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Google Image Search – What have they done this time?

Apr 12th, 2013
by Admin.
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What in the name of god have they done this time?

OK here’s the theory, those of you who have been avid readers of this blog and my arcane ramblings over the past few years will realise I have no love for Google (oh god here he goes again on one of his “rants” I hear you cry?) because of the cack-handed way they always seem to deliver or roll out their “algorithm updates”.

How can such an organization seemingly filled to the rafters of so called intelligent people so habitually get it wrong but I digress, back to the theory.

Webmasters complaining about changes made by Google is nothing new. Every time Google releases a major algorithm update like Penguin or Panda, the outcry is everywhere. But, like it or not, that’s Google trying to better its algorithm, and ultimately improve its search results. You could also argue that any traffic one site loses, another gains. Somebody wins.

OK that’s the theory but funny it never seems to work out that way and especially with their latest developments regarding Image Search.

Now any good SEO Agency worth their salt will advise you that it is advisable to been seen almost everywhere for a client. The name of the game nowadays is all about branding and making sure that your name is found everywhere above all others so as well as making sure you rank in conventional SERPS you need to make sure you can be found in places like Google Blog Search, Image Search etc etc.

But….

The Image Search story is a bit different, however. This is not an algorithmic change designed to point users to higher quality images or more relevant image results. It’s a cosmetic change, and while some users may find the experience to be an upgrade, it’s clear that many webmasters have not welcomed the redesign.

 “55% dropped for websites with images…”

“My traffic has dropped to 1/5 of what it was before the new Google Images search roll out…”

“My traffic was cut by half overnight…”

“My image based website has lost 2/3 of the visitors after the change…”

“Google image traffic has dropped by 50-70% on my site…”

That was back in January. It doesn’t appear that things have gotten much better.

Define Media Group published some findings from a recent study on Monday (hat tip to Search Engine Land). According to the firm, you might as well spend your time in other areas of search engine optimization and online marketing, and not worry so much about optimizing for image search anymore.

“We analyzed the image search traffic of 87 domains and found a 63% decrease in image search referrals after Google’s new image search UI was released,” explains Shahzad Abbas. “Publishers that had previously benefitted the most from their image optimization efforts suffered the greatest losses after the image search update, experiencing declines nearing 80%.”

“In the eleven weeks after Google’s new image search was released, there has been no recovery – which means for image search, the significantly reduced traffic levels we’re seeing is the new normal,” he adds. “In the aftermath of the new image search experience, image SEO has been severely compromised, and we have no choice but to recommend deprioritizing image SEO when weighed against other search traffic initiatives.”

Of course, there’s always the chance that your images could turn up in universal search results on Google’s web results pages, but even then, personalized “Search Plus Your World” results tend to get the emphasis when applicable.

It’s all made even more interesting due to the fact that Google pitched the changes as good for webmasters, indicating that they would actually drive more traffic to sites.

“The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on,” wrote associate product manager Hongyi Li in the announcement. “This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.”

“The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view,” Li added. “This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers, and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews. As usual, image search query data is available in Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.”

It’s possible that some sites are seeing more traffic from the Image Search changes, and just aren’t being as vocal, but there has been an overwhelming amount of complaints since the redesign, and this new study is not doing anything to defend Google’s case.

Of course, Google is all about placing users first (even over webmasters), and they’ll continue to do what they think is best for them. From a user experience perspective, the changes aren’t bad. But that’s little consolation for those who now have to find other ways to get their content in front of an audience.

Seasons Greetings…….and plans for 2013

Dec 26th, 2012
by Admin.
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First up, I hope you all had a terrific Christmas Break, enjoyed all of that which was on offer and spent some quality time with your families and loved ones.

Whatever your faith or whatever traditional Mid Winter break you observe, it is always nice to be able to take time out and spend it with special friends and family.

Our Databases and Data mining tools here at simple Leveraging have been working overtime these past few weeks and as part of a special “Twelve Days of Christmas” promotion we are supplying a lot of our High Page Rank Lists at knock down rates but the quality and the exclusivity remains the same i.e. there will only be limited availability to preserve a degree of exclusiveness.

