MUST READ – Fixing Google’s Penguin Penalty

As I told you last week, the latest Google Penguin Update
has caused havoc across the web. Even sites who are supposedly
squeaky clean with it comes to link building have seen their
site’s rankings simply tank in Google.

Only good thing which I can see, this Update affects almost
any site which has actively practiced SEO or have gone out
of their way to optimize their site. Millions of sites lost
rankings, which means there is some broad algorithm change
here which should be easy to spot.

One of the best reasons for all the de-ranking was put
forth by a site called www.mircositemasters.com, which does
SERP site tracking as their online business. They collected
data from thousands of sites and one of their major findings
has to do with “money keywords” in regards to the number of
your inbound “anchor text” links.

Those sites which have over-optimized their link building by
having money paying keywords in OVER 60% of their inbound
links were penalized in some way by Penguin. Those sites which
had less than 50% of their inbound anchor text containing
money keywords DIDN’T get a penalty.

Money keywords, as the name suggests, are those keywords were
the traffic can lead to a sale or lead. Simply, keywords which
produce money. As I tell anyone who starts with online marketing,
paying keywords are those which have Ads surrounding them in
search results.

You can often tell how lucrative a paying keyword phrase is by
examining the number of paid ads surrounding it when you do a
search in Google or Bing. Another way is to check them with Google
External Keyword Tool or Adwords to see the competition and how much
they’re willing to pay for each click. Keep monitoring those keywords
over a few months, see which sites/companies are still there paying
the big bucks.

The main reason the outcry about Penguin has been so loud,
it’s mostly businesses and affiliate sites which were earning
money (before Penguin) by mainly targeting these lucrative keywords.
Now their whole livelihoods are at stake unless they can fix the
problem.


Main Google Penguin Solution:


You must diversify anchor text to include non-paying money
keywords. Instead of always placing in your targeted keywords,
you need to use “click here”, “go here” “here” “www.yoursite.com”
or we see a lot of sites now picking whole 4 or 5 non-related
word phrases for your anchor text.


While this seems like a simple solution…


It’s not if you have been practicing article marketing (especially
before a few years ago) you could have thousands of the SAME
inbound money keywords in the anchor text links in your resource
box at the end of each article. Articles which can now be on thousands
of sites around the web.

So it might take some time before you get your overall inbound
links to your site under that 50% threshold. Of course, in a
lot of cases, you might have control over those links and you
can easily go back to change or diversify them.

One reason I believe this is the key to overcoming the Penguin
penalty – I have around 15 sites. The latest sites which are
around 1 to 2 years old were not affected that much by Penguin.
These don’t have extensive links with the same anchor text because
since a few years back, I have been switching up my keyword anchor
texts in these links. On my most oldest site, which have 10 years
of link building with mostly “money keywords” was hit the hardest.

Keep in mind, there is always a shake-up when Google makes a major
algorithm change because the sites linking TO you may be affected
and this will flow down or lowered the PR juice of your links
from these sites. Sort of an after-shock effect from Penguin, your
link diversity might be fine but those links have lost some of their
former strength.

The more sites affected the more “wide-range” the fallout or
changes in Google’s search listings. I read somewhere that over
750,000 to 1,000,000 sites received warnings in Google’s Webmasters
Tools that their links were unnatural.

In addition, there are probably other issues involved here too,
especially dealing with links from related or relevant niches
in your field. You must have some of these links in order to
rank for your targeted keywords. No big news there, but if you
ONLY have links coming from non-relevant sites, you may have
received a down-grade.

Another extremely tricky issue is Exact Keyword Match Domains,
(EMDs) you have your money keywords directly in the domain name
and URL. Matt Cutts and everyone associated with Google, says
these exact domains don’t get special treatment when it comes
to ranking. I might be the exception, but my exact keyword
domain sites didn’t lose any rankings with Penguin, a few even rose.
Even here, it’s probably best to even diversify your inbound links
with non-related or neutral anchor text.

If you were affected by the Penguin update, I strongly suggest
you go here to read this post.

