In addition, Here’s Nielsen’s report last February 2014 stating that

“The ownership of mobile devices is revolutionizing the consumer shopping experience. Increasingly, consumers are relying on mobile devices to research potential purchases and compare prices for goods and services. As U.S. consumers continue to take advantage of the convenience of anytime, anywhere browsing and shopping via their smartphones and tablets, there is a huge opportunity for retailers and brands to capture the full path-to-purchase.”

Given the data above, mobile SEO is definitely something, we, SEOs and inbound marketers should take SERIOUSLY to evolve with moving forward or else, we become dinosaurs in our own field. As such, I’ve asked 14 Influential SEOs in our community on what’s their take on mobile search engine optimization.

Here is my question:

What are your top three mobile search optimization tips to adapt on the impending mobile search/usage surge?

Rand Fishkin              Ann Smarty
Gianluca Fiorelli        Tadeusz Szewczyk
Duane Forrester       Aleyda Solis
Dan Shure                  Nick Eubanks
Jason Acidre               Peter Attia
John Doherty             Kane Jamison
Martin Reed               Brian Dean

14 Influential SEOs on Mobile Search Engine Optimization

Rand Fishkin – Co-founder of Moz and Inbound.org

1. Ensure that you not only leverage responsive design so your site/pages look great across all platforms and devices, but that you’re also thinking specifically about which content should appear front and center for mobile users (who may have different information/task needs than desktop users).

2. Be ludicrously fast. The speed expectations on mobile are growing, and are already at an almost-unreasonable level. Those who can create pages that fly to a mobile device’s screen have the best opportunity to retain and please their visitors.

3. Expand your keyword and content universe to consider all the ways mobile users might search for solutions related to your product, your content, or your expertise. Being there at the right time can provide immense benefit.

Gianluca Fiorelli – Owner of ILoveSEO.net

Many SEOs forget to ask themselves: Is responsive the correct solution for my site?

If you think quietly, maybe you’ll discover with surprise that using responsive design may be not the best solution for your business. It is true that is the solution Google prefers (having just one URL to crawl and store in the index instead of two is beneficial for Google in terms of server costs), but has a looped-issue:

Google prefers responsive > But responsive can harm the performance of the site > And Google doesn’t like “slow” sites, especially on mobile > But Google prefers responsive > and the loop continues.

For this reason I tend to be prudent when I hear clients urging for implementing a responsive design.

Maybe it is better to create and optimize a mobile site (m.domain.com), so that you can optimize it for those displays that really are offering you the best metrics.

Or, maybe, it is better taking into consideration Adaptive design, which is usually confused with Responsive but that is completely different in its purposes. Responsive adapts a site to the pixels of every screen. That means a lot of code, css et al, hence the PageSpeed slowdown.

Adaptive, instead, consciously define what to show of the site for a certain set of screen-size. In this sense it’s more streamlined and – because you are not showing all the site in every platform – it makes the mobile user experience a better one.

I usually says that Adaptive design let you treat your website as it was an App, because you really can decide – over the base of user data retrieved via Google Analytics and tests groups – what content is really used on the different mobile sets (smartphone, phablets, tablets). For instance, people just use the “reservation form” in a restaurant’s site when on mobile, while maybe consulting menu and/or the searching for its phone number and address. With adaptive design you can decide to show users just those content, and so being more useful and obtaining a better ROI. With Responsive you would be pushing everything to the users, also those things that data tell you aren’t working on mobile.

Duane Forrester – Runs the Bing Webmaster Program – Sr. Product Manager at Bing

1. Speed matters – the network will suck up time, so you need to be fast, fast, fast or users will think the issue is with your site.

2. Usability matters as much, ore more, on mobile devices. Don’t be that site w/mouse-over navigation for a mobile user.

3. Stick with responsive design; avoid m-dot domains – test, test, test – mobile means tablets & phones; you won’t know which.

Dan Shure – Owner/Consultant of EvolvingSEO.com

1. Segment search traffic to mobile/tablet only. Surprisingly a lot of people don’t do this. But there’s a lot of insight you can get from this basic segmentation.

For instance, you can then sort landing pages by page load time, and find the slowest pages on mobile devices. Then fix whatever is causing the slow load time for those specific pages.

You can also use this segmentation to identify pages that get higher bounce rate on mobile from search. When looking at bounce rate, do it as compared to the site average. Raw bounce rate it good, but this will be relative to your site
as well.

I emphasize that you should do this segmentation for search traffic only, because it’s one way to see what Google might be seeing (and users!) from search results. These metrics are important because Google is taking site speed and possibly “bounce back to SERP rate” into their rankings.

2. Make use of the User Experience test in Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. For example, here’s a random check of Warby Parker, http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=www.warbyparker.com – As you can see, their mobile site is pretty well optimized for UX according to this tool.

3. As I mentioned in the comment on Dr Pete’s post, Google is now indexing Android Apps right in Google Search on mobile devices. If you have an Android App you should make sure to get it indexed: https://developers.google.com/app-indexing/ – I think this is going to be more important as App Indexing develops.

Hypothetically, there may be a day when you can search for iPhone Apps with Duck Duck Go in Safari on your iPhone. I’m just making that up, but don’t think it’s that far fetched. App indexing is something to keep an eye on!

Jason Acidre- Author of KaiserTheSage.

1. Serve a different version of your site’s key pages’ content for mobile users. Mobile users are known to have shorter attention span, compared to desktop users. So making it easier for mobile-driven users to get straight to the information they’re looking for may improve the engagement rate.

2. Responsive web design – is obviously one of the methods that can help improve a site’s visibility on mobile search. But it still depends, as you also have to weigh in if having a mobile version of the site (instead of responsive web) would generate more conversions or business sales to the site.

3. Implementing Local SEO techniques, given that mobile search results may also display listings that are based on the searcher’s location (but this approach may also depend on the business model of the site being optimized).

John Doherty – Head of marketing for HotPads in San Francisco. Founder of HireGun

First, make sure you use rel-alternate tags (in your
<head> or XML sitemaps) to tell Google the equivalent mobile-friendly page of your desktop pages. This is, of course, only when you do not use responsive design.

Second, make sure your Analytics are set up to easily gauge the differences between how your desktop and mobile sites are performing. As I wrote about in this post almost two years ago now, often mobile sites convert way worse than a desktop site, so this is an opportunity where you can improve your user experience, likely rank better (especially since Google is now telling mobile users when a page likely redirects you to the homepage), and you’ll win more business.

Third, remember that many of your mobile users will likely come either through apps or social media. Therefore, optimizing your messaging for mobile users and sending them to mobile-dedicated landing pages will go way further than optimizing a page for keywords.

Ann Smarty – Owner of SEOSmarty.com and MyBlogU.com

1. Optimize load time… I can’t say how often I dropped a page on mobile because of the slow connection. Besides, Safari reloads all pages once you launch them again (still can’t understand WHY they would do that). So the load time is crucial for mobile devices. I’d put it #1 as I can usually deal with design bugs but the load time can prevent me from ever giving that page a chance. Just make the pages fly!

2. Optimize and test your forms and calls to action (especially java and flash elements). I’ve seen so many broken drop-down menus and buttons when browsing on my phone! That, again, is more important than pretty pages: You risk losing mobile leads!

3. Make it responsive… I choose responsiveness over mobile (plain) design as it works for many designs and allows for beautiful / playful look. Overall responsive design is flexible and has long been my mobile design optimization preference.

