marți, 26 august 2014

94 years later, here's where we are:

 

Hi, everyone --

In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to John Adams, then serving on the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and reminded him to "not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands."

Seventy-two years later, in 1848, women across the country gathered together for the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. And it wasn't until 72 years after that, in 1920, that women in the United States officially gained the right to vote.

Let's be honest: Change hasn't ever exactly come quickly for women in this country. And 94 years later -- while it's undeniable that women have made leaps and bounds in every facet of American life, from the classroom to the boardroom -- it's not enough.

Today, on the anniversary of the 19th Amendment, we celebrate Women's Equality Day. And today, the day-to-day operations of too many businesses and institutions still don't reflect true gender equality. We've got the data to prove it.

Throughout the day, I've posted charts that tell the story of the progress we've made -- and the challenges women still face in the workforce.

Take a look -- and then share these with someone you think needs to see them.

In 2014, inequality and discrimination live on. Women, on average, continue to earn less than their male counterparts (and that's 51 years after the Equal Pay Act passed), and the gap is even greater for women of color. Our workplace policies, on the whole, force many working parents to choose between their job and their family -- and that's wrong.

This Administration has a long history of shattering our remaining glass ceilings and upholding the rights of women -- but real gender equality is going to take more than the President acting alone.

Right now, there's legislation before Congress that would make it better -- that would make it easier for women to discuss what they're being paid, and to do something about it.

So if you're ready to see broader, meaningful action on these issues, then get the facts and help spread the word.

No major achievement for women's rights in this country has come easily. It's always taken a determined group of women and men alike, doing everything they could to organize, protest, and agitate the system they aimed to change.

The year 2014 is no different. So if you're ready for real equality for women, then make sure everyone you know has the facts.

- Betsey

Betsey Stevenson
Member
Council of Economic Advisers
@CEABetsey


 

Today Is Women's Equality Day

 
Here's what's going on at the White House today.
 
 
 
 
 
  Featured

Today Is Women's Equality Day

Etched into our nation's history are the stories of women who fought for the America they knew was possible -- a country where all are truly treated equally and have access to the ballot box, regardless of gender.

It took generations of fearless women who organized and advocated to secure women's right to vote. Today, on Women's Equality Day, we honor these courageous heroes, celebrate how far we have come in the decades since, and acknowledge the work still left to be done.

Learn more about Women's Equality Day, and how the President is working to help America's women and girls succeed.

Watch the President's statement on James Foley.

President Barack Obama bends down to listen to the daughter of a departing U.S. Secret Service agent in the Oval Office, October 28, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)


 
 
  Top Stories

Happy 98th Birthday to the National Park Service

On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service to protect and preserve our natural lands so people all over the world could experience America's historic beauty and heritage for years to come. Today, the National Park Service manages 401 national parks and memorials, which supported 238,000 jobs and pumped more than $26 billion into local economies last year.

READ MORE

Weekly Address: The Export-Import Bank

In this week's address, the President highlighted the progress made toward rebuilding our economy, including the creation of nearly 10 million new private-sector jobs in the past 53 months and the rise in the number of American exports to an all-time high. That growth is in part thanks to the actions of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, an organization that creates American jobs by helping to take American businesses global.

READ MORE

Attorney General Holder Meets with the People of Ferguson

Last week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder traveled to Ferguson, Missouri to review the Justice Department's independent investigation into the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown. While there, the Attorney General met with community leaders, FBI investigators, and federal prosecutors to get detailed briefings on the status of the case.

READ MORE


 
 
  Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Time (ET)

9:50 AM: The President departs the White House

10:05 AM: The President departs Joint Base Andrews

11:20 AM: The President arrives Charlotte, North Carolina

12:00 PM: The President delivers remarks at the American Legion's 96th National Convention

12:30 PM: The Vice President attends an event for the Anthony Brown for Governor campaign

1:10 PM: The President departs Charlotte, North Carolina en route Washington, DC

2:20 PM: The President arrives Joint Base Andrews

2:35 PM: The President arrives the White House

4:50 PM: The President and the Vice President meet with Secretary of State Kerry


 

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Negative SEO: Should You Be Worried? If Attacked, What Should You Do?

Negative SEO: Should You Be Worried? If Attacked, What Should You Do?


Negative SEO: Should You Be Worried? If Attacked, What Should You Do?

Posted: 25 Aug 2014 05:15 PM PDT

Posted by MarieHaynes

There has been a lot of talk lately about negative SEO. Does it really happen? If so, should you be worried? How do you know whether someone is attempting to attack you with negative SEO? And what should you do to protect yourself? The purpose of this article is to shed some light on the subject, and hopefully to reduce some of the fear exists in this area.

