The HOTH — Day 0.

$300 dollars by Tuesday. That’s all we were aiming for.

When Dax and I created The HOTH, we had no expectations that it would become what it has. That it would come to serve nearly 2,000 agency-level clients. That we’d fulfill over 10,000 link building campaigns. That our team would reach nearly 90 people.

We were just trying to make $300 by Tuesday.

As it happened, we made over 10x that amount from SEOs manually PayPal’ing us and emailing their order inputs to me personally. In those first days, I would respond to all questions, confirm each set of inputs against its PayPal payment and put it into a spreadsheet, where Dax would begin the cantankerous wizardry of our production process. He’d later notify me when it was time to manually mail reports again.

It was not pretty, but we’ve come a long way since.

We now have the tools to serve agencies and professional SEOs of all sizes, accepting 100s of orders at time via API or Bulk Uploader. The workflow management software we’ve built to manage our global, distributed workforce is top-notch, validated by top content organizations. The content distribution technologies we’ve developed make the original HOTH product look like Fisher Price, allowing us to build better, more consistent links than ever before.

Every job Dax and I did in those early days has been automated away or abstracted and elevated by strategic hires.

Clayton Johnson, our COO and first employee, was hired from managing a national screen printing production facility to help us systemize the beast we’d created. Tyron Foston, our CTO, later joined to develop our proven business concept into a full blown technology company.

When The HOTH made more than $300 by Tuesday, I think we got lucky.

But I’m proud that we were smart enough to realize we were getting lucky.

We were lean, not due to hipness or savvy, but out of necessity. We couldn’t afford NOT to be lean. Our minimum viable product was a terribly made, 1-shot YouTube video. Our version 1 website was a Google form. And frankly, especially compared to our current offering, I do not hesitate to say that our original product was shit.

But the market saw our vision. They spoke with their dollars. And we invested those dollars into realizing that vision.

And that brings us to today.

The HOTH — Now.

The challenge of every great product company is to create, prove and scale.

Over the past 2.5 years, we’ve built a product we’re proud of, achieved traction, and now our goal is to serve as many people as possible.

Enter Next Net Media.

Marc Hardgrove and David Martin, Co-Executives of Next Net Media, with HOTH monster (2011).

Dax and I met Marc and David of Next Net Media at our very first conference, PubCon 2011. There was an early mutual respect. Next Net Media had created the original .com of our industry, Backlinks.com, along with countless other webmaster serving properties. Likewise, Marc and David were impressed with the energy, obsession with user experience and resulting humanistic brand Dax and I were building for The HOTH — something that had been previously absent from our industry.

Over the years, we came to learn that Next Net Media served 400,000 publishers, advertisers and SEOs. As we arrived at a point where we would either take investment to scale or align The HOTH with an organization that would allow us to do so, Next Net Media made that decision easy.

After only a few brief conversations with Marc and David, we knew we had a match. Next Net Media would acquire The HOTH as a fully-functional, continuing business unit.

With Next Net Media’s 400,000 users, business development organization and commitment to the SEO industry, we couldn’t ask for better alignment in realizing our goal of serving as many people as possible with The HOTH.

To quote Marc and David, Co-Executives of Next Net Media, “We’ve been in this industry for a decade. It’s extremely competitive and we know that The HOTH is a winner. The product, its rate of growth and the brand, built on commitment to quality and user experience, are inspiring to our entire organization. We’re excited to grow The HOTH brand and infuse our product line with its lessons and momentum.”

What Now? What Does This Mean?

For our customers, employees and distributed workforce of content creators, nothing will change. All orders will continue being fulfilled (6-day turn around as I type!) and all team members will be retained.

Clayton Johnson, COO, and Tyron Foston, CTO, will come on board Next Net Media as Head of Product and Technology, respectively, to continue growing The HOTH product with the leverage of Next Net’s resources. Likewise, Next Net Media will retain The HOTH’s 6-person core team and nearly 80-person distributed workforce.

As for myself and Dax, we’ll be moving to other projects knowing that our baby has graduated and is in good hands. We are confident that The HOTH’s best days are still to come and look forward to seeing the heights it can achieve at Next Net Media.

Read the full news release via Wallstreet Journal here.

(Please direct further media inquiries to alex@thehoth.com)

Thank Yous

If you are reading this, you likely deserve a thank you. Below are a few people who I would like to particularly recognize for their help, support and contribution to this journey.

Our Team
Clayton Johnson
Dax Miller
Tyron Foston
Greg Webb
Demetrius Freeman
Will Magley
Eric Radoux

Next Net Media Management
Marc Hardgrove
David Martin

Our M&A Advisor
David Weisburd (CEO of RoomHunt)

Friends, Colleagues and Inspirations (In no order)
Mike Kofman
John Ramey @ isocket
Gary Sheynkman
Andy Angelos @ Social Katy
Sean Corbet
John-Henry Scherk
Matt Hunckler @ Verge
Jason Shen @ RideJoy
Cesar Cortes @ Ruta N | Startup Weekend
Chris Sharkey @ Bislr
Mai-Li Hammargren @ Mute Watch
Jeremy Shoemaker @ Shoemoney
+ Countless others I’ve forgotten

And thanks to everyone’s parents for making them.

Thank you all x1000000000000000000.

Signing off,

Alex Pyatetsky
CEO, The HOTH Corp.
5/14/2013

The new HOTH Volume Module includes

• Better links powered by The HOTH Network
• Vertically relevant sites
• NEW ‘To Top-Level’ linking to give you more control (see infographic below)

Questions? Comments? Love? Leave them in the comments below!

When you’re working on numerous link building campaigns, it can be hard to keep track of them all. You want to be able to organize by account manager, client, season or anything else that’s important to you.

That’s why we created Tags for The HOTH.

Tags allows you to assign as many organizational tags as you want to any campaign. These aren’t keywords for us to use for link building. Just tags that you can later sort by to make your life easier.

Watch the video above to see Tags for The HOTH in action.

Available now in The HOTH Customer Portal for existing accounts and New Link Building Customers.

Leave your questions, comments and feedback in the comments below!