Penguin Analysis

Other Helpful Links:

Penguin Update and Negative SEO

Google Penguin Tips From SEOs

17 Ways You Can Survive The Penguin Update

Google Penguin, Panda, PageRank (Triple P) & Bing Redesign

Kind Regards,
+Titus Hoskins
Twitter
Pinterest
www.bizwaremagic.com

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Penguin

Has Google Search Become One Big Mess?


Just when the Hockey Playoffs are heating up, Google goes and
makes some drastic changes to its search rankings. Is there no
common decency left anymore!

And the fallout from these recent Google changes is just as
messy as some of the latest playoff games. If you don’t follow
ice hockey, you won’t get the reference, but believe me… it’s
pretty messy.

Like thousands, if not millions, of site owners I am scrambling
to adjust to the latest Google minefield. Since I have been
actively link building for over 10 years, these recent changes
within Google have really affected traffic on a few of my sites.

Thankfully, since last year I have been looking at other
ways to market online (other than SEO and high rankings
in Google) mainly through Press Releases, exact keyword
domains and changing my article marketing to just make sales
rather than to build links or for SEO purposes.

However…

This week Google rolled out one of its most disruptive
Algorithm changes yet, one that far out ranks anything
the whole series of Panda Updates ever did to Google’s
listings. If your site wasn’t affected by these changes,
consider yourself very lucky for now, countless webmasters
have seen their sites disappear from Google’s SERPS altogether.

According to Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland, this
new update is called Penguin. It was released or rolled out on
April 24 of this week.

The online forums are full of horror stories from some
very legitimate high quality sites which have seen the
negative effects of the recent changes. Google and Matt Cutts
are saying these recent changes have to do with “webspam”
and those sites which “overly” uses SEO to rank high
in Google.

More or less, if you have been actively building backlinks
to your site, this latest update could do serious damage
to your site. Google wants to reward sites which don’t
“aggressively” build links or practice SEO.

In a perfect world, maybe those changes would work, but
in an online environment where many businesses, big and small,
have been optimizing and aggressively building backlinks
for 10 years or more, these changes spell disaster.

See a list of Penquin/Webspam Winners and Losers here.

Again, as with any changes Google make to determine what
sites get ranked, there is widespread uproar that Google is
simply now showing more junk results in their listings. The
outcry this time seems to be louder than in recent memory.

So has Google’s organic search results become one big mess?
Has consistency gone the way of the DoDo bird? Has Google
really thrown the baby out with the bath water this time?

No matter how loud the outcry from affected webmasters
and site owners, the real question here has to be answered by
Google’s mainstream users. Will they accept these new
listings/rankings OR will they look for another search
engine to use?


Don’t hold your breath.


Actually, Google’s share of the lucrative search market is going
up and not down. It now controls over 65% in the U.S. and much
more in other countries. Unless those numbers go down, Google
can pretty much do what it wants, regardless of the outcry
from battle weary webmasters.

The only losers in all this are the search users and unless
they change their habits, SEO may indeed be on the way out,
along with relevant results. Especially if Google is now
penalizing webmasters who are practicing SEO and off-site link
building, the future looks very bleak for SEO.

……………………………
Penguin Update

I have spent this week reading countless
articles/posts/material on this Penguin Update
and comparing the findings with my own 15 or so
sites. Here’s the best material I found so far
- discussing diversifying anchor text in your
money keywords and examining your back linking
structure. It also gives 5 Steps to overcome/fix Penguin:

Penguin Analysis

……………………………

To find out more about these new changes go directly to
Google’s Webmaster Central Blog and make sure you read
some of the comments left by webmasters…

Google’s Blog

Although some experts are saying you shouldn’t do
this – but you feel your site has been unfairly
affected by the Penguin/Webspam/Titanic Update you
can submit your argument/feedback to Google here.

Related Posts:

Fixing Google’s Penguin Penalty

Will Google’s Titanic/Webspam/Penguin Update Sink Millions Of Sites?