What is negative SEO?

Negative SEO occurs when someone makes attempt to lower a site's rankings in the search engines. There are multiple ways that this can be attempted. The most common type of negative SEO that gets discussed is link based negative SEO, but there are many other techniques that unscrupulous people can use to try to reduce your rankings. We'll talk about how to recognize some of these tactics later on in this article .

Does negative SEO really work?

We know that a site can be penalized or can be suppressed by Google algorithms if they have engaged in manipulative link building. The result can be a manual unnatural links penalty or an unnanouced demotion at the hands of the Penguin algorithm. So, if links that I made can hurt me, then intuitively it makes sense that links that someone else made could have the same negative effect. Or can they?

Google is quite adamant that true, effective negative SEO is very rare. In an effort to understand more about Google's stance on negative SEO I decided to research every instance I could find where a Google representative discussed negative SEO. You can read transcriptions of a good number of John Mueller's and Matt Cutt's statements on negative SEO in this article. I'll be quoting from these transcriptions several times in this Moz post as well.

Prior to January of 2003, Google had a page on their site that said the following, "There is nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. " 

 And then in 2003, they changed the wording to say, "There is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking…."

And really, the change made sense. I don't believe Google was admitting at this point that you could drop a site by pointing links at it. Rather, they were likely conceding that there could be cases where someone could harm your website by, for example, hacking into your server and deleting your site or changing your robots.txt file to tell search engines not to crawl the site any more or other such nefarious things.

But what about links? Can a competitor point bad links at you and reduce your rankings? In 2007, Matt Cutts was quoted in a Forbes article on negative SEO: "Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor's site to reduce its search rank isn't impossible, but it's extremely difficult. "We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against it," he says. "I won't go out on a limb and say it's impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice."

So, at that point Google is admitting that negative SEO via linkbuiding is a possibility, albeit quite a remote one. Let's jump forward to 2012. In April of 2012 Google released the first version of the Penguin algorithm which was created to reduce and even penalize for the use of unnatural links. This is when the topic of whether or not you could negatively affect a competitor's site by pointing bad links at them became a very common discussion. Take a look at the Google Trends data for searches for "negative SEO":

Shortly after Google refreshed the Penguin algorithm in October of 2012, Matt Cutts announced the creation of a new tool, the disavow tool, which would allow site owners to ask Google not to count links that they felt could damage their site. Matt stated that the vast majority of sites would not need to use the tool and that Google's algorithms were really quite good at making sure that these bad links would not hurt your site. But, he did admit that it could potentially be a concern for people in high money, competitive niches, saying, "For the people who are in maybe super competitive poker, casino, whatever kind of niches and they're worried about, 'OK, what if someone is trying to do some ill will towards my site?' we've just released a new tool called disavow links."

If you read through the transcriptions of things that Matt Cutts and John Mueller have said about negative SEO, here are the points that Google seems to be emphasizing:

  • Google works hard to ensure that a competitor cannot hurt your site by pointing bad links at it.
  • They have things built into their algorithms to help determine whether the links are self made or not. For example, if there has been a pattern of unnatural linking that has been occurring for many years, then it's not likely that a competitor is at fault.
  • If you notice a bunch of bad looking links pointing at your site, most likely they are not going to do any harm to you. But, Google admits that they may not get things 100% correct all of the time and as such, it's not a bad idea to disavow any spammy looking links that you see.
  • If you see a situation where you feel that negative SEO is actually being effective, Google would like you to report it either in the webmaster forums or by contacting John Mueller and they will look into the situation to see if they can improve their algorithms.
  • The vast majority of cases where people report negative SEO attacks to Google end up NOT being negative SEO.

Examples of things that are NOT negative SEO

I can't tell you how many times I have had a client claim that a competitor is attacking them with bad links when in most cases, this probably isn't true. If you start looking at your backlink profile and seeing some odd looking links it's a normal reaction to think, "I didn't make these spammy links! So, if I didn't make them, who did? It must be my competitor!" 

Here are some examples of situations where negative SEO was suspected, but in reality there is another explanation for what is going on:

Example #1: "Weird" links are not necessarily bad links

There are some websites that link out to almost every site on the web. For example, most sites will have links from sites like:

  • askives.com
  • mrwhatis.net
  • m.biz (and hundreds of m.biz clone directories. I don't know where these come from, but although it's probably not necessary, I disavow them just to be safe. In my opinion, they're not likely negative SEO though.)
  • directories that have scraped dmoz.org
  • links from sites that analyze and provide domain info
  • Chinese sites that scrape alexa.com

...and so on.