1. Complementary Products:

Social

GroupHug | Cost: FREE — This is the only other product from us. In short, grouphug allows you to harness the social power of your true fans and supporters to get your message shared every time. Check out the short video on the website for a more detailed explanation.

Content

TextBroker & Scripted | Cost: Varies — We have relationships with both these companies and have had great experiences for content generation needs. Specifially with Scripted, you can order content from an extensive range of options including blog post content, press releases, video scripts and even tweets.

Links

Comment Kahuna | Cost: Free — CK can help you find targeted blogs to comment on, build relationships, and get links back to your site.

Knowem | Cost: $69+ — Knowem allows you to check for the use of your name / brand on popular social networks and will even create the accounts for you for a fee. Great for branding, getting quality links, and ORM content generation.

Link Building Courses | Cost: Varies

• Point Blank SEO LinkBuilding Course
• Distilled University

Link Prospecting | Cost: $99+ / Varies

• Ontolo

Getting Local Links

2. Improvements to Customer Dashboard:

Easy Re-Ordering
This feature is added and LIVE! You can now easily re-order previous pacakges with 1 click. You can also re-order multiple packages at a time. Check it out in your customer dashboard.

3. Higher Quality Links

New Volume Module / Options

Internal Volume Module (Network) — Over the last few months we’ve worked to bring our Volume Module internal.  In the past we would slow drip articles to open submission sites.  We wanted more control over the quality of the sites we were submitting to so we brought it internal, giving us 100% control.  Bringing the network internally also allows us to constantly rotate new high quality sites into it so our service is always improving.

New options (live soon)!:

Volume Module — Direct To Site

Volume Module — To Top Levels

Volume Module — Off

4. Faster turnaround

Right now, we stand at about ~2 weeks delivery from the time you place your order. This allows us time to send the order to our content creation team, pass through QC, go to our top level team, go back to QC, go into production, and back into QC before the reports are sent.

We always working to improve our turnaround time and we work very hard to keep it at 2 weeks and below. We know for agencies and consultants that have monthly billing cycles this is very important. By placing your packages monthly, you’ll ensure new links coming in by your next billing cycle.

5. Discount Program

We have a discount program for bulk buyers here. You can save 12.5% on every order!

6. Better Explanation of Reports

New reports with better descriptions are live! You can download your reports in the customer portal.

7. More Webinars
We have a few webinars in the pipeline coming up, but in the meantime, here are our previous webinars:

• 2013 Keyword Strategy Cheat-Sheet
• Everything You Need to Know About Panda
• Link Building Pyramid — Replay not released, but you can find an overview of the webinar here (thanks Keith!), and a condensed version of the material available via SEW

8. Repeat Inputs Option

This feature is now up and running.  You can easily re-order previous packages with just a few clicks in your customer dashboard by clicking the re-order button right next to the order number.

9. Complimentary Blogger product

This is not currently in the pipeline.

10. Keyword analysis & SERP Tracking

Keyword research
Many of our customers expressed interest in help with keyword research and selection.  This isn’t a service that we offer since every campaign has different goals, but here are some helpful links that could set you in the right direction.

• HOTH 2013 Keyword Strategy Cheat-Sheet
• The Viperchill guide to Keyword Research
• Distilled U — Keyword research - (You can make a free account and access the keyword research module)

Rank Tracking
We will never build out a rank tracking tool because there are so many fanastic products on the market. Check out some of our favorites -

• Authority Labs
• Serpfox

–

Thanks again for all your feedback.  If you have any questions or comments for us, just drop us a line!

Trying to HOTH the SERPs into submission without a solid keyword strategy in place is like playing blindfolded golf with a sledgehammer. You’ll hit something – not necessarily the ball and rarely in the right direction.

In the wake of this year’s Google updates, many of you have asked us for feedback with your keyword strategies. Accordingly, we’ve created this resource to help you improve your swing and get that ball in the hole more frequently.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Keyword Basics

Keyword research is a nuanced skillset comprised of equal parts art and science.

Accordingly, If you’re not confident in your abilities yet, there are some fantastic resources waiting for your consumption. If words like ‘longtail’ and ‘commercial intent’ don’t play a central role in your understanding of SEO, you’ll want to read these ASAP.

• KWR101: SEO Moz Beginners Guide
  Covers: keyword value, longtail theory, commercial intent, keyword mining tools and methods
• KWR201: ViperChill Keyword Research
  Covers 101 topics in further depth plus advanced tools and methods.
• Recommended KW Discovery Tools
  Google Keyword Tool — Every SEOs Starting Point. Free.
  Serp IQ – Awesome keyword discovery, competition assessment, and on-site auditing tool. Freemium with 7-day free trial.

The Rules of Sane
Keyword Selection.

As a rule of thumb, we encourage SEOs to go for “easy wins*” over epic conquests. We’d rather rank an achievable term like “human resources management software” in a few months than embark on multi-year quest for a diffused head term like “HR.”

Why?

• You’ll rank faster,
• With less links,
• For terms with higher intent, yielding more conversions on your site (and more money in your pocket).

Conversely, let’s consider the downsides of conquesting for short-tail, head terms.

• You front-load all of your risk for an illusive, lottery-sized pay off in the end. By contrast, pursuing long tails allows you to steadily build traffic to your site, generating real-time ROI, which can be reinvested in more real-time growth. If a ranking will take over a year to achieve, you should expect to go through 2+ Google updates in that time. Who knows if your early efforts will even carry weight by the end?
• Over reliance on non-diversified, short tail rankings is a recipe for bankruptcy. The nature of SEO is that all rankings are not permanent. You may rank at the top for 3 months or 3 years, but you should expect your reign for any 1 term to come to an end sooner or later. When that happens, make sure you have diversified traffic sources, including a variety of organic keywords you can fall back on. Disproportionate focus on short-tail terms over long-tail ones puts you in an all-or-nothing game that you’re going to lose.
• The math just isn’t in your favor. Google keyword tool showing you 50,000 monthly searches for your pet term? Party! Right? Not quite. Even at position 5 for that term, with a click through rate less than 5%, your best hope is 2,500 monthly visits to your site. Alternatively, if you pursue 25 terms with 2,000 monthly searches each and achieve an average ranking of 3 for each one, you’d see 4,900 monthly visitors to your site. In short, 2,500 less targeted, centralized-risk visitors or 4,900 more targeted, diversified-risk visitors. Which would you rather have?

