weight to these links. This will keep your site in line with search quality guidelines.

Local submission. In the post-Pigeon era of local search, promotion of your local business via business listing and review sites like Yelp have become crucial. Local directories can now be a pushy helping hand for driving referral traffic to your site, increasing social proof for your product and bolstering your local SEO campaigns on a local level. If you are present on the most authoritative local business directories like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google My Business, then you are more likely to hit the first page of local search results.

ECommerce submission. If you have an eCommerce website then being presented on the leading high converting shopping search engines will bring you the most bang for the buck. There are no penalties for spamming shopping search engines. Each of the platforms has its own strict requirements for product listings submission.

Social Bookmarking. This is a good alternative to search engine or directory submission. The biggest SEO advantage of social bookmarking is that the links are generated by users. Content that is massively distributed and shared with rich anchor titles, tags and description has much more quality, trust and relevance in the eyes of search engines. Social bookmarking sites are great from the perspective of content promotion and traffic generation. Usually social bookmarking platforms generate NoFollow links and don’t pass any value and strength to your link profile.

What makes the WebCEO Content Submission Tool different from other free or paid website submission tools?

If you are looking for an automatic tool for all-in-one website submission within 24 hours, then you will be disappointed. Our Content Submission tool is not a magic wand. We at WebCEO care about your ranking consistency and our reputation. That’s why we do not provide tricky SEO tools for an all-at-once search engine and directory submission. What we offer is a laborious manual selection of high PR and trustworthy third-party platforms that are split into categories in accordance to your business needs and the region your business is based in. We provide categorized lists for:

• Automatic submission to a very small number of respected directories that still carry link juice. Here we automatically submit your business details once you click on the Submit button in the Automatic Submission tab.
• Standard submission. Here you will find all the major SEs and directories for sitemap submission and manual submission.
• Local submission. Here we provide the best local listing directories in your local area. (Check the region you need in the submission tool settings).
• eCommerce submission. Here we provide a list of the major paid shopping directories and search engines.
• Content submission. Here you will find all the needed platforms for promoting your content, including bookmarking sites, press release submission sites, download sites, affiliate program directories, infographic submission and photo and video sharing sites.
• Blog submission. Here you will find only high PR and SEO-friendly blog directories and RSS feed directories.
• PPC outlets. Here you will find the list of advertising platforms and search engines for your paid search and social media marketing campaigns.

We allow you to control the process of submission and we recommend that you don’t do everything at once. If you forget or fail to submit your site or content to some of the sites, you can resubmit it again any time. There are checkboxes to show what you have and have not completed.

*The Content Submission tool is available for all plans.

Remember: We highly recommend that you not submit your content to all sites and directories at once!

A Final Word on Staying Informed

Are you still doing content submission without quality content marketing, editorial link building and user experience optimization? Then you’d better monitor your rankings on a regular basis, because you might get into big trouble with the upcoming Penguin 4.0 Update.

The post How to Stay On the Light Side of Website Submission appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Happy Thanksgiving to all those of you, who regularly check your sites for issues and fix them, keep your backlinks clear and make customers happy. Here’s a brief recap of the latest SEO news so you can get back to enjoying family and friends.

Google News

Google has confirmed that a new Penguin Update 4.0 will go live by the end of 2015. Luckily for many webmasters, the upcoming Penguin iteration will process all the toxic and low quality links that you removed or disavowed after the previous manual penalty in real time. Do you remember that it took months to recover from the manual penalties of the previous Penguin updates? If you have not yet refined your backlink profile for the upcoming Google Penguin 4.0, be sure to check your backlinks for domains with a low trust level (0.30 or less) and then submit them in a list to the Google Disavow tool through the Web CEO Backlink Quality Check tool.

Google has officially rolled out its new artificial intelligence algorithm RankBrain. This new machine learning system is a part of the Google Hummingbird algorithm and the third-most important Google search ranking signal that helps to interpret and better understand non-exact match search queries on the level of an individual searcher’s intent. This means that SEO will see a shift from keywords to topic-focused research and optimization.

