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Google SPY World

Is the name google Search Plus Your World just a coincidence? Or a Freudian slip?

GSPYW could ALSO be Google SPY Ware.

Enjoy.

I always insist, when a public story breaks in the SEO field of big proportions, you should take every opportunity to learn from it. The Chrome paid posts debacle is actually a pretty good example, as unlike in previous situations, Matt Cutts has publicly announce EXACTLY what the penalties were.  Which is all kinds of awesome to know.

A bit of background reading over at SEObook who originally spotted the story, then to Danny Sullivans breakaway post with more analysis and again Danny’s post on the announcement of the penalty. If you want, you can also read Matt Cutts response over at Google+.

What did I learn from the situation?

It’s possible to be Innocent

Despite the hype, I don’t believe that the campaign the Google Chrome team ran was to gain links. To be honest I doubt they needed them.  I am with Andrew Girdwood on that (and you should read why here).

By mistake, some webmasters added those links. So what happened if this activity was caught by the manual spam team? Pretty much a penalty. So in effect, it IS possible for someone to screw up link building without realising. If you were a small business (read: NOT Google or another brand) then you would be in effect screwed.

As Danny rightly puts it:

It also raises the serious question that if Google can’t keep track of its own rules, what hope is there that third parties are supposed to figure it all out?

Now lets take another coment – made by someone on Matt Cutts post:

So if I understand this correctly, it was only 1 sponsored post (out of 400) that was passing pagerank that was against the guidelines? Since the writer was being paid to write an article about Google Chrome they decided to insert the link editorially and that’s what has generated this penalty? Would there have been a penalty applied if that 1 post had not linked to Chrome and it was just 400 paid spammy posts? The whole thing seems strange. Polluting the internet with poor content and spamming the video is ok but one link (which the author deemed relevant in this case) is not? I don’t get it someone please clarify.

The bolded sections are my highlights.

This link was not paid for.

The payment was for the hosting of the video.

The link was given by the editor. Update: Want more proof? See this post by Dave Naylor on Unruly Media and how they send out campaign requests. If I was Unruly Media, I would be fuming.

As an advertiser, you HAVE NO CONTROL over what someone puts up on their site over and above what you have paid for. So did Google, in effect, unfairly punish themselves just for good PR? The mind boggles.

A Single Link and a Singular Penalty Example

Matt Cutts said:

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

So Google penalised itself. The chrome main page dropped out of the index for its most profitable generic “browser” and its most appropriate brand “chrome”.

However, the page https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95346 ranks for Chrome instead.

Now call me a conspiracy theorist, but I CAN understand why the original Chrome page ranked for “chrome” . Not sure why the support one does though.

Chrome Backlinks via Majestic SEO

What Should then?

Personally I see this page now supposedly the stronger one – of course, I haven’t investigated the value of other internal Google  links, nor the value of each link. And I admit my view is very simplistic.

I guarantee you, if such a penalty was applied to ANY other site for ANY brand term, NOTHING from that site would rank. Interesting to see a PAGE specific penalty in this way.

Or is that NOT a page but a subfolder?

Why use Google Chrome

Aha! It IS a subfolder specific penalty, because I am pretty sure ONE of those pages ranked for “Why Use Google Chrome”.

Oh wait! SEMrush confirms that at their last crawl, their recorded ranking position 1 for that term was http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/more/index.html

In fact, if you dig into the above SEMrush data a bit deeper, you will see that a common high volume query was: “what is google chrome”.  Guess who ranks at the no. 1 position for that?

No. It’s not a Google property, but the Wikipedia page I highlighted above. Which makes me wonder if that  support page which now ranks for Chrome has been manually promoted or is it just that the next best page from the domain surfaced?

Let’s go back to SEMrush and check previous US rankings for “Chrome”:

Support page ranked or not?

Ha! According to SEMrush data, that page did NOT rank in the top 20 results. Yet here it is. At position 1.

Let’s pull out a screenshot Danny Sullivan has of the US results for “Chrome” just to verify.

Danny Sullivans screenshot

Now a disclaimer: The Support page DID in fact rank in the UK. (see screenshot below).

Support page in the UK

What does this teach you?

