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Blog Link Networks Crash & Burn

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Perhaps by now you have heard that Google just released a major update to their search algorithm that has “slapped” blog link networks. This update has resulted in many thousands of sites dropping in ranking, and several major websites (including BuildMyRank.com) being de-indexed.

I’ll get into this in a moment in more detail, but first I want to assure all of our SEO customers that (unlike many search firms), TruBlu did not rely upon (nor even use) the methods that Google recently penalized, namely blog link networks. So if you are TruBlu SEO client, your ranking will be unaffected (at worst) or benefit as your competitors’ sites drop down.

You see, in the last few weeks, Google has been de-indexing private blog link networks. These are services that sell links and let you post to hundreds of blogs at a time. It doesn’t matter if they are on separate IP addresses or not. (Reference: click here) De-indexing means what it says — removing a website from Google’s search index, so that even if you search for the site by domain name, none of the site’s URL’s will appear in search. The site is gone — as in GONE gone. Digression: it reminds me of the Monty Python’s “The Dead Parrot Sketch,” as in, this site is no more. It is a deceased website.

Blog Link Networks = Can You Say “Spam”?

Google Panda eats blog link networks.

Most of the content posted on these “blog link farms” were spun articles that created  several backlinks from unrelated content in the same article. Even if the content and titles were spun up to 50%, Google found three word fingerprints, as well as sudden link growth, and penalized the whole group. (Reference: click here)

Google publicly stated they are, “… turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.” It appears to be link popularity – the shear number of links – that won’t matter anymore. What will matter is what has always mattered:  quality links, and deep links, in context, from topically related content.

So if you’re not a TruBlu SEO client, the question you may be asking is, how do I know if my SEO provider is using a blog link network in marketing my site?

• The first thing you might do is get a ranking analysis immediately now that the update has been made by Google and compare your across-the-board rankings; if there is unanimous loss of rank, that’s a potential clue that your provider is using blog link networks.
• Next, ask your SEO provider if they use blog link networks as any part of their strategy, and if they do cancel their service immediately and find a qualified SEO provider!
• Third, if you feel like you’re getting the runaround and can’t get a straight answer, euphemisms like “Tier 1″ and “Tier 2″ network sometimes implies blog link networks are at play — not always but sometimes. This same terminology comes into play with legitimate Link Wheels, which (when done properly and conservatively) are part of an effective and legitimate linkbuilding strategy.
• If your SEO firm is using any kind of automated posting software like SENuke X, there is a very good chance they are involved in blog link networks.
• If your SEO firm advertises they can get X number of thousands of links almost overnight to your website, they are most certainly using blog link networks as part of that strategy. There are only a few ways to legitimately get that kind of traffic to a site in a short time frame, and none of them involve posting thousands of spammy articles to blogs around the world.

How to SEO without Blog Link Networks

The fact is, blog link networks were never a permanent method for marketing a website. Blog link networks were a shortcut that would only lead to disaster — deciding to arrive at the ground floor of a building by leaping from the window rather than take the elevator. Blog link networks would never end well, and we feel bad for the business owners who hired SEO firms that deployed their sites on blog link networks; it will take months to recover their rankings in the search engines and undo the damage of their blog link networks’ linkbuilding.

Blog link networks are not the worst thing a business could do… But let’s consider what can be done by a business to rank their website properly. The best way to attain search ranking is what TruBlu has been doing and recommending all along — real content by real people, originally written by people who are authorities in their niche, that is not only relevant but valuable to your audience. And then slowly and methodically doing whatever is possible to attract an audience to that content — in a natural way.

It may be cliche but true — the only way to success is consistently mastering the basics over & over. There are no shortcuts. We applaud Google for cleaning up search; there are a lot of angry people screaming about how bad this is. And we have seen on professional marketing forums people announcing they are leaving SEO because their entire business just got canceled. No one is pleased to see someone’s livelihood dry up, but the fact is that “search” (in its greater context of Google, Bing, Yahoo and hundreds of other search engines) provides a function and implies a level of trust — gaming the system completely violates that trust. If that means deleting blog link networks from the online universe so be it.

If you found this article helpful, please forward it to your business associates, share it on Facebook or Tweet about it. Thanks for spreading the word about blog link networks and what to do next.

Have you ever searched for your business on Google and come up empty? Even if you searched by exact name? No, you’re not living in the Twilight Zone. But you’re definitely not putting the effort into SEO that you need to be in order to profit with your Santa Clarita business.

