“I’ve never seen it work on a truly clean, established site,” Fishkin told us at the time. He is confident enough in his sites’ link profiles and reputation. He also said, “I’d rather they target me/us than someone else. We can take the hit and we can help publicize/reach the right folks if something does go wrong. Other targets probably wouldn’t be so lucky.”

We had a conversation with Fishkin today about the Penguin update, and about a new SEOmoz project related to webspam. We also asked for an update on how the challenge is going, and he said, “On the negative SEO front – I did notice that my personal blog had ~40,000 more links (from some very questionable new sources) as of last week. It’s still ranking well, though!”

It sounds like the the challenge is working out so far, which certainly looks good on Google’s part, especially in light of the Penguin update, and the opinions flying around about negative SEO. Just peruse any comment thread or discussion forum on the topic and there’s a good chance you’ll run into some of this discussion.

I’m guessing the challenge is still on the table, but so far, Fishkin doesn’t seem top be having any problems.

Of course, most people don’t have the link profile or reputation that Fishkin has established, but that also speaks to the need for content producers to work on building both.

SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin tells WebProNews, “It’s done a nice job of waking up a lot of folks who never thought Google would take this type of aggressive, anti-manipulative action, but I think the execution’s actually somewhat less high quality than what Google usually rolls out (lots of search results that look very strange or clearly got worse, and plenty of sites that probably shouldn’t have been hit).”

SEOmoz, by the way, has launched an interesting project aimed at tackling Webpsam on its own.

Fishkin actually posted a new video discussing the Penguin update today, which is worth the watch, particularly if you’ve been affected. There are six main points he discusses, but one in particular that I found interesting is that there are a lot of sites in the marketing industry that appear to have been hit.

Fishkin says, “There appears to be a very disproportionate level of sites in the marketing/services field affected by this. What I mean is, we have seen more people write in about keywords like, ‘seo services,’ ‘seo company, you know, some particular city name’, or ‘web design services, some particular city name’. Those types of results seem to be hit heavily.”

“Now, I’m gonna throw out to things I think may be to blame here,” he continues. “One is: a lot of people who operate in these marketing services fields are also likely to have a lot of correlation with the people who are potentially getting the kinds of link spam to their web pages that Google hit in this update. So, it’s not necessarily [that] Google focused on these. It could be the types of spam they focused on and the types of links that these people had just happened to be correlated and connected. The other things is, this could merely a leading indicator…we’re obviously in the marketing and SEO field, and so it could be that we’re just getting a disproportionate number of those types of folks talking about it in Q&A, emailing, tweeting at us…all those kinds of things.”

“That’s also possible, though usually we see more balance across the board, typically,” he notes.

Beyond the obviously spam-heavy topics, like making money online and pharmaceuticals, we’d be interested to hear more about what kinds of sites have been impacted most by Penguin. Do you believe you were hit by Penguin? What industry is your site part of?

CEO Rand Fishkin announced the project on Google+ Monday evening, acknowledging that his company is “certainly not going to be as good at it or as scaled as Google,” but that it’s making for interesting research.

Fishkin tells WebProNews that Google’s Penguin update was not the motivator behind the project, though he did have this to say about the update:

“In terms of Penguin – it’s done a nice job of waking up a lot of folks who never thought Google would take this type of aggressive, anti-manipulative action, but I think the execution’s actually somewhat less high quality than what Google usually rolls out (lots of search results that look very strange or clearly got worse, and plenty of sites that probably shouldn’t have been hit).”

You can read more about Penguin via our various articles on the topic here.

“We’ve been wanting to work on this for a long time, but our data scientist was previously tied up on other items (and we’ve just hired a research assistant for the project),” Fishkin tells us. “The original catalyst was the vast quantity of emails and questions we get about whether a page/site is ‘safe’ to acquire links from, or whether certain offers (you know the kind – ‘$100 for 50 permanent text links guaranteed to boost your Google rankings!’) were worthwhile.”

“Tragically, there’s a lot of money flowing from people who can barely afford it, but don’t know better to spammers who know that what they’re building could hurt their customers, and Google refuses to take action to show which spam they know about,” he continues. “Our eventual goal is to build a metric marketers and site owners can use to get a rough sense of a site’s potential spamminess in comparison to others.”