1. The penalty isn’t PAGE specific as some people are saying – it’s to the whole subfolders – which in effect are now being treated as subdomains as well – we knew that they made this change for recognising internal links in the past year. But as I demonstrated, the penalty is to the whole subfolder / subdirectory.
2. The surfacing of the support page – if you have  penalty on a particular page / folder / directory of a site, you CAN rank again for that KW as long as you have another section of your site dedicated to ranking for the same KW. In theory at least. Especially if that KW is a “brand” signal.

Manual Penalties Exist, and Always Have.

Often I hear when Google is being taken to task over some legal issue about them artificially pushing up or down certain results, we have had quotes saying that Google cannot control the flow of the organic algo. However no one seems to mention these penalties, which can be applied – which means that though they may have no manual control of the UP switch, they do in fact have control of the DOWN switch – which has the same effect as the UP switch if you demote everything slightly.

This to me constitutes control over the organic placements. I think it’s time everyone started reading more about Foundems Search Neutrality  Campaign. Like I said on a recent post in Econsultancy:

“…serious investigation by capable organisations on the Google Monopoly of the search market and its anti-competitive behaviour to various niches.

I don’t think it’s fair that Google is allowed to bring out products and services that are simply clones of businesses it’s been taking money from to market, and using its data to build and market their own services.”

Some Other Takeaways That SEOs Should Be Aware Off

On Matt’s Google Plus post, a bunch of interesting questions have been asked, some of which have been answered well by John Mueller ( a googler I really respect)  – which I am pulling out because they are worth recording somewhere other than a random Google plus post.

Would another site’s page be “banned” from Google search, not just demoted in pagerank?

Generally speaking, we only remove pages or sites from the index if there are significant issues with regards to our webmaster guidelines with the website itself. As mentioned in http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

there’s also a blog post on this topic at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html which covers some of the possible negative effects.

Would another site’s root domain get demoted, not just the offending page?

As mentioned in http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/tips-for-hosting-providers-and.html

“We try hard to be granular in our actions when protecting our users and search quality, but if we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific web host that are spammy or are distributing malware, we may be forced to take action on the web host as a whole.”

In a case like this, it’s easier to be granular since it’s based on a very specific action.

Now that Google knows how innocently a good site can get caught up in a mess like this, will the ability to “plead your case” be opened up a bit before demotion?

You can always explain what happened in a reconsideration request. As Matt mentioned, it’s important that you document your efforts in getting any known issues cleaned up in your reconsideration request.

There’s more on reconsideration requests at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843 .

I realize it’s not often that the community at large will find and diagnose an issue with a website in this way, but if you’re unsure of what your site has run into, you can always post in our webmaster’s help forum to get more input. While you may not always get answers from Googlers there, the replies there will often point you towards issues that can be resolved, and in many cases, in the right direction.

You see, I love finding interesting gaps in Google, both Organic and Paid Search results. I haven’t often spoken about Paid search manipulation, although it does exist, from arbitrage to brand manipulation. However I always love it when I spot something new, that could have been an innocent mistake, but could be used to pervert the normal run of PPC ads. And I spotted one today that made the mental clogs whirr.

Better Click Through with Celebrities

Ok, let’s say that your products were always endorsed by celebrities. And that you could manipulate them into doing this, almost free, with the thanks of Google. Would you? I know I would. Just imagine, Justin Biebers millions of fans seeing his face on your PPC ads, thinking that he endorsed your site! I bet sales would go up. Or what if Oprah’s face turned up on your ads for weight loss programmes? Jackpot!

Well, it’s not as impossible as you would imagine. A simple flaw in Google’s +1 and Adwords algo could enable you to pull something like that off.

Google Plus? Adwords?

As an SEO, you most probably know that if anyone from your network that shared a link via Google Plus, or “plussed” a link, they would show up on your ordinary Google searches. See for example a Google search for “Webmaster Tools”. Cool, Matt Cutts  shared that page.

Matt Cutts Shared This

With this next screenshot, you can see that Matt has more than 150K people with him in their circles, which means they will most probably see him when they search for anything endorsed by him. Fair enough right?

Matt Cutts Circles

However, at some point this year, Google has opted adwords and adsense sites into the Google Plus program. Which means, that if anyone plussed a particular page, those pluses will ALSO show up on adwords. Regardless whether they are organic pluses or paid search pluses.