Google+ just recently updated its design with a heavy focus on Communities of Interests and Collections. Now the “ugly duckling” of the social media family strongly resembles the look of Reddit and Pinterest. With the new design, folks were saying that Google+ local pages forgot to add business reviews. Google then officially confirmed that business reviews will no longer be displayed on Google+ local pages, but they will be accessible when doing search via Google and Maps.

Yet again G+ received an enthusiastic response from users, but maybe not the response they had hoped for:

Yandex News

Yandex has announced that they will start to crawl CSS and JavaScript content, as a test in order to better understand the content of web pages. They are now informing webmasters to stop blocking their CSS and JavaScript files and resources. In the long-run, this will have an effect on Yandex SEO processes. Yandex has also added a mobile-friendly label to mobile search results and released a supporting mobile-friendly diagnostic tool for webmasters to make sure that their website pages meet mobile-friendly guidelines.

Facebook news

Facebook has launched lead ads! Yes, you heard right. Facebook now allows running lead generation ads (similar to Twitter lead generation cards) which collect user information, share lead capture content and make prospects complete a desired action without actual leaving Facebook. Read more on how to configure your lead generation program on Facebook here>> .

Now local businesses can promote their products on Facebook more effectively with local awareness ads. The new ad feature allows you to target groups of people who reside near your business neighborhoods.  Furthermore, Facebook has made the Instagram Ad Platform available to all marketers around the world. Now you can launch a photo or video ad campaign right from your Facebook ad management tools (Power Editor).

Twitter news

Twitter has suffered a lot of quality changes recently. One of the major updates of Twitter has been the change of the shape of its Favorite icon from a star to a heart.

Not long after this redesign trick, Twitter officially shut down its API that provides data on Tweet Share Count. Now you can’t see the number of your article Twitter shares in your social share button bar. This may have a negative impact on user interaction and social proof factors for your content.

For those of you who want to drive more user engagement and learn what followers think on this or that topic, you can now create polls on Twitter!

The post Happy SEO-News-Giving Day! appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

It took years for Google to adopt and successfully release their critters on the world, which now devotedly guard the Internet search domain from mortal transgressors. Each of the Google animals live in their own area of the search world with specific rules and laws. You can tame these beasts if you are fully dedicated to what you do, like Martin Lacey with his head in a lion’s mouth, or Roy Horn being grabbed by the throat by a tiger or Daenerys Targaryen, the mother of dragons, who raised three dragons (don’t tell us you don’t watch that series).

Google critters are really friendly to those who feed them with consistent food like fresh content, yummy backlinks, rich context and original local SEO cuisine. But when they meet intruders on their territory, who give no value to them and their search visitors, they run amok and can even harm you.  For you to stay safe from feral Google critters here is a short interactive SEO infographic. Keep your eyes open on Halloween and use WebCEO to tame the Google beasts.

The post How to Save Yourself from Sneaky Google Critters appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

It’s almost time for summer vacation and all you can think about are beaches, forested mountains and cold beverages. But, there are also events in the digital marketing world you’ll want to think about before you hit the trails.

What’s new in SEO?

The search space has been lately engaged in an algorithm updates race.

On April 21^st Google hit mobile search with its long-awaited Google Mobile-Friendly Update and only the mice in the fields remain ignorant of this. The experts from Google pointed that Mobilegeddon was even larger than Penguin or Panda: twice as many non-mobile friendly pages lost rankings as gained after the Mobile Update. If you have not yet re-optimized your website to meet mobile-friendly guidelines, you’d better start working on it before you take that vacation.

Here is the Mobile SEO Issues Checklist you will need to check your website pages for in order to gain the rankings you may perhaps have lost.

But this is not the last Mobile-Friendly Update that comes into our view. At SMX Sydney, Garry Illyes (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) just said there will be another update called Platypus targeting slow page speed and app download interstitials usage.