Kind Regards,
+Titus Hoskins

www.bizwaremagic.com

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The Photogenic Award Goes To…

While Bing may be losing the search war, at least when
it comes to “user numbers”, but can the case be made
that Bing will win the Little Miss Photogenic Award.
However, don’t rule Google out when it comes to putting
on a good show for its visitors, this little Backrub
has made some great interactive moves in the past few
years.

Today’s Zipper image almost takes the crown, but the
Pac-Man game from a little while back, was much more
entertaining.

Is it just me, or has Google increased the number of
these “special logos” they feature on their home search
page? Could this be in response to all the images Bing
is displaying? Isn’t all this foolishness, sounding more
and more, like a little Miss Search contest? My dimples
are prettier than your dimples…

But this is serious business, serious as in Billions,
since gaining the patronage of loyal users who log in
each day does mean money in the bank for these search
engine companies. Hands down, Google seems to be winning
that war with over 65% share of the lucrative US search
market, but according to Alexa, Google has been knocked
down from its #1 spot numerous times last year by Facebook.

The premier social network repeated this feat several
times again this year and this must be worrisome for
Google, which has long been the top site on the web.
But even more troublesome is the fact that Facebook
users spend much more time on site or logged in, than
do Google users. And did someone say Facebook was
developing its own search engine?

All serious stuff indeed, but back to our Little Miss
contest, who wins the photogenic award for having the
best visual presentations? Bing? Google?

Months back, I became so annoyed at Google’s whole
Privacy Changes and its cruel Panda Updates, I switched
my computer’s homepage from Google to Bing. I have been
enjoying immensely the eye-popping images which are
presented each day. It does make me want to keep using
Bing and seeing all those pictures.

However, I do find the Google’s presentations much more
creative or should we say inventive. Besides, in a former
life I have been an artist and art teacher, so liking
things which show the creative and whimsical side of life
is probably in my DNA. While the search engine marketer
in me is totally ticked at Google’s recent move to favor
corporate brands in organic search, I must admit some of
Google’s doodles are true masterpieces. They keep me
grinning all day long.

So who wins?

Who cares… just keep those images coming so I can get
my daily fix.

+Titus Hoskins

www.bizwaremagic.com

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If you’re like me and monitor hundreds of major keywords
in Google on a daily basis, the last few weeks have been
really interesting. There seems to be a major shake-up
in the works, mainly regarding your site’s backlinks
and if they appear natural or not.

Google, now more than ever, seems to be judging the
quality of your links. Do your links follow set norms
or standards? Do they appear natural? Or do they
apppear manipulated?

Thousands of webmasters have received Google’s answer
in the form of a message in Google’s Webmasters Tools
- your site’s links appear unnatural.

These webmasters have been told by Google to:

“Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural
links pointing to your site that could be intended to
manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could
include buying links to pass PageRank or participating
in link schemes.”

In fact, Google has de-indexed some popular blog networks,
where webmasters could purchase links to manipulate their
rankings in Google. This is a warning sign for other
webmasters to make sure your links are natural and not
manipulated in any way.

Of course, if you have been practicing SEO, you probably
have been actively building backlinks to your site and
web pages for ages. Now is a good time to re-examine your
link building practices and see if they do meet Google’s
standards.

This is very serious business, if your links appear unnatural,
you will lose your rankings in Google. It can even make your
site unprofitable.

Anyway, as usual, I have written another article on this
topic and I list 5 or 6 things you can do to make your
links appear more natural in the eyes of Google.

You can find the article here:


Google & Your Links

But I would like to leave you with another helpful tip.
One easy way to monitor your current links and keywords
in Google is simply to create Google Alerts for your
site’s major keywords and your site’s URL. Then whenever
Google indexes a link containing these keywords or your URL
- Google sends you an email. Great way to track your links
and also a great way to track your competition.


Google Alerts

Helping People Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
+Titus Hoskins

www.bizwaremagic.com

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As I told you last week, Google judges the quality of your content
and if your site or content triggers a penalty – your site drops
from page 1 to page 3 or beyond. In other words, your site and content
becomes worthless in regards to getting very valuable targeted search
traffic from Google.