These are also a precursor to the annual “Simple Leveraging Methodology Overhaul” we carry out at this time of year…every year.

The reasons we have remained in existence for so long whilst other groups have come and gone is that we continually (well once if not several times a year) “reinvent” ourselves.

The reason for this being is that though Best Practice in Link Building by and large remains the same, despite what the other “Gurus” claim, it does need “tweaking” from time to time. Sites and particular aspects that worked like “gangbusters” several years ago perhaps aren’t quite as efficient today whilst other basic techniques just steam along nicely working year after year.

Taking all of this into consideration we continually review what is working on our own and client sites, review and listen to what is working amongst our Simple Leveraging colleagues sites and then amalgamate this all together into our core “Simple Leveraging Methodology”.

This sounds all very pretentious I know but what it all boils down to is “if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it” or “if it is broke then try and understand why”. We then take this information and add it to our basic Simple Leveraging Approach.

It is by doing this that we are able to call upon a wide degree of expertise across the board and recently when Google rolled out the latest in their Penguin Updates I was able to find out pretty quickly who had been hit and why we thought so but more importantly who hadn’t been hit and even more importantly why we thought they had avoided a slap and survived?

We’ve amalgamated all of this and one of our longer standing SLS Members, Blake Webster, has compiled a beautiful set of charts which in principle he has agreed to share but what we’ll do is put them all into a Webinar/Workshop format and then make sure that all those who wish to get this information can do so?

 

Fear And Uncertainty Stalking The Internet – Can Only Mean One Thing, Google At It Again.

Nov 8th, 2012
by Admin.
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The last few days has seen Internet Bulletin Boards awash with comment about the latest Google initiative – the Disavow Initiative.

Now for those who haven’t spotted this. In a nutshell this is what Google Disavow is all about. First up Google hit a site with either an outright penalty in the form of a de-indexing or a 500 place drop because they feel that the site has not conformed to Google Best Practices etc. Either that or they send out a message via Webmaster Tools indicating that there might be problem issues amongst certain of the sites back links and that if they aren’t removed, the Webmaster can fill out a form and inform Google which links the Webmaster would like Google to ignore (yeah right).

Now Google Disavow has the potential of all of the last few Google Updates to be the “real deal” in terms of rewriting the Back Links Landscape totally. It will completely force a rethink at every level of SEO and Link Building.

It has to, as it has been designed purely by the Google FUD Dept to do exactly that. Spread Fear, Uncertainty and Despair right throughout the SEO and IM Community.

It will do so and succeed through the misguided panic reactions of the majority of Link Builders and SEO Practitioners who by their own ignorance will fall into the hands of Google and do their work for them.

On that ground alone it has been designed and executed to perfection with a degree of sneaky brilliance that we have not seen Google come out with for a long time.

For the past few years we’ve seen Google repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot (whilst quite often opening their mouths to change those same feet if you don’t mind me splitting several metaphors) but here they’ve executed the big one.

And executed it to perfection.

It’s not the immediate effect that is the danger, it’s not the actual act of entering in and processing the initial “disavow” Data that is going to do the damage. It will be the ramifications of how Google process all this data (and you can bet they have oodles of data processing power to eat this all up) and the incredible potential for collateral damage the like of which we have not seen for years.

Briefly for example, take the following scenario.

Site A has a Back Links Profile that involves Blue Chip content and by and large Blue Chip links from so called Blue Chip sources but in a way that looked at carefully could be construed as Link Building contrary to Google’s T&C’s in that the Links are bought and paid for despite their quality and therefore contrary to Google’s Best Practice Policies. But, due to care and attention to date have hitherto slipped under the radar.

The only problem is that these same link Sources have also been used by Site B who have been slightly less ethical/more aggressive in their Link Building with other sources and they’ve been caught up in the Google trap and been issued with a Warning Letter that tells them to remove their so called “bad links” which due to the way they acquired them they are unable to do.