In addition to all this noise, Google has confirmed that it is now official that there are more searches on mobile devices than on desktops. This is big news and, if you want to dominate on Google search, then the mobile search optimization strategy is in your first-rate priority do-to list.

On May 6^th, Google officially updated and renamed the Search Queries report in its Webmaster Tools. Now, in your Webmaster Tools you can find the Search Analytics report with more accurate data and filtering options.

On May 20^th, Google Webmaster Tools was rebranded into Google Search Console. Google decided to changes the ten year old name of the tool to a more universal because it is used not only by webmasters but also by website owners, SEO experts, marketing specialists, designers, web developers etc.

At the beginning of June, the Google team announced that they are going to rework the Penguin algorithm so it runs on a permanent basis. It means that there won’t be any manual actions toward ranking changes because the data will be refreshed all the time. It doesn’t mean that you can sit and relax because individual websites can still be hit with huge overnight ranking losses. This means that you will need to work towards keeping your backlink profile ever clean and genuine in the eyes of Google.

According to Search Engine Land this year the SEO Success Factors Table has been immensely updated and complemented by new factors such as the availability of Vertical Search, HTTPS and Direct Answers results. Greater Importance has been given to Mobile Friendliness and Structured Data etc.

To keeping up with Google’s updates, use WebCEO’s Online SEO tools to analyze your site’s SEO performance and ensure it aligns with the latest Google algorithms.

What is new in Social Media?

The fact that Social and Search have become more integrated and interlinked is proven by the latest Google-Twitter deal. Starting on May 19, users in the U.S. can see relevant and real-time tweets in their search results when using the Google search app on iOS and Android. That’s good news for search giants, users and for brands. Twitter promises to bring its real-time content on to desktop search and to more countries in the upcoming months.

Unlike with Twitter, Facebook doesn’t want to rely on Google and decided to build its own in-app search engine. Thanks to its own search team, Facebook is already testing the ability to crawl and return content for users without the need for them to search Google directly.

At the beginning of June, Instagram announced plans to launch InstaAds which will be labeled as “Sponsored.”

We wish you a happy summer and be sure to enjoy nature and the little extras summer brings.

The post The SEO News Recap You Should Read Before Your Vacation appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

With the weather getting hotter, Google has been aggressively rolling out update after update. It all started with the Google Mobile-Friendly Update aka Mobilegeddon. Then it was followed by speculations about an additional Google Mobile Search Update dubbed Platypus and confirmations of a ‘Phantom 2 Update’. The latter update was first noticed on 4/29 and has been confirmed to be non Panda, Penguin or Mobile Algo related. It targets the overall quality of search results. Google Phantom 2 seems pretty similar to the Google Phantom Algo tweak rolled out in early May, 2013. Not long after that, Google Penguin 2.0 hit websites. This means we should be on the lookout for the next big Penguin update. Some experts have already confirmed information about an upcoming link spam penalizing algo update.

With another big Google Penguin Update always round the corner, you will need to keep your backlink profile audit constantly updated and free of suspicious link referrals.

What kind of backlinks are in Google’s favor

Most webmasters and SEOs understand link building too literally and treat it as the main way to increase popularity on the web and gain higher rankings. No, no, and again, no! Google sees your backlinks as one measure of your content credibility; something that is built upon relationships with people. Earning quality backlinks has become more holistic and complex, where you should build your link profile manually, with a long-term, solid perspective. In the Post-Penguin era Google validates and ranks only those links built in a natural, non-manipulative way:

Editorial links are a common definition for the kind of backlinks that are generated in an organic, non-promotional way via trustworthy industry-level sources.   Make use of some of the 7 ways to earn editorial links provided by Amanda DiSilvestro in order to pass editorial link juice to your backling profile.

Implied Links are one of the safest type of backlinks. These are not actual hyperlinks, but just mentions of your website name or domain name that can dramatically benefit your backlink profile bringing a strong connection between your brand mentions and your site.