Now, while Google hasn’t come out and actually said they don’t like
affiliate sites… they definitely don’t like sites with too many
affiliate links and very little “value-added” content. I do believe
having too many affiliate links, especially above the fold or at the
top of your pages, will hurt your rankings post-panda.

As I also told you last week, by simply hiding or masking my affiliate
links on one site, I brought my Google rankings back from page 6 to
the top of page 2… not quite back to the first page where they were
pre-panda, but search traffic and sales have increased which is the
goal.

For years, most webmasters and affiliate marketers have been masking
or hiding their affiliate links. In the case above, I was using a
meta-refresh script which is a very bad move in the eyes of Google
because many browsers can’t read it and your pages turn up blank.
A site which shows a lot of blank pages is obviously not of the
best quality!

There are many ways to hide your affiliate links, as in my site above,
I used 302 redirects which doesn’t pass link juice. Since these are
affiliate links there’s no need to pass the PR pagerank juice to them.
Now if you want to pass link juice, you have to do a 301 (permanent)
redirect.

One very simple way to mask your affiliate links is to create
a php page or redirect.

For example, here is URL or link

http://yourdomain.com/recommends/affiliatelink.php

Now you would have a php page on your site which
would contain the following:

< ?php
header( 'Location: http://affiliatelink1.com' ) ;
?>

For example, if you had an affiliate link for hp laptops
then you would have a page entitled hplaptops.php and your
affiliate link would be placed in the ‘Location:’ in that
short script. Where ever you want to place that link on
your page you would have to use:

http://yourdomain.com/recommends/hplaptops.php

Now, if you’re like me and have hundreds or even thousands of
affiliate links on a site. Creating a php file or page
for each link can be time-comsumming and a real hassle.

I did some searching on the web and I found a free script
which saves a lot of time because you have all your affiliate
links on the one page. This script is from www.stevedawson.com
and you can find it below:

Free PHP Redirect Script

There are many other versions of this “array” type script for masking
your affiliate links but this one works for me and it’s free. One major
benefit, if one of your affiliate links becomes outdated or is changed…
you just have to make one change on this page to fix the problem, instead
of manually changing hundreds of links on countless pages on your site,
been there, done that.

Now one final note, many SEO experts say you should stop Google from
indexing these affiliate links. While it doesn’t completely block Google
from indexing them, if they find the same links elsewhere on the web.

It will help to insert this into your Robots.txt file.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /jump.php/

This will stop the Google and the search engines not to index the
page containing all your affiliate links. Keep in mind, this page where
you keep all your affiliate links can be named anything, like ‘recommends’,
‘go’ or even ‘links’.

Helping People Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
+Titus Hoskins

www.bizwaremagic.com

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I must make a confession, while I have been using images to
get targeted traffic for years, until a little while ago I had
never heard of Pinterest.com! As I said before, I am not that
much of a social media person, but that hasn’t stopped me from
taking full advantage of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin…
when it comes to promoting my sites.

Have you heard of Pinterest?

It’s a very simple concept – an online bulletinboard where people
pin their pictures. Pinterest users can share and re-pin images that
they like and you can also follow other pinners.

Pinterest has only been around for two years but is slated to
be the break-out social media site for 2012.

According to Bizreport, Pinterest delivers almost as
much referral traffic as Twitter and Google.

According to Hitwise, Pinterest is one of the top 5 social networks
on the web. In an article, Huffingtonpost states that Pinterest hit 10 million
monthly views faster than any other site in history. But what really
caught my eye, were two important facts concerning traffic…

- Pinterest delivers more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube
and Linkedin Combined

- Pinterest users stay on the image site longer than Facebook users

On average, Pinterest users spend 15.8 minutes sharing images, while
Facebook comes in at around 12.1 minutes. This metric is important
because, where Internet users spend most of their Internet day is
vital to advertisers and the amount of traffic you get.