Example #2: Sitewide links are not all bad links

I've seen site owners get really upset when they look at their "Links to your site" section of Webmaster Tools and see something like this:

The fear is that Google is going to think that you built tens of thousands of links to your site. Now, in the example that I have given, where the site is a well known one like yellowpages.com, it may be a little more clear that this is not an unnatural link. But, what if a site owner in your niche really liked your content and linked to you in their sidebar? And what if they linked to you with a keyword? Underneath "Links to your site" in Webmaster Tools is a section called, "How your data is linked" that contains your most commonly used anchor text. So, if I got a sitewide link from a site with thousands of pages and they linked with a keyword, I'm going to see that Google thinks that the majority of my links are keyword anchored. Oh no! I've had people think that they've been hit by negative SEO because they have seen a single keyword anchored sitewide link. In my opinion, Google is pretty good at figuring out that a sitewide link is really just one vote from a site. A single sitewide link is not a sign of negative SEO even if it causes thousands of links to appear in Webmaster Tools.

Example #3: Your old habits are coming back to haunt you

Have you ever in the past purchased a link building package? For example, years ago when I was learning SEO I purchased a citation building package to one of my sites. It was one of those deals where you pay $100 and you get a whole bunch of directory listings. (Yeah...I'm not proud of it, but hey...we all had to start learning somewhere.) I've since cleaned up those links. But, the amazing thing is that they keep replicating. I will often see new links appear that are using the same text that I used when I purchased that package. It would be easy for me to say, "Hey! I haven't built any links in years...and now I'm seeing spammy directory listings appear. This must be a competitor pointing bad links at me!" But really, my own actions were the cause for these unnatural links.

Example #4: A well-meaning employee or friend is building you links

You might laugh at this example, but I've seen it happen. I had a client who contacted me for help with a manual unnatural links penalty. He swore he had never purchased or built a link in his life, but his backlink profile was full of a lot of pretty manipulative stuff. He assumed it had to be a competitor doing this. As we were doing the cleanup for his site we noticed new bad links that were appearing. Agh! We're under attack! Well, it turns out that the site owner's nephew had been doing some reading about SEO. I am not kidding. He thought he was helping his uncle out by SEOing his site for him. Oy vey.

Example #5: A previous SEO made these links

Some people are shocked when they find out that their SEO company has been building them unnatural links.  I have seen many cases where an SEO company promised they were going to give a site "White hat links" or links that were within the Google guidelines, but in reality it looks like they outsourced the job to a cheap linkbuilding company that created spammy bookmarks, blog comments and forum signatures.  If you've got unnatural links and you've ever hired an SEO company, there is a good chance that those bad links were actually made on purpose and that YOU paid for them!  Remember, prior to April of 2012, these links used to work well to rank pages and very few websites would get penalized for using them.

Example #6: You've been hacked

While someone could negative SEO your site by hacking into it, not all cases of hacking are negative SEO. A while back, a friend of mine emailed me and said, "Hey! Did you know that one of your sites is ranking highly for Michael Kors handbags?" His suggestion was that I take advantage of that and throw an affiliate page up on the site. :) I had a look at the backlinks and here's what I saw:

Crap.

This was not a competitor trying to hurt my rankings. In fact, the tens of thousands of spammy links that were pointing at my site were actually helping my rankings at that point. What had happened here is that someone had taken advantage of a vulnerability in a Wordpress plugin that had not been updated. They were able to hack into the site and create a whole bunch of new pages. They then pointed huge numbers of spammy links at these pages and redirected them to their Michael Kors affiliate sites.

If you are looking at your backlink profile and you see odd keyword anchors for things like viagra, cialis, casinos, payday loans, ugg boots, etc, then there is a good chance that you have been hacked. In most cases these links can be removed by finding and removing the pages that the hacker created on your site. However, if you have been hacked, it's a good idea to have someone familiar with cleaning up hacks look at your site to figure out how the hacker got in and how you can close that door.

In this situation, we removed the offending pages, found and fixed the access point, AND I also disavowed all of those links. According to Google, if you get hacked and have bad links pointing to you, you can probably ignore them because their algorithms are good at picking up and just discounting this sort of thing. However, it concerned me that these bad links actually were helping this site. If Google was just discounting them then they should have had no effect. I am 99% sure that I would have been ok to leave them, especially since the pages they pointed to had been removed (which also removes the link pointing to that page), but just to be absolutely sure that something odd didn't affect me with the next Penguin update, I disavowed them all at the domain level.