*Not all “easy wins” are truly easy per se, but they have a solid chance of yielding ROI. Conquests, not so much.

How to Find Easy Wins

• Use SEMRush (freemium) to find keywords that you’re already ranking for and improve those rankings. Pushing your page 2 rankings to page 1 can be an easy, low cost way to increase valuable organic traffic to your site. (Tip: While you’re in SEM Rush, spy on your competitors’ terms!)
• Don’t have an SEM Rush account? No problem. Check your analytics. Keywords that haven’t been intentionally optimized, but already produce a trickle of traffic are likely ripe for an easy SERP boost. (Tip: Investigate conversion rates in addition to traffic volumes to ensure that you’re investing in the most worthwhile terms).
• Of course, use the Google Keyword tool. Sort by monthly searches and make sure to pay attention to terms well under 5,000 searches per month. Keep in mind that low search volumes are not synonymous with “ease of ranking.” You can use tools like SEO Quake and Open Site Explorer to manually investigate sites that are currently ranking for your terms. Alternatively, expedite the process with SerpIQ, an awesome, streamlined competitive research tool.

Now that you have a solid list of viable keywords, let’s get ready to…

WAIT! Before You Begin New Campaigns

Before you go on a link building/on-site optimizing extravaganza, there are a few things you should do before actually implementing your keyword strategy in 2013.

In 2012, Google declared all-out war against all types of over optimization. If your title tags (and other on-site elements) are stuffed or your anchor distribution is weighted too heavily on commercial terms, you run a much higher risk of your site being penalized.

Conducting an audit of your onsite and offsite SEO is important before beginning any new campaigns.

First, check your analytics for any previous penalizations and try to match them to dates from Google’s update history. Small dips are inevitable, but landslides suggest that you should pay particular attention to changes introduced by that update.

No landslides? Great. Proceed to Go and collect $200. Time to check your site for over optimization.

Look closely for anything that could be considered “stuffing.” In particular, inspect for the following:

• All title tags unique.
• No more than 2 commercial keywords per title.
• Natural anchor text distribution (checked via Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer – both freemium and awesome). We recommend that naked anchors (e.g. example.com, www.example.com, http://www.example.com, etc.) make up at least 40% of your anchor profile. We prefer 50%, just to play it safe. Likewise, if you’re not getting natural anchors already (i.e. click here, more info, learn more, etc.) consider throwing those in as well.
• Aim for an anchor profile where no term comprises 30% or more. Yes, this includes branded and 1-word anchors. More is no longer better with anchor text optimization.
• Additionally, avoid stuffing locations for multi-location businesses in ways that aren’t helpful to users.
• Lastly, meta keyword/description stuffing. Stay classy. Don’t do it.

“Oh crap, I’m totally over optimized.”

No worries. The HOTH is particularly well equipped to remedy this (as are many other link building products/services).

• Don’t have enough naked anchors? Run campaigns with naked anchors until you do. Despite popular belief, this is far from worthless. These days Google cares just as much about the quality of the link (e.g. uniqueness, relevance of content, authority of site, etc.) as it does about the specific anchors — arguably more. Plus, Google is pretty good at figuring out what terms to rank your pages for based on the keywords in your titles, the commercial anchor texts that do link to you and your internal link structure.
• Still worried that Google won’t know what to rank your pages for? Don’t be. Just build internal links to your target pages with desired keyword anchors. Ideally these should be in-content links throughout the site.

“Seriously though. Does all this on-site stuff matter? Isn’t it all about links?”

As a link building company, it would be too easy to say “yes, it’s all about links,” but at this point, it’s not. The on-site stuff does matter.

After detailed analysis of hundreds of HOTH campaigns, there is almost always something wrong with on-site SEO where rankings have struggled. Accordingly, it’s safe to say that on-site optimization is more important than ever.

Some additional issues to consider

• Canonicalization (Resource)
• Duplicate content throughout the site (Resource | Copyscape)
• Internal linking
• Blank pages
• Duplicate titles
• Making sure your target keywords are used in titles, h1s, and elsewhere in content

Developing a sound keyword strategy and auditing your site, as we’ve detailed above, can literally be the difference between thousands of dollars wasted and fully realized ROI.

Ready. Set. HOTH.
(aka. What to do at the HOTH Order Screen)

The HOTH let’s you use up to 3 URLs with up to 5 Keywords for each order. This allows you to build a diverse anchor profile with plenty of naturalized and naked links. Click image for more info.

All steps completed? Great. Now you’re ready to start submitting orders to rank your URLs for your target keywords.

With The HOTH, we let you target up to 3 URLs with 5 keyphrases for each order. We want you to submit a diverse set of keywords including naked and naturalized terms.

You can be as aggressive as you’d like, but we recommend submitting 50% naked and naturalized terms. Likewise, we recommend changing your anchors monthly to keep your link profile healthy, natural and diverse.

Questions? Leave them in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe (see red box below)!

Note: These guidelines are good for any type of link building you do. It’s just that this is our blog, so… you know…

A while ago we sent out a customer survey to learn what new features you wanted to see in The HOTH. By far, the most requested was a Customer Portal. And we’re super excited to bring you just that today!

The HOTH customer portal brings together all of your  data, freeing your inbox, eliminating deliverability issues and creating greater transparency in every order. We’ve also built tools to serve the unique needs of agencies and SEO professionals, including bulk order uploading and a soon to be released ordering & reporting API (which will be a game changer, by the way). All of this means that you can build more links, spend less time and make more money than ever before.

Check out the video tour above or get started now!

ATTN: EXISTING HOTH CUSTOMERS, YOU MAY ALREADY HAVE AN ACCOUNT!

If you’ve placed any HOTH orders in the past 3 months, you probably already have a Customer Portal account. You should have received a system email with your credentials. If you can’t find it or aren’t sure if you have an account yet, go here and click “Forgot password.” If you already have an account, your password will be emailed to you immediately. Otherwise, you’ll want to create a new one by placing your first order at the new http://www.thehoth.com/order.