Another important feature which caught my attention – you can link
your images directly to your site or URL. This is extremely vital
for getting traffic and exposure for your products or services.
You can also tag or keyword your images which is needed for
full SEO benefit.

Furthermore, you can also pin your videos on the site, which
really makes Pinterest something you should be interested in,
pardon the pun.

Being a former professional artist (albeit a poor one), I am extremely
interested in using Pinterest to full advantage. Over the years, images
have been a great source of traffic for me, especially from “image search”
on the major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Some webmasters and online marketers ignore the importance of images
in their promotions. Don’t! These images can be a great source of
traffic for your site or sites.

Only downer I can see, you have to put your name on the waiting
list before you can get an invite from Pinterest. Currently, from
what I can gather, the waiting time is around one week.

But the sooner you’re on that waiting list, the sooner you
can be pinning images and getting all that free traffic.


www.pinterest.com

Helping People Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
+Titus Hoskins

www.bizwaremagic.com

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5 SEO Benefits Of Using WordPress Blogs

As you probably know, I am not a tech person, but last
week I had to upgrade several of my wordpress blogs. On
one of them I even had to update the MySQL and PHP, as
well as backup a database and move it before I could
manually upgrade my WP blog to the latest version.

I mention all this because many webmasters are sometimes
discouraged from using a WordPress blog because occasionally
they will have to go in and handle some of the tech stuff.
However, the WordPress platform is very well established and
the directions/support/forums are all very professionally
run and managed.

So there simply is no reason why any webmaster shouldn’t be
using this type of free blogging software in conjunction with
their site or sites.

If you’re one of those who is not using WordPress or similar
blogging software with your site, here are 5 SEO reasons
why you should use it.

1. – Get your content indexed in Google almost instantly by
simply using a WP blog. I use Google Alerts to get an email
every time Google indexes any piece of online content associated
with one of my keywords so I know immediately when my blog
posts are indexed. Sometimes it’s a few minutes, sometimes
a few hours – but the content/posts get indexed almost
immediately. Needless to say, getting your content crawled
and indexed by Google is the starting point to getting more
traffic.

2. – WordPress is “Keyword and Category Rich” so you can
easily target your main keywords and keyword phrases. You
can have your blog neatly divided into categories and the
proper sub-categories so that the search engines will love
your blog. Again, having this kind of blog software/platform
will make it easy for you to target your keywords and help build
your rankings. You can also place your main keywords directly
in the URL for your blog posts.

3. – Blogs are current and while that might sound rather
obvious but recently Google has come out and stated it does
take the “timeline” or “date” into consideration when presenting
their search results. Using WordPress will give you current
timelined content for Google to easily digest and present.
Having this relevant and current blog content can prove to
be a major SEO benefit in the months to come.

4. – All blogs have RSS feeds. This is another obvious
fact but many webmasters simply don’t understand what
RSS feeds do. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication
and it is a great way to get your content on the web.
Just think of it as a proactive method rather than a
passive method. RSS pushes your content out to all those
who want to receive it. It’s like broadcasting your content,
instead of just having it sitting on a static HTML page.

5. – Keyword anchor links embedded in the content of your
blog posts. Again, this is another one of those recent
SEO changes which affects the importance search engines
place on your backlinks. Years ago, backlinks coming at
the end of a post or article were good enough. However,
these days, search engines like Google are looking for
more natural backlinks which appear throughout the whole
body of your material, especially in the first couple of
paragraphs. Blogs give you the perfect chance to embed
your backlinks directly into your content so that you can
reap the SEO advantages.

Now, these are just 5 SEO reasons to have a WordPress
blog or blogging software on your site. There are other
SEO benefits such as allowing “comments” from users which
can add to the content of your site. These comments are
also judged by the search engines to see if you have a
live active blog or community. Only drawback, I have
found comment spam to be a problem, especially on a high
ranked site. But you can put software in place to cut down
on the amount of spam you get.