The way round this is quite simple according to Google (such lovely kind fellows), simple apply the Disavow attribute/submission and Google will process the said links and discount them but they would need all the data and information on these links and their sources and origin first.

Aren’t we so lucky to have such nice wonderful friends in good old Uncle Google?

Hmnn not quite and here’s why.

Google will process the data from Site B and it will analyse ALL of the Links Landscape from Site B, of this you can be 100% GUARANTEED. It will assume that not everyone tells the truth 100% of the time (shucks) and as such will take the view that if the promoters of Site B have been so unethical as to undertake a Link Building Campaign contrary to Google’s T&C’S then surely the logic will be; what about the seemingly perfect immaculate Links coming in from the so called Blue Chip Links and hang on…….all with perfect matching Anchor Phrases and structure.

Wait a minute these couldn’t possibly be contrary to Google’s T&C’S as well could they?

Surely not? They look too good and too respectable…in fact a bit too respectable and bit too good….oh heck problem on the horizon, lets discount these Link Sources as well as they come from seeming unrelated Blogs with funnily enough…..High Page Rank?

Let’s discount the effect of all them.

Knock on effect for this is that Site A who has hitherto escaped Google’s inspection now gets their Links downgraded as a result because they share the same sources albeit unwittingly.

Looks and sounds like collateral damage to me.

Now anyone who thinks that this is all a bizarre trip and flight of unrelated Conspiracy Theory based Fantasy due to yours truly having been exposed to too much sun over the weekend better go back and analyse ALL of Google’s actions over the last few years and consider them in “the round”.

This is the Company who brought us “Personalised Search” but never told us and thereby ended the concept known as the definitive Google No1 – after all No 1 where? Which Data Centre and which territory worldwide?

This is the same Company that told us via Webmaster tools that they couldn’t provide referral data on visits from surfers when they weren’t logged into their Google Accounts due to Data Protection issues. Hang on, this  is the same company that were found a few days afterwards selling this Data to premium Adwords Clients. Hmmnn so much for Data Protection?

Google Disavow is nothing more than a shameless “Snitches Charter”.

It is couched in “cyber altruism of the utmost degree” alongside such other notably inglorious chapters in their history such as when they provided Webmasters, with a button within Webmaster tools that they could use to “rat and grass up” other webmasters if they felt they were doing anything that Google ought to think suspicious.

What a lovely organisation and given last week’s stock market debacle that resulted in the world’s largest one day share price crash of $15 bn – couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of fellows.

Anyway the upshot to us is that this now means that Link Diversity and the Power of Press Releases now becomes even more vital and even more useful.

It’s how SEO Practitioners and Webmaster deal with the Google situation that matters and so far no one is talking about the real potential for damage because no one has thought it through properly yet.

It is in certain quarters but unlikely to be widely available for some time due to the fact that most are unaware of the potential damage.

This is our opportunity. As with all things, these situations can be dealt with as long as you understand the “situation” fully.

There Is Life After Google……Seriously There Is…

Oct 2nd, 2012
by Admin.
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OK so the Search Engine landscape has resembled a WW1 landscape recently with casualties littered all over the place, but if you look carefully underneath it all sometimes it isn’t as bleak as it might seem.

Now conventional wisdom states that currently Google have circa 66% of the US Search Market and arguably much greater worldwide. Yahoo and Bing lag well behind in 2nd and 3rd place with approximately 27% between them while Ask and AOL are almost nonexistent (they will of course deny this strongly but then to paraphrase a well known Politico/Journalist quote – “they would say that wouldn’t they”) whilst the new kids on the block, Yandex and Baidu look good outside bets but still have yet to penetrate outside of their own domestic market places in any meaningful manner.

So if we take the above almost as Gospel then you would normally assume that when you get wiped out by Google then traffic, business, in fact any form of meaningful interaction online disappears overnight?

You would certainly think so?

However in one case we had control of earlier this year this was not necessarily the case.

The site in question was caught up as collateral damage in the “Great Penguin Attack of April 2012.”