Social citations. Though providing nofollow value, social links are in play and are used to measure the power of your content. Let’s see how it works. You write a post on your blog, or elsewhere. What’s next? You send a newsletter email to your clients about your new article. With this kind of scenario you would hardly get new traffic to your site and earn more than a few inbound links. You will need to be out there diligently promoting your content asset (unique and informative or interactive) on every single social network where your potential clients might be. You may still get only 9 or 10 likes or shares per post, but then Google will compare your performance to that of others in your industry. The most effective social networks and platforms for building social citations are:

• Twitter, which is one of the top social networks for generating social citations and where individual posts are now a full-fledged part of Google search results pages. Read about the prospects of the latest Google-Twitter deal for your business and learn what factors can help you get posts into Google organic search listings and generate a great portion of new traffic.
• LinkedIn is a perfect place for sharing links to your content (LinkedIn Profile/Group) and blog posts (Pulse) in order to build your personal brand authority and earn new professional connections.
• Facebook is the right place to keep your audience informed about your company updates, special offers, industry news etc. The more your audience likes and shares your Facebook posts, the more you will expand your target audience (their friends) and your social link profile (Google records how many likes and shares posts receive that have your domain linked in them).
• Reddit/StumpleUpon/Growthhackers are powerful social media platforms for direct links distribution and branded content promotion. Remember that you should be proactive and unbiased. Share not only your content but provide useful assets with links to other sources.
• Quora is one of the most authoritative Q/A expert communities where you can generate links (nofollow) back to your site right in your in-depth answers and grow your personal brand authority and awareness. Quora is also a great source for attracting well-targeted traffic with a high conversion rate.

In a link building perspective, quora links may be officially nofollow, but they are highly indexable and rankable by Google.

Guest Posting is still in play if done in an unbiased non-promotional way. Guest posting can do more harm than good if you write for your own SEO benefits. Your approach to guest blogging should be like your approach to charity, which is altruistic as well as good for building trust and authority to your persona and creating a strong expert connections network where you’ll see pay-offs down the road. If you link to yourself from a guest post platform, consider linking indirectly to your Twitter platform. Read more about ways to find guest blogging opportunities at Social Media Examiner.

Co-citation is another effective way to build relative links back to your site. Co-citations are the link references cited on a single source page to two or more external related sources. This means that you will want to be listed with your competitors as much as possible. The most powerful method of building co-citations is competitive backlink analysis. The WebCEO Competitor Backlink Spy tool will help you to prospect high quality, niche-related links from third-party websites in order to get listed alongside your competitors.

Google will be totally happy with your website if you balance your link building strategy with all the above mentioned backlink types. Google doesn’t like it when SEOs go overboard with one single link building technique in their strategy. Ann Smarty learned a lesson after big G disgraced her “baby,” MyBlogGuest, last year for abusing of link schemes.  (Read about link spam/toxic links over two sections below)

The backlink data you should take under control in order to claim higher rankings.

Here are some of the essential backlink factors that determine link quality.

# of Linking Pages – Links coming from multiple unique and relevant pages = a strong ranking factor

# of Linking Domains – The number of linking domains is critical for determining the quality of your link profile. However, the quality of linking domains is more important than their quantity. Having 1000 links on 100 high quality domains is better than having 100000 low quality backlinks on 100 domains with low authority.

Linking Domain Age – Google likes backlinks hosted on older domains more than those hosted on new ones.

Linking Domain Authority – Google pays more attention to the links from domains with a high Home PR (they are now replacing PageRank with rankings measured by others in the industry).

Linking Domains Diversity – Google may consider an excessive number of links coming from the same exact domain a negative manipulative link building technique.

Page Rank of Linking Page/Page Rank of Home Page – The age of the linking page and linking domain determines its authority. The higher the better.