Aaron Wall Did Not Plus This

As you can see below, Aaron Wall could be considered a celebrity within the industry of SEO, he has over 10K followers on Google Plus (and 18K plus on twitter) . You would consider his recommendations worth a look and anything he has to say about SEO, most definitely worth a read.

Aaron Wall Circles

So imagine my surprise when I saw:

Aaron Wall +1 Fleece Blankets

I could’nt help myself and sent that tweet off to Aaron, whose reaction, understandably was summarised in the following tweets:

interesting tidbit there. I did a + on US site, but not on all pages nor internationally. And after removing the + it still appears

that is just another Google #scam … you +1 one site & the ad claims you +1′ed A SPECIFIC PAGE on a different site no less #scam

that Google ad flat out #lies , it claims I personally endorsed a page I did not. I hope they do this on a celeb n get sued

Google’s brand bias again. Just because I recommend registrar x’s domains doesn’t mean I like their junk no-value SEO package

You know when you start merging stuff cross domains in weird ways it is cloaking or spam. but Google can falsely merge u & its fine.

Google doing that garbage is no better than the acai scammers using Oprah … in aggregate it is actually probably far more harmful

btw, am not faulting eBay on this, as every marketplace has some junk, but this scam’s engineered by Google to increase ad clicks

keep in mind Google’s verbiage “name x recommends THIS PAGE” … not “THIS SITE” or “A SITE FROM THIS COMPANY”

someone will probably put up a scam SEO package on Google pages & collect the @mattcutts endorsement. then move it into sales copy

Take Away from Aarons Tweets?

1. He DID plus eBay.com, and NOT .co.uk. Google merged it to the .co.uk domain.
2. He later REMOVED his plus. Google ignored the fact.
3. He plussed the root domain. Google indicates that he plussed  the SPECIFIC Ad Page.
4. Its false endorsement, manipulated by Google.

For the past few years, both Aaron and I and quite a few other SEOs are spotting disturbing behaviour by Google. see this post by aaron for example – Schema or Scam?

Can You Use It?

Well, I haven’t tried it yet, but I know that Aaron DOES NOT recommend SEO DVDs from eBay, nor does he recommend make money DVDs from eBay. But that doesn’t stop Google from telling me he does!

Aaron Wall +1 SEO DVD

How could you use it?

Imagine being a brand or a retail site. Then creating a strong, promotional and flattering page about your celebrity target. But DON’T allow access to that page without a Google Plus  – so they have to plus the page. Now get a few fans tweeting  / messaging the celebrity to check the page out. In order for them to access the page, they would have to hit the Google Plus button. They look at the page, either form an opinion, or don’t. Pointless  to worry about that.

Now run Google Ads. Hopefully, if the flaw in Google Adwords and Google Plus still works, you have the celebrity endorsing almost every PPC advert…. Sit back and collect cash.

Now go off and Plus this page…

Update: Bing does the same with your Facebook likes…

I often say that you need to try new things, test new theories, play with the SERPs as often as you can. After all, if you blindly follow what others, and don’t try your own experiments, you won’t be a competitive SEO.  At the same time, read others experiments, learn from them, but try and replicate your own.

For example, Shark SEO posted about Multiple meta descriptions. This is a technique others in SEO, including old school SEO superstars such as Greg Boser and Dave Naylor have been playing with meta descriptions for years.  Greg has even advised up to 5 meta descriptions on a page, if I recall our twitter conversation correctly (see this tweet from Joost) , while Dave has been playing with Snippet optimisation for as long as I can remember.

So what’s the premise?

Simple: Show a different, more relevant meta description for a page for different queries. AKA Dynamic Meta Descriptions!

Why? To improve your click through rates of course!

Does it work?

In a nutshell, I don’t take anything as gospel – I try and test as much as I can. In this instance, I did, and it works!

The below is a search for my Brand: Explicitly Me.

Explicitly Me Meta Description

See that meta description?

Explicitly Me is an experiment on exposing weakneses in Google, Bing & Yahoo. Visit the site at Explicitly.me to get awesome Blackhat Tips.

Now let’s run a search for my name:  Rishi Lakhani

Rishi Lakhani Meta Description

Rishi Lakhani (rishil) is a specialist SEM consultant, working on Paid, Organic, Affiliate and Social Media. To find out more, feel free to get in …

How cool is that? Its picking this up again from my meta description, and serving the right one for the query.

