Central Perk: SEOptimise

joi, 26 mai 2011

SEOptimise

How to Turn a Google Penalty into Great Linkbait, by J.C. Penney

Posted: 26 May 2011 02:13 AM PDT

Yesterday it was reported that J.C. Penney have showed signs that their Google penalty has now been lifted.

The original penalty was imposed at the end of Feb for “shady SEO practices”. Searchmetrics have published a report to show that organic search traffic is back on the rise again for J.C. Penney:

JC Penney Google Penalty

Obviously we can only speculate about the SEO activity that J.C. Penney have employed in order to get this penalty turned around so quickly. The obvious steps would be to clean up their backlink profile and remove any paid or suspicious links and then submit a re-inclusion request (which has been confirmed by Matt Cutts).

So when analysing J.C. Penney’s recent backlink history, wouldn’t you expect to see a drop in links?

JC Penney Google Penalty

No! Majestic SEO shows that they’ve actually had a significant increase in recent links. So what does this mean? Maybe they’ve bought more links :) Or perhaps they’ve had a very successful PR campaign? In fact, that is much closer to the truth!

So even when it’s assumed they’ve made large efforts to remove links, they’ve actually increased volumes by considerable amounts. But it’s not just about numbers - if you look deeper into the quality of these new links, you’ll find that the quality of these are very high. There are many global media and newspaper websites covering the story, along with hundreds of authority blogs such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Econsultancy, Techcrunch etc – as well as the huge number of SEO blogs picking up on this.

That’s all without looking at the PR value of how much coverage and brand visibility they’ve generated from this. Being from the UK, I’ve got to admit – I’d never even heard of J.C. Penney before this.

So what can we learn from J.C. Penney?

Admit your mistakes – it’s great linkbait! It would have cost them a fortune to buy links and coverage like this from the NYTimes otherwise!
Clean up your act, quickly – figure out why you were banned and fix it. In this case it appears to be more of a manual penalty than an algorithmic one, so it’s likely to require a re-inclusion request to make sure Google are aware that you’ve corrected any issues and can reconsider the penalty.
Make sure everyone’s aware when ban is lifted = more links! They didn’t even have to leak the news this time, there’s so many SEOs watching the outcome of this one that any change in rankings/traffic was always going to picked up on.

The end result: J.C. Penney have set a great example of how to turn a negative into a positive.

They’ve cleaned up their backlink profile, replaced these with a huge volume of very high quality media and blog links which are far more natural and defensible – and are likely to return to Google in a much stronger position than ever (certainly long-term).

30 SEO & Social Media ROI Analytics Resources

Posted: 25 May 2011 06:23 AM PDT

ROI or Return On Investment is on everyone’s lips these days. It’s become so widespread that you could call it a buzz word now. Although its meaning gets a bit diluted, I have to admit that I use it sometimes outside its strict sense myself.

Originally ROI meant the extra monetary return, while increasingly it may mean any value that you get back for something you invest in, be it time, effort or money.

With SEO, and especially social media, ROI has become very fuzzy.

Everyone wants it but it’s not so obvious, so more and more people come up with their own notion of how the actual ROI of SEO and social media might look, and how you can measure it.

Over the recent months I have collected a multitude of ROI-related resources that often introduce new concepts of it or try to adapt the old definition to the new areas the metric isn’t native to.

SEO ROI

While SEO and analytics are closely related, for years many people focused on old school SEO metrics like rankings and traffic, instead of hard core business metrics. More recently there is a growing trend to measure SEO success in ROI. It’s not easy but it’s not impossible. Still, it’s not as exact as in other areas. Nonetheless we can already clearly see that some aspects of SEO have a tangible ROI.

Social Media ROI

The spectre of social media ROI has been among us for years, but there are many issues with measuring social media as a business metric. There are many ways to deal with the ephemeral character of some social interactions online. You can either just focus on them, or you can try to redefine ROI for an actual social media campaign as something other than actual revenue.

Analytics and ROI Metrics

So how do you actually measure the actual ROI? What factors can be measured? There are many approaches. Some use common tools like Google Analytics, while others depends on their own ways to collect data and calculate ROI. Additionally you have to dig deeper than the numbers. You have to understand how they affect your business.

“ROI of Human Relations”

The obsession with ROI has also created some considerable backlash among Web professionals. Some of them already question ROI as it is or parody it, while others use the term in a metaphorical sense.

So as you can see, ROI is not always what you expect it to be, and without measuring ROI or anything else that lets you determine the actual value of what you do on social media and in search, you can end up wasting your money.

Even in cases where the investment is still higher than the benefits you can measure, now you can at least determine the long term or soft factors of your investment in SEO and social media.

On the other hand, you can’t measure everything – especially on social media, where monetary metrics often collide with human relationships you can’t easily quantify. There is also the question of whether you should quantify relationships; this is one you have to ask as part of your social media strategy.

* Image by Gunni Cool.