Backlink Anchor Text – Google sees the anchor text as a descriptor of a linked page. A backlink with a relevant anchor text is a powerful ranking factor.

Linking Domain Relevancy/Page-Level Relevancy – Since the Hummingbird Update, Google seeks to understand the theme of each site and gives more value to the linking domains and pages that are relevant to your site’s theme.

Location of Backlink – Contextual links are more valuable than those placed in navigation sections of linking sites. Sitewide links are considered low quality and manipulative.

% of Nofollow Links – Having lots of links with rel=”nofollow” status should be part of a natural link profile. Google doesn’t count them but pay attention to their presence in your link profile.

# of Social Shares of Linking Page – Linking page is considered valuable if it has a number of social shares and likes, i.e. brings natural traffic.

Ahrefs Domain Rank/Ahrefs URL Rank – These measure how valuable a referring domain/page is by verifying the number and quality of the backlinks they get themselves.

Backlinks Velocity – It provides the trend of your backlink profile for natural/unnatural growth.

What is a toxic link and how do you identify one?

When some of the above mentioned factors are devalued or abused, Google may consider one of your backlinks as manipulative spam link. If your link profile includes more than 20% toxic links you are in the Google Penguin Penalty risk group. For your backlink profile safety, WebCEO has created a specific toxicity formula that helps to identify toxic links.

According to this formula and Google Penguin-proof link building guidelines, backlinks are considered toxic in the these common cases:

• linking page has an excessive number of outgoing links
• backlinks are part of a network of links coming from the same linking domain/subnet/IP
• high % of sitewide links (placed in footers, headers, sidebars)
• high % of links with the same exact (generic) anchor text
• high % of directory backlinks, backlinks from comment sections and guest post backlinks (if they are not nofollow).

If you have thousands of backlinks and don’t know if there are toxic links among them, be sure to use our Backlink Quality Checker to find and detox harmful links.

The Algorithm of the Backlink SEO Audit:

For an effective Google Penguin-friendly linkbuilding strategy, WebCEO shares its best recommendations based on Google guidelines, our tried-and-tested techniques and customer experiences.

Once you have the needed SEO backlink data and a comprehensive backlink quality check tool at hand it’s time to get your all-in-one backlinks report which should provide solutions to problems related to:

1. Linking Domains Analysis.

A weighted analysis of the linking domains to your site is the first thing you should start with, in your Backlink Profile SEO Audit. A comprehensive report should provide information on how many links are coming from one single domain, how many juicy links it passes, what % of toxic links and nofollow links it provides. Such data as Home PR, Ahrefs Domain Rank will show the authority of a domain.

2. Linking Pages Analysis.

The analysis of a linking page should include insights about what anchor text it uses, what page of your site it targets, its quality (Google PR, Home PR, Ahrefs URL Rank) and status (dofollow, nofollow or suspected toxic) data.

3. Broken Link Check

Using WebCEO’s “Chosen Links Watch,” be sure to check the availability of your most important backlinks to search engines (you may have just redesigned your site and accidentally eliminated a page that had a great backlink to it). If your backlink profile has a lot of broken inbound links this may negatively affect your overall rankings.

4. Backlink Anchor Text Analysis.

Pay special attention to your backlink anchor texts, because they are the cover of your backlink profile. Check the diversity of your anchors, the number of exact-match anchors, how much link juice your link texts pass, how many source domains use this or that anchor text etc.

5. Linked Pages Analysis. The quality of backlinks is partially identified by those of your website pages that they are linking to. Be sure to check your most linked pages and determine if the backlinks to the pages are related and descriptive and diverse.

6. Toxic Links Analysis.

Once you check your backlink profile for shortcomings and have found the most harmful ones, you should add them to your get-rid-of list.

7. Competitor link profile analysis.

Competitve backlinks analysis is crucial for identifying weaknesses and strengths in your current link building strategy. You may consider sites linking to your competitors as your link prospects.  Evaluate your competitors’ backlinks in order to pick the most relevant and valuable with a high page ranking as determined by independent sources like Ahrefs and preferably from EDU. and ORG. domains.