Here is a Screen shot of my meta description, but if you don’t believe me, check it yourself:

meta description snippet

Dynamic Meta Descriptions are Cool

Now that I have validated that you can in fact have dynamic meta descriptions, I feel justified in deploying them for a number of sites and clients. Some example situations in which I would deploy these:

1. Brands Home Page – Brands home pages tend to rank for all sorts of stuff, from brand name, to top level generics. How cool would it be to have the home page meta showing a brand message when a brand query is entered, and showing a generic offer led copy when  a generic keyword is searched for? You then please both the Brand Police, and your SEO CTR requirements.

2. Top ranking generic pages – although I need to test this a bit more, I also think you can optimise the copy to show smaller variations in the description tag, for example, when a Car insurance page ranks for  both, Cheap Car Insurance, and Car Insurance Comparison – traditionally you would optimise ONE meta description for that page to include both keywords. But how cool would it be to show TWO separate ones which are query dependant? E.g.:

Car insurance comparison desc

Cheap Car Insurance Desc

Takeaways:

Read your peers, keep an eye on what they are trying and testing. See their results, then try and replicate as many as possible, as long as the results they get are something you can use.

This post has been inspired and adapted from one of my favourite non-SEO bloggers, James Altucher. He recently wrote: 9 Ways to break all the rules.

As an SEO, regardless to the fact we proscribe or prescribe the definition, our jobs are to get our content high up enough in SERPs to attract searchers into our sites. Simply put, it’s the art of making something findable. However, in order to do that, we need to try and follow a set of rules; rules that have been set for us by search engines to get that content up there.  Of course, these rules are different for different people, but don’t let that stop you.

Sometimes rules are meant to be broken. Some need to be tested and bent to withhold the test of time and their stability. I mean, if everyone followed the rules to letter “T”, would probably mean that not everyone will rank, after all, there is only one No. 1 spot and only 10 spots on the first page of the SERPs (I am ignoring all the other stuff like images, maps, etc excuse the exclusion).

Part of being a good SEO is to understand what these rules are, but part of being a GREAT SEO is to know how far you can stretch these rules, how to cleverly interpret them, and when you can break them.

A few of these are going to be shocking, a few outrageous. And maybe a few not even worth doing, but worth knowing about. Most of this happens, but the “clean” world of competitive SEO doesn’t talk about it.  Others are simple, well thought out risks that you should probably try.

I don’t endorse, nor condemn any.

rules in SEO

===> Do the opposite.

On any given day, there are hundreds of theories on what the right strategy is. Some from leading SEO sites, others from Google themselves.

Don’t follow blindly – sometimes try the opposite of what is being suggested, just to see what happens.  Google Suggest can’t be manipulated by anything else than search volume, right?

Try something that is totally out of sync with what the leading theories are saying. You may just find something new.

===> Surprise

Surprise yourself, surprise your colleagues, surprise your clients. Are your normal reports about keywords that the site ranks for? Why not suddenly submit a set of keywords that you DON’T rank for? (but could).

Is the strategy to look at volume of links? Instead, why don’t you suggest something totally different?

Like mining the top 5000 long tail keywords in the niche, and then proposing to dedicate budget to developing content around each? That’s how Demand became one of the most powerful companies in the content space right?

===> Change one thing

So you have gone hard and fast acquiring exact anchors. Ever thought of shifting tract for a little while to target long tails instead? What are the effects?  

Reputation Issue? Instead of trying to outrank a site with your own content, find other content that matches the query. Buy and build links to it.

You can’t get your site penalised for buying links to someone else’s site right?

===> Steal

Take the top 50 results for your target keyword. Grab all their content.  Give it to an editor / copy writer to rewrite it to work seamlessly.  What do you have there? Probably the longest, best researched, well written  piece of content on that subject. Thats Content Spinning on a majestic level.

Don’t start from scratch.

What are your competitors highest value backlinks? Buy that site. Remove those links and replace over time with yours. Learn destructive SEO.

===> Combine

SEO does not work in silo. It a marketing discipline that should be treated like one. Combine your strategy with another.

For example, does your business end out marketing emails? Why not try link opportunity mining there? Send out one email to the whole database to ask customers to submit their own sites for an “award”.  Mine these to select which are ideal for grabbing links. Build a True Value Link Network.