“A score (or scores) of some kind would (eventually, assuming the project goes well) be included in Mozscape/OSE showing the spamminess of inlinks/outlinks,” he explained in the Google+ announcement.

According to Fishkin, the SEOmoz algorithms will be conservative and focus on the most obvious and manipulative forms of spam. “For example, we’d probably catch a lot of very obvious/bad link farms, but not necessarily many private blog networks or paid links from reputable sites,” he said in response to a comment on his Google+ post.

Also in the comments, Fishkin indicated that data would be presented in a ‘matches patterns of sites we’ve seen Google penalize/ban” kind of way than a “‘you are definitely webspam’ type of thing.”

The data scientist Fishkin spoke of will present the findings at the company’s Mozcon event in July. Fishin expects an actual product launch late this year or early next year.

Earlier this month, the company announced that it has raised $18 million in VC funding.

“SEOmoz is one of those companies that you just know is going to do big things, “ said Brad Feld, Managing Director of The Foundry Group. “I tend to judge the organizations I invest in based on character, culture and leadership. I believe Moz has exceptional depth in all these areas and the financial growth trajectory to back them up. The relationship is a great fit from all angles and I’m positive we have a very successful future ahead of us.”

The software that SEOmoz creates crawls websites to find errors or missed opportunities for SEO and then makes recommendations based on SEO best practices. The startup also helps websites battle negative SEO. SEOmoz has 15,000 current paying subscribers and predicts it will take in $18-20 million in 2012.

In addition to the highly detailed blog announcement that tells the entire story of the funding, SEOmoz has put out an official press release that is littered with internet memes. One example can be seen below, and represents the tenuous explanation for their less-than-serious release. The rest of the memes, which, I must warn you, are not all winners, can be seen here.

Despite the silly press release, SEOmoz is sincerely hoping this investment will allow their startup to grow and flourish. “In that first phone call with Brad, I knew we’d found someone special,” said Fishkin. “I was, honestly, scared of starting another fundraising process after our previous two attempts, but the chemistry between Foundry and Moz was instant – we couldn’t ask for a better fit. This new partnership coupled with the continued support of our original investors, Ignition Partners, gives us the ability to achieve some remarkable milestones in the years to come.”

How do you feel about companies that cast their SEO magic on websites? Should all companies be less serious about their press releases? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Do you think negative SEO practices can be effective in hurting a competitors’ rankings, even if that competitor is playing by all of Google’s rules and has a squeaky clean reputation? Let us know what you think.

First, you’ll need a little background. There’s a thread in the forum Traffic Planet started by member Jammy (hat tip to Barry Schwartz), who talks about an experiment run with the cooperation of another member in which they were successfully able to have a hugely negative impact on two sites.

“We carried out a massive scrapebox blast on two sites to ensure an accurate result,” Jammy writes. I’m not going to get into all of the details about why they targeted specific sites or even the sites themselves here. You can read the lengthy forum thread if you want to go through all of that.

The important thing to note, however, is that the experiment apparently worked. BUT, Fishkin maintains that the sites in question weren’t necessarily in the best situations to begin with.

“In terms of negative SEO on the whole – I think it’s terrible that it could hurt a site’s rankings,” Fishkin said in the forum thread. “That creates an entire industry and practice that no one (not engines, not marketers, not brands) benefits from. Only the spammers and link network owners win, and that’s exactly the opposite of what every legitimate player in the field wants. Thus, I’m wholeheartedly behind identifying and exposing whether Google or Bing are wrongly penalizing sites rather than merely removing the value passed by spam links. If we can remove that fear and that process, we’ve done the entire marketing and web world a huge favor.”

“I’ve never seen it work on a truly clean, established site,” Fishkin tells WebProNews, regarding negative SEO. He says the examples from the forum “all had some slightly-seriously suspicious characteristics and not wholly clean link profiles already, and it’s hard to know whether the bad links hurt them or whether they merely triggered a review or algorithm that said ‘this site doesn’t deserve to rank.’”

“If negative SEO can take down 100% clean sites that have never done anything untoward and that have built up a good reputation on the web, it’s more concerning and something Google’s search quality engineers would need to address immediately (or risk a shadow industry of spammers popping up to do website takedowns),” he adds.