Another whole issue is Pingbacks/Trackbacks and how they can
affect your rankings or SEO efforts. These are like backlinks
but I usually manually inspect these links to determine their
quality and whether or not I want to accept them. But again, it’s
another way using a WordPress blog can have SEO benefits.

So even if you’re not a tech person, I would suggest
you put a WordPress blog on your site or if that’s too
much trouble you can always just create a free blog
hosted on the WordPress.com site. Regardless, this is a
great way to boost the SEO factors associated with your
site.
…

Several ways to set up a WordPress blog… easy way
is to simply use the free hosted service at WordPress.com
- just follow the instructions on the site.

The other way is a little more complicated… you
have to download the WordPress Software here:

WordPress

And then follow their instructions in the download…

Helping People Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
+Titus Hoskins

www.bizwaremagic.com

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Seo Link Monster

Whenever I see a new product by Brad Callen – I take close
notice of it. Mainly because years ago, it was a simple free
web marking guide from Brad that gave me my livelihood on the net.
Maybe I would have found out all this “marketing stuff” on my
own, but Brad saved me years of trial and error.

That free course proved to me that Brad knew his stuff when
it came to getting top ranked keywords in all the search engines,
mainly Google.

Brad knows his stuff and I have always used many of his major
products such as Keyword Elite and SEO Elite . His SEO software
tools are top-notch and I would highly recommend them to anyone.

Once someone shows you how to do something and it works, you
sort of go overboard in singing their praises. But I still try
to remain objective when evaluating any new software or marketing
strategy.

In a nutshell…

SEO Link Monster is a series of blogs linked together in a
network. If you subscribe to this link building system, your
links will get displayed on all these keyword related blog sites.

Why would you want it?

Obviously, getting backlinks to your content/site is extremely
important when it comes to achieving high keyword rankings and
traffic from the search engines. Usually, the more backlinks you
have, the higher you will rank.

Even in very competitive keyword niches, get enough backlinks
and you start to rank on the first page for those keywords.
Usually, the stiffer the competition, the more links you will
have to have in order to rank.

With one exception, the quality of your link sources is extremely
important. One high quality backlink from a very respected authority
site could be worth (for ranking purposes) more than a hundred, or
even a thousand of lesser quality links.

SEO Link Monster will only be as good as the quality of the blog
networks where your links will be coming from. If these are mostly
“spammy” blogs, be aware. If they’re of a higher quality, then you
have a link building service that’s worth buying or subscribing to.

I have long learned that you can do all the site optimization you want,
but if you don’t have enough quality links pointing to your content,
you simply won’t rank on the first page in Google.

Quality links = Higher Rankings = Targeted Traffic

That’s basically all there is to web marketing if you go the
SEO route, you do need those quality links and SEO Link Monster
is offering you a solution.

Will these linking structures work Post-Panda?

As far as anyone can gather, Panda has nothing to do with linking,
it has to do with the design and quality of your content. It closely
examines your site’s load times, bounce rates, time spent on site,
duplicate content… all those site/content metrics are considered
to see whether or not your site/content gets a penalty or downgrade.

But…

This is in addition to Google’s basic Algorithm or rankings which is
still largely determined by the number of quality backlinks you have
pointing to your content. It is my belief that if you have enough of
these backlinks you can still beat your competitors – but it will take
more of them if the Panda is not smiling when it sees your site.

I also believe this is one of the main reasons we are seeing a lot
more link-building products or services being launched at this time.
There are thousands of Panda Challenged sites out there, looking for
ways to build their rankings back up. More links could help in this
regard…

You can check out SEO Link Monster for yourself here:

SEO Link Monster

P.S. One of the ways I use to check-out any product is to see
who is endorsing it. I use SeoQuake for Firefox to check the rankings
and traffic stats of the sites recommending this product. Gives
you a good indication of where these folks are coming from and how
effective they are at marketing on the web. The sites/webmasters
recommending this looks pretty solid, but keep in mind this is an
affiliate product.

Helping People Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
+Titus Hoskins

www.bizwaremagic.com

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help spread the word – recommend this content by using
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