As always, we’re immensely grateful for the opportunity to serve you. It’s been an amazing journey since we started together in September 2010, and we’re just getting started!

Tell us what you think about the new Customer Portal in the comments below OR get started now! Questions and feedback welcome.

How we feel about Google’s Penguin update and you probably do too.

Cynical title, ain’t it? Frankly, I’ve been putting off writing this “Penguin post” for 2 weeks.

Why?

Because I have a problem with talking about things I don’t actually know about.

The unfortunate state of affairs right now is that nobody really knows much about what’s going on. Sure, there are plenty of gurus writing blog posts on “how to recover after Penguin,” but the irony is that there are almost no blog posts called “How I Actually Recovered After Penguin” (hint: link bait opportunity, nerds. Get on it.). In other words the vast majority of what the gurus and professional SEO journalists are saying is theoretical fluff, much of it contradicting, with very few real case studies behind it.

With our shared sentiments on the table, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work. My goal is to give you a glimpse into what we’re seeing, what others are saying, what kind of data is out there, what it means, and what to do about it.

Edit #1: Despite the passive aggressive headline, it appears that the discerning folks on Twitter have deemed this article helpful. Yay.

4500 Words on Everything We Don’t Know About Penguin and What Not to Do About It truth.thehoth.com/seo/penguin/ <- A++ would read again.

— Matthew Brown (@MatthewJBrown) May 18, 2012

Finally something worth reading about Google’s Penguin update (from @the_hoth): ow.ly/b0Byk

— Eppie Vojt (@eppievojt) May 18, 2012

RT @eppievojt: Finally something worth reading about Google’s Penguin update (from @the_hoth): ow.ly/b0Byk

— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) May 18, 2012

High 5 for this article! — 4500 Words on Everything We Don’t Know About Penguin… truth.thehoth.com/seo/penguin/ via @The_HOTH — thx for the mention!

— potpiegirl (@potpiegirl) May 19, 2012

4500 Words on Everything We Don’t Know About Penguin & What Not to Do About It: raven.im/JiqTFP Long but worthwhile read via @the_hoth

— Raven Tools (@RavenTools) May 22, 2012

Edit #2: This post was intended to be shared with our clients only. To our surprise, it went pretty  huge on Twitter (see conversation) and inbound.org. As a result, some unintended readers have brought up a concern that this analysis is biased, somehow favors our own link building product, etc.

To be clear, this is not the case. This article was written for people who already bought our product. It does offer some perspective on what the update means for them, the culmination of which is “there is no noticeable correlation” and “there are no silver bullets,” not “buy buy buy!” 

In short, this article is not intended to sell anybody anything. It is intended to help our community, and based on the above feedback from Twitter, it appears to have done just that. If you are not a user of our product and have concerns about it, first make sure you watch our homepage video so you actually understand it. Next, if you still have product related questions, please contact us.

Neither I nor any member of my team will be fielding sales questions on this blog post. 

Step 1: What Are We Dealing With Here? (In Theory, Anyway)

Penguin is the long awaited “over-optimization penalty” and rumblings of its coming were apparent months ahead. If you watched our Panda 3.3 webinar, we were already advising our customers to diversify their link profiles heavily with natural anchor texts (i.e. click here, more info, learn more, etc.) and naked anchor texts (i.e. <a href=“http://mysite.com”>http://mysite.com</a>).

Almost unanimously, we’ve heard this to be the case. If your anchor text profiles are heavily over optimized for your “money keywords” you may have gotten slapped or the anchor text relevancy factor may have merely been devalued. Which of the 2 it is tough to determine, but since we know that negative SEO works now, we can bet its a penalty, which is good because penalties are reversible.

It seems that Google is less interested in particular keywords, and more in their meanings. Applied, this means much better treatment of synonyms (this official statement uses the word synonym 20 times alone). Ideally this would mean that when I search for something like “emergency room chicago,” the search engine would be smart enough to look at available results for terms like “hospital chicago,” “emergency care chicago,” “ambulance chicago” and deliver me a SERP consisting of the most qualified sites from all of them. For us as SEOs, this is a signal, more than ever, that we should be diversifying anchor texts heavily, not just on 2–5 terms, but upwards of 10–30 terms in the long run. With all of this said, whether this synonym recognition is actually in effect is still questionable and its quality even more so (more on this below).

That’s half the story anyway. According to the wonderful wizard of Google, aka Matt Cutts (see official statement), Penguin is also intended to devalue/penalize sites for links from irrelevant pages. To be clear, the severity of irrelevance that Matt suggests they’re looking for is absurd. The outright stupidity of someone who’d build links this way is beyond my comprehension.

For your convenience, here is Matt’s example of building irrelevant links in 2012.

An Example of Links Coming from Irrelevant Content. Who Does This Anyway?

I’m not sure if this is a joke or not. I’ve interacted with over 1000 SEOs in my career and I’ve literally never met anyone that knowingly built links like this.

No worries, Matt’s announcement is a full on retro party, featuring throwbacks such as “we don’t like keyword stuffing,” screenshots and all.

As I’ve previously described, this is what I call the world of appearances. It’s the song and dance Google puts on and expects us to believe. There are 3 main groups of people who believe this stuff — the media, investors and sheep. Don’t get taken to slaughter. There’s a lot more here than meets the eye.

The World of Reality

Right now the SERPs are awful.

I mean, truly abysmal. I don’t mean this from an SEO’s perspective, I mean it from a search engine user’s perspective. The crap that I see popping up for search terms is worse now than it was 5 years ago.

Chris Rempel says it fantastically in his very thorough Penguin analysis -

Anyone with half a brain can plainly see that Google’s current SERPs, spanning almost every vertical, are some of the lowest quality results that we’ve seen in years. Decades, even. There are literally forum profiles and empty blogspot/web 2.0 pages ranking for some of the web’s most competitive keywords in every major commercial market…

I’ve spent the past week pouring over hundreds SERPs, and I’m consistently seeing low-quality, and in many cases outright nonsense, ranking on Page 1 for basically any high-comp keyword. Of course, there’s the nearly-guaranteed presence of WikiPedia/Squidoo/eHow/YouTube/BlogSpot (and equvalents) across the gamut – irrespective of quality or even relevance. Clearly, the domain-authority filter has been jacked up, way too much.