Tadeusz Szewczyk – SEO and Owner of onreact.com

1. The first one should be obvious by now: responsive design. On WordPress sites and other commonly used CMS systems that’s not a problem by now. You often just need to change or at least update your them. Choosing a responsive theme is by now difficult because there are so many options. I’ve been searching for one at the end of 2012 and back then was still struggling to find a good one, ideally for free. Now it’s the other way around.

You get inundated with highly professional responsive teams that resize and reorganize the content and layout based on the size of the user’s screen.

For custom built sites it’s more difficult but not impossible. I currently am transitioning my 10 year old site gradually to responsive web design. It’s challenging but also a very interesting task. I enjoy the coding so much I even consider to offer it as a service to my clients.

2. Responsive images aren’t that obvious, after all you can resize the large image can’t you? It’s a fallacy to assume that mobile users will want to see the same images or the same size of images in the first place.

Showing people on the go a smaller view of the large image with 100kb or more is really annoying when you have a slower connection.

I have made that mistake too and I am actively looking for solutions now. There are several workarounds for responsive mobile friendly images – non of them perfect yet – but I will focus more on optimizing images for mobile in the near future.

3. Responsive SEO is what I call or adapting your site on the fly depending on who uses it. Nobody knows what “user segmentation” means and thus I prefer the more self-explanatory responsive SEO moniker.

It’s about deciding what your mobile users would want to see other than when accessing your site from home or work for example.

On my WordPress blog over at seo2.us, I use a combination of Google Analytics and SiteApps to segment my users and then decide what to show to them or not (see partial screen shot above). For example, mobile users won’t see my long list of topics I cover on SEO 2.0 because very few people click that list and its length would force them to scroll a lot.

I have even described the tools and process over at the Ahrefs blog:
http://blog.ahrefs.com/responsive-seo-advanced-user-segmentation-wordpress-google-analytics-siteapps/

Aleyda Solis – International SEO Consultant and Founder of Orainti.

1. Have a multi-device friendly site, that effectively adapts your content and layout according to the type of device used, whether with responsive, dynamic serving or parallel mobile site.

2. Verify your mobile site crawling and indexing by avoiding interstitials and faulty-redirects.

3. Optimize your mobile site speed. Analyze it with PageSpeed Insights and follow Google’s speed optimization best practices.

Nick Eubanks – Owner of SEONick.net and the current. Vice President of Digital Strategy at W.L. Snook & Associates. His current side projects include SEO Leads and Link Babel.

My top 3 mobile tips are simple, probably redundant, but still *so* under-utilized that I feel it is important to hammer then home again:

1. Make sure your website can support your #1 KPI on mobile. If you don’t have budget for a mobile landing page of responsive design, then set the viewport to zoom in on your phone number, or add a simple contact page/form with a CTA to get in touch for more information.

2. Support mobile browsing behavior. Translation: make your website thumb and scroll friendly. Buttons can (and should) be bigger on mobile devices. Long pages are OK; mobile users are used to having to scroll.

3. Leverage caching and CDN’s to speed up your pages. While a lot of mobile access is done on wifi networks, there is still plenty of users relying on mobile-broadband for their connections, and saving 100kb here and there starts to really add up on page render time and the navigability experience.

Peter Attia – Founder of Cucumber Nebula, an inbound marketing company and Head of Marketing at Pingboard

This may be obvious, but one of my top “fixes” is using a responsive design as opposed to separate pages for mobile. It’s cleaner, easier, and less prone to send someone to an unrelated page when they click a result. People hate getting redirected to a page that isn’t what they wanted on mobile and will immediately bounce off. This is an easy negative signal for Google to pick up.

Secondly, I think it’s important to focus on Click Through Rates for meta titles and descriptions. I still often see these meta tags optimized for robots only. Mobile users make quicker decisions, because they want their information immediately. They’re typically not looking to compare or browse around. This means being the first person to be clicked can be a huge win.

Lastly, I think it’s important to focus on short and precise copy, design, and navigation. Keep things simple and easy for people to get where they want to be. People have shorter attention spans on mobile.

This isn’t an easy feat, but this can have a huge impact on conversion. It’s important to also note the conversion rate of desktop visitors if making dramatic changes to mobile. A large number of mobile users still prefer to purchase on desktop and you may not realize they already decided to convert from finding you on a mobile device.

Kane Jamison – Founder of Content Harmony

1 – Look up top organic search landing pages in Google Analytics, filtered down to Mobile Device usage. Do the same thing in Google Webmaster Tools’ Search Queries report. Then make sure title tags and descriptions look great on mobile searches and not just desktop for each of the primarily landing pages and major mobile search keywords.

2 – If you have a site that tends to produce same day conversions (rather than one that people visit many times for months before they’re ready to purchase), split test responsive vs. desktop view against mobile conversions. It’s pretty easy to split test a master style.css file. Simply remove responsive code from one of those files, and test to see whether responsive generates a better conversion rate.

3 – Inspect all of your branded search terms on mobile. For example, brand name, your phone number, the names of your key staff, and whatever Google Instant suggests that people are search for after your brand name, for example “Dave’s burger joint menu” or “Dave’s burger joint directions”. In each search, make sure the top results are pages you control and make certain that all information is relevant and up to date. If the top rankings include something else, like Yelp or another 3rd party page, login and update everything or email them and request changes be made so that users are getting accurate information.

Martin Reed, Head of SEO at Dejan SEO

1. Optimise for the user. Don’t squeeze the desktop version of a website onto a mobile site, trim all the noise and leave the bare essentials with a clear funnel to the user’s goal.

2. (If using a separate mobile site and not a responsive design) utilise rel=alternate markup. Let Google send traffic straight to the mobile site, don’t rely on the extra steps of a server (or browser) side redirect.

3. Reduce the payload.

Bonus: Don’t redirect all mobile traffic to the home page, redirect it to the equivalent page.

Brian Dean – Founder of Backlinko

1. Check your Google Analytics to see how much mobile traffic you get. I’m consistently surprised by how many people read “50% of all traffic is now mobile” but have no idea how many mobiles users visit THEIR site. For a lot of B2B sites, mobile traffic is less than 10% and therefore not a huge priority.Once you know how many mobile users you’re getting you can better figure out the resources to put into mobile SEO.

2. Invest in making your site insanely fast. The word “invest” is key. Slow sites are even slower on mobile. You may need to pay a developer 40 hours to optimize code, images, databases, the works.

3. Write killer title and description tags. With author images gone, compelling title and description tags are going to get you coveted mobile clicks. 

Summary:

I’ve summarized the key tips and ideas mentioned by our highly regarded SEOs using the graph below. Thank you SEO influencers for taking part on this round-up. I salute you all!

The post 14 Influential SEOs on Mobile Search Engine Optimization appeared first on .

Background: January 2011,  I’ve got a call from a US-based company and was eventually consulted for SEO. 

The Company’s Situation:

1. Historical data via Google Analytics showed a downtrend in overall traffic across more than 10 of their sites. Google Analytics data showed a consistent year-round slow traffic drop.

2. More than 10 sites they own have duplicate content. Worth mentioning too, that they have about hundreds of thousand duplicate pages and all domains are EMDs (Exact-Match Domains).

3. Bounce Rates across all sites were on the average of 90% and up. Main logo of the different legacy websites were all the same and were all linked to their main website.

4. Sub-domain migration was already made prior the consultation. They used the sub-domains approach to replace some of their legacy sites.