When asked why he would antagonize those who disagree with his view by offering his own sites as targets, Fishkin says, “Two things – one, I’d rather they target me/us than someone else. We can take the hit and we can help publicize/reach the right folks if something does go wrong. Other targets probably wouldn’t be so lucky.”

Perhaps there should be a Good Guy Rand meme.

“Two – if this is indeed possible, it’s important for someone who can warn the search/marketing industry to have evidence and be aware of it,” says Fishkin. “Since we carefully monitor our metrics/analytics, haven’t ever engaged in any spam and have lines over to some folks who could help, we’re a good early warning system.”

So what happens if challengers are successful at taking down either SEOmoz or RandFishkin.com?

“SEOmoz gets ~20% of its traffic from non-branded Google searches, so worst case, we’d see a 20-25% hit for a few days or a few weeks,” Fishkin tells WebProNews. “That’s survivable and it’s worth the price to uncover whether the practice is a problem. Our core values (TAGFEE) dictate that this is precisely the kind of area where we’d be willing to take some pain in order to prevent harm to others.”

When asked if he’s confident that Google will correct the problem in a timely fashion if he’s proven wrong, Fishkin says, “Fairly confident, though not 100%. I have my fingers crossed it won’t get too messy for too long, but my COO and community manager are a little nervous.”

Fishkin concludes our conversation with: “I’d say that the evidence on the Traffic Power thread is strong that if a site already has some questionable elements, a takedown is possible. But, it’s not yet proven whether wholly clean sites can be brought down with negative SEO. I hope that’s not the case, but I suspect the hornet’s nest I kicked up will probably answer that for us in the next month or two.”

Word around the industry is that Google is making SEO matter less, in terms of over-optimization. Google’s Matt Cutts talked about this last month at SXSW, and that discussion had led to a great deal of discussion and speculation as to just what this would entail.

“The idea,” he said, “is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit, so all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, ‘over-optimization’ or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.”

One thing’s for sure though: If negative SEO can truly impact clean sites, that’s not quite the level playing field Google is aspiring to create.

Fishkin’s experiment is going to be an interesting one to keep an eye on. If SEOmoz can be severely impacted from this, who’s to say your site can’t? Do you think it’s possible? Tell us in the comments.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the scenario that our friend Rand Fishkin, the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, found himself in not long ago. In 2007, the company received venture capital funding from investment firm Ignition, and earlier this year, was approached by a number of firms interested in investing further.

Fishkin told us that the company had not planned on raising funding but that it began to get excited about the potential opportunity. During the bidding process, there was clearly one firm that stood out. Fishkin said it made them a good offer and the companies signed a term sheet.

As he explained, this is “usually a done deal unless the investment firm finds fraud of some kind.” However, three weeks after the signing, the investment firm pulled out. Aside from the fact that SEOmoz did not receive the funding, he said it was also hard to understand why it happened since the firm did not give a clear reason for its action.

“That experience was new for us,” said Fishkin. “I think folks tend not to write about the fact that even after a term sheet is signed, the investor can still pull out.”

Because he has always been very open about all things SEOmoz, Fishkin wrote a very detailed post, within legal bounds of course, about the entire experience. WebProNews asked Fishkin about why he felt so compelled to be open since most companies would not go to the extreme to find out what they could actually disclose.

He told us that transparency has always been a core value of SEOmoz and always would be. He believes that this includes both the good times and the bad times.

“There’s nothing up my sleeve,” said Fishkin. “It’s all out there.”

Is it possible for a business to be too transparent? What do you think?

Fishkin and SEOmoz take transparency very seriously and believe in being upfront about all matters, even when they involve finances and legalities that aren’t flattering.

“It’s one of the qualities that consumers and business customers appreciate so tremendously much these days,” pointed out Fishkin. “We’re getting a culture, it’s particularly in the technology world, that anticipates, loves, and rewards transparency.”

With this transparency, there is also a risk since investors may avoid SEOmoz in the future out of fear of being the subject of a blog post. Fishkin admits that this is a very real concern but said it was one that he was willing to take.

“It’s a risk that we feel comfortable with,” he said. “I would rather say I’m going to commit to our core values, we’re going to do it 100%, we will be transparent no matter the costs, rather than say… we’re transparent but only when it’s convenient for us.”