Yes, that’s right – SEO. Three tiny letters that strike fear into the hearts of many Santa Clarita business owners. “SEO” stands for ‘search engine optimization’ and it means investing a tiny bit of time and effort into getting the search engines’ attention.

For Santa Clarita business owners who don’t know SEO, it might seem like a form of black magic. SEO specialists are like wizards who know how to appease the Google monster. Actually, SEO is not nearly as hard as its cracked up to be and there are a few ridiculously simple things you can do to get your Santa Clarita business site found in search results.

Hey Google – I’m Over Here!

Getting Your Santa Clarita Business Found Online

If you create a website for your Santa Clarita business, the search engines will notice it eventually. But if you want them to find your Santa Clarita business right away, you need to be proactive and submit your site to them. Submitting your website means basically telling them, ‘Hey, I’ve got a site here. Come and index it!’

Indexing means that the search engine scans your website and decides what it’s about. Then, it can direct searches to it; the more searchers that hit your site, the more possibilities you have to convert them into customers for your Santa Clarita business. Most people don’t realize that you can do this. Submitting your site to the search engines will tell them that it’s there, but it’s even more important to…

Build Some Backlinks to your Santa Clarita business website

What really gets your site noticed is all of the links coming into it. These are called ‘backlinks.’ Some SEO people tell you that the more backlinks you have, the better. Not true! It’s really the quality of your backlinks that matters. In fact, creating low quality backlinks is a form of spamming, which can result in Google, Bing and Yahoo penalizing your website — that’s bad for business.

Measurable, Effective Marketing of Your Santa Clarita Business

The search engines rank every website. Sites that search engines consider high quality are called ‘authority’ sites. When you build backlinks to your Santa Clarita business website, you should focus on getting links from authority sites. Low quality websites that have little content and few visitors aren’t worth backlinking from.

A backlink is created anytime you put something out there with a link back to your site. For example, your profile at a forum or social media site like Facebook gives you a backlink to your Santa Clarita business. Articles that you submit to directories give you a backlink, but you should be forewarned that the practice of loading articles into article directories carries minimal value after Google’s “Panda” update. If you write guest blog posts and submit them to high-traffic, high-ranking blogs, you’ll get some very nice backlinks to your Santa Clarita business. Your SEO strategy should focus on getting these. Jump on every chance you get to put your Santa Clarita business website’s URL out there.

Submitting your Santa Clarita business website to search engines and building backlinks are just two basic methods you can use to get your site onto the search engine results pages. Hiring someone to do your SEO isn’t completely necessary if you have the time and attention to devote to it consistently; if not, you would be well served to hire a professional for your Santa Clarita business.

Fat pings are something you will hear more about in coming months as SEO gurus try to sell products promoting how much you need them, and how their ‘fat ping product’ will guarantee you higher rankings, blah-blah… Let’s cut to the chase. Fat pings from RSS feeds really are a wonderful thing and something you definitely need to implement on your website for better search engine optimization. The good news — we’re going to show you how to get them completely free.

First let’s answer what is a regular ping. If you have a WordPress website (highly recommended!), then every time you make an update to your site, it sends out a ping to RSS directories that a new post is on your site. The headline is what gets pinged. A fat ping publishes the entire content to the RSS feed, so you not only get a thin little headline but a big fat piece of content besides. Fat pings are great for SEO. There is a whole nerdy discussion about fat pings here, but we always look at things from a business standpoint. What can a fat ping do for your bottom line?

Fat Pings Verify Authorship

The greatest value of a fat ping, in our view, is that it provides authentication of authorship. There are bot scrapers out there that go out looking for content and then mash it up & post it on websites to imply they are the authors. With the Panda update, Google has done a pretty decent job of stomping on the autoposters and aggregators, but even so, what happens sometimes is a scraper will grab content from a poorly indexed site and publish it. But the scraper site is actually better indexed so that content — the forged content — outranks the original author’s content. This is where fat pings come to the rescue

Fat Pings Save the Day

Fat Pings distribute your entire article the moment you hit the publish button, sending your article out to Google et al. and securing your place as the rightful owner of the content. Google finds your content, your site gets ranked, people like you and not the scraped guy, and everyone lives happily ever after. It’s a nice system this fat pinging…

When you publish something on your WordPress website, it automatically gets published to the RSS feed on the site, and distributed and read by any subscriber of that feed. Depending on how highly optimized your RSS feed is, it may also get published to RSS services and picked up as content linking back to your site. Whenever we think of expanding the reach of our audience, we want to be aware of our engagement and our reach… A complete article would do a much better job of hooking a reader than just having a single headline out there, right?