I now have alerts on Google Alerts and Moz Freshweb Explorer set up to help me determine when someone is hacking my site. To do so for your sites, in each of these tools you can set up alerts for things like:

  • site:yoursite.com "michael kors"
  • site:yoursite.com viagra
  • site:yoursite.com casino
  • site:yoursite.com "payday loans"
  • site:yoursite.com "cialis"

...and so on.

Signs of things that COULD be negative SEO

I said at the start of this article that the vast majority of cases of suspected negative SEO that I see really aren't negative SEO after all. But, there are situations where it does indeed happen. Here is the type of link that you can commonly see when someone is trying to attack you with negative links:

  • Links from foreign forums
  • A huge number of links from sites with TLDs of .ru, .cz, .cn, .pl, .ro, .bg, .biz, .com.ar, .com.br and .info. Not all of those links are going to be unnatural, but if you are suddenly getting an influx of links from russian sites, it could be a sign of an attack.
  • A large number of links from complete nonsense blog posts:

  • Lots of keyword-anchored links from multiple sources. (I'd like to reiterate that receiving one sitewide link from a questionable source is not a sign of negative SEO, even if you are suddenly seeing thousands of links coming from that site.)
  • An influx of links from bad neighbourhoods such as porn sites, gambling sites, payday loan sites, etc.

There are many other tricky techniques that can be used to attack sites with negative SEO, but most sites will not need to worry about these tactics. (I'll explain more about whether or not you need to worry below, so keep reading!)  I'm not about to describe all of the different ways you can do negative SEO, as I don't want to give any evil people any ideas. But, the one tactic that I will mention and that you can keep an eye on is someone redirecting penalized sites to yours. Take a look right now at your site on ahrefs.com. You don't need a membership to see whether you've got redirects pointing to you. Scroll down until you see "backlink types" and then "redirect".

Now, not all redirects are bad. If you have affiliates, they may have pages that redirect to your product pages, These are usually okay, and there are many other valid reasons for a site to redirect to yours. But if today you see that you have three sites redirecting to you and next week you've got 30 or even 300 sites redirecting to you, then this could be a sign of a problem.

Can these redirects hurt you, though? Can an influx of bad links hurt you? Do you need to worry?  Google has given conflicting advice in this regard. In one place, they have said that bad link signals will definitely pass through a 301 redirect, but in another place they have said that attempting to 301 redirect a penalized site to a clean site will not cause a penalty on the clean site.  In my opinion, what Google is saying here is that if you are redirecting one of your own sites to another of your own sites, then they'll pass the bad link signals.  It's just like you building your own unnatural links.  But if you try to 301 to someone else's site then they won't let those links count.  How does Google know the difference?  That's part of the secret sauce.  I do think that they use all sorts of signals to determine whether links are self made or made by a competitor.

Should you worry about negative SEO?

OK, so let's say you see evidence that someone is attacking your site with unnatural links. Does this mean you are going to lose your rankings?

Google really does work hard to algorithmically protect sites from this type of link causing a problem. And, I would say that for the vast majority of you who are reading this post, you DO NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT NEGATIVE SEO

Yes, just shouted there. I really want to emphasize that most sites do not need to worry.

This is the point in the article where the black hatters start getting upset. I wonder who the first person will be to post a comment saying, "You don't know what you're talking about! Negative SEO works because I've done it on hundreds of sites." Or, "I know negative SEO works because my site got taken down."

Here is my opinion on the types of sites that could possibly be adversely affected by a link based negative SEO attack:

  • Sites in very competitive, high-money niches such as casinos, payday loans, insurance, pharmacy sales, etc. - People who are running negative SEO in these circles have more knowledge of sophisticated methods that just may possibly work. Some of these people spend hours and hours trying to find loopholes in Google's algorithm that will allow them to take down a competitor. When Google adjusts their algorithms to be able to combat those methods then these people spend even more hours trying to beat the system. They also have huge budgets that they can throw into a negative SEO attack. For the average small business owner to pay someone to do a high level intensive SEO attack that has the potential to work, it would likely cost more money than it would cost to implement regular SEO methods on your own site.
  • Sites that have a long standing history of doing their own manipulative linking. If you have received a manual link-based penalty in the past or have been affected negatively by the Penguin algorithm, then in my opinion you really should keep a watch out for additional unnatural links pointing to your site. In a hangout, John Mueller spoke about a situation where Google may not be certain whether to discount bad links that look like negative SEO because the site itself had a lot of signals that indicated that the site owner had been engaging in webspam. He implied that Google may not be able to tell what was self made and what was an attack:

    "It's something where we see these problematic links and we don't really know how we should react to that. It's not that we can just close our eyes and say, 'Oh well... we can recognize these problematic links and ignore them. It's more that we don't know what we should do with all of the other signals that we find attached to your website"

In these cases, if it does appear that negative SEO is being targeted at your website, the best tool you have is to do monthly monitoring of your backlinks.