Even though SEOmoz didn’t receive the funding, no one can say that the company doesn’t stick by its values. The experience, however, has made the company hesitant about raising capital in the future.

“We’re going to go back to our original mission of not raising capital,” said Fishkin. “Maybe we’ll think about it again next year, but I sort of hope we don’t.”

“I’d prefer not to go through that process,” he added. “It takes a lot of time and energy away from running the business.”

If the opportunity were to come up again, Fishkin told us that he would like his company to be in a position in which it doesn’t need the funding, so that it could walk away if it wanted. Since most startups that are covered by the Silicon Valley media receive funding, he also said that he would try to create buzz around his company before he attempted another VC round.

Although the experience was difficult, Fishkin and SEOmoz have received a lot of praise and support for being transparent. Fishkin told us the praise is a “good consolation prize” but that it was a little “bittersweet.”

Going forward, he hopes that startups will be more aware of potential issues and that investors will be more cautious.

Do you think Google is ranking search results effectively? Comment here.

You can view the entire presentation here, but I’ve pulled out a few key slides that basically sum up the findings.

The factors are actually broken down into the following subsets, where each is ranked against other related factors: overall algorithmic factors, page-specific link signals, domain-wide link signals, on-page signals, domain name match signals, social signals, and highest positively + negatively correlated metrics overall.

The results find that page-level link metrics are the top algorithmic factors (22%), followed by domain-level, link authority features (21%). This is similar to the same SEOmoz poll for 2009, but there is a huge difference in the numbers, indicating that experts are less certain that page-level link metrics are as important. In 2009, they accounted for 43%.

Page-specific link signals are cited as metrics based on links that point specifically to the ranking page. This is how the results panned out there:

According to Fishkin, the main takeaways here are that SEOs believe the power of links has declined, that diversity of links is greater than raw quantity, and that the exact match anchor text appears slightly less well-correlated than partial anchor text in external links.

Domain-wide link signals are cited as metrics based on links that point to anywhere on the ranking domain. Here is what the poll looked like in this department:

The report compares followed vs. nofollowed links to the domain and page, finding that nofollow links may indeed help with rankings:

On-page signals are cited as metrics based on keyword usage and features of the ranking document. Here’s what the poll looked like on these:

Fishkin determines that while it’s tough to differentiate with on-page optimization, longer documents tend to rank better (possibly as a result of Panda), long titles and URLs are still likely bad for SEO, and using keywords earlier in tags and docs “seems wise”.

Here is how the domain name extensions in search results shook out:

Here are the poll results on social-media-based ranking factors (which Google has seemingly been putting more emphasis on of late):

Fishkin suggests that Facebook may be more influential than Twitter, or that it might simply be that Facebook data is more robust and available for URLs in SERPs. He also determines that Google Buzz is probably not in use directly, as so many users simply have their tweet streams go to Buzz (making the data correlation lower). He also notes that there is a lot more to learn about how Google uses social.

Andy Beard has been testing whether links posted in Google Buzz pass PageRank or help with indexing of content since February 2010. He is now claiming evidence that Buzz is used for indexing.

Danny Sullivan asked Google’s Matt Cutts about the SEOmoz ranking factors survey in a Q&A session at SMX Advanced this week – specifically about the correlation between Facebook shares and Google rankings. Cutts is quoted as saying, “This is a good example of why correlation doesn’t equal causality because Google doesn’t get Facebook shares. We’re blocked by that data. We can see fan pages, but we can’t see Facebook shares.”

The SEOmoz presentation itself has a lot more info about the methodology used and how the correlation worked out.

All of the things covered in the presentation should be taken into consideration, particularly for sites that have experienced significant drops in rankings (because of things like the Panda update or other algorithm tweaks). We recently discussed with Dani Horowitz of Daniweb a number of other things sites can also do that may help rankings in the Post-panda Google search index. DaniWeb had been hit by Panda, but has seen a steady uptick in traffic since making some site adjustments, bringing up the possibility of Panda recovery.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable polled his readers about Panda recovery, and 4% said they had fully recovered, while more indicated that they had recovered partially. Still, the overwhelming majority had not recovered, indicating that Google probably did its job right for the most part (that’s not to say that some sites that didn’t deserve to get hit didn’t get hit). In that same Q&A session, Cutts said, “The general rule is to push stuff out and then find additional signals to help differentiate on the spectrum. We haven’t done any pushes that would directly pull things back. We have recomputed data that might have impacted some sites. There’s one change that might affect sites and pull things back.”