5.  Zero knowledge in SEO. Technical SEO issues such as sitemap submission, canonicalization, duplicate content, proper site migration, 301 redirect, schema, and whole lot more were just random ideas for them.

6. The use of their brand company logo for all legacy sites was due to their “re-brand”.

7. Google cached their pages erroneously that showed different domain URLs across their sites.

Important Google Updates within this date:

Overstock.com Penalty — January 2011: In a rare turn of events, a public outing of shady SEO practices by Overstock.com resulted in a very public Google penalty. JCPenney was hit with a penalty in February for a similar bad behavior. Both situations represented a shift in Google’s attitude and foreshadowed the Panda update.

Attribution Update — January 28, 2011: In response to high-profile spam cases, Google rolled out an update to help better sort out content attribution and stop scrapers. According to Matt Cutts, this affected about 2% of queries. It was a clear precursor to the Panda updates.

Panda/Farmer — February 23, 2011: A major algorithm update hit sites hard, affecting up to 12% of search results (a number that came directly from Google). Panda seemed to crack down on thin content, content farms, sites with high ad-to-content ratios, and a number of other quality issues. Panda rolled out over at least a couple of months, hitting Europe in April 2011.

Source: Moz.com

Fast forward… After three years battle with Google, the website recovered.  While many SEOs call the latest Google Panda 4.0 as a softening update, it did not matter. The client finally saw the light! Have they been lucky? Yes and No.

But why it took them 3 years to recover?  I believe it was not only on the issue with Google Panda that delayed the recovery, but more on OTHER THINGS.

Here’s Why:

1. Not 100% Buy-in from Top Management.

The consolidation of all legacy websites under one roof or domain has been argued among the top management due to the past glory years of those keyword rich domains. Given the situation on duplicate content, massive cascade on traffic due to Panda algorithm, and their blurred branding effort, we recommended the migration to only one branded domain.

Reason: Consolidation of the pages initially addressed duplicate content issues and made all marketing efforts focused on a single brand.

Tip: Some notes on Duplicate Content can be found at Google Webmaster Tools Help page. Click here.

2. Moving Target on Implementation of SEO Recommendations.

As consultants, we were limited by how the recommendations were carried out. There were many developers and designers on the client’s side; however, slow task delegations dragged the entire process. Imagine a 3-4 months delay before any SEO recommendation was carried out was simply unacceptable. This led to delayed implementation of SEO audit suggestions.

3. No Dedicated Tech/IT and UX Team.

Working on a client whose team were spread too thinly and manning many smaller projects made the SEO project worse. For example, the developer who used to work on the SEO tasks was at the same time, the server admin and more! One server admin to man other database tasks is just taxing given the size of the website/s involved. This is just plain bad project management.

4. Lack of Ready Content Team.

This item led to long debates with the top management. The suggested shift of the website to content-based type to serve its visitors better was taken somehow differently since it might impact the revenue model of the business being a directory website.

5. Follow Top Management’s Whims at the Expense of Ideal SEO Implementations.

Our SEO implementations may be ideal but the management didn’t see it feasible because a lot of those pages were “untouchables” for fear of having more traffic losses by the management. Interim solutions were done but were not really helpful at all. We’ve recommended killing a lot of those duplicate pages (many times in the past) but were not carried out until 2014.

To cut the story short, an in-house SEO was hired to oversee SEO implementations. However; due to the large tasks thrown at him from data analysis and other major tasks, a lot of the recommendations we’ve made were not done despite his being good at what he does best as SEO. Many of those SEO To-Dos were on-page and off-page which required more manpower. The problem persisted in 2012.

Glad that in 2013, the operations manager, dedicated tech team, database expert, project manager, SEO team, and server admin were more proactive and faster than before. This is the huge improvement made over the years. Efficiency was way better.

Finally, we reached and tackled…

6. Bad Information Architecture, User Experience Design and Slow Database Issues.

We looked at everything from Information Architecture to User Experience Design. We drilled further into the database design and slow DB queries which were causes of multiple server outages.

Worth noting too, due to the good support and persistence of middle management, the big boss finally gave in (somehow?). The company invested in creating quality content meant for users. Dedicated tech team, and in-house SEO team were formed to finally combat Google Panda. The project manager also made sure things rolled as planned and on-time.

Personally, I am happy that our SEO recommendations up until now still serve as their basis (at least) for moving forward by making sure that the website has well-balanced quality content all throughout its important pages. We’ve also helped their managers and tech teams on how SEO know-how integrates to their daily tasks. Although the company still has a lot of things to do in order to regain leadership in their industry via search, its future is now clearer after more than 3 years in the gray area.  Key Takeaways

1. Before taking any SEO project, make sure that there’s a total buy-in among top management. They should believe in SEO. Make it clear to the decision makers what’s in it for the company (on a larger scale) to implement SEO best practices.

2. Ascertain that you have a ready team of content marketers, project managers, server admins, software developers, and UX designers.

UX Design, Server Reliability, and Top-notch Content which primarily improve user experience on the website are large factors that we can attribute to Google Panda recovery. Here are guidelines that you can use to educate your clients in building high quality sites.

3. Delayed Project equals Big Revenue Loss.

Self-explanatory. Adherence to timeline is second to none.

4. Always educate the company you work with on how to properly conduct SEO. 

You may or may not retain the client but you’ll always feel better by giving them the right direction or framework in order to improve their brand visibility online. That’s the real VALUE.

5. Soft skills is super important. 

Dealing with different stakeholders of the company you work with is key in moving the needle of success faster. Software developers, business people, and creatives have different mindsets and mood swings. Learning to deal with them properly is gold.

6. Dilly dallying is a No-no.

Top management needs to understand that dilly dallying on decisions negatively impacts the bottom line. Teams down the line become frustrated too.

7. Talk about bottom line most (all) of the time with the bosses. 

The magic bean to get top management’s attention is to make sure that discussions revolve around the impact of the project on the company’s bottom line .

Just a little warning though, when you get on-board in times of panic mode just like when the company is hit by Google Panda, you’ll have to spill your guts out in explaining to the stakeholders on why they really have to fix the issue as fast as they can. Be ready. 

Tip: An income projection PowerPoint slide can get most top management into total buy-in. Don’t scare them. Simply present the cause and effect of the project in a manner that they can easily understand. Talk dollars and pounds. =)

The post So the Boss Gave In and We Won Against Google Panda 4.0 appeared first on .

1. Our Google Tag Manager implementation had some Javascript conflicts as per Chrome browser based Tag Assistant by Google plugin.

2. Two (2) Google Analytics trackers were detected. One of which is the mysterious UA-7453698!

We looked at the templates and html files to delete the said script. However; we could not remove it from the files. The script is hidden.  Here’s the code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push([‘vTrack._setAccount’, ‘UA-7453698-1’]); _gaq.push([‘vTrack._trackPageview’]); (function () { var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true; ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); var vURI = window.location.pathname; if (vURI === ‘/’) { vURI = ‘default.asp’; }

</script>

After some hours, we already started Google-ing for clues and answers. Here’s what we’ve found out below.  We’ve looked at a number of websites on the list and true enough, the UA-7453698 is present to a lot of the Volusion websites! It turned out that Volusion has been adding the said Google Analytics tracking code for their own usage based on an article we’ve read here. I just don’t know if other Volusion e-commerce website owners are really aware of this practice. From the list we saw, there are at least 50 sites with the mentioned Analytics code.

