What if My Competitor Buys Spam Links to My Website?

This question has been very often discussed. Yet, we are getting back to it again and again. Let’s try to crear up some confusions?

Here’s what makes us discuss that questions again: Whiteboard Friday from SEOmoz. The question is simple: how Google finds out that a website is building spam links?

Incoming links are not under your control, there is no simple way you can stop your website from getting links back from spammy websites. So what if my competitor buys 100s of spammy links and then points them to my website? Will Google pull my website down like JC Penney and others?

So, is there any way to remove the links from those sites? Is there any penalty for those who are involved in these kinds of unethical activities to pull down the competitor?

Track Your Incoming Links
Gary-Adam Shannon has a wonderful post about this; let me share some important points from the post:

Adam recommends two tools to be alerted of new backlinks: The Google Alert and Link Monitoring Service.

• Set the Google Alert for your website name so you will get notifications as soon as your brand is mentioned anywhere online.
• Majestic SEO (in my opinion) is the best tool for Link Monitoring. Majestic can give you a daily break down on new links and you can use their graphing systems to see link spikes.

Ok, let’s move on… now I know how to get alerts when any SPAM website is linked to me, but what are the preventives once I am under attack? Let’s suppose I come to know that there are some SPAM websites who are linking to my website and this is not natural, it clearly seems like somebody has done some link buying in against of my website, the graph shows something like this:

So What Do I Do If I Suspect I am Being Spam-Linked?


Do I have to email Google or something like that? What should I do? Keeping this situation in mind, I broke down the situation into three questions:

I emailed the same questions to one of the most creative link builders Wiep Knol. Here’s his reply:

Google’s Matt Cutts has repeatedly mentioned that they will try to prevent this as much as they can. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible, but it would be very difficult for aged domains. New domains are easier to burn with spammy links.

In most cases, Google will simply devalue the paid or spammy links, instead of penalizing the buyer. In some cases, either the link seller or the link buyers will get a penalty, but this is quite rare if you compare it to the amount of sites that sells and/or buys links.

And since it would be *really* difficult to determine which competitor has been buying links for website A, I don’t think competitor B has much risk, apart from bad press when things do come out.

Conclusion:
There is no simple way Google can track who is actually buying the links?

So, what I can do? First, don’t get obessed. In reality this kind of situation is very rare. People would hardly do this kind of investment as you can never be sure if and how it will work. Will it pull you down in SERPs? Will it be ignored? Will it result in wasted money?

Al you can do is to maintain a clear natural link building profile. Nothing is earned as hard and works as good as a crystal clear reputation!

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/what-if-my-competitor-buys-spam-links-to-my-website/28786/

10 Tips to Improve Your SEO Using Twitter

Google and Bing are constantly working on integrating the social and search results. Social media becoming the voice of the people cannot be ignored or neglected.

Twitter is the most popular micro blogging platform as of today .Twitter is a large network and has the potential to supplement your SEO activities . If the tweets from your account are focused and topical then it surely helps you to establish your online reputation and build a brand online. But, on the contrary, vague tweets do not have any SEO benefit and it is just a sheer waste of time and energy.

Below are some tips that you may consider while tweeting which will help in your SEO campaign.

1. Brand Name

Your brand name or username should reflect your site name or offered services as this is what will be mentioned and displayed as your network, re-tweeted your posts. The more re-tweets your post’s get, the higher its significance.

2. Profile / Bio

As a point of reference, put your website link on your profile page. The bio content is the information part of your Twitter. Maximize it and make it relevant to your website, and the link that you display on your twitter profile, point it to a relevant page that will help with your conversions, rather than just pointing it back to your websites home page.

3. Links

Since Google is now displaying tweets in SERPs, despite nofollow, putting your links on your posts will aid your link building activities or has the potential of giving a wider web presence. Also, accompany your links with effective keywords. You can post your links several times or in interval in order to maximize possible keywords and contents, and exposure.

4. Hash Tags

Hash Tags is a Twitter feature that works like a Meta data for your tweets. These are posts with “#” symbol like “#web” and “#development”. Hash Tags help organize tweets and determine the trending information in Twitter.

5. Mentions

If you to mention users in Twitter you need to put a “@” symbol before their usernames. It is like a retweet effect and the more your account is retweeted, the higher your relevance. It is like voting policy. Hence, whenever you tweet, or Re-Tweet other users ensure to use the @symbol before their username.

6. Be a Help to Others

Re-tweeting, other relevant posts especially those that are of the same niche with yours will help you build your brand and promote your services. Posting everything coming from your site may somehow looks like a spam. Also, as you retweet, you have been a help to others too, by giving your followers a good choice of links to view.

7. Tweet Interval

Do not post bulk of tweets at once as this will annoy your followers, clogging up their stream, but instead spread your tweets out over the day with a decent interval, I would suggest of about an hour or two interval is good.

8. Blog Site

Promoting a blog site like your corporate one is a good option too. Blog sites can provide more information to your visitors and is the best place to interact with them, help them, know their thoughts, allow them to share your articles and contribute contents via comments, and also giving them the option to Re-Tweet your articles.

9. Twitter Button

Twitter button is now a requirement to many websites. It is a great aid to share pages easier.

10. Build your online brand

An effective Twitter account does not just help in your SEO, but will build your online brand, and increase visibility of your company and brand, by building new connections.

Last but not the least, determine a purpose for your Twitter presence. Do you want to focus on customer support or share information about your products and services or would you like to engage with your potential customers or would just like to converse with people from your own industry, etc. Only when you have a purpose you will get a direction and only then it is possible to monitor and measure the success, else it becomes a vehicle without a driver and no destination.