Maybe that’s the “3%” that Matt Cutts had mentioned was affected by Penguin. Perhaps the other 97% of Google’s results comprise searches like “Why do hippies smell?”, “Who would win in a fight Chuck Norris or Moby?” and other completely unprofitable keywords that simply don’t matter, to anyone.

Although I can give examples for days, here is a great one from Jennifer Ledbetter, a former Google fangirl who really used to believe all of Google’s hooplah about sites ranking just because they have great content and structure (which definitely does help, but obviously isn’t enough). Below is a screen shot from Jeniffer’s analysis on how bad the SERPs are right now.  This is the SERP for “make money online,” an absurdly competitive term with literally thousands of active competitors.

Out of thousands of qualified, active competitors, Google somehow chooses to rank this no-name blogspot blog on page 1.

Amongst some questionable results on the front page, the dodgiest by far is a no-name Blogspot blog. But maybe we should give Google the benefit of the doubt? Maybe this blogger is a rising star being awarded for his incredible content and meteoric rise to popularity? Or not…

This site ranks on the first page for “make money online” after Penguin. Wow.

Yes, it is a blank Blogspot without so much as a single post on it that ranks for “make money online,” one of the most competitive terms out there. Note: if you perform this search right now, you won’t find this ranking anymore, but based on the fact that folks like Chris Rempel and I continue to see this crap over hundreds of SERPs, I’m pretty sure this one was a manual fix from the folks at Google.

This is the reality of the SERPs right now, and it’s not you who should be scared.

Here’s the thing, this is far more dangerous for Google than it is for SEOs.

To understand why, you have to understand the core of Google’s business model.

Google’s key asset is the quality of its search results. The more people search, the more search result pages are shown, the more opportunities Google has to sell those eyeballs to advertisers. Searches are Google’s inventory, just as any website that sells ads treats its page views as inventory. Decreased quality of search results means users (sooner or later) begin to lose faith in the search engine and begin to look elsewhere. As searchers, we’re already doing it with sites like Yelp for local information and this scares the crap out of the folks at Google.

The One Equation Google Management Understands Better Than Anything Else

Lost Faith = Lost Eyeballs = Lost Inventory = Lost Revenues = Lost Stock Valuations = Lost Management Seats = #$%^&*

AdWords (aka PPC advertising) is Google’s primary revenue engine and always has been. To date, they have yet to create another industry leading, monetized product. Yelp is beating them in local. Groupon and Living Social are beating Google Offers in daily deals. And Facebook is absolutely obliterating the joke known as Google Plus+. YouTube is certainly not the king money maker in the building (extremely rough estimates suggest 6%). Search is where it’s at for them (and content network as well, although that has much lower margins).

Google management is aware that search is their golden goose, and the vitality of their search product is virtually synonymous with the company as a whole.

Right now, search is in trouble.

While Google puts on its pretty face for the media, claiming that this update is a huge improvement in SERP quality, this is the first time we’ve seen them setup a “holy s#*%! What’d you do to my site?!” form (whether you should fill out this form is discussed in the “Action Items” below).

With absolutely abysmal SERPs for so many key terms, something’s gotta give. There has to be another update coming.

Our Opinion: Don’t Panic. Lots of Great Sites Got Hit. We Have No Clue What’s Coming. But Something Has to be Coming.

I think investing a ton of time, resources and money into changing ship right now is kind of insane. The SERPs aren’t good. That’s not a sustainable situation for Google. Who knows where you’ll rank after the next update or what kind of different strategic changes you’ll have to make then.

Also, based on updates coming out every couple of weeks, its probably safe to expect another change coming sooner than later. Yippee.

But What About Over-optimization, Sites Are Being Penalized For That, Right?

Yeah, but honestly, the data is a lot muddier than you’d think. There are a TON of “over optimized” sites that show perfectly fine rankings and no penalization.

The folks at MicrositeMasters, a rank tracking company, put together their before-and-after Penguin data for thousands of sites they track rankings for to make sense of this. To date, it is the most insightful dataset we’ve seen come out about the Penguin update. With this said it has some serious flaws, which I’ll explain below.

First of all, we see that there is a decent distribution of sites of all levels of anchor text optimization, from 0% to 100% “money terms,” amongst those that did not get penalized.

Amongst sites that did not get penalized, there is a surprisingly even distribution of anchor text optimization.

In order to conclude that sites with less anchor optimization were safer, we’d expect to see a downward sloping trend, with the highest level of survivors at 0% and the lowest level at 100%. We don’t see that here at all. Likewise, why the 0% and 5% columns are empty is unclear. In general, there are no conclusions to be drawn from this graph.

Around 65% anchor text optimization for money terms, we begin to see sites getting penalized. With that said, the more predictable penalties only seem to kick in around 90%.

This data is a bit more insightful. Amongst the sites that did get penalized, we see a threshold of about 65% anchor text optimization before penalties begin to happen. Even so, it seems to be a fairly small percentage of sites. It’s only at 90%-100% that we see pretty consistent penalties. Again, due to issues with this data that I’ll explain below, I’m reluctant to state either of these casual observations as conclusive claims. With that said, it’s probably smart to keep your anchor text optimization at 60% or below (shameless plug: HOTH users can easily do this by submitting 2 or more natural/naked anchors for any URL targeted).

This chart shows that sites with branded anchors and naked anchors (e.g. URLs as anchors) statistically were less likely to be penalized than those without any.

This chart confirms what we told people back in our Panda 3.3 webinar, use branded, natural and naked anchors to stay on the Google’s good side. It makes your anchor text profile look natural. And Google likes natural.

So yeah, clearly more sites are getting penalized for over optimizing than not, but there’s still a huge percentage of over-optimized sites sitting pretty. Likewise, countless content-leaders in their category have had their rankings absolutely smashed. There clearly are a ton of confounding factors here, based on how many 100% anchor text optimized survivors there are alone.