How can you protect yourself from negative SEO?

If you are in a competitive niche, or if you have a history of being penalized and having to do link cleanup, then you really should be monitoring your backlinks regularly. What we do for our regular link audit clients is a monthly backlink audit. This really should be frequent enough to find and clean up unnatural links. However, if you are under a strong attack where new unnatural links are coming in daily, it may be a good idea to do this cleanup every one-to-two weeks.

It's not a bad idea for other sites that are at low risk of succumbing to a negative SEO attack to do a monthly link audit as well. What we have found is that when you monitor your new links monthly, you can easily see the new, good links that your site is attracting. This can give you a lot of ideas on how to get even more links. If you see, for example, that a few people had recommended a particular product of yours via a link from forum posts, then you may want to create more content surrounding that product and engage on an email outreach campaign to get more people to link to that content.

But wait….why would I recommend doing a regular link audit if Google says that they can catch negative SEO and discount it? The reason is that you're relying on an algorithm and the algorithm is not going to be 100% accurate. Here are some quotes from John Mueller of Google regarding their accuracy on catching and discounting negative SEO:

"It's a tricky situation and not something where I'd say that we can guarantee that we always get it 100% right. But, from the cases I've looked at I think we've done a pretty good job."

"We do work very hard to make sure that third party effects like that don't play a role within the search results. It's something we can't absolutely guarantee that we'll always get it right. So, if you're seeing something like this you're welcome to let us know about that. "

"If you're looking at the links in Webmaster Tools for example I might go ahead and submit a disavow file for those links. In general though, we do recognize these kind of situations and handle them appropriately. "

How to do your backlink audit

There are many different ways to do a backlink audit. Some people will use automated link auditing tools, but if you do choose to do this it is vitally important that you do a manual audit alongside of the automated suggestions. I can't tell you how many failed reconsideration requests I have seen because people have relied solely on these reports. I have also seen these tools recommend disavowing some fantastic natural links as well. In my opinion, you must look at your links manually!

If you are working on a site that does not have a history of unnatural linking, you can probably get away with just using the links that you get from Webmaster Tools. Google has said in the past that Webmaster Tools links are "all you need". However, John Mueller and Matt Cutts have clarified that statement saying that they are all you need in order to pick up your patterns of unnatural linking. This is fine if you are lucky enough to have a complete list of all of the links that have been ever made on your behalf, but if you don't have that then you're likely going to have to go looking to other sources to find all of these links.  We have come across many unnatural links that are indexed in Google and not reported in Webmaster Tools. And, we've even been given some of these as examples on failed reconsideration requests. The links you see in Webmaster Tools are just a sample of your links. As such, we use links from the following sources:

  • Webmaster Tools (Recent)
  • Webmaster Tools (Sample)
  • ahrefs.com (a paid tool)
  • majesticseo.com (a paid tool, but it's free for your own site if you verify your site)
  • opensiteexplorer.org (This is Moz's tool, and for most sites you can get a good number of your links for free provided you register an account with Moz. I would say though that I find that Open Site Explorer tends to pick up more of the good links and doesn't catch as much as the overt spam as Ahrefs and Majestic.

We then sort the links into a more manageable list so that we only analyze one link from each domain. If you are doing monthly audits, you will want to keep track of which domains you have already audited so that you don't waste time assessing that domain again. You can use a VLOOKUP formula in Excel to highlight which domains you have already audited in previous months. You can use a similar VLOOKUP to highlight domains that are already in your disavow file.

It took me a while to understand how VLOOKUP works.  There are many tutorials out there, but here is my simple explanation:

  • Let's assume that your link auditing spreadsheet is "Sheet1" and you have a list of your disavowed domains on "Sheet2".  Let's say that column A of each sheet contains your domains and column B of "Sheet2" contains the words "in disavow".
  • Let's assume that you have 1000 domains on "Sheet2".  Again, this is your list of disavowed domains.
  • On "Sheet1" create a new column and enter this formula:
    =VLOOKUP(A1, Sheet2!$A$1:$B$1000,2,FALSE).
  • Now, copy that formula down the entire column.  You will end up having each row saying either "in disavow" or "N/A".
  • For those domains that are in your disavow, you don't need to re-audit them because you have already disavowed them.