Optimizing your twitter account is optimizing your search engine visibility too. By managing it well, you will have a higher chance to create a bigger network, connect more to people and gain the exposure you need.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-tips-improve-your-seo-using-twitter/28790

Google Panda Coming to a Market Near You

If you live outside the United States and were unscathed by the Panda Update, a world of hurt may await soon. Or you may be in for a pleasant surprise. It is hard to say where the chips may lay for you without looking.

Some people just had their businesses destroyed, whereas the Online Publisher Association sees a $1 billion windfall to the winning publishers.

Due to Google having multiple algorithms running right now, you can get a peak at the types of sites that were hit, and if your site is in English you can see if it would have got hit by comparing your Google.com rankings in the United States versus in foreign markets by using the Google AdWords ad preview tool.

In most foreign markets Google is not likely to be as aggressive with this type of algorithm as they are in the United States (because foreign ad markets are less liquid and there is less of a critical mass of content in some foreign markets), but I would be willing to bet that Google will be pretty aggressive with it in the UK when it rolls out.

The keywords where you will see the most significant ranking changes will be those where there is a lot of competition, as keywords with less competition generally do not have as many sites to replace them when they are whacked (since there were less people competing for the keyword). Another way to get a glimpse of the aggregate data is to look at your Google Analytics search traffic from the US and see how it has changed relative to seasonal norms. Here is a look out below example, highlighting how Google traffic dropped. ;)

What is worse, is that on most sites impacted revenue declined faster than traffic because search traffic monetizes so well & the US ad market is so much deeper than most foreign markets. Thus a site that had 50% profit margins might have just went to break even or losing money after this update. :D

When Google updates the US content farmer algorithm again (likely soon, since it has already been over a month since the update happened) it will likely roll out around other large global markets, because Google does not like running (and maintaining) 2 sets of ranking algorithms for an extended period of time, as it is more cost intensive and it helps people reverse engineer the algorithm.

Some sites that get hit may be able to quickly bounce back *if* they own a well-read tech blog and have an appropriate in with Google engineers, however most will not unless they drastically change their strategy. Almost nobody has recovered and it has been over a month since the algorithm went live. So your best bet is to plan ahead. When the tide goes out you don't want to be swimming naked. :)

How to Write and Format Web Content

Web Content Writing is not like writing a college paper (thank goodness), which means you probably don’t have a lot of practice at ideal formatting. Unlike the world of academia where literally millennia have gone into developing forms and formats, webpages have only had a couple brief decades to find their bearings. To help those still in the early phases of writing web content (a.k.a. the phase of confusion and panic), here is a basic checklist to go through before publishing work.

Are My Sentences Too Long?
Every sentence will express a very different thought, so variation is natural and even good in writing. However, sentences that extend too long will simply confuse and infuriate readers. Try to keep your sentences no longer than about 40 words, which equates to about two lines in average web publications.

Are My Paragraphs Too Long?
Advice varies on how long paragraphs should be, but the general consensus is they should be “edible.” What this means for the standard user is typically somewhere around three to five lines of text, or roughly 50 to 100 words. Variation is certainly acceptable, but it shouldn’t extend too far beyond the crunch three to five lines.

Are My Sentences Too Complex?
Are you using several independent clauses, all joined together, one after another, in a series of commas that seems to never end, running on forever like it’s being chased, kind of like I’m doing now; perhaps it doesn’t even end with a typical period but instead continues, frivolously, self-interjecting, whisking around – like it’s beating brownie batter! – and, in the end, doing nothing more than confusing all your readers. There can be something elegant and beautiful about complex sentences, but they diminish reader comprehension and patience.

As a general standard, try not to have more than two independent clauses in a sentence (that will usually mean no more than one comma) and use abnormal punctuation sparingly. Sentences that are currently too complex can easily be re-cast into multiple sentences or slightly new phrasing.

Are My Headlines Active?
Drawing readers in is even more important on the Web, where the article title may be all some potential visitors have to go off of. Make your headlines interesting and active by including numbers (such as 6Plot Threads Famous Movies Forgot to Resolve), clear indications of the use of the information (such as the “how to” mentioned in the title of this article), and energetic adjectives (such as The World’s Creepiest Plants).

Is My Headline Too Long?
The headline should only take up one line of text, which means that it shouldn’t exceed about 50 characters (assuming you’re using a standard H1 tag size). That’s roughly six to eight words of content, varying pretty broadly dependent on how long the words you use are.

Do I Have an Introduction?
Even with the best headline in the world, you will want to introduce the content to come. This can be anything from a two line summary of what you’re about to say to a five line background on how the industry was started. The point is that you should prepare readers so that your direction and organization are both clear before you present your data, arguments, or other content.

Have I Proofread This Piece?
Nothing says “I don’t care” quite like a blatant tiepoh in the middle of your piece. Most people require at least a couple proofings before they catch all the errors, and even then some are bound to slip through. Make sure you’re taking the necessary precautions by doing your due diligence even after the final paragraph is written; just because you’ve finished writing doesn’t mean the article is complete.

Am I Inviting Feedback?
While it won’t always make sense to do so, most places where you are publishing web content probably allow for reader comments. Capitalize on this by inviting users to leave comments. The most effective approach tends to be providing one or two specific questions to stir conversation and get the ball rolling.

Keep in mind, as a rule, that rules should regularly be broken. What about you? Which of the above rules is it nearly impossible for you to prevent yourself from bending in each article?

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-checklist-how-to-write-and-format-web-content/28754/

Google's Cat & Mouse SEO Game

This infographic highlights how Google's cat and mouse approach to SEO has evolved over the past decade.

One of the best ways to understand where Google is headed is to look at where they have been and how they have changed.

Click on it for ginormous version.


Infographic by SEO Book