Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[music]
Hi, everybody. I'm Tom Harari, SEO Manager at iAcquire. Welcome
back to another edition of Cliffs Notes Tuesday. Today we're going over
Paddy Moogan's "The Link Building Book," specifically the chapter on link-
based penalties. It sounds really scary. It's not. We're going to walk you
through it. Hopefully after this it'll help you identify if you've hit by a
link-based penalty and what to do to fix it.
The chapter, first of all, starts off with links are important for Google.
This you, of course, already know, but obviously because links are
important, they've been a little bit abused in the past. What's happened is
Google obviously doesn't like unnatural link building. They want things to
be natural and links to be given out for editorial reasons. So they've been
getting very aggressive about coming down on manipulative link building.
What's happened in the last year, you may have heard of it, is the Penguin
updates. They come out with these updates that happen regularly where they
try to find out manipulative link building, manipulative link practices,
and basically penalize sites that are engaging in that type of behavior.
Basically there's three things you need to know for this chapter, that this
chapter goes over. Specifically, there's how to detect if you've been hit by a
link-based penalty, diagnosing the exact cause, so being sure that it
actually is link-related, and then the steps to lift the penalty.
First off, how to detect, this is pretty simple. You've either gotten a
warning in your Google webmaster account that says, "We found that you have
unnatural links," or you've seen your traffic and rankings drop. That could
be a good first sign of detection. Then diagnosing the exact cause and the
steps to lifting the penalty, we'll get into right now.
Patty lays out nine steps specifically that we'll go over one by one. The
whiteboard here is not going to do justice to the chapter. It's very
screenshot-heavy, this specific chapter. It goes through specifically
different types of Excel things that you can do. Definitely check out the
chapter itself, but I'll give you a good highlight of what to expect.
To start off, you want to verify the data. So you want to make sure that
what you're looking at is actually some sort of penalty that's happened,
and it's not some sort of silly mistake. You didn't block your site with
the robots.txt by accident, or maybe someone took out the Google Analytics
tracking code, and that's why it looks like you don't have any traffic. So
make sure that what you're looking at is actually a dip in traffic.
The next thing you want to look for is patterns. Seasonality is one thing,
but if you're familiar with what type of traffic you're supposed to be
getting or what you've consistently been getting, you want to look for
either a dip in the number of keywords that are getting traffic from
organic search, or the number of pages that are getting traffic from
organic search. Two different things, but will kind of let you know what
type of penalty you've been hit with.
What's really cool is you can now take all of the known Google algorithm
updates and just kind of overlay them on top of your analytics to see if
any type of dip in traffic correlates or coincides with a known algorithm
update, like a Penguin update. You can do that using the penguintool.com
tool that they provide. It's really easy to set up. Check it out.
The next step is you want to get all your links. This was mentioned in the
previous chapter. Definitely go back and read that chapter if you're still
unfamiliar with it, or check out our video that we did on it. What you're
really looking for here is, once you've gathered all your links, we're
going to be looking for either low-quality links, site-wide links, or over-
optimized anchor text.
The next step is finding the low-quality links by PR, or page rank. He goes
into specifically how to use some cool different Excel functions and how to
use a pivot table, so that you can basically chart it out and get a good
visual representation of the type of links you have by page rank. You can
see how many links are a page rank of zero, or how many links are a page rank of three.
This kind of helps you visualize where you're getting your
links from, what type of quality are they.
The next step would be to find the low-quality site-wide links, so how many
links you're getting from a specific domain, and this could be indicative
of a problem if you're getting lots of footer and sidebar links. That's
something that you'd want to see, and again, he uses pivot tables to show
you how to do this.
Then step six is finding over-optimized anchor text. Again, using pivot
tables, but this time you're looking for the count of how many links you
have with a specific keyword. He puts together this funny but relevant
equation for finding the main culprits, or the worst offenders, if you
will, where he says basically look for very low page rank of either -1 or
0, plus commercial anchor text, plus if they're site-wide, then that
probably makes a prime candidate for removal.
Step seven is now you need to do what's called link removal. We've been
talking up until now about link building. Now we're going to do link
removing. A funny world we live in. Don't be scared. It's actually exactly
the same as just regular outreach, except in this case, instead of emailing
a webmaster and saying, "Hey, can you link to me?" now what you're saying
is, "Hey, you linked to me. Can you not do that? Thanks."
You need the contact information, obviously, for all of these different
links that you have, and he recommends just outsourcing that, because it
probably is going to take a lot of time for you to comb through each and
every single site and find out what the email address or phone number is.
Most importantly, it says follow up. Don't just send one email and then
think you're done. Follow up at least once, and we'll get into why that's
important, aside from the obvious reason that it would probably increase
your chances of getting in touch with somebody.
The next thing you want to do now is, let's say you've gotten a few links
removed on your own, or maybe you've gotten no links removed on your own.
All of the remainders that you were unsuccessful in getting removed, you
want to use Google's Disavow tool. What you can do there is just basically
submit all of your links and then say, "I disavow these links, and I don't
want them to count against me. Just dissociate my site from these links."
If that still doesn't work, then the last step, step nine, is the
reconsideration request, where you're essentially reaching out to Google
and saying, "Please, please, please can you forgive me? We know we did some
wrong in the past." It's really important to admit your wrongdoing. Just be
very open and honest about what type of link building practice you've done
in the past. If you use an outsourcer, if you use an agency, Paddy assumes
that Google will probably know everything. So you might as well just be
forthright about it.
You want to go through the steps that were taken to get those links
removed, and what type of steps you've taken to also make sure that this
type of behavior doesn't happen again for your website, for your
organization. Then he says to also link to any supporting documents you
have. So maybe you created a Google Docs spreadsheet to track all of the
different webmasters you've contacted, and this is where showing them that
you've followed up more than once would show that you were pretty
persistent and you still were unable to get those links removed.
A lot to handle here. Definitely check out the chapter itself for specific
step-by-step detailed instructions on how to do these things in Excel for a
lot of the different pivot tables and stuff. I didn't have room on the
whiteboard. But hopefully you enjoyed this, and hopefully you enjoy the
chapter. I'm Tom Harari at iAcquire, signing out. [music]