But, interestingly enough, though turnover was hit it didn’t drop to the same degree or level that the Google Referral traffic did. The reason for this, looking back and analysing the data was that actually there is a huge difference between traffic and surfers visiting from the various Search Engines and this can have a marked effect on your turnover.

If you think of it this way, when you search via the Google Search Portal, you are met with a very minimalist Search Form that subconsciously puts you into the mindset “Research”. It is designed thus, always has been and that was its very early appeal and there is nothing wrong with that.

Conversely, if you look at the Yahoo Portal you are met with so much going on that it screams “interaction” and so by and large you are “in the mood” for clicking and interacting almost from the get go.

With Bing, it is slightly different and this almost is a hangover from the days when Bing (or MSN as it once was) was the Search Engine of default when IE was bolted on as a necessity with all installations of Windows OS. Now due to deregulation, Microsoft can no longer bolt on IE with Windows, the levels have dropped but historically the surfers who visited via MSN were always the most active of the lot.

Anyway to sum up, there is life after Google and that’s before you start to think about some of the other more socially oriented sites out there such as FaceBook or Pinterest.

If someone gave me the choice, lose traffic from Google or Yahoo / Bing?

To be honest with you, we’ve proved a site can survive with damn all Google love, if we lost Yahoo and Bing then that could / would have much more of a financial implication on the bottom line.

Moral of the story after the latest Google putsch?

Spend as much time with your web analytics as you can and find out where the main traffic that’s coming from Yahoo and Bing originates from and concentrate on that in the short term while Google recovers from its latest bout of anti social behaviour.

Thoughts on This Weekends Google Update

Oct 1st, 2012
by Admin.
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We’ve been gathering information in the past 24 hours or so about the latest Google Update that was apparently rolled out over the Weekend and when we’ve got some fairly concrete analysis backed by evidence then I’ll send out an update as to how we think it’s going to pan out.

However, my one piece of advice at this stage is this. Google updates are always pretty brutal and savage at the outset i.e. the worst is always at the start and things actually get better and better as they realise what gaffs they’ve made and the implications of their screw ups.

It’s a particularly shoddy way of doing business in my mind and they seem to have no concept of the downside in terms of collateral damage of their actions which does tend to make me wonder about the Corporate Ethos at Mountain View in California.

You would have thought that with the so called collection of supposedly “superior cerebral matter” in their company that these updates and their implications would be better thought out but sadly that never appears to be the case.

But back to the initial carnage. This update appears to be more targeted towards low grade EMD Domains (Exact Match Domains such as www.campingsuppliesbelfast.com if ever such a domain were said to exist) with damn all in the way of content and loaded with Adsense or some other form of CPA / CPC Media.

Now no doubt the moment I have sent this Newsletter out, I will be beset with correspondence from folks all claiming that their collections of similar sites have remained OK but for the majority of folks with these types of sites in their Portfolio it is now looking more and more like a disaster.

I was reading on one bulletin board of one Webmaster who used to have approximately 50 such sites and as of this morning had lost 45.

Ouch.

So what is the upside?

Well sadly there is no upside but the only thing that can be said is that in most cases the damage is always at it’s more severe in the first few days (we’re approximately in Day3 of the rollout) and then things start to improve as the Search Engineers slowly start to tweak and adjust the algorithm. The side effects of this being that sites that have not totally been wiped out but only devalued should then start to see some drift back up towards where they were if you go back to basics.

We had one major client site really hit badly by the Penguin and lost a phenomenal amount of Google love but since then we’ve seen a 30% month on month growth of Google activity and interest and though we’re still not where we should have been we are certainly a good way down the road to claiming back our traffic levels and SERPS.

So the moral of the story?

Don’t panic – it’s too late to panic anyway as the damage if any, is already done so the best you can do if you’ve been hit is take the phone off the hook, tell your secretary that you’re in a meeting and front up to the situation. If your client sites have been hit then for god’s sake deal with it positively and don’t try and hide the fact. The clients will know and will certainly think an awful lot less of you if all you do is an impression of an online Ostrich.