If you don’t have a backlink checker tool on hand to conduct an audit of all of this complex backlink data, sigh up free for WebCEO to try our Backlink Quality Checker reporting tools and the Technical Audit tool.

Reminder: Be sure to audit your backlink profile on a regular basis, such as once per quarter, in order to keep your site safe and forget about having Penguin mania.

The post How to Keep Your Backlink Profile Ever Clean appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Happy Halloween our dear SEOs!

All Hallow’s Eve is destined to bring a lot of frightening fun. With all those jack-o’-lanterns, trick-or-treating and dressing up in freaky costumes, being an SEO you should keep your eyes open. This year SEO Halloween is accompanied by a real SEOmbie Apocalypse. Yes, you heard me right! If you run an online business, the SEOmbie Apocalipse may come to you as well. Horrible SEOmbie monsters like a shambling Panda, a crawling Penguin, a peaky Hummingbird and a spooky Pigeon are crawling in pursuit of your site rankings’ freshness and your traffic savor. Are you equipped enough to protect your site against SEO-mbie attacks? We have prepared the SEOmbie Survival Guide for you to stay BOO-tiful and keep your site safe.

Moreover, you can use WebCEO’s Website Audit tool to fend off these ghastly creatures by keeping your site’s SEO health in top condition.

The post How to Survive the SEO-mbie Apocalypse With the WebCEO Survival Guide appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

I love penguins and many of you do as well. They are cute, not aggressive and have a funny way of walking. But to those who do SEO, a penguin is a kind of monster pecking their sites and eating their rankings. No wonder most SEOs shudder at the thought of penguins. It’s been almost a year since the 2.1 edition of Penguin rolled out. Now, just in time for Halloween, the Google Penguin 3.0 Update is here.  It started its invasion on October 17^th and it is going to roll out across the globe over the next several weeks. People initially felt relief after John Mueller (the famous Google Webmaster Trends Analyst) said that the update had already been completely rolled out, but this was soon followed by an unexpected message from Pierre Far (another major Google Webmaster Trends Analyst) implying that the effects were yet to be seen in most cases.

The good news is that if you were hit by a previous Penguin update, you will probably see some positive shifts in your site rankings and traffic, *if* you responded to that previous update by cleaning up your link profile and assuming that you said good-bye forever to black hat linkbuilding tactics. If you did this, Google probably forgave and blessed you. However, folks are still confused at how smoothly the update is landing. Anticipation is high; the fear of a further heavy impact. SEOs want to know how things will be moving and in what direction.

To Update or Refresh? That Is the Question!

While the latest Penguin Update is rolling out, SEOs speculate on what Google has put into this. Is this a major update with new signals added to the algorithm or just a simple data refresh? How did it come about that two official spokespeople of Google failed to put out a unified message? Are there two Google “lobbies” or is it that we’re supposed to be a bit confused? It seems that the Google Penguin Update didn’t smoothly roll out entirely on October 17^th.  Why it was named Penguin 3.0 and not 2.1, considering the fact that it was officially named a refresh?

First, let’s follow Matt Cutts explanation of what an actual update is and what a refresh is.  Matt makes cute comparisons of an index update, algorithm update and data refresh with car parts.  However, the listener will still struggle with knowing what’s on Google’s mind.

What Are the Link Building Tactics Scorned by Penguin 3.0? The Key Takeaways.

Similar to the previous versions, Penguin 3.0 is trying to clean up the web from link spam on the one hand and, this time around, to also recover the positioning of good sites that were hit by Google Penguin 2.1 and then reacted positively.