Take note though that the pesky UA-7453698 tracker only appears whenever you are logged in into your account that is, if you’ve already applied the mobile analytics implementation that was recently released by Volusion to your site. If not yet, it remains on your website even if you are not logged-in.

Is this something of a big issue or not? What do you think?

The post Volusion’s Mysterious Google Analytics Tracker UA-7453698 appeared first on .

As such, this leads me to answer this question, What guarantee, after Google’s manual penalty revocation on website, that its traffic will be back on track or improve its revenue moving forward? My answer is NONE. There is no guarantee. Why? Let’s try to dissect some of the cases we’ve handled.

Case 1: A classic client who just wanted to remove its manual penalty.

With our proven track record on lifting penalties via link cleansing, a lot of companies are coming to us for help to remove their penalties.  It is usually a done deal. Some would only want to have their links cleaned. That’s it. In some cases, traffic goes well after the lift but at times, they don’t. See the sample below when penalty is still imposed on the website until it was lifted on March 8, 2014.

This client evidently improved its traffic after the penalty was revoked at face value. However; upon comparing its traffic and revenue last year, metrics are still way lower having in mind that all other outer factors remain constant. Worst, assisted and direct conversion values are down  46.06% and 63.61% respectively. Why? Let me answer that after I present another case.

Case 2: One of the many clients that underwent full recovery from penalty.

After more than six (6) months of work, manual penalty was revoked on Oct 9, 2013. Comparing it to last year’s performance, traffic is much better as evidently shown below. If you look at the e-commerce revenue from Organic Search, it generated $1,558,065.40 for both assisted and last click conversions. On top of the increment on eCommerce revenue, there’s a delta change of 103.35% on assisted conversion value and 70.21% last click conversion value. It is a huge leap from last year’s revenue attributed to Organic Search alone. It is a whopping $735,854.02 value handed to the client just like that. So what’s the difference?

Actually, it is pretty simple.

The first case simply focused on cleaning its backlinks and hoped that after the manual penalty revocation, all else will be go back to its normal traffic. The second case waited and understood that SEO and content marketing take time in putting together brick by brick the building blocks on becoming a formidable brand aside from simply pruning bad links.

The key takeaways here are as follows:

1. At the start of the engagement, let the client understands that link cleansing can remove them out of Google’s manual penalty, however; it is does not guarantee that their traffic will be back to normal.

This will save you a lot in compromising with your clients since most of them read many articles about successful websites’ recovery from Google manual penalty but the reality is, it has always been a case to case basis. There’s no guarantee like I mentioned awhile ago.

2. Link cleansing is just a subset of what needs to be done in order to completely recover from traffic and revenue losses.

3. Thorough assessment of links profile will let you determine the amount of damage on the website. More than 40% links to be removed will already tell you that the client is already on for a long period of time before it recovers. 

So what do you need to shorten the road to recovery and to obtain faster upward traffic/revenue trend?

Here are my Pro-tips:

1. While link pruning does the job at a certain point, client must invest on improving UX and Conversion.

Below, look at the positive percentages leading to conversion when conversion rate optimization (CRO) was implemented properly on the website.   Here are good sources below on Conversion Optimization that can help you. 

• The Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization
• 100 Conversion Optimization Case Studies
• 6 Of My All-Time Favorite Conversion Rate Optimization Case Studies
• Holy Grail of eCommerce Conversion Optimization – 91 Point Checklist and Infographic
• Everything You Know About Conversion Rate Optimization Is Wrong
• Paying for Traffic vs. Paying for Conversion Optimization

2. Address Thin Content.

With the second case I presented, audit on website’s User Experience (UX), identification of bottle necks in the Conversion Funnel (Yes! CRO), consolidation of redundant pages and ultimately, removal  (or 301 redirection) of useless pages viewed as thin content were done. As a result, traffic increase on traffic every step of the way on the website’s landing pages were evident. See image below. Pro-Tip: One simple step to consolidate pages is by going straight to Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). Drill down via Search Traffic> Search Queries > Click a keyword > Pages. 

You may find those competing pages on SERP. You can consolidate these pages should you see redundant pages. This may result in higher Page Authority (PA) overtime too.

2. Build Digital Assets on the website from the very start of the link cleansing process.

In most cases we’ve handled that fully recovered, clients’ openness in tweaking their website is key to success. Building digital assets on the website that are themed and targeted to their audience should be of utmost priority. Variation of these content on the website gives you good leverages in reaching out target market with different degree of needs. Long-form articles, white papers, slides, blended form articles (a combo of infographics, GIFs , and texts) and lastly, interactive HTML5/CSS3/JQuery content were the most effective ones so far.

3. Content Promotion and Outreach.

While a certain part of your activity is about link removal requests, a lot of work is also dedicated in promoting content assets and targeted in engaging influencers via outreach and social media.

4. Monitor, Rinse and Repeat.

This item is a classic process. It is simple but effective. While you build your content editorial calendar based on your content marketing strategy, coming up with your customized benchmark worksheet to monitor organic traffic, referral traffic, goals, bounce rate, time on site, assisted and direct conversions, and links acquired paramount to your success moving forward.

5. If SEO and Content Marketing takes time, more so, Recovery from Penalty. 

We could personally relate to what Rand Fishkin recently discussed via Whiteboard Friday regarding The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing and What if Your Ugly Website is Holding Back Your Marketing Efforts? because these are the usual issues we encountered from clients wanting to recover from penalty. The use of influencers and users’ feedback works well when you are on the stage on convincing your clients. You need to remember that if your client’s website is hit, you are not starting from point zero but rather on the negative side of a line number graph. Note:  We have had a few clients who do not want to engage in SEO, CRO, UX audit and Content Marketing in order for their websites to improve. They only wanted their websites lifted from Google Manual Penalty by Link Cleansing. We have no issue with that, however; some of them fall on the case 1 I presented. While most of our clients who fully recovered are those that are open to changes and do not limit us only in link removal requests. It has always been a case to case basis.

The post 2 Google Penalty Cases and a $1M Revenue Increase appeared first on .

But such thing does not worry you at all though. Oh hell yeah! As resourceful as you are, you actually find the best tools out there! With a great community you have, you get the beef right at your doorsteps!

But then after some weeks, you may find yourself in the same predicament again saying, “I need to really, really clone myself.”

So, what is really missing? For some, this is the elephant in the room.

Don’t get me wrong here. Getting the right tools to scale your content marketing strategy or SEO output is one of the best things to do so that you can focus more on the essentials – relationship building and high impact activities. Inbound.org has a list of awesome tools that you can use. To give further weight on how SEO tools can improve production, conductor.com released The Unoptimized SEO: How manual tasks sabotage the potential of Natural Search Marketers white paper stating the following below:

Key Findings:

1. There is an inverse relationship between the high-impact tasks SEOs want to be spending time on and the operational, low-impact automatable tasks that they are actually spending time on —which consume up to 4 out of their every 10 hours.

2. SEOs can achieve up to 340x efficiency gains on operational tasks with an SEO platform vs. completing those tasks manually.

3. SEOs can increase their time-spend on high-impact activities by up to 133% by using an SEO Platform.

While I agree with most of these findings, it made me think further on another variable of the equation to actually realize scaling SEO or content marketing tasks which is Process Mapping.

In terms of using the right tool or platform, a word of caution should be inscribed. Using too many of these suggested tools can zap a lot of your time and money when you lack goals and ways of doing things. In short, having no defined processes even when equipped with the right software is like kissing death.