Gather all your relative details and tell them you are working on it and then as I said, take the phone off the hook and get researching. It is absolutely imperative that you know the very worst of the damage even if the client is only partially aware.

Now is the time when we “SEO Practitioners” really start to “earn our corn” and I’d wager that all situations are usually reversible it just depends upon how you go about it.

It’s a pain, a complete and utter “pain in the proverbials” but that’s life when you deal with the big G.

As I said earlier, I loathe them for the shoddy way they do business and perhaps in the long term this long awaited tie up between Microsoft’s Bing / Yahoo partnership and either Yandex or Baidu might force Google to start to behave a little bit more responsibly.

One can but hope.

Any questions then fire away and as usual, here at Leveraging Central, we always love to hear your comments.

Explanations On Five Very Rare Platforms for Link Building

Jul 30th, 2012
by Admin.
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Just wanted to send out a quick email out to everyone to answer a few questions that emerged from my last email and then also to give out a quick heads up regarding some of the answers.

First up were a few questions about some of the software platforms that we covered namely ESyndicat, the wiki platforms Moinmoin, TikiWiki and Docuwiki and then the Social Platform JomSocial.

First up ESyndicat. ESyndicat powers by and large by far and above the largest number of web Directories around and from a Link Builders perspective is actually extremely useful as long as you know where these Directories are. By and large they prove dofollow links and therefore should be part of every Link Builders armoury. The thing that you of course have to remember is that is unless you include them as part of an overall Campaign as a tier and make that supported then it can be sometimes a struggle to get links indexed. That having been said however, as we discussed a few months ago if you take the Urls that your links are on and either ping those Urls or ( as I prefer) compile them into an RSS Feed and then feed them through Yahoo Pipes and Google Feed reader then you’ll get them indexed quite easily. For those who want to investigate ways of getting articles and links submitted fairly quickly then there are a number of submitters around that will do this for you.

The most important thing to remember is that these Directories (along with other directories) are superb for diluting any potential concentration issues you might have inherited or been exposed to via the Penguin Update. As a tier within your overall Campaigns they are great as long as they are supported and this is obviously where our little ‘ol network at SLS comes into its own. The other thing about ESyndicat is that there are enough of them around (if you know where to look) with reasonable Home Page PR to make them extremely useful for our purposes.

Ok, next question was about the three wiki platforms, Moinmoin, TikiWiki and Docuwiki. Now these Wiki Platforms are not found to the same degree as MediaWiki which is very much the “Industry Standard” (or certainly the most common). Now unlike MediaWiki which provides virtually 100% nofollow links by default, there are some Moinmoin wikis which are dofollow, a much greater percentage of TikiWiki and virtually all Docuwiki are dofollow.

Because of the fact that these platforms have not had as much exposure as MediaWiki to the wiles of Link Builders (euphemism for Spammers) they are (at present) much more useful for our purposes at the moment and now is the time to get in now “under the radar”, get your accounts set up and then develop carefully.

Basically it’s the same deal as with Media Wiki in terms of usage and development but much more valuable because of the rarity value i.e. 25K potential Media Wikis and only 1.5 K DocuWikis etc.

Lastly, JomSocial. Well JomSocial is the social network application that runs on the Joomla CMS Platform. So the upshot of this is if you are running Joomla as a CMS Platform (Joomla for those who don’t know is effectively the grown up version of Mambo) which is one of the free Open Source php applications then you can use this as your software to set up and run your own versions of either a Social Network or Blog. It’s a great application and allows users to post dofollow links.

OK perhaps not as wide spread as other set ups but with the added advantage that as it runs on Joomla as its source engine, the upshot of this is that a lot of the sites it powers have very good Page Rank. Approximately 20% of the installations we have tracked down run on a Home Page Rank of over 3.

So there you have it. Five newish platforms (OK 4 but with added awareness of ESyndicat) and as per a request from a JV Partner to put some information out, we have put together some packs of a very exclusive deal together exclusively for SLS Readers.