A new adjustment to the Panda update has been approved at Google, but has not rolled out yet, he says. This adjustment will be aimed at keeping scraped content from ranking over original content.

Home Page Content

There have also been other interesting bits of search-related information coming out of Google this week. Cutts posted a Webmaster Central video talking about the amount of content you should have on your homepage.

“You can have too much,” said Cutts. “So I wouldn’t have a homepage that has 20MB. You know, that takes a long time to download, and users who are on a dial-up or a modem, a slow connection, they’ll get angry at you.”

“But in general, if you have more content on a home page, there’s more text for Googlebot to find, so rather than just pictures, for example, if you have pictures plus captions – a little bit of textual information can really go a long way,” he continued.

“If you look at my blog, I’ve had anywhere from 5 to 10 posts on my main page at any given time, so I tend to veer towards a little more content when possible,” he added.

Who You Are May Count More

Who you are appears to be becoming more important in Google. Google announced that it’s supporting authorship markup, which it will use in search results. The company is experimenting with using the data to help people find content from authors in results, and says it will continue to look at ways it could help the search engine highlight authors and rank results. More on this here.

Search Queries Data from Webmaster Tools Comes to Google Analytics

Google also launched a limited pilot for search engine optimization reports in Google Analytics, tying Webmaster Central data to Google Analytics, after much demand. It will use search queries data from WMT, which includes:

This week, we also ran a very interesting interview between Eric Enge and Bill Slawski addressing Google search patents and how the might relate to the Google Panda update.

Back to the SEOmoz data. Do you think the results reflect Google’s actual algorithm well? Tell us what you think.

I will not regurgitate Fishkin’s post here, but if you’re concerned about laws pertaining to disclosure of paid endorsements, it’s a must-read. He does offer the following takeaways to sum it up:

1. Most social media marketing is legal without disclosure.

4.  Linkbait, viral content and microsites don’t require disclosure (most of the time).

In the online marketing world, does not always cross our minds that there are legal boundaries that are being stepped on or even crossed in some cases. For the protection of your business, it is really an important thing to make sure you are abiding by federal regulations. These are only US guidelines though, so if you live in a different country, you will probably want to do some digging of your own to find out what the regulations are in your own government.

Read the FTC’s guidelines here.

Nielsen Online, however, has looked at the top online companies and brands for the month of March. This data looks at unique audience and time per person spent with each. Take a look at these charts from Nielsen:

"The parent level is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs owned by a single company or division," explains Nielsen. "The brand level is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs that has a consistent collection of branded content."

Nielsen also looked at Internet usage in general for the month of March. There are some interesting statistics here as well:

I find it interesting that the average web page is viewed for just under a minute. This might be an interesting stat to advertisers displaying dynamic ads with different offers. This is the kind of information that can be considered when deciding how long to leave each offer displayed before moving on to the next one.

"The sorting is done in order, not of raw link counts, but of linking root domains – a metric that we’ve found incredibly valuable both for identifying broad popularity (vs. sites that simply earn lots of links from a few sites with many pages) as well as filtering spam (it’s easy to get lots of pages linking to you, and even easy to get lots of subdomains linking to you, but getting a diverse set of root domains is considerably harder)," explains Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.

I’m not going to replicate both lists of 500 here. You can view them at SEOmoz, but I will provide a quick glance at the top ten of each:

Top Domains

1. Google.com
2. Yahoo.com
3. Blogspot.com
4. Adobe.com
5. Wikipedia.org
6. YouTube.com
7. W3.org
8. MySpace.com
9. WordPress.org
10. Microsoft.com

Top Pages

1. Woredpress.org
2. Google.com
3. adobe/products/acrobat/r…
4. miibeian.gov.cn/
5. validator.w3.org/check/referer
6. statcounter.com
7. jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/chec…
8. phpbb.com
9. del.icio.us/post
10. yahoo.com

Graph by SEOmoz

You can get a look at all of the stats like linking root domain count, external link count, mozRank, mozTrust, PageRank, and change on the charts. Fishkin also provides some interesting highlights from the lists like top gainers and losers here.