SEOs are cognizant of Analytics, Content Marketing, Panda, Penguin and all other sorts of SEO related stuff just to name a few and there’s one thing I’ve noticed. We diverge in defining many things even if we have common grounds, concepts and principles based on the type of tactics and strategies that we employ. Most of us understand the strategy (the What/Why) and the plan (the How) but once we start digging deeper into the “how” areas of SEO’s daily tasks, we tend to mix things up not knowing where, what and how to start/end each task most of the time. Lack of proper adherence to activity parameters of any SEO strategy & plan is usually the problem. As they say, “The devil is in the details.”

Generally, take it this way. To determine what you need to do to arrive at a goal is the Strategy. The “How are you going to move from A to B” is the Plan in order to anticipate possibilities/risks involved. Then, to establish simple checklists to ascertain things are implemented rightly is the Process that can be linear or with nodes.

Due to varied tasks we undertake as SEOs from outreach, social media, data analysis, excel ninja flipping, account management, technical SEO, etc., we tend to go astray from our focal point of daily activities/tasks which is the real culprit that limits us to increase our SEO output. We succumb to work extra hours again and again… Sleepless, at times.

It should not be.

Many times over the best way to solve this ubiquitous workplace scenario is to take a step backward and see things from a different angle. Dig deeper to your daily activities and draw out your processes.

1. List all your Processes

How will you able to identify if it is a process? Simply put, a process is any activity or group of activities that takes an input, adds value and provides an output to an internal/external receiver.

You need to jot down all your activities.

• Outreach
• Data Analysis
• Link Cleansing
• Concept Building
• Content Creation
• On-page Site Audit
• Link Audit
• Rank Tracking
• Report Generation
• Link Building
• Brand Building
• Competition Analysis
• Community Management
• Conversion Rate Optimization

2. Define each of your process objectives

Ask yourself, why do you work on those modules? What are they for? Are they really needed to achieve those set goals by your company/client? For every SEO process, there must be a goal.

For example, what is the goal of your link cleansing activity or your link prospecting work?

Note: If your process does not have a clear goal then there is no point doing it.

3. Draw your existing Functional SEO Flowcharts

a. Outline or diagram your existing processes.

Come up with a workflow. My best buddies for this type of activity are pen and paper. Remember to be honest with yourself in mapping your activities in order to actually understand later where your bottlenecks and hurdles are.

Having a simple flowchart or diagram is like getting you out of a complete mess in no time.

You can use the following tools:

1. Draw.io is a tool that you can integrate to Google apps for Business

2. Choose process/mind mapping tool list via chrome web store.

3. The ever dependable Visio by Microsoft or MSWord.

4. Gliffy.com is also a good business process modeling software alternative.

b. Document your guidelines or standards

How do you define a spammy website? How over-optimized is an over-optimized site or anchor text? How bad a link profile is? Of course, there are wide array of tools we can use to speed up this process. However; there are instances in your activities that require manual inspection like how ugly a website design is? How ugly is ugly? Whenever you are put in a situation like this where subjectivity is required, you must document your guidelines. This will unburden you in recalling your thought-process in your head if given similar instances in the future. Speaking of cloning yourself again, your decision-making can now be read by your teammates and along the way involved them in improving your guidelines.

Quoting Ross Hudgens about his early lessons from building a consulting company, “In the first six plus months, I essentially ran on experience – no fancy Excel documents, processes or anything like that: this was possible because it all existed in my mind. When you hire someone else, that must be transcribed on paper or at least verbally, and there must be standards for implementation that grow with the company – or your work will suffer as it scales.”

‘Nuff said.

4. Compare process output with your established objectives

With the existing processes assumed to be already mapped out, you now need to put them side by side with your set goals. Are you being effective? Are you doing things at the most efficient manner?

You need to keep in mind that your work needs to be aligned with your company/client’s objectives in order to make sense spending or allocating time/manpower for it. For example, is it really appropriate doing link cleansing activity when you were only asked to work on concept building? Do you check traffic and conversion data twice a day, per hour or once a week?

Rand Fishkin’s WBF entitled, The Key to Empowering your Marketing Team tackled the importance of aligning goals to process and people citing examples on how marketing team can articulate those high level objectives into actionable, definable and measurable activities which for me, it totally made sense.

5. Identify redundant and/or gaps in your routines

Try to check each segment for redundant activities and gaps. This is where you usually see all the loopholes and pain points. All the “fat that you need to cut” are on this stage. You will be surprised with the interoperability and interdependency of each of your processes given that SEO scope has already morphed into a massive set of tasks.

For example, you may find out that social media works are actually tightly tied to outreach and link prospecting tasks. As such, you can better understand which task goes first or runs parallel with others in order to get the best output in the most efficient manner.

Pro Tip: Address pain points and mechanical SEO drills using the right fit SEO tool to your activity.

My personal favorites are Citation Labs, Buzzstream, Followerwonk, SEOGadget, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, MS EXCEL and MOZ tools.

You can also check out how clambr.com put up together 55 SEO experts reveal their favourite link building tools , Richard Baxter’s 30 Best New SEO Tools and Seer Interactive’s SEO Toolbox.

5. Perform Time Study

The Industrial Engineering Terminology Standard defines time study as “a work measurement technique consisting of careful time measurement of the task with a time measuring instrument, adjusted for any observed variance from normal effort or pace and to allow adequate time for such items as foreign elements, unavoidable or machine delays, rest to overcome fatigue, and personal needs.” – Wikipedia.

I am including here how Six Sigma explains time study to save me time explaining it.

At this point, you can already recognize if you need more/less hours or manpower in order to meet your company/client’s goals. You may be playing super hero or actually, slacking off big time due to unnecessary activities.

6. Communicate and Implement

If you are working with a team, you can actually do the process mapping together and once done, agree on implementing the improved version of your routines.

As a solo SEO practitioner, you must follow judiciously your set flowchart to save you time and give you more leverage scaling your SEO production. You may find out perhaps that you don’t really need a clone or you actually should build a team.

I use Binfire and Trello a lot to ensure that our activities are on track and are communicated properly among all members of the team.

7. Continuous improvement cycle

I am a believer of small iterations, split tests, and improvements. Adapting Agile methodology to your inbound marketing processes is the way to go. Jonathan Colman nailed it via WBF when he talked about Agile marketing. Doing that widely popular 10-minute standing meeting is very helpful to identify immediate barriers and successes among your team members. Every roadblock should be taken into account where modifications of affected activities are implemented at once.

a. Identify / prioritize opportunities
b. Develop Implementation Plans and Change Process

Recognize your priority activities and opportunities (think like doing a SWOT analysis) to keep you on top of the demanding job of being an SEO. If you are working with other departments say, the UX team, you can actually give them timelines in parallel with your scheduled tasks on how you’re going to execute your kick-ass HTML5 content ideas, for example.

Key Takeaways

1. Talking about scaling SEO and content marketing strategies, you can actually transfer your knowledge-base on SEO/content marketing into bits and pieces of processes which are much faster to be digested by your team.

2. Be more of a process-focused SEO so that you can literally replicate yourself when a new team member comes onboard. Of course, you cannot duplicate 100% your innate strategic decision capabilities but you can minimize the long arduous task of getting new members to be trained without guidelines and workflows in place.