Or combine two clients’ link building strategies.  Is one a Car insurance client, while the other Lawyer? What about a series of articles that have a bent on legal issues around Car Insurance? Get that out to the press. Two clients, one subject, good links.

===> Question Everything

The worst SEO in my opinion is one that follows Google guidelines blindly.

They are nothing but a financial organisation, despite whatever they say. They often dont follow their own rules. Nor do they have the best track record of honesty.  Question everything.

Why is Google Plus so important? Why do they want to give you free analytics? Why did they buy a bunch of verticals? Why are they suggesting you put more ads on your site? Why are paid links bad?

As James says in his article:

There’s always a “good reason” and the “real reason”

===> Ignore  CAN’T, DON’T, SHOULDN’T, MUSTN’T

Self explanatory.  If I need to explain this any further, then you haven’t read the post right so far.

===> Honesty

Contradiction or what? On one hand I am asking you to steal, the other asking you to be honest?

Honesty is the only one thing that sets you apart from any other SEO company.

Be Honest to your clients. If you are going to try something risky, tell them what and why.  Don’t screw them over – your own business will end quick enough if you do.

Don’t make up answers, if you DON’T know why the site tanked, then say so. Be 100% honest to your clients.  And dont suggest anything that could be potentially illegal.

They will respect you for it. If they don’t, maybe they aren’t the right client for you. You would be surprised what clients let you risk if only you explain it to them.

===> Persistence

Keep testing. Keep bending the rules. Keep trying. Keep developing new theories. Don’t give up. Keep going.

When it comes to a link building exercise for clients, I tend to prefer a long tail strategy rather than a top level generic strategy. Long tail Link building? What the heck is that? Why don’t we just chuck all our links with the exact anchors that we want for our money words?

To start with, a long tail link building strategy centers around driving a small share of link volume per page on a site, while using 3+ phrases as the anchors. The other element of my long tail link building strategy, is that instead of driving links into the top level pages, I would drive them to tighter match, sub category pages.

How Do I Work on the Long Tail Links?

So take for example an affiliate site that deals with Insurance. Typically, you would have some top level categories like:

• Car Insurance
• House / Home insurance
• Cheap Insurance
• Pet insurance
• Health Insurance

The typical traditional exact match anchor link building looks a bit like this:

Traditional anchor links

However, my long tail link building is more about building out each one of those categories into sub categories.

A very small sub set of Car Insurance would look like:

• Car insurance for Young Drivers
• Car Insurance for women
• Compare Car Insurance

I would then use google suggest to gauge the really long tail versions of queries that match these pages:

And the end result would look a bit like:

Long Tail Anchor Links

So Why The Long Tail Link Build?

I have 5 reasons for building links in this manner:

1. It look more natural than exact match anchors
2. It’s easier to get these links than your typical one word or two word anchors
3. You use googles own data to pick out long tails
4. There are knock on effects to the rest of the site
5. You build a link profile that is varied, and strengthen the base of the site

Effects Of Long Tail Links

But to give you a more detailed view, when we build links to long tail phrases, we talk about the 4 fold effect:

Effect one

Directly improving the pages relative import to Search Engines for the phrase and its minor variations for that Key phrase, thus ranking well for long tail keywords. In my SERP Sniffing post, I highlighted the importance of ranking for the long tail:

Effect Two

Indirectly affecting that pages ( the long tail page) importance for shorter versions of the hyper link – so where “car insurance quotes for young drivers” is the anchor, both, Car insurance Quotes, and Young Drivers, get affected as other possible key phrase combinations and rank for them, such as “Car Insurance for drivers”, Insurance for Young drivers”.

Effect Three

The page gains authority and can potentially rank for some of the related content on the page, for example if that page had a section: “Risks for Young Drivers”, chances are that the sites ranking for that phrase may go up, and as a result should be correlated with rankings / traffic before the link building was carried out

Effect Four

Over all site authority goes up. As we build a large number of long tail links to deeper content, this has a pyramid effect, where the high base is holding up the tip (in this case the home page) which strengthens for its own content, which then causes a flow of strength through the whole site

Proving the value of a Long Tail Link Building Strategy

Convincing clients used to traditional link building to use this approach may or may not be easy, but you still need to justify that it works. The best way to do this is to:

Take two time points:

• Before the strategy started
• At the end (or current point in) of the campaign

Next, isolate all the traffic to your end target pages from search engines and extract all the referring keywords to those pages for each given time point.