So how do you implement fat pings in your website? If you have a WordPress self-hosted site, it’s super-easy. Just go and install the plugin for fat pings – found here. If you have installed plugins before, it’s very straightforward. But if you need any help, feel free to contact us.

Good luck with your pinging. Go fat pings and get quality SEO for your business.

Mobile Marketing is the specific creation of a presence that is optimized for the mobile platform, acknowledging the rapidly evolved mobile culture we live in. Having a good non-mobile website remains essential to your online business, but with half of your web traffic being mobile — yes, half the users hitting your site are doing so on their iPhones, iPads, Droids, Blackberries and other smart phones — you want to make sure they have an outstanding experience on a mobile website.

If you’re not already engaged in mobile marketing of your business, then you may have a website that is hard to navigate on a mobile device. Or worse, you may have a Flash website that can’t even been SEEN on an iPhone or iPad… Mobile marketing is yet another way of reaching your audience and building your brand, promoting your business and gaining more customers and more sales. Mobile marketing is another tool in the toolbox, but it’s on the order of the hammer and saw. It’s not the 96-piece wrench set.  Not sure where to begin with it? Don’t worry; we’ll offer some helpful mobile marketing tips to get you started.

Branding in Mobile Marketing

Don’t forget branding. In your rush to start mobile marketing, you might forget that your mobile marketing efforts need to be integrated into your larger marketing efforts and your brand. Expanding your brand recognition will help bring you more customers, so don’t forget about your brand when communicating with prospective customers via cellphone.

Make use of QR codes to allow mobile device users to instantly access your marketing content. QR codes are square, black-and-white boxes that have data encoded in them. When a user takes a picture of the QR code with his mobile device’s camera, a decoding app will take the user to a website or show a message. This means your customers don’t have to write down a URL to visit later.

Be sure to send text messages. People usually have a ringer that will go off whenever they receive a text. They also tend to check it right away. Just make sure to send small files such as photos of a new product that you have available, thus allowing the customer the option of receiving texts or not.

Customers love rewards so reward them just for signing up. Just for signing up give them a coupon for a free item when they come back and purchase something else. Since they are giving you their mobile phone number, reward them with something worthwhile that will keep them coming back.

Mobile Marketing the Customer Experience

The customers who are receiving your mobile marketing do not want to have flashy or unclear messages. They want you to get to the point and let them know why you are messaging them. You only have about seven seconds on average to make your point with a mobile user. Do not make them click an image to see the message; get to the point and tell them what the benefits of your message are immediately.

Mobile Marketing business owners take note: mobile internet usage by smart phones

Try to set a budget and stick to it if you want to market effectively. Shooting past your budget can quickly cause your campaign to fall apart, if only because you may start to change how you handle things due to a fear of money. Work meticulously to stay within your budget for mobile marketing success.

Make your mobile ads suitable to small screens and slower speeds or they may not be viewed at all! Most mobile devices have tiny screens and data speeds much slower than a regular PC so design your mobile content to be displayed accordingly or else it may never reach its intended target!

Make sure that your messages are targeted to their purpose in mobile marketing. You won’t have any room for meaningless words here. If the customer cannot understand your message in a few words, then it isn’t even worth contacting them in the first place. You need to be very clear here as to your purpose.

Yes, a good website is essential to an online business, but as you have read, it needs to be properly promoted to your customers. The most helpful way to do this is through mobile marketing. So, what are you waiting for? Use the above tips, and start improving your mobile marketing plan!

That is a complete scam, folks. Google is not in the business of selling anything other than the tiny ads you see when you’re in their search engine. The automated dialer that is “Bob” is a private company that will put you into a series of aggressive upsells and cross-promotions that you’ll never get out of. Please don’t fall for it.

If you have become the victim of this scam, we suggest you contact your credit card company and block any future charges; contact the Federal Trade Commission and file and complaint; and issue a ‘cease & desist’ letter to the company directly. We assume you’ve already tried the third step a number of times; we have heard from business owners who are now our clients who were targeted by unscrupulous companies who were perpetrating this…

If you haven’t yet been victimized, congratulations. If you pick up the phone one day and someone says, “Hi! This is X with Google Placement. If you are a business owner — ” …we suggest introducing them to the sound of your dial tone.