3. Right tools are essential but when you are actually looking into growing your SEO production, you can save your neck from growth pains or at least minimize the bleeding when you’ve mapped out your processes from the very start.

4. Document your guidelines/standards especially those that require subjectivity or manual check in order to translate your thoughts to other members of the team.

5. For solo SEO practitioners, still document your guidelines anyway because you may find yourself on the same spot again. If that happens, at least you have a ready laser-guided manual to keep you focused. It will save you a lot of time and weekend works.

6. Be agile and quick in adapting improvements/changes on your processes.

So what is the drift? Focusing on finding the right tools for specific SEO tasks and using scalable SEO/Content marketing strategies can definitely increase output. More so, adding a process or a system in place can further boost your production both immediate and long-term to greater heights. You can minimize duplication of efforts, inadequate or misallocated resources, and unnecessary or non-value added activities.

True SEO scalability is via process, not resources. Your SEO processes are your real arsenal.

The post Process-Focused SEO: An Elephant in the Room on Scalability and Strategy appeared first on .

Anyhow, here is a definition from Wikipedia.

“The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself.” – Wikipedia.

As of this writing, we have already seen a lot of Penguin successful recovery stories  and part of their success formula is to remove those low quality links.

Success Stories:

A manual action recovery story
How Wpmu Recovered Ffrom the Penguin Update
Recovery From Google Penguin Tips from the Trenches

While there are many happy clients who are reaping the seeds of their good white hat SEO companies’ works, some were not lucky, having to see their websites’ traffic plummet because of their mistakes in hiring not-to-be-named link building experts who happened to have built (ehem!  bought) links some years ago or have acquired links via automated software. I remember a client of mine telling me, “I have been penalized just now for a certain technique that used to work years ago…etc.” Well, all I have to say is, let us move forward.

Let us admit it, it is really hard to ask/request link sellers to move their butts in removing those links even with the most cordial email and phone call you can imagine, especially when you are contacting hell-bent disinterested splog owners whom your client worked with before to get those links.  Aside from that, some are also shady enough to hide their identities that even your most trusted Whois tool could not detect their real contact information (as in REAL contact information).

Luckily though, the SEO industry is full of helpful people who share their experiences in almost every possible scenario you are faced with.  Richard Baxter, for one, has covered some effective ways on how to find those dreaded hidden information which I find really helpful.  There are also a number of good link clean-up services, which Cyrus Shepard reviewed on his post, that can help you speed up your link cleansing process.  However, the fact still remains that cleaning all those mess will still get you nowhere if site owners are not participating at all. Exhausting!  So, I decided to make an experiment.

Allow me to share with you an experiment I made that took out a lot of links from different domains using DMCA Filing, hitting those stubborn link sellers on the head.

Warning: A word of caution before doing this. It may backfire. 

Important:

It should be noted that you are doing this DMCA Filing request because you are sure that your site was hit by Penguin or was manually penalized by Google and you admit that you have been involved in paid links (these are your site targets) before.  I don’t want to repeat the entire process on how to diagnose a Penguin hit but let me just give you some resources that discuss in detail what you need to look for, or you can simply read my post about Google Penalty recovery.

1. Use SEO tools like OSE, Raventools, Scrapebox, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs to scrape all the links of your client.

In my case, I just used Open Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), and Raventools. Download all your data in Excel in order to have a better grasp of them.

You can use GWT, OSE, and Raventools data in order to know those bad links pointing to your site and the contact details (use SEOGadget) of those domain owners. You can also use Watch My ISP by domainpunch.com (I only used the demo version) in order to do bulk WhoIs checks or you may use DomainTools.com or any other WhoIs checker you are comfortable with.

Sometimes, just by a simple check, it is easy to spot the host provider. But, at times, you need to use another tool like intoDNS in order to trace the nameserver’s origin.

3. Create a page dedicated for reviews/testimonials on your website.  

4. Copy and Paste the content (including the links) from those “offending sites” linking to your website.

Note: This is usually used for those blog posts (if you can remember the sites meant for link selling) normally with a 250-words (3 links each) type of post linking to different types of website from construction, casino, web hosting, payday loans, etc. If you are sure that you paid those blogposts with your links on it, you basically own those content, Right?

I stumbled upon a sample document can be downloaded here dmca letter_host companies.

There are other copies over the Net too. See below.

b. Hostgator is the easiest hosting company I dealt with because they have an online form.
c. Search Engine DMCA filing process takes longer.

Here is a snapshot of emails I’ve sent overtime.  Click here for a larger image.

Hosting companies are allergic to notices like the DMCA Copyright Infringement Act and they usually respond quickly. In fact, they themselves contact the offending parties which are normally given a 24-72 hours grace period to remove those content or else they will be suspended. Thus, it forces the site owners to remove the content (links) that you wanted them to remove.

Once the content/links have been removed by the targeted sites, you can simply remove the content from your pseudo-testimonial page. That’s it!

Advice:

Take this tactic with a grain of salt because it may backfire. You need to choose which specific sites to use this method on. Choose your battle. Based on my experiment, splogs, and link seller sites are easier targets in removing those links because you can shutdown their business if their sites are down/suspended.

The post DMCA Filing, Abusive or Just Getting Even? appeared first on .

Here is Slaven’s original post. I appreciate that Slaven aired his side on the matter. I understand his frustration about combatting spammers which other webmasters can relate too. I am a webmaster too, I feel his pain.

Going back to Slaven’s post stating that I lacked perspective on what he was to trying point out about spamming, hacking and all other things that webmasters have been suffering for ages. It is not actually about the lack of it but because it is not the subject of my post. I was more focused on how to deal with those webmasters who are involved in paid links, made-for-SEO sites, cheap link directories, etc. that, in my opinion, pollute the web. I would assume that Slaven is not in any way part of it. So, he should sit tight and be cool.

There has been quite an active discussion inside inbound.org about Slaven’s post from which I commented to clarify the issue.

See my reply below. 

Link Removal Requests Done Right.

Try to draw the line between those good and beautiful SEOs doing their jobs correctly and those spammers of the web. Legit SEOs understand basic relationship building and correct email outreaching. For any RR to be looked into by Google Web Spam Team, SEOs are required to contact webmasters (all types) to request removal of those links deemed unnatural. Take note, it is not a demand email but a request. Taking the cue from that, we understand the value of cordially asking webmasters for link removal. We get different replies (mind you!) and non-replies. That is again alright, we have them documented as part of our report to Google.

Now, if you think you are a victim of spammy link removal emails, then, that is another story. But I am certain that those purveyors of irritant emails are definitely not real SEOs. The SEO industry exists with all its purpose is to help webmasters and site owners be more visible on the web when users are searching for their sites.

The post Link Removal Requests Done Right appeared first on .

1. Google Webmaster Tools showed us the links!

Just recently, Matt Cutts answered a question about locating unnatural links. See below.

Watch the video –> How do I know which links to remove when I get an “unnatural links” message?

The video was published last February 11, 2013 but we can attest that it was rolled out months ago.  See Google Webmaster Tools email last September 20, 2012. It was a useful hint on which links to focus on.

The anchor text cited by Google was a direct suggestion pointing to the over-optimized anchor texts we’ve uncovered when we used Majesctic SEO and Open Site Explorer. See what we’ve found below.