I have prepared hundreds of link audit spreadsheets.  This summer I dedicated a huge amount of time to creating and programming a system that allows me to keep track of my monthly audit clients and create awesome spreadsheets for manual link audits.  The sheet that is produced chooses the best link from each domain to audit, eliminates domains that I have already audited for each client, marks the nofollows, marks which links are keyword anchors, and marks which domains have already been disavowed (and also takes into account subdomains when you have disavowed the full domain.)  It also tells me whether or not each domain is my list of tens of thousands of domains that I call my "disavow blacklist"  and also my whitelist that contains domains that I know contains links not made for SEO purposes such as sites like alexa.com, aboutus.org, known dmoz scrapers and so on.  

This system saves me a huge amount of time, especially for those clients for whom we do regular backlink audits.  I want to thank Moz for allowing me to mention this system.  I am now making it available for others to use (for a fee). You can get more details here.  

The next step, once you have audited your links and determined which ones are ones that were made to manipulate Google, and are therefore unnatural, is to add these sites to your disavow file.  You almost always want to disavow these domains on the domain level.  This means including "domain:example.com" rather than "http://www.example.com/page1.html".

Once this is done, add these domains to your existing disavow file and upload it to the disavow tool.  Don't worry...there is no harm in submitting regular disavows.

Summary

I have covered a lot of info in this post and hopefully I haven't confused too many people. The topic of negative SEO really is a tough one to understand. On one hand Google says, "Don't worry about it." But, on the other hand they tell us that although it shouldn't be a problem, it's not a bad idea to disavow any spam links you find pointing to your site even if you didn't make them.

Here are the takehome points of this article:

  • Not everything that looks like negative SEO is negative SEO. All sites have weird links pointing to them. Don't always assume that every odd looking link is one that a competitor has made.
  • A sudden influx of odd links very well could be an attack.
  • In most cases, if a site does get attacked by a competitor pointing spammy links at them, Google's algorithms will just ignore those links and you won't see a drop in rankings.
  • If you are in a hyper-competitive niche then you are much more likely to fall victim to a sophisticated negative SEO attack. 
  • If you have a history of doing a lot of unnatural linking yourself then you could fall victim as well, as Google may not be able to tell the difference between your unnatural links and the attack links.
  • Sites that are not in a competitive niche and have not been engaging in manipulative linking, most likely do not need to worry about negative SEO.
  • In any case, if you think you are under a negative SEO attack, it is a good idea to audit your links regularly and submit a disavow file.

Negative SEO always brings up interesting discussion. Have you been a victim? Do you do monthly audits? Do you feel that Google is good at preventing negative SEO?  


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10 Tips to Take the Moz Tools to the Next Level

Posted: 25 Aug 2014 04:48 AM PDT

Posted by EllieWilkinson

Hey Moz fans! I'm Ellie, and I'm part of the newly formed Customer Success team at Moz. As part of the "S" team, I work to teach customers how to be successful marketers and awesome Moz users.

Whether you're an old pro or a newb, we want to help you achieve your marketing goals. That's why the Success Team and the Help Team at Moz decided to put together some tips and tricks to bring your Moz knowledge to the next level. Think of them as "power-ups" for your Moz boss fights!

We recorded several videos to provide step-by-step guides to the Moz tools for you. Be sure to watch the videos in the bottom right-hand corner for a laugh, and see how many video game references you can find!


1. Find the best time to tweet

Learn how to time your tweets to coincide with your Twitter followers' activity with this  Followerwonk walkthrough, which also shows me in action at my side job as PR specialist at the Death Star.

Tweet this: Find the best time to tweet: One of 10 video tips to take @Moz tools to the next level


2. Get the web's best SERP analysis report

Watch Nick's guide to gathering intel on a competitor and exporting a detailed SERP report using the  Keyword Difficulty tool.

Tweet this: Get the web's best SERP analysis report: One of 10 video tips to take @Moz tools to the next level


3. Research local categories and keywords

Sam walks you through how to use the  Moz Local category research tool to gather local keyword ideas.

Tweet this: Research local categories and keywords: One of 10 video tips to take @Moz tools to the next level


4. See your ranking history

Looking for your keyword rankings history? David gives you a step-by-step guide on where to download and export the report in  Moz Analytics. Also, discover an automated way to get keyword ranking PDF reports sent directly to your inbox.

Tweet this: See your ranking history: One of 10 video tips to take @Moz tools to the next level


5. Gather new keywords to track

Rock your keyword list with the keyword opportunities tab in  Moz Analytics - Chiaryn and her sweet puppy Lettie Pickles show you how it's done.

