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James Schramko here with an SEO news update and this one is about paid links and Google’s
stance on this, given the recent slap of a florist company for having sponsored articles
written with full follow links, which I think Google have deemed as paid links.
So, the natural question is “What does this actually mean for us?” Well, in times like
this whenever there’s been a big announcement, it makes us all reflect on our strategy and
campaigns, and I’ve got to say, we’re in pretty good shape over here at SEOPartner.com
and Linkjuice.com and here’s why. When things like this happen, a lot of people
throw their hands up and they say “It’s all too hard!” and they leave the market.
And if they’re doing dodgy tactics or they’re doing things that are frowned upon by Google,
then they probably should leave the market. What this also means is that links are still
really valuable if you can happen to get good quality themed category-specific links, then
they are worth something. And it’s good to mix up your links with follow and no-follow.
You want to be getting links from different places but always relevant and as natural
as possible. So how do you get natural links? You create
amazing content. Companies like Linkjuice.com create original content such as articles,
PDFs, videos and infographics and then we give them to the customer to put on the customer’s
website, so the best content is going on your own website and we promote it using different
tactics; not just one tactic. So we regularly look at our results and so
far, we’re still well in the 80 something percent success rate, and now that we’ve
categorized sites with different color codes, we are able to make sure that we’re always
doing the right SEO tactics for the right website. In fact, we are able to tell someone
if we’re not able to help them. One way to find out of course is the website check
that’s available on SEOPartner.com. We’re pretty confident that if we say we can help
you, we can. I think large corporations are always going
to push the limit because there’s huge profits available to them if they can succeed and
I think Google probably like to make an example of people who are blatantly doing the wrong
thing. Now, I’m not saying that florist was doing the wrong thing, maybe they just
innocently send out flowers around Valentine’s Day, which could be a specific promotion.
But they are clear, if you’re going to do promotions or advertising, make sure you put
a no-follow attribution on your links. When we get links for customers, we’re actually
putting content on a mixture of sites that have follow or no-follows, so the link profile
is going to look very natural. It’s normal that people would share good
content on social profiles and that’s what happens. In fact, a lot of the work we do
has a compound effect because real people share it and real people find it and that’s
the whole point. In fact, people will even actually buy things. And if I could change
the metric from search results in search engines to Return on Investment, or search query click
through rates leading to sales and conversions, then that would be ideal. Now, a lot of customers
are still not at the point where they’re even tracking conversions properly or optimizing
for the right phrases, and we’re here to help you with keyword selection, etc. So when
you order one of the packages, we will have a look at your keywords if you ask us for
an opinion and help to make sure that you get a return on investment because we want
you to be able to stay onboard. Remember with content, there’s always varying
levels of quality. An article can be a good article or it can be a bad article. If you
get it from one of the numerous cheap suppliers, make sure that it’s not just being passed
off as original when in fact it’s been copied because that does happen. In our team, we
hand-create everything. We hire all of the team full-time. They only work for us and
there’s rigid quality standards that they must meet. We’re also using multiple components.
It’s not just about one tactic as in the case of this particular paid link problem.
We’re using RSS submissions, we still use social sites, we have our own properties that
we’re able to put content on and of course, we’re always emphasizing for our customers
to get the best content on the customer’s site with the right key phrase and then you
stand a very good chance of getting great ranking.
So in summary, if you’re doing good work and if you have a sensible approach to SEO,
you’re going to be fine. In fact, it’s much harder for people who take shortcuts,
it’s much harder for people who compromise and it’s much harder for the cheats.
The best thing you could focus on is getting good quality content on your site and then
promoting it in a safe way. We’re here to help at Linkjuice.com and SEOPartner.com.
I’m James Schramko and I’ll catch up with you next week.