In terms of the 2 URL samples cited by Google, they have a lot in common as follows:

• The same EXACT anchor texts that were used pointed the home page. We think the URL destination is irrelevant.
• We qualified them as inorganic links because the links were forced to be just there but they were really off the subject of the content itself. Even if both sites were with valid Pagerank until now, they can still be a source of penalty should it be detected with unnatural links.
• They have a consistent pattern of 250 words or less type of posts, linking out to different sorts of websites. Mostly paid posts. We think that the 2 sites were part of blog network sites meant for paid posts, given the variety of articles published linking to different websites.

2.  Most links tagged as Toxic and Suspicious by Link Detox should go.

We ran Link Detox by LinkResearchTools and most of those sites that were considered ‘toxic’ and ‘suspicious’ were included in the Google Disavow Tool file.

We still did manual double checking though for the all sites taking into account the ff:

• Spammy websites (linking out here and there)
• Low quality directories
• Riddled with Ads that hampers good user experience. They are obviously made for Adsense kind of sites.

3. Most websites using those over-optimized anchor texts must be removed.

Pro Tip: We focused more on those websites linking to our client’s site using those identified over-optimized anchor texts making the link distribution unnatural.  We used Google Webmaster Tools  and Majestic SEO to get the link profile.  Majestic SEO, in our opinion, is really good in detecting anchor texts distribution too.

4. Say Goodbye to Unnatural Sitewide Links 

Sitewide links are not categorically bad but in our case, we removed those sitewide links that are irrelevant to the client’s website. The damage of sitewide links with unnatural anchor texts using a completely low quality website is huge, in our opinion, making the anchor text distribution abnormal and skewed. But that is just our opinion. 

5.  All sites with unnatural links were included in the Google Disavow Tool file. 

We include the entire domain [ domain:spammysite.com] should it be manually evaluated as low quality by our team. We are merciless when it comes to using Google Disavow Tool.

If you think your site is getting algorithmic Penguin issues, then try uncovering those links that are doing harm to your site and simply removed them. It should be better that way.  Be not afraid to do it.

The post How We Categorized Unnatural Links Pointing To A Website appeared first on .

A bit of warning. This is not for you if you have been awesome doing all that is good and great in SEO for your clients.  This post is meant for all those who have been experiencing (even until now!) the wrath of Google’s Panda/Penguin algorithm. This article is written for those who are still clueless not seeing the “light” yet, in spite of all their efforts to resuscitate their websites.

One of the hardest challenges in being an SEO is to be approached by a client whose website is penalized by either algorithmic (Panda/Penguin) or manual reasons.  But I tell you, it is a rewarding job being a practitioner of the craft especially when you’re able to bring a business back on track. Your client will thank you for saving his/her company.

Here is a TRUE story. 

Below is the revenue of the client during penalty and after it was lifted.  From $14,750/mo to $60,000/mo and it’s still growing to this date. 

The story began when…

1. We Signed-up with a Penalized Client

We’ve already suspected from our initial audit that the client we were about to sign-up was penalized by Panda and Penguin due to its gradual decrease in traffic among other things. But still, we took the client even though it seemed to be doomed, thinking that we may still have time to revive it. However, two days after the contract signing, the dreaded Google Webmaster Tools message came.  See below.

We have not lifted our fingers yet, so to speak, and we were already in a perfect storm situation.  We now have a manual penalty and the algorithmic Panda & Penguin at work.  A triple whammy!

See the sudden drop in traffic?!

2.  Laser-like Backlinks Audit

So, we grabbed all the backlinks we can get from the client’s website using Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. Paying attention to those anchor texts that were unusually high in backlinks causing over-optimization, we used John Doherty’s method in assessing Penguin Penalty. 

We’ve asked all past SEO reports from the client in order to speed up audit of its SEO activities. The good thing was that he kept a bunch of reports from his past agency but they were all link sellers.  Using Link Detox by LinkResearchTools helped us too in uncovering more potentially toxic links.

Take note, the client’s SEO activity for the past 5 years were technically considered by Google now as low quality, unnatural and deserving of a penalty.

3. The Road to Link Cleansing is Daunting

It took us more than 4 months to email site owners requesting removal of our client’s links. I guarantee you this activity is the nastiest of all in bringing back a penalized website but we are glad that Boomerang for Gmail came in handy.  We made sure all emails  and follow-ups we’ve made were all recorded via Google Docs. This included rejected  and approved requests.

PRO Tip: You need to document all of your activities in reaching out to webmasters for your link removal requests whether they are successful or not because the Google Web Spam QA Team reviews your efforts based on your documentation and it is an important factor for your manual penalty to be lifted or not.

4. Be Not Afraid to use the Google Disavow Tool

There will certainly be webmasters out there who will strip you down to the bone asking for money in exchange of link removals. These are the most soulless snake oil salesmen on earth. We’ve documented and submitted their replies to Google too. You can also include all those rejected link removal requests and bounced emails due to misinformation on email addresses used by other webmasters via WHOIS.

We’ve included all those sites that we failed to remove links from to the Google Disavow Tool  text file. I’ve curated articles about the Google Disavow Tool and posted it for your reference.

See below a snake oil salesman haggling for bucks!

(Click to enlarge image)

Pro Tip: Never give in to webmasters asking for money in order to remove your links. Your reply saying a simple “No” is already fair enough to tell the Google Webspam QA Team that you are serious with what you are doing in helping them “cleaning the web”.

5. The Google Reconsideration Request

We’ve submitted our first Google reconsideration request and guess what, we failed. See Google’s reply below.

However; we did not lose hope with their reply. Instead, we continued on what we have been doing in removing links and improving the client’s website in terms of user experience, page speed and applying all those best practices for on-page optimization.

Pro Tip: While you are doing your link removal activities, it is best that you are also working on creating linkable assets, improving web user experience, social outreach and content marketing in order to have your base quality link sources already being built to replenish the lost ones.

Here was the reply from Google on our second try. See below.

Google’s reply stated that there are still traces of inorganic links to our client’s site but we were not worried because we knew that we’ve already done a decent job on link cleansing (which we are still doing until now) and the Google Disavow Tool submission we’ve made will handle the negative algorithmic effect of those inorganic links.

6. Out from the Saddle and a Sudden Slap (again!)

One week or so after Google replied, the traffic started to increase. However, our “feeling good” moment was interrupted by a sudden drop on the traffic again! See figure below.

What went wrong? The culprit was a single 301 redirect we’ve made from an old page (with too many inbound spammy links we’ve removed during our cleansing activity). For whatever stupid reason, we redirected it to another page and boom! the drop happened. True enough, the negative effect from spammy links can really cause damage to a website. We have been reading and hearing it from others but our first hand experience, validated it. So, we removed the 301 redirect and the awesomeness resumed! 

My Personal Take:

Recovering a business like what I’ve cited creates a lasting impact not only to the client but also to the team involved in the entire process. For the client, he vowed not to do anything about spading the spade anymore. It taught the client the importance of investing on real world marketing (RCS as Wil Reynolds may call it). This is what I call, “providing REAL value to customers”. 

We just saved another business. Aren’t we heroes in our own little way?  =P

This is one of the reasons why I love SEO.

Update: 

For clarity’s sake, the “webmasters” I am referring to as “snake oil salesmen” are those webmasters that manage made-for-seo sites, cheap link directories, blog networks selling links and etc. They already collected money from the client by selling links but still ask for more when asked to remove the links.

The post A True Story: From A Triple Whammy Google Penalty To $60K/month Revenue appeared first on .