Tweet this: Gather new keywords to track: One of 10 video tips to take @Moz tools to the next level


6. Explore your SERPs with MozBar

Abe demonstrates how to use the  MozBar to enhance search results and quickly export reports right from the SERPs.

Tweet this: Explore your SERPs with MozBar: One of 10 video tips to take @Moz tools to the next level


7. Discover who to target on Twitter

I explain how to build an outreach campaign and gain followers on Twitter using the "Compare users" tab in  Followerwonk.

Tweet this: Discover who to target on Twitter: One of 10 video tips to take @Moz tools to the next level


8. Uncover your site's broken links

From his tiny box in the corner of your screen, Matt shows you how to export and explore a CSV from the Crawl Diagnostics tab in  Moz Analytics.

Tweet this: Uncover your site's broken links: One of 10 video tips to take @Moz tools to the next level


9. Find your competitor's most popular content

Analyze your competitor's most successful content to gain ideas for your own strategy using  Open Site Explorer, as Rachael demonstrates.

Tweet this: Find your competitor's most popular content: One of 10 video tips to take @Moz tools to the next level


10. Scope out your competitor's fresh links

Roger the Mozbot and I show you how to see fresh links pointing to your competitor but not to you (yet!) using  Fresh Web Explorer.

Tweet this: Scope out your competitor's fresh links: One of 10 video tips to take @Moz tools to the next level


Hopefully these tips and tricks give you some ideas of how to take your Moz game to the next level. Maybe you're even ready to do your speed run through Moz Pro! If you have some Moz protips of your own, share them with us in the comments below!


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Top Tips for Measuring & Analysing Your Content

Top Tips for Measuring & Analysing Your Content

Link to White.net

Top Tips for Measuring & Analysing Your Content

Posted: 26 Aug 2014 02:00 AM PDT

Content, content, content – it's all anyone in SEO seems to talk about. We're not just a company, we're a digital publisher! Content is King! Long live content! I'm a content specialist and even I'm getting sick of it.

It's not the principle that irritates me – indeed, the principle is excellent and key to me keeping my job! No, it's the execution. Now that content has been universally agreed upon as the way to gain rankings, the world and his dog are churning it out at a rate of knots with little thought as to quality or whether it's actually doing anyone any good.

So, I'm here to explain to you how you can measure your content, analyse it, and use it to improve what you're producing, which should benefit both you and your audience.

What Should You Measure?

First things first, what do you need to measure to understand how well your content is doing? As with everything in SEO, there is a wide range of opinions on the matter. But we need a list, so here are my key data points that you MUST be checking:

  • Time on page
  • Bounce rate
  • Number of views
  • Conversions
  • Shares

Simple stuff, but people still seem to be churning out content without bothering to do any analysis. So I'm going to walk you through these data points, how to collect them, how to analyse them, and how to improve your content off the back of them.

Time on Page

This one's really basic but still incredibly important. Time on page will let you know at a glance whether people are actually reading your content. If they're only spending a few seconds on the page and then leaving to other areas of your site (or, worse, bouncing back to the SERPs) then your content isn't working.

To see if this is an issue for you, the easiest way to find this data is in good old Google Analytics. Just go to Behaviour→Site Content→All Pages and find the relevant URL.

If the time spent on the page is worryingly low then it's time to do something about it. Have a look at your page. Does the title/header make it clear what the page is about whilst engaging the reader? Is the content laid out in an easy-to-read format, ensuring people aren't put off by huge blocks of impenetrable text? Do you use subheading and images to break things up, making it more aesthetically pleasing and easy to skim?

If not, try making these alterations first. Making your page more user-friendly and engaging should help to get more people to read your content and take in what you're saying.

Bounce Rates

Closely tied to time on page is the bounce rate. If people are reaching your content and then immediately heading back to the SERPs you know you've got something wrong.

To find your bounce rate, follow the same steps as for time on page – it's just a couple of columns over in Google Analytics. If you've got a high bounce rate then you know you need to make some alterations. As a benchmark, anything over 60% is really worth looking at, but if it’s around 40% or lower then feel free to be smug.

As with time on page, ensuring that your content is user-friendly should be your first step. However, if these changes don't help then it may be a case of the wrong page being ranked in the SERPs – i.e. your page doesn't contain the information people are searching for. This can happen for multiple reasons – and isn't necessarily your fault.

However, there are things you can do to improve the situation. First, take a look at the URL, title tag, meta description and H1 tag for the page. Do they all accurately reflect the content that users can expect to find on that page? If they are inaccurate or misleading then you should make changes to them ASAP. We all want to rank well, but there's no point ranking for irrelevant terms or getting lots of traffic that won't convert.