In Chris Rempel’s words -

many salt-of-the-earth publishers (like AskTheBuilder.com, DaniWeb, and countless others) were severely affected by Penguin. Sites that are in some cases over a decade old, comprised of thousands of pages of quality, unique content, and plenty of social/brand signals – and they’re tanking, hard. These are sites that provide an awesome user experience.

Google claims that they are rewarding high quality sites. Their SERPs make it clear that they are rewarding scrapers, irrelevant, outdated web 2.0 pages, generic “slightly relevant” domains, and YouTube.

The Other Supposed Piece of Puzzle — Irrelevant Links

Based on their dataset, Microsite Masters concluded that having links from irrelevant sites is actually a bigger predictor of whether a site would be penalized by Penguin or not.

Unfortunately, I view this as a total misread of the data.

Tons of non-penalized sites have 0% links from relevant sites. This data suggests that having a higher percentage of links from relevant sites doesn’t necessarily keep your site safer.

Like the previous graph that showed a huge number of 100% anchor text optimized sites ranking just fine after Penguin, this one shows that plenty of sites with 0% links from relevant sites are ranking fine as well. The distribution above and below 50% link relevance looks virtually identical. Based on this data, we cannot conclude that more links from relevant sites means additional safety from Penguin.

Finally, it seems we can conclude that the less links you have from relevant sites, the more likely you are to get penalized by Penguin. Unfortunately, this data doesn’t say that. Explanation below.

If you’re like me, upon looking at this graph, you think “look, pages with 0% links from relevant sites obviously get penalized, and there’s a heightened probability of getting penalized until you reach 30%!” Unfortunately, you cannot arrive at this conclusion from this data.

Warning: $#*% is about to get mathy.

In order to make a comparison like “sites that have 20% of links coming from relevant sites are 3x more likely to get penalized than sites with 30% of links coming from relevant sites,” we’d have to know what percentage of sites at the 20% level got penalized and what percentage at the 30% level got penalized. THIS DATA SET DOES NOT TELL US THIS. Instead it tells us what percentage of all penalized sites in this sample had 20% relevant links and what percentage had 30% relevant links. This does not allow us to make any comparative claims regarding likelihood of getting penalized.

Ok. I probably just confused the crap out of you. Here’s a simple metaphor to clarify.

Imagine I have 50 very short basketball players and 5 very tall basketball players. I have each player attempt a slam dunk. Of the 50 short players, 25 can do it. Of the 5 tall players, all 5 can do it. We can make a comparative claim here (sample sizes aside) that since short players can dunk 50% of the time and tall players can dunk 100% of the time, tall players are twice as likely to dunk than short players. If we treated this data the way Microsite Masters treated theirs, we’d report that 83% of successful dunkers were short, while 16% were tall. While this is factually accurate, it tells us nothing about the likelihood of a tall player dunking compared to a short one. So when you see that huge bar at 0%, that tells you nothing about it’s actual likelihood of getting a site penalized in comparison to higher levels. Sucks, huh?

I know what you’re thinking right now.

“Ugh! Science is so annoying! I’m obviously looking at a compelling graph. Can’t I make some conclusion?”

For the most part, no. But let’s humor ourselves and pretend like we are looking at data that can speak somewhat probabilistically (note: the only reason it would is if we invented this convenient reasoning). The chart for penalized sites shows us that as long as you have 10% relevant links, your likelihood of getting penalized is way less than if you have 0% (which is weird because, again, 0% is the category of highest survivors as well). Anything more than 10% of relevant links only produces a marginally better chance of not getting penalized. Likewise, we see no shortage of sites at 50–90% relevant links, which most people would call “squeaky clean,” still getting slammed.

Ultra Unscientific Conclusion: Get At Least 10% Of Your Links from Relevant Sites.

Why I Think The Relevant Site Filter Can’t Be Right

As one commenter in the MicroSite Masters article pointed out, an “irrelevant sites” filter would effectively value a New York Times link less than some blog roll from any industry friend. Logically, this is kind of nuts and I don’t think Google would want to do this. Often, non-subject matter specific sites (aka “irrelevant sites” or at least “not particularly relevant sites”) are the most influential and independent. If links from irrelevant sites really do produce a ranking drop after Penguin (which, again, based on the data, we have little reason to believe), I’m fairly confident it will either be rolled back or heavily toned down in the long run.

The other sacred cow that Google would be slaying if it did introduce an irrelevant sites filter/penalty is that of virality. Matt Cutts has said “just create great content and people will link to it!” so many times it makes my ears bleed when I hear it. But that’s just the thing. Pages, as they become more and more popular, increasingly get more and more irrelevant links. Likewise, if you’ve ever gotten a link from Huffington Post, Tech Crunch, Wallstreet Journal or any other huge publication, you know that its going to be syndicated by hundreds of sites. These sites, are likely “irrelevant” as well. Are we supposed to believe that there is a Wallstreet Journal penalty? Personally, I think that sounds totally nuts.

What Does This All Mean For The HOTH & Our Users?

(Disclaimer: I’m going to speak about The HOTH product in this section. As such, it may be biased, but my goal is to be as honest as possible and address our customers’ concerns.)

To date, we’ve worked on over 4000 campaigns, and roughly 8000 websites. If I told you that not a single site we’ve worked on was affected by Penguin, I’d be lying through my teeth. Likewise, for you to have that expectation would be a bit unreasonable as well. With that said, it’s with some relief that we have not heard a unanimous cry from our customers that their sites have been penalized. Some certainly have, but nothing above industry average, which is the best any of us can ask for when even the squeakiest of clean sites are getting hit.

In short, we don’t see any correlation between HOTH link building and penalization.

As far as diversifying your anchors, The HOTH is kind of the perfect tool to do that with. We give you 5 keyword slots per URL and you can submit naturalized anchors (i.e. click here, more info, learn more, etc.) or naked anchors (i.e. http://brandname.com, brandname.com, brand-name, etc.) in them. This means you can use The HOTH to naturalize your anchor text distribution.