We received a phone call, too. The number that called us was from a (262) area code. Buyer beware.

In a briefing on Thursday, Adobe announced plans to abandon Flash for the mobile platform and commit fully to HTML5 development. This is significant for a number of reasons which I’ll discuss in a just a moment. It marks a longterm struggle between Adobe and Apple that Steve Jobs predicted would mean the demise of Flash on mobile websites. I have been on an anti-Flash soapbox for years now, and this is (in my view) a clear signal to drop whatever remaining Flash web properties or elements you may have and express yourself in other mobile-friendly ways.

Mobile is the future; Google has spoken this, Apple has spoken this (by not supporting Flash on their flagship products like iPhone, iPad and iPhone Touch), and now Adobe has (somewhat) reluctantly come to the table. More accurately, Adobe was already at the table, but they agreed to finally eat their peas and not continue to pound the table that Flash would rule. (As Wired magazine noted, this was an abrupt about-face for Adobe.) Flash stopped ruling 5-6 years ago when savvy business owners realized that as pretty as Flash is online, search engines can’t make heads or tails of the content; to a Google bot, a Flash website is a monolithic blog of clay as much as it is a website. Mobile, iPhones and Steve Jobs drove the final stake in the heart of Flash and Adobe mercifully has pulled the plug. I love pretty websites as much as the next guy,

HTML5 the Future for Business

So Flash website owners, HTML5 is the future, and coincidentally, we got into the HTML5 parade some time back so we’re well positioned to help you move into the present. As Adobe itself noted, “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively.  This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” We completely agree; our mobile website designs are almost exclusively HTML5 mobile websites.

In the past several months, we have been hard at work testing and analyzing all the different mobile platforms and dissecting the benefits and ROI for business owners. It’s one thing to know you need to go to mobile, but it’s quite another to know what to do and how to get there. In that time, we have developed mobile websites using a variety of technologies including WordPress, PHP with CSS and HTML5 on our private network. There is a tremendous amount of junk out there with broken code, half-baked platforms and fly-by-night vendors… While WordPress is by far the best solution a business owner can deploy for a website, it is a bit “heavy” on the code for mobile and is really a different mindset than what is appropriate for mobile. I’ll be discussing this in future articles. For now, I want to make clear that I’m not anti-Wordpress; having developed over 500 WordPress websites, I can say with certainty and experience that there is nothing that provides the same level of design flexibility, search engine optimization and end user ease of use than WordPress.

HTML5 mobile superiority

In mobile, however, HTML5 exemplifies a superiority over other options in the same way WordPress is superior on the web. Adobe noted, HTML5 offers “great options for delivering compelling web and application experiences.” I agree with that. While PHP is a good second choice and is reasonably close to HTML5 in current functionality, HTML5 is a newer technology that offers much more of what a business owner needs and will be able to take advantage of as the mobile web continues to evolve. HTML5 has the best Return on Investment of any other mobile technology we have seen, so we are very excited to be committed to HTML5; and excited to see Adobe is too.

If you are a business owner with a Flash website, you may be wondering what people see when they come to your website on an Apple iPhone or similar mobile device. The short answer is, absolutely nothing — oftentimes, just a black nothingness. If you want to test your site yourself, visit Google’s GoMo. Fair warning: it may truly shock you when you realize how many customers you’ve thrown off the boat because they can’t even see your business on their mobile device.

The other unsettling thing to consider about Flash is how people are receiving content on the internet, and where these trends are going. More and more users are moving to mobile, and it’s estimated by 2013 / 2014 that mobile users will outnumber desktop & laptop users online. That will even further limit access to your customer base if your website is Flash. While we applaud Apple’s efforts to move the universe away from Flash — and rather enjoyed Steve Jobs’ rant against Flash – Apple had their own reasons for doing so — drained iPhone batteries, made Apple devices crash, etc. We have our own: it’s not good business, especially when you’re talking about online business. Particularly when you are talking about optimizing your online business, capturing leads and then converting those leads into a customer base. The mechanism for that conflicts with the thought process behind Flash; we have always opined that websites are workhorses, not pretty baubles. They are (or should be) profit mechanisms or income streams, not tax write-offs.

This is an exciting day for business owners online. HTML5 is a stable, robust platform that is only going to continue to get better and better. Join us as experts in HTML5 and explore the possibilities of mobile optimization for your business.