Now compare three things:

1. Volume of traffic, then and now

2. Keywords variations driving traffic, then and now

3. Keywords targeted, vs kws NOT targeted, then and now

If you ran a decent campaign, then the difference would be in the numbers:

Example of increase in long tail traffic within a week of a single page targeted with 20 Keyword link variations

This example is for one of my small affiliate sites, I isolated a page that had many combo variations via google suggest, then built  a series of long tail links. The keyword variation on keyphrase referrers to the page goes up,  as well as traffic. Over time, as those links mature further, it will rank higher and higher. If I did the same for the 50 plus pages the site has, the benefits would be higher than trying to get its two word anchors for the home page and trying to compte in that space in the SERPs.

And that folks is my simple guide to long tail link building

I was researching the niche on one of my new domain purchases, 24hrloans.co.uk, and guess what I found? The internet never ceases to amaze me.

A Picture is Worth 1000 Words. Click to see it in detail

Thoughts?

Dont tell me how dodgy it is, tell me how they did it. I have covered it before, so you should know.  See the site for different serps, see the site for direct URL type in. If you really havent got a clue have a look at: Pills Link Hacker.

When PR Doesnt work with SEO and loses link opportunities.

PR and SEO

I know How powerful SEO and PR can be. You do too, I am sure. PR is the one way to get legitimate “white hat” links of real authority. However, we are far from working well together with PR. Below I have highlighted 9 mistakes I have seen more commonly than I would like to.

This is a short post, because you dont need a full explanation – these points should, in theory, explain themselves.

1. When the PR story is shared BEFORE the SEO team realise
2. When the PR team release it without ANY links
3. When the PR team knows something is cooking, but doesnt tell online team – especially with reputation management
4. When the PR team links to product pages which may move around
5. When the PR team links to product pages / site with ANALYTICS TRACKING
6. When the PR team links, but doesnt capitalise on the right anchor text
7. When the PR team gets a good link TAKEN OFF. (trust me, it happens)
8. When the PR team refuses to answer interviews regardless of how good the Link opportunity is
9. When the PR team waits for weeks before forwarding a GOOD link request from a National Newspaper, because its “online only”

Image Source: My awesome Logo Creator

This is not going to be a long post, nor is it going to teach much. I am putting it out as a way of an early warning system for thin affiliate sites that survived the panda effect.

Basics  Of Thin Affiliates

I run a few data collecting (and money making) thin affiliate sites. I dont hide the fact and I dont overly try and push them either. I build them and let them run. Most of these survived the Panda 1.0 update. Panda 2.0 was a different matter.

For those who dont know what a thin affiliate site is, Its pretty much a thematic site put together with a series of affiliate feeds on related products that automatically create product pages. The game here is to try and rank for the long tail – often Google would give priority to thematic sites built on Exact Match Domains, over the original retailer. The other advantage to date has been that some ecommerce sites are so huge that they only concentrate on the larger volume, money making SERPs, and tend to ignore smaller volume products.

This is where a number of thin affiliates who make money play at. The SERP competition is low, and it is often easy enough to outstrip the original retailer in the SERPs for their own products. Its nothing new and many have made a living out of it comfortably. (Sadly not I – I get bored too easily).

In essence, though not exactly “scraping”, these sites often tend to be repetition of content that exists on other sites, passed on through the blessings of the original content producer.

So what happened?

Initially Panda 2.0 halved the traffic to the sites. Literally. and I thought to myself, well 50% aint so bad. And I thought that Panda updates are going to be periodic, bulk algo changes. However, if what I am seeing is the norm, then the roll out is far from finished. Here is the aftermath as of yesterday:

Light Affiliate Site Destroyed by Panda Sloww Roll out (click to get full image)

Learnings

Panda 2.0 isnt a one of release, and can potentially affect sites weeks after its roll out – just because you survived, or partially survived the aftermath, doesnt mean your sites are safe if the content isnt great.