Among the key takeaways of the Penguin 3.0 Update, the most noticeable at the moment are the following:

1. Google has now hit sites that use grey hat 301 redirects.
2. There has been a slight shift from site-wide to page-level impacts of the Google Penguin Update. While de-indexing home pages, Google Penguin 3.0 may allow internal pages to continue ranking on search results if they are free of spam links themselves.
3. There are now penalties for Affiliate sites and Private Blog Networks.
4. Google is now planning to run Penguin updates on a regular and frequent refresh basis with smaller impacts, similar to what they did with Panda Updates.
5. Link profiles similar to those of the sites penalized in the last updates are likely to be hit by the Google Penguin 3.0 Update. If you escaped with toxic links before, you may not be so lucky now.

Future Penguin Strategy Predicted by WebCEO.

The bad news is that it is too late to “hide” from Penguin 3.0. Penguin was at your home and if you had not already cleaned up your home from any backlink mess a month or so before the Penguin rollout, your home may not now be found on “1st page Google” street until the next Google Penguin comes by.

If you want to sleep well without spending restless nights with coffee, quivering as you create toxic link disavowal reports in GWT, you should follow the following simple strategy that will keep you away from problems with “Big Brother:”

Protect your site by conducting a detailed analysis of your current backlink profile using the WebCEO Backlink Quality Check tool and the step-by-step Backlink Clean-Up tutorial.

Filter external links to your site and refine those of high quality. Not all backlinks add value to your site, even if they pass link juice. Pay attention to the relevancy of a link, its provenance, their sourced domains and the pages they lead to, whether they have an exact-matching or a diversified and keyword rich anchor text.

Build your Penguin-proof link profile using some up-to-date link building techniques including implied links usage, trusted social citations and competitive backlinks analysis.

The post Google Penguin 3.0: The Key Takeaways And Penguin-Proof Predictions From WebCEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Google changes its algorithm almost every day. However, search results were affected greatly by some major updates this past year. When you know the dates of the most important updates, you can understand changes in your rankings and organic website traffic and ultimately improve search engine optimization. Let’s see how Google changed SEO in 2013:

Panda

The year started with the animal that frightened every search marketer. The Google Panda update was meant to stop sites with low quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results. Websites that used scraped content were penalized by Google and disappeared from the Google search results pages. Google says it only takes a few pages of poor quality or duplicate content to hold down traffic on an otherwise solid site, and recommends such pages be removed, blocked from being indexed by the search engine, or rewritten.

Now Panda is a part of the Google algorithm. This filter makes the web a better place: good search marketers produce more high quality content and steer clear of any duplicates.

Penguin

In May, Google continued the war against low quality and rolled out a big Penguin update. This was aimed at websites with poor backlink profiles. Since then, the term ‘toxic link’ has become a search marketer nightmare. WebCEO reacted to the Google Penguin update with a great new tool that helps to clean up one’s backlink profile.

Link building will now never be the same after the Google Penguin update. Now SEOs carefully investigate who links to them and they disavow really toxic links to secure rankings.

Link Schemes document update

This was not a Google algorithm update, but it was very important. After Google updated the Link Schemes section of its Webmaster Guidelines, it’s been against Google’s rules to:

• Use guest posts for pure link building.
• Post press releases with keyword anchor text.
• Add optimized anchor texts to your forum signatures.
• Embed links in widgets distributed on multiple sites.
• Add sitewide links on multiple websites.

‘Not provided’

Late in September, Google confirmed that it would be encrypting all search data, regardless of whether a user was signed in or not. This means that now you can’t know what keywords searchers used to enter your website.

You can still view search terms at the Google Webmaster Center, but only the top 2,000 terms per day and only going back for 90 days.

Hummingbird

The Google Hummingbird update was rolled out to improve user experiences. As the number of mobile searches grew and voice search has been used more and more, Google started to pay more attention to factors such as a site’s theme, long tail keywords and structured data.

The WebCEO developer team promises to add more tools for you in 2014 and they will enhance the existing ones. Our new Internal Links Optimization tool will be available to you in late January.

The post The Most Important Google Updates of the Year and How They Changed SEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.