Link Building Crackdown, New vs Old Domains, Black Hat SEO, Speedlink 5:2014

Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great and productive week. Google continues on with its link building crackdown, taking down recently yet another link network, the French Buzzea. Although Buzzea is defending itself, saying that they always kept the ethical side of sponsored articles focusing on quality and natural links, Matt does not seem to agree based on his tweet.

Today we’re taking action on a French link network that violates our quality guidelines (Buzzea).

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) January 29, 2014

What’s more is that Matt goes as far as saying that next on the line for action will be a German link network. I think I know of one that might be a target, but I won’t say it just for now. Let’s see. In any event, this is just to show you that it is getting harder and harder to build links. Guest posting is being devalued (specially if it low quality and inbound links are from low domain authority), site wide links are a no no, and now, Matt tells us why you should steer away from article directories. Actually, this type of link acquisition has been long gone in my opinion, and yet for some reason, many still use it. As a matter of fact, the “link building” term is now being replaced by “link earning”. What do you think? What “link earning” strategies do you employ that you feel does work? I’d be interested in knowing your thoughts.

On a different front, Matt talks about another topic that may be of interest to those of you that have or acquire old domains as part of your SEO strategy. Matt explains why old or aged domains may not necessarily rank better than newer ones, despite the perceived value of an older sites, and provides some suggestions on how you can maintain your rankings.

Lastly, an interesting article published on SEMrush really caught my attention this week. When you see a title of a well established site saying “Why Black Hat SEO is Awesome“, you have got to read and see what that is all about. In the article written by Paul Bliss, he explains the difference between Black Hat SEO and sheer SPAM, and also provides some insights on why “black hat” tactics are still being employed by many. Head over there and read what he has to say and come back here to tell me what you think about it.

OK, I did say “finally” above, but this one should also be of interest to you, specially if you are into affiliate marketing. Another “warning” from Google about running affiliate programs on thin sites that don’t provide value. They warn of sites risking itself of being deindexed in case you violate their guidelines.

And as usual, in no particular order:

That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend!

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Page Layout Algorithm, New Klout, Suck At Marketing, Rich Snippets, Speedlink 7:2014

 

Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great and productive week. Early this week Matt Cutts sent out a tweet saying that they made a refresh of an algorithm. That´s about it. One of those kind of tweets that you either click on it to read more, or it really does not say much, does it? Anyway, clicking on it will take you to a post that talks about the algorithm that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result. Essentially this one of for those “ad heavy” sites. I guess that those sites that have nothing really to offer (long landing pages for example) may start to see less organic traffic. What do you think about this move?

SEO folks: we recently launched a refresh of this algorithm: http://t.co/KKSXm8FqZW Visible to outside world on ~Feb. 6th.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 10, 2014

Some few days ago Klout announced a new version that they say “takes the first step towards our vision of helping people be known for what they love.” By leveraging their massive trove of social data, their new content platform helps Klout users be better content creators. So did you see that? They now have a content platform. Essentially you can now create content, schedule it and share other people´s content too. The difference with other similar tools is that “Klout intelligently recommends content that will strike a chord with your unique set of friends, fans, and followers” as they mentioned in their post.

Anyway, if you are interested to know more, they published another posts clarifying some things that you may not know of. One that called my attention was that creating and sharing content on the New Klout does not help you increase your klout score. How about that? Do you use Klout? Are you even interested?

This week, Rand Fishkin of Moz.com published a video about The Best Ways To Suck in Marketing. If you a marketer, it may interesting to see what he has to say. I think that in a way, even if just a little, everyone (including me) is a bit guilty of some of these marketing practices that “suck”. Are you?

Finally and following the Rich Snippet issue that can get you into trouble with Google, here´s a great checklist to make sure you’re on the safe side.

And as usual, in no particular order:

That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Rich Snippets, Blogging, SEO, Social Web, Speedlink 01:2012Rich Snippets and Authorship: Implementation and Benefits [infographic]Top SEO Tools and more, Google+ Nofollow Links, Rich Snippet SPAM, Speedlink 6:2014Google Privacy Changes, Trust Triggers, SEO, Speedlink 04:201263 Flares Google+ 2 '>Twitter 56 Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");'>Facebook 4 '>StumbleUpon 1 '>63 Flares ×

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Top SEO Tools and more, Google+ Nofollow Links, Rich Snippet SPAM, Speedlink

Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great and productive week. This week Moz.com has released the 2014 results from over 3,700+ plus people who participated in this year’s industry survey. The compiled results are available here. Essentially, content marketing is on the rise and fewer and fewer are actively link-building (I wonder why). In any event, keyword research and rank-tracking are still an important part of SEO, according to the survey. Aside from many information that you will find in this survey are the top SEO tools used by many, top social platforms, top marketing activities, etc. Not surprisingly, the #1 spot for SEO tools is Google Webmaster Tools.


In addition, in this survey, you will also find the top:
Top 10 content toolsSocial Toolsand more..
Another interesting news this week was that of a thread posted on Google+ by Mark Traphagen. See the thread here more info. Essentially, it appears that all links in the profile section are no longer followed. There you go, another link crackdown from Google? For now, post links seems that are still followed so let’s see how that goes.
And finally, SearchEngineWatch (SEW) reported that Google is now also penalizing (or might) sites that are using rich snippets. “If you use rich snippets on your websites, you should be aware that Google is now penalizing websites for spamming structured data markup”, says SEW. It appears that there are users that are receiving some manual actions warnings on GWT, which goes like this:

Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google’s Rich Snippet Quality guidelines.

And as usual, in no particular order:
That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend!

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