I think one of the biggest news from Google for webmasters this 2012 is about the Google Disavow Tool.  As expected, a lot of opinions and speculations are being published each day while more and more people are using it for varied reasons.  This led me to create this page to once and for all curate every known post/article out there that can help anyone interested about the tool.

I can’t stress enough the one single phrase that keeps on resurfacing from all the posts I’ve read which is,  “Use Google Disavow Tool with CAUTION.”

Your Ultimate Reference: Google Disavow Tool

Learn how search industry leaders talk about the Google Disavow Tool

October 16, 2012

New Disavow Links Tools Proves Negative SEO Exists, Is a Serious Issue– Wordstream  (Larry Kim)

This article is about Larry Kim’s take on the release of the tool  and how he connects the dots with the existence of Negative SEO that has been rumored to be true.  His post tackles the tool creating moral hazards and proving that the link clean-up is still nearly impossible.

October 16, 2012 

The Dos and Don’ts for Google’s New Disavow Links Tool – Portent (Josh Patrice)

A simple but meaningful post about the Do’s and Don’ts of Google Disavow Tool. Let me pick some… “Don’t use the tool as a short cut”, “Don’t assume that all ranking issues can be fixed by disavowing links”, “Don’t become a serial uploader”, “Do party like it’s 1999” (lol) and “Do think of this like rel=”canonical””. ‘Nuff said.

October 16, 2012 

3 Conspiracy Theories About Google’s Disavow Links Tool – WebGnomes.org (by Steve Webb)

Whenever I hear the words conspiracy theory, it reminds me of Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts’ movie. Steve Webb though talks about 3 theories on Google Disavow Tool as follows: 1) Spamming & Negative SEO just got a lot easier, 2) The tool is actually a crowdsourced spam detector (hmm… makes sense!), and 3) All webmasters will destroy their sites.  Well, Steve Webb crafted this post convincingly in my personal opinion.

October 16, 2012 

Questions and Answer on Google’s Newly Released Disavow Links Tool – IMI (Benj Arriola)

Benj answers the fundamental elements of a  question namely; the Who, What, Where, When and How.  Furthermore, he explains the difference between Rel=”nofollow” and the Disavow Tool.  Interestingly enough, he discusses possible scenarios on how not-so-be-named SEOs can exploit the tool which is meant to let webmasters be aware of such unscrupulous activity. Thus; they can be prepared to future-proof their sites.

October 17, 2012

Google Link Disavow Tool: The Complete Guide – DejanSEO (Dan Petrovic)

Talk about the tool’s comprehensive How-To guide, this post is COMPLETE . Dan even came up with a downloadable pdf  version and attached our Google Hangout discussion to substantiate his article.

October 17, 2012 

Link Removal and Google’s Disavow Tool – Virante (Phil Buckley)

Phil Buckley says that the tool MUST be the LAST RESORT to use in the reconsideration request process. Remove’em which is obviously their tool is still useful being part of the equation in the link cleansing phases.  His post’s take away is about trusted sites being harder to be overtaken now since they got ahead during the easy days of SEO.

October 18, 2012

Google’s Link Disavow Tool – Handle with Care – CoastDigital (Michael Carden-Edwards)

Michael Carden-Edwards came up with a list of how to use the Disavow Tool effectively, such as proper scrutiny of the backlink profile, proper assessment of links and the need to communicate first with website owners for link take down requests.  He recommends to use the tool sparingly and test its impact.

October 18, 2012 

Google Launches New ‘Disavow’ Tool to Help Protect You From Bad Inbound Links – HubSpot (Corey Eridon)

After all the different news that was heard in the past about some efforts to remove links (even using lawyers), Google finally gave-in in releasing the tool.  Corey Eridon emphasizes that the request to disavow is not automatic, by reiterating Matt Cutts’ statement, “It is not a directive but a strong suggestion”.  One must be careful to use the tool else, one may end up harm the site’s ranking and traffic.

October 18, 2012 

Google’s Disavow Tool – Take a Deep Breath – SEOMoz (Dr. Pete)

If you want to know how Dr.Pete showed his brilliance in coming up with yet another awesome post, the link above is meant for you.  His post talks about the processes needed to be done beforehand and dissects the practical use of the tool. As always, he ends up with some wise bits of advice so as not to hit Robin in the face with a Batarang.

October 19, 2012

Google disavow links tool. Wearing the tin foil hat – State of Search (Gianluca Fiorelli)

This post stresses the real reason why Google finally came up with the tool in order to make webmasters and SEOs feed the Penguin algorithm. It also discusses the different types of SEOs and their corresponding reactions to the said tool.

As always,  you get to pick Gianluca’s wits about not quitting to “wear the tin foil hat”.

October 19, 2012 

Google Launches Disavow Tool to Battle Link Loopholes – 360i.com (Mike Dobbs)

The post says that we’ve already reached apex in Google’s battle against link spam.  It also discusses some tips on how to go about using the tool. Mike also angles an idea that Google is actually pushing an alternative path for brands via Google+ product.

October 18, 2012 

Google Disavow Tool – SEO Book (Aaron Wall)

“Careful, Now”. The disavow tool is a loaded gun. If you want to understand the other side of the equation,  Aaron Wall’s take on the newly released tool is something you should not miss to read.

October 18, 2012 

How to Successfully use the Google Disavow Tool – Cognitive SEO (Razvan Gavrillas)

This is an infographic that shows you the steps on how to successfully use the Google Disavow Tool. They’re easy to follow.

October 22, 2012

Google, Penalties & the Disavow Links Tool: The Big Game Theory – Search Engine Watch (Simon Penson)

Simon Penson uses  Game Theory to dabble about the bigger picture  of Google’s  game plan to make its engine a better place to search for quality information.  Oh! The pawns and the puppeteers are working together for a better web.

October 22, 2012 

Google’s Disavow Links Tool: First Impressions – Search Engine Journal (Jayson DeMers)

First impression lasts. Jayson thinks that the link removal campaign has come to end with the roll out of the tool.

October 23, 2012 

The Many Shades of Google’s Link Disavow Tool – Search Engine Journal (Jennifer Slegg)

The title sounds like the 50 Shades of Grey but it is not. It is  about Jennifer Slegg’s opinion regarding the tool not being a game changer. She also talks about the need to have further guidelines to prevent fallout from misuse of the said tool.

 October 29, 2012

Q&A With Google’s Matt Cutts On How To Use The Link Disavow Tool – SEJ  (Danny Sullivan)

This Q&A with Matt Cutts by Danny Sullivan clarified further the use of the tool and how should webmasters’ use it. Without any effort to remove links and simply, resorting to the tool will not help sites.

Here is Matt Cutts’ video talking about the tool:

Case Studies: Successful Usage of the Google Disavow Tool 

October 19, 2012 

Disavow Tool Beta Test Recovery Laid Bare! – Dave Naylor (by Alex Graves)

This is a case study on how to successfully recover a website from penalty by using the tool for a Google reconsideration request. Dave Naylor’s group actually beta tested the said tool.

October 25, 2012 

The Disavow Tool Works! Real Sites, Real Recoveries! – SEOWizz (Tim Grice)

Tim believes that Negative SEO can truly hurt sites and that Google could not just ignore bad links thus, the tool was released. Citing actual cases of recovery is something worth noting regarding his post. Compelling…

More Updates on this post. 

This post will be updated as more and more articles about Google Disavow Tool will be written to help everyone learn more about it. If you know other interesting views/posts regarding the tool, I will be glad to include them in the list. You can use the comment portion below.

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