Number of Pageviews

Speaking of traffic, the amount of views your pages get is another great way to evaluate how well your content is doing. We all know Google wants to reward great content by making it rank well so, if you're producing great content it should be ranking and thus getting lots of visits.

Of course, it doesn't always work like that. If your page is getting lots of views (and has good stats for time spent on page and a low bounce rate) then you're doing brilliantly and don't need to be reading this. However, that's rarely the case.

Maybe you're doing well with time on page and have a low bounce rate, but just don't have much traffic coming through (remember to check all of this via Analytics). If this is an issue for you then you need to have a look at your meta data. Are the title tag and meta description exciting and engaging? Would they make you want to click through to the page? If you're not interested or intrigued, then you might want to update it.

Have you also linked well to this page? Is it easy to access on your site? Has it, if it's a blog post or content of that ilk, been well-promoted? Basically – do people know this page exists and can they find it? If not, it's time to make some changes!

Conversions

Obviously, some pages are easier to measure conversions on than others. If the aim of your page is to get people to sign up for a newsletter, buy a product, or make an enquiry, then it's simple to see how well you're doing. You can even set up Goals in Google Analytics to track things for you.

If your page is harder to analyse then it's time to do some thinking. Is the page supposed to guide people through to another section of your site? Is it supposed to encourage people to comment and engage with it? Or is it just there to inform? For the first two cases it's quite easy to assess conversions.

If you're guiding people through to another area then you want to set up a funnel and look at the drop-off rate. If people are moving through your site as desired then the content is doing well. However, if people are failing to continue along your funnel then you'll want to make some alterations. Perhaps you need to make the call to action clearer, or make it more obvious what the next step to take is.

If you're trying to spark conversation then you need to look at how many responses you're getting. Are people liking, commenting or sharing your content? If not, consider whether you're making it easy for them to do so. Are there clear, prominent social sharing buttons? Can they leave a comment without having to undergo a long sign-up or sign-in procedure?

Making things simple for your users is essential. You can even use Google Content Experiments (an option within Analytics) to A/B test changes to pages, such as the wording or placement of your call to action. This can be a great way to determine how to encourage more conversions.

However, it may be that your content just isn't good enough to be shared. In which case it's time to pull your socks up and start creating something worthwhile and not just for the sake of adding something new to your site. Every page on your site should have a defined purpose. If it doesn’t have one, then it shouldn’t exist.

Shares

One of the hardest things to analyse is whether your content is being shared successfully. My two favourite tools for figuring out where your content is getting shares from are Open Site Explorer and Social Crawlytics. Both of these will give you an overall figure for share and then a breakdown of where they're from – be it Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest etc. A quick note – on OSE you'll want to filter to "only external links" to get a clear picture.

I like to use both because they give you slightly different pictures. For example, OSE differentiates between Facebook likes and Facebook shares. Social Crawlytics, on the other hand, allows you to see shares broken down by content type and provides some nice graphic representations of the data.

Using these tools can quickly help you understand how much your content is being shared and on what platforms this is happening. If your content is aimed to get shares but isn't doing so, then you can now focus on promoting it better and ensuring that it is of a high enough quality that people will want to share it with others. If it's doing well, then give yourself a pat on the back.

 

So there you go – those are my key data points to keep an eye on when creating content. Using these stats you should easily be able to figure out what is and what isn't working for you – and fix the areas that are failing. Another bonus – clear figures make it much easier to persuade clients that they need to up their game and invest in their site content – happy days for those of us in SEO. What areas do you analyse? What stats do you find useful? And how do you approach improving website content? I'd love to know your methods, so please get in touch! Either leave a comment here or grab me on Twitter @SamanthaKHall

 

Image from Wikipedia

The post Top Tips for Measuring & Analysing Your Content appeared first on White.net.

Seth's Blog : The best lesson from Fantasy Football's success

 

The best lesson from Fantasy Football's success

When people say, "my team," they mean it.

In the top-down world of industrial marketing, the San Francisco 49ers say, "we built this team, buy a ticket if you want to come."

Then, a few years later, it broadened to, "you should buy a jersey so you can be part of it."

In the sideways, modern world of peer-to-peer connection, people say, "my team has this player, that player and this defense." It belongs to them, because they built it. Everyone has their own team.

In neither case is the fan on the field, getting concussed or making the big decisions. It doesn't matter. What matters is that our feeling of ownership, of us-ness, is shifting. We want celebrities and brands and teams that do more than merely put on a show. In addition to the show, people want to believe that they own part of it.

       

 

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