We’ve heard different theories, but there seems to be a consensus that you should have 50%+ non-optimized anchors.

Likewise, from the perspective of relevant pages, all of the pages that link to you from The HOTH are relevant. Literally, every last one has custom written content that is relevant to your subject matter. The top-level properties are specifically on subdomains optimized for your subject matter, meaning they have site-wide relevance. Meanwhile, the rest of the links, following from our viral link structure, mimic the kinds of links you’d get as a result of a Huffington Post article being syndicated. Again, the the virality concept is one of the most sacred cows for the search algorithm. To penalize sites that have gotten links as a result of some sort of viral distribution or syndication would effectively create a Wallstreet Journal Penalty. But clearly, that’s not happening.

We’re keeping our footprint squeaky clean while we move towards better verticalization of our links. Likewise, with HOTH Plus+, you can now have content written by 100% US educated, talented writers who produce SEO copy to the highest standards of readability. All of this means that you can continue using The HOTH confidently.

As always, we advise that you use it as a tool in your toolbox and not as a silver bullet. In SEO, there are no silver bullets, and with time, as the algorithm becomes increasingly more complex, there will be fewer still. Use us as a fantastic tool, but if the Microsite Masters data tells us anything, those 10% of links from relevant/authority sites that are the biggest difference between penalized sites and safe sites are still on you.

Actionable Items

1. Keep calm. Don’t panic. Change will come again, probably soon.
2. Rough rules of thumb (based on Microsite Masters’ data analysis above): Keep 10% of your of your link profile from relevant sites and and at least 35% of your anchor texts natural/not-optimized.
3. Analyze your actual SERPs. Use Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, and Majestic SEO to analyze who is ranking in your niche. Do you see any trends for sites that are ranking? What is their anchor distribution like? See what you can learn about what Google is actually favoring in your SERPs by analyzing the winners and adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.
4. Use a well rounded link building strategy, such as the one we taught in our Link Building Pyramid webinar earlier this year (full webinar unfortunately not available due to corrupt recording, but here is a condensed version via PubCon). Don’t put all your eggs in 1 basket. Like any investment, building all the same kind of links is not sound.
5. Maximize the value out of every visitor that comes to your site. STOP SQUANDERING YOUR TRAFFIC. If you don’t already live the age-old advertising adage “the money is in the list,” now is the time to start. This means you should be retargeting your visitors with services like AdRoll, split testing the living crap out of your site, and doing everything you can to get visitors on your mailing list (whether they buy or not). So many marketers squander their traffic by only giving themselves 1 shot with visitors. Find ways to turn a visit into a relationship that may yield many touch points and many possible sales down the road, not just 1. I know for a fact we’ve gotten some of our biggest customers because they visited us once, saw us all over the internet for a while thanks to retargeting and finally became curious enough to give us a shot. If the only part of the funnel you’re interested is the mouth (i.e. traffic generation) you will find yourself extremely frustrated over time and ultra susceptible to quirks that come up with different traffic sources. In my opinion, understanding, building and optimizing sales funnels versus merely getting traffic is the definitive difference between a bonafide internet marketer and an SEO technician. There is nothing wrong with either, but the prior has a career even if Google gets nuked tomorrow.
6. Look for guest posting and press opportunities. There are a billion articles written about the art of guest posting so I won’t waste your time beating a dead horse. Just do it. This will get you really solid authoritative links and, if your guest posts are at least decent, you’ll get great qualified traffic back to your site. In many cases, the market value of a guest post can easily be hundreds or thousands of dollars, while the return may be higher than any banner ad. The only thing it costs is brainpower and time. Likewise, press is easier than ever with services like HARO that will send you emails every day packed with requests from journalists for qualified sources. Pitch the ones that you feel you’re qualified for and you may get some press. Again, this is super smart because it drives qualified traffic, builds reputational assets, and depending on the quality of the sites you get published on, will likely result in a ton more syndicated links from elsewhere. Don’t have time to reply to HARO? No problem. There’s an app for that.
7. Watch our Panda 3.3 webinar. We basically called all the warning signs of Penguin, over a month before its release and adjusted our product accordingly. Many of those ideas are shadowed in this article, but you can get more depth on what’s been going on with Google over the past few months, what we’re doing about it and what you can too.
8. A huge portion of SERPs now contain results linked to a specific author. Whether this is causal or correlative is hard to tell, but its pretty safe to say that Google is going to give more credit to content associated with trusted author accounts over time. Now seems like a good time to set yours up. Here are the official Google instruction on how to setup your author profile.
9. Stay curious. In the words of Chris Rempel, “the fat lady has not sung.” Pay attention to the SERPs. Analyze your competitors. Notice changes. And give yourself the benefit of the doubt that it’s not necessarily you who is screwing up, but Google (at least sometimes). This will keep you sane, but more importantly, it will give you the perspective not to ditch everything you know every time there’s a bump in road and over-invest into appeasing Google’s latest temper tantrum. This update has literally been out for 3 weeks now. Our standard advice to anyone doing any kind of SEO work is to watch for changes in the SERPs for 3–6 weeks from the time of the initial change — even for something as simple as link building. For something as major as this, I’d definitely recommend the same.
10. Evolve.  As you look at the serps, you may find many new opportunities to experiment with.  Right now, large web 2.0 sites (i.e. tumblr, blogspot, wordpress, youtube) seem to be ranking abnormally high.  If you have the bandwidth, move quick and exploit these opportunities. If you don’t, don’t fret. This probably isn’t something that’ll make or break you in the future.

What NOT To Do

1. DO NOT file a re-inclusion request unless you’ve been de-indexed. This seems to be a popular move amongst panickers. If you can type in your sites URL into the Google search bar and it finds your site, you haven’t been de-indexed. In this case, filling out a reinclusion request makes about as much sense as filling out your death certificate when you have the flu.
2. DO NOT assist Google on its crusade. Google has created a page for you to assist them in screwing over sites. The reasons why you shouldn’t do this are endless. First there is the karmic factor. You can bet its a matter of time before someone does the same to you. Then there is the fact that just because Google slaps one of your competitors doesn’t mean you will necessarily rank any higher. Generally, this is a huge waste of time and only invites greater scrutiny into your particular SERPs, which is something that almost never benefits anyone.
3. This one is not a strict “do not,” but I personally wouldn’t fill out Google’s Penguin Feedback Form (aka “AHHH! WHAT’D YOU DO TO MY SITE?!?!?!?!” form). First of all, as a rule of thumb, any time you ask for a manual review, you are usually asking for trouble. Reviewers are not interested in helping you. Just because you requested it doesn’t mean they’re magically on your side. And more importantly, I just haven’t heard of it helping anyone yet, so it seems like a waste of time. Proceed at your own risk.