Because of the exclusive nature of the three wiki platforms and also JomSocial, we are only making 10 copies of this deal available. This package contains over 650 very exclusive Urls containing some nice EDU and Academic Domains where you can place more dofollow links than you can nofollow.

This deal is available for $50 each and is available on a first come first served basis.

So to sum up, 650 Domain urls from some very rare and hitherto under exposed software platform / Sites now available for the first 10 takers.

Those interested, send the $50 via PayPal to info@simpleleveraging.com and we’ll get you sorted out with the Urls. These Urls are rare and are difficult to source.

Usual deal gang, any questions feel free to ask away and we’ll get as much info through to you as we possibly can.

June Monthly Free Downloads plus an expanded Bookmarking Network

Jun 12th, 2012
by Admin.
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Just a quick update to bring everyone up to speed on developments at Simple Leveraging.

Firstly we’ve been testing and integrating some new Directories to the network and now the Network is up to 372 with another 18 waiting in the wings and they will be integrated over the next 7 days but the new configuration is available for download in the premium members downloads area.

I was asked earlier today how effective this sort of utility still was so it was interesting to be able to forward a screen grab of where we had just placed a Press Release on behalf of a client to No 7 in Google within 8 hours of its release and there at No’s 8, 9 and 10 on Page 1 in Google were three of our Bookmark Directories. :-)

We’ve also just put live this Month’s free High PR Authority Forums list into the Premium Downloads area as well. This contains 50 EDU, Academic and Gov Forums where you can place and manage your own inbound links. The Home Page PR on these ranges from PR7 to PR 2.

Let’s all try and use these as responsibly as we can.

We’ll also be putting live some AA Blog Urls for Comments that have just been sent to us. These involve some EDU and Gov Urls as well. As soon as we’ve processed these they will also go live in the Premium Downloads area.

As with the Forum Urls, these are free of charge to members with current live subscriptions. It’s our way of saying Thank You for being members.

The members Premium Download area can be found here:

http://simpleleveraging.com/slschat/index.php/board,55.0.html

We’ve also been updating various scripts on the Forum so any problems accessing these downloads then get in touch and we’ll sort you out asap.

Thoughts on Google and how we ” rescued a Penguin Ravaged” site.

May 14th, 2012
by Admin.
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Just thought I’d follow up on some thoughts that we started to express
the other day.

So first up, Google and it’s antics of late.

Question: “Why has Google behaved the way it has in what it is doing?”

Answer (short version):”Because it can and it’s Google?”

Answer (Longer version): “It is clearing the index (or attempting to)
of an entire sub class of folks who are trying to “game” its index and
rid itself of a plethora of absolute garbage that has arisen from too many
folks who have spent too much time reading the garbage that a lot of those
folks continually seem to publish.

There. Got that rant off my chest.

Seriously, it would appear that Google is by and large after the IM Market
(who seems to be screaming and shouting the loudest) and to be honest Google
doesn’t give a damn about this bunch and never will. If they all decided to
leave the Earth and populate the Moon it wouldn’t be day too soon as far as
Google is concerned. They just clog up the system with, as I said, by and
large worthless garbage and continually try and devalue what Google and
the others have to offer.

For example take the following. It seems for years we’ve had nothing but
guides telling us how easy it is to set up a system whereby we can buy traffic
via Adwords et al for mere pennies in the dollar as opposed to paying the current
market rates.

Then the same bunch start to scream about Adsense yields going down. You
can’t have one without the other being affected; it’s the other side of
the coin.

When you have an entire sub class of individuals whose entire “raison d’être”
seems to trying to earn a living by “killing”, “massacring” or whatever, Google
then you can hardly expect Google to be their biggest fans. Now this bunch
have all started to shout and scream that we should all forget Google and
go and play elsewhere.

Now for those of us who inhabit Planet Reality and have day to day SEO
Clients to deal with this is complete and utter suicide and total folly.
I can just imagine the next client pitch when we roll up and proudly announce
that we are going to take our prospective clients entire SEO Campaign and
forget about Google and move it elsewhere.