I lost the HOMPAGE. Thats right – the home page does not rank. In this example and 5 other hit sites. In fact, an inner page ranks for some of the KWs that the home page used to rank for. Is this a signal? I dont know. but I know that the home page of a blog based site tends to be the strongest part of a site – and often short term content that appears on it helps sites rank for KWs even before the inner post pages are indexed.  Whats the easiest way to stop sites ranking quickly for constant low quality content? Kill the home page.

Blood Thirsty Panda

Damage Control?

I dont think that the site is worth recovering, despite the volume of traffic it used to drive. Why? Because I know that it was a crappy affiliate site, I knew that there wasn’t much content on it that was original, and I know it deserved to die. So I will let it R.I.P .

So what will I do? If you are new to my writings, you should head over and read about SERP Sniffing. But in essence, this is a strategy that allows you to capture long tail keywords that drive volume, AND are easy to rank for. Thus armed with this data I intend to build this site on a new domain, without all the crappy element, write custom content for it, make it useful, and hopefully make it pay off.

What should you do? Be wary and keep an eye out – it isnt over yet.

Image Source http://forums.voogru.com/off-topic/13741-red-white-pandas-4.html

This post is a first for me. First time there is a guest post (well semi-guest) on this site. It also is my first collaboration with one of my favourite Research SEOs Neyne.  Neyne (Real name Branko Rihtman) doesn’t blog very often, but when he does it is always worth a read. This is a two part post, the first by Neyne, with the second part by yours truly.

My last post was about using Wordpress Plugin Flaws to link build, “aka soft hacking”. However what we are about to demonstrate is another opensource CMS, Joomla, has just as big a flaw as WP. We didnt investigate the backdoor, or how it was done, however we do demonstrate the extent to which it works.

Worse Than Blackhat, Meet the Hacker SEO

Just like with “SEO is Dead” debate that raises its lame head in seemingly regular intervals over the past few years, so does its not-so-distant cousin, the “Whitehat vs. Blackhat” debate. There has been one raging on the popular blogs in the last week or so and, just like with its useless relative, this round did not bring any new arguments nor has it convinced anyone on the either side of the argument. However, not often does one get to encounter a true black hat campaign, one that leaves you with no doubt as to whether it is useful or not nor whether it is illegal or not. Thanks to a tip from one of my SEO buddies, I have taken the glimpse into the eyes of the beast, and it ain’t pretty.

Just before we dive in, I want to make something clear. I don’t usually out websites or SEO techniques. I think that outing is a cowardly practice, done by people that are not capable of outperforming others. Or in the immortal words on one of Aaron’s tshirts: “I have a very high tolerance for spammers, but a very low one for weasels”. That said, the techniques outlined in this article are most probably illegal (not a lawyer, so don’t want to be definite on that one). They include hacking into other people’s sites, flagging them as pill-related, squandering their link equity and eventually getting them flagged as compromised in Google SERPs, thus seriously decreasing their CTRs. Asshatery like that should be eliminated and I feel no remorse for doing so.

It all started with an enquiry of the mentioned friend about one of his client’s sites. The site seemed to be OK, nothing irregular about it; however, when looking at the Google cached version of the site, a footer appeared:

Pills Footer

This footer does not appear when the site is visited with Googlebot useragent, so my guess is that this is a case of IP cloaking. The more interesting thing is that none of the sites linked in the footer seem to be V1@6r@ related.  They are regular sites on a wide range of topics. So my first thought was that this is a hatchet job – a slimy SEO company that is trying to ban their competitors by creating thousands of artificial, spammy links on hacked sites. However, when looking at the source code of Google cache of each of the linked sites, a different picture started to emerge. Check out the differences between the <header> element as it appears on the live site vs. how it appears in Google Cache:

Google Cache Header of Haked Site

So my next question was whether these site rank for any of the linked phrases. Almost all of them did. Check out this SERP for [V1@6r@ price] (6600 Global Exact Match monthly searches)

Ranking for V Price

So here came a head scratching part. It seems like someone is hacking into Joomla based sites, planting links in their footer to other hacked Joomla sites, whose header is cloaked to show V1@6r@-related keywords. But what is the point? Why would someone send V1@6r@-relevant traffic to totally unrelated websites? Then I clicked through to the site from the above SERP. This is the site I got:

Now you See It

If you go to the site directly, by typing the URL into the address bar, this is what you get:

Now You dont

So not only are they doing IP cloaking, they are also doing referral cloaking to show all visitors referred from Google SERPs .  Here is a partial list of sites, with their original Titles, hacked Titles, keyword they targeted with footer links anchors and their ranking on Google.com for that keyword:

Partial List of Hacked Sites

There is one thing that is common to all the websites in question – they have been all created in Joomla. Furthermore, it is easy to target them as there is a clear indication they are Joomla based in their header:

<meta content="Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Management" />

**************Investigation Ends******************

Search Volumes for v1@6r@

So Neyne has shown you the what, how and why. Hacking these many sites for those rankings isn’t an easy job, unless you prebuild in hacker doorways as I demonstrated in the WP Plugin Security fail. The only other way to do this is to run a number of brute force scripts on known weak spots of various servers and CMS’s. I want to show you what I learnt from investigating those links with Neyne. Like I said with the JC Penney scenario, when you get a chance to learn, do it.

10 things I Learn From V1@6r@ Link Hackers

1.       Old Spam Tactics still work!

A while ago, I wrote about Spam Tactics, Then and Now, where I identified a number of tactics that still work. This discovery reinforces what I learnt back then, that old spam tactics dont die, they just resurface. And that Google isnt really as sophisticated an algo that people believe it to be.  Some of the points below take this into more detail…

2.       Content is NOT King

None of these sites that we investigated were serving up content that was V1@6r@ related. Of course quite a few had cloaking which meant that some conteant was being shown, but after investigating a number of these sites, not all had redirection or cloaking set up as yet.  And as a result just had links that were doctored.  So why did they rank for these keywords?

Just links. Links, links and more links. What about great content? Nope. Links.

Using Majestic, lets look at what the links could be like:

Look at all those links! (click to view Majestic data)

3.       Anchor Text Over Rules All

Wordle for Links

Relevancy, thematic links, semantic analysis etc etc can all go to pot if you are working with a large scale access to link text manipulation system. Doesn’t matter where they are placed, and doesn’t matter where they came from.

An advanced analysis of the anchors for some of the sites we looked at gave you the wordle above  – you can see how heavy the manipulation is. In raw terms:

Anchor links Count

4.       Footer Links Work

For a while SEOs have been devaluing the relevance of links in footer or common elements – ummm they seem to work.

5.       Sitewide Links Work

Again, we get arguments that the value of sitewide links have been dampened greatly. Not when you are working in volume, as we discovered when we investigated these sites.

6.       Referrer Cloaking still Works.

I think Neyne demonstrated this pretty well above.

Another spam tactic from the past, still live and well.

Scripting, its an Art - this one isnt. (this is a tracking script on one of the sites)

7.       I Need To Set Up Alerts

What really shocked me is that these site owners still haven’t realized that they rank for these keywords. If you suddenly rank for or get traffic from didgy keyphrases, its time to check WTF is going on. Now in the case of user agent redirection, sometimes analytics will not record those visits. But will most certainly show up for high volume impressions if you are signed in with Google Webmaster Tools.  AND they have a malware detection piece on there which is worth looking at once in a while.

8.       I Need To Monitor Catch All Accounts

Google does try and email those sites that they have flagged up :

Site Compromised

Site Compromised on All Accounts

But you need to monitor and even set up catch all email accounts: You can find out if your site has been identified as a site that may host or distribute malicious software (one type of “badware”) by checking the Dashboard in Webmaster Tools. (Note: you need to verify site ownership to see this information.) We also send notices to webmasters of affected sites at the following email addresses for the site:

• abuse@
• admin@
• administrator@
• contact@
• info@
• postmaster@
• support@
• webmaster@

9.       Edu Sites Need some Serious help!

As part of the investigation, I had to scan a large number of SERPs for v1@6r@ related keywords. The most common resulting domain extension? That would be the “.edu”.  Google and/or someone else needs to teach these guys how to secure their sites… It’s not hard to spot the volume of hacking – see this simple query.

Or look at this gem:

edu Ranks for Buy that stuff Cheap

10.   .Gov sites are FUBAR

Another common domain  extension that shows up in the SERPs is the .gov extension.   By the way, did you know google has an old search page that only looks at Government sites? Look what I found through it: http://bit.ly/dOlzKR