Today, we’re extremely excited to announce the  The HOTH 3, our most effective, safest and most consistent seo link building solution to date.

The HOTH 2 was an important phase in the product’s evolution. It served over 3000 campaigns. In that time, we acquired almost 1000 of the world’s top SEOs as our clients. We’ve kept our ear to the ground, stayed humble and listened to your feedback. Likewise, we’ve paid close attention to the changes in the search engines and adapted to stay several steps ahead.

The HOTH 3 includes over 50 individual
improvements, based on your feedback.

Here are the 7 that you need to know about.

• Better Content — Hands down, the #1 request we’ve received since beginning The HOTH is better written content. We’re happy to announce our tightest content standards and most effective copywriter training program to date. We’re extremely picky in who we bring on board, often sifting through 50–100 applicants just to find a good one. Furthermore, we’ve invested in fulltime staff devoted to quality control while keeping the price exactly the same to you. We recognize that an investment in quality is an investment in your loyalty and a savings in averted support.

  Likewise, the launch of The HOTH 3, marks the release of HOTH Plus+ from private beta. HOTH Plus+ makes The HOTH the first 1-stop link building product to offer 100% US college-educated copywritten content! Learn more below.

• Panda Proofing — In 2011, Google announced its now infamous usability filter, The Panda Update. Panda drops site’s rankings based on poor usability. This usability data is collected via Google Analytics, Google Chrome, and other data sources. We’ve monitored these developments closely to improve the product and keep it future-proof (check out our insanely popular webinar — Everything You Need to Know About Panda 3.3 and What to Do About It).

  The HOTH 3 doesn’t just have SEO optimized content, but each article and property created is optimized for user experience as well. This means that there are more relevant images & videos embedded in all of the articles and properties we create for you than ever before. We’ve even taken steps to discontinue posting to sites with particularly poor usability, while replacing them with better ones.

• More Powerful, Diversified Structure- The power of The HOTH is in its ability to mimic the path of viral content. This natural process, consisting of top-level, authoritative properties publishing content and lower-level properties citing and syndicating that content, is exactly what search engines love to see. With The HOTH 3, we’ve taken this a step further.

  The HOTH 3 introduces a 2nd, completely independent viral link structure known as the Power Article Module (PAM). This means more link juice, in less time, with less footprint than ever before. PAM links come from our new internal network of ultra high quality, 0-footprint, UX optimized sites.

  In addition to PAM, The HOTH 3 brings greater randomization to the linking pattern of our viral structure. We’ve also added an extra helping of social bookmarks direct to your money site, just because we like you (and the social signals couldn’t hurt).

  You can see these changes in The HOTH 3 infographic below.

• HOTH Plus+ Released — One of the most exciting developments! HOTH Plus+, our 100% US college educated copywriting upgrade to both original HOTH packages, has been in beta for 3 months. The response has been overwhelmingly positive.

  The goal of HOTH Plus+ is to thrill the pickiest SEOs and their clients. Therefore, The HOTH Plus+ writers are not the best of the Philippines nor India nor US-based teenagers working for minimum wage. We’ve recruited a team of talented professionals that have been rigorously screened for writing ability. This means a more professional product for you to resell at higher margins, with less customer concerns than ever before.

  Click here for HOTH Plus+ writing samples

• Safer than Ever — In addition to Panda proofing, a more diversified link structure, and better content than ever, we’ve built mechanisms to ensure that every link we build comes from a safe neighborhood online. This will help you sleep better at night when you resell The HOTH to your clients.
• Improved Indexing — Simply put, improved indexing of links means you’re getting more results for your dollar. If the search engines find your links faster and more consistently, you rank sooner and more consistently as well.
• Countless UX improvements that’ll make you smile. — ‘Nuff said then.

Meanwhile, 3 things remain the same.

• Same no brainer princing.
• Same A+, Chicago, USA based support.
• Same dedication to Hitting you Over The Head.

The HOTH 3 — its just more of a HOTH.

The demand for this Panda 3.3 tell-all webinar was so immense that we had to do it twice. Still, our email boxes are getting slammed for requests of a recording every day.

You ask. We deliver.

Warning: This webinar is long, intense & not for the faint of heart.

Despite being 2 hours long, 2/3 of all attendees stuck with us to the very end in the middle of the work day. Some even woke up at 4AM on Saturday to join us from Australia! We strongly suggest you block out 2 hours dedicated to watching it so you can get its full value. Tell your boss you have to attend a webinar — its true!

In this webinar we discuss–

• What EXACTLY is Panda 3.3 and, more importantly, what is it not?
• The step-by-step guide to building your very own blog network in 1 afternoon (and why you shouldn’t).
• The 5 changes we’re making at The HOTH to give you safer, more effective links.
• The 8 action items to stay on Panda 3.3’s good side.
• The 3 SEO strategies that’ll make you stronger than ever going forward.

Some important links from the webinar

• GroupHug — GroupHug is our second product at The HOTH Corp. and it’s one of the only ways to consistently get 100% real, non-spammy social signals to any page you want. Beta drops Q2. Sign up for an invite now.
• Unatural Linking Warning Survey — Have you or someone you know received one of Google’s “unnatural linking” warnings via Google Webmaster tools? If so, we want to hear about it. We’re compiling as complete a body of research as possible about these warnings to figure out exactly what triggers them, how to avoid them and how to get rid of them. Once the study is complete, we’ll publish the findings. If you’ve received a warning, please contribute.

If you find this webinar helpful, please make sure to share it with your colleagues!

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