30 seconds later as we’re no doubt scheduled to follow our laptops as they
make their way out of the nearest window we would no doubt be reflecting
on our hastiness to be so “innovative”.

Daft or what?

Whether we like it or not (and I keep saying I am not Google’s greatest
admirer) Google is here to stay. It’s too big and the name “Google” has
now entered the dictionary and is synonymous with Internet Search.

Work with it or get another job basically.

Yes I know FaceBook, Twitter and the like of Pinterest are getting lots
of traffic and shouldn’t be ignored but the way to look at is as follows.
How much penetration commercially are they getting and whereabouts in
the overall “pantheon” of online search do they lie.

Answer: Well down the pecking order from Google.

I know FaceBook is popular and great for brand awareness etc, it’s very
cool and “sexy” brands are jumping on board left right and centre but
when it comes to day to day activities and active search it still comes
in a long way behind Google.

I use my wife as a “touchstone” in matters like these. She uses her laptop
a lot for buying all sorts of things from personal items, family holidays
and making all sorts of travel arrangements for the family. She would not
think of starting off at other point than from Google when she flips open
her laptop.

When I come back from a hard day at the Office grumbling about what a bad
day it’s been fighting Panda’s and now Penguins she looks at me as if I
should be strapped to a stretcher and being marched to nearest Psychiatric
Ward.

So where does this leave these issues? Panda and Penguin et al matter to the
SEO Market (of which I sadly am one) and the IM Market.

Google aren’t wild about the former and could well do without the latter
so they are not going to lose any sleep over what is going on at the moment
and we’d be best served by just knuckling down and fathoming out how to cope
on both our personal sides and on the side of our clients.

Now we’ve just completed a fairly comprehensive look at what has happened
with the web sites we have under management, either our own or our clients
and the picture isn’t (touch wood) that bad.

Where we have been hit, and this was the unexpected one, we’ve just gone
back to square one and now 10-14 days later the site is starting to respond
with regards to its SERPS. It’s still not great but the traffic levels are
rising and the SERPS are responding in the right direction.

What have we done? As I said, we’ve gone back to basics and spent the last
3 weeks or so diluting the Anchor Concentration on their Back Links and
have just accomplished this by getting the client to publish articles and
material on their site that relate specifically to their own subject matter
and have left them to their own devices regarding content, structure,
keyword density and all the other SEO stuff that we’ve been so used to.
We’ve then taken this content and re purposed it and published it on any and
every site we could fine and just funneled the links back to the target
site using an extremely wide, varied and non-focused Link Anchor Campaign.

OK we’re not back to where the client was but Page 2 in Google is better
than Page 82 or wherever they disappeared to

We’ve also discussed this approach with a number of colleagues and friends
and the general consensus is that just moving forward with general promotion
rather than tightly focused and structured Campaigns is the best way forward
for the time being.

We’ve been promoting this for some time at Simple Leveraging where we’ve
been advocating the construction of wide and varied structures to support
your Campaigns that would withstand any form of penalty attack etc that
Google decided.

You see the crux of the whole matter is that that very rarely does Google
do anything out of personal malice etc. None of this is ever personal unless
you’ve actually committed the heinous crime of making them look very stupid
in Public or been very rude about one of their staff in an unnecessary manner.
Then you might get the odd personal inspection and suffer the consequences
but for 99.9% of us it’s purely an algorithmic thing.

As such when you are dealing with something like this, it is always best to
take a step backwards and think carefully before you make your next move.
Difficult I know (and boy do we know) when you have a panic stricken client
breathing down your neck and you feel then that it is intensely personal
despite knowing it is not.

So when all of the new “Penguin Killer” SEO Guides come out and you better
believe it they are on their way if not out already. Just think as to what
exactly Penguin is all about. By and large it is all about over optimization
and gerrymandered SEO Link Building. If it looks unnatural then you better
believe that Google will spot it sooner or later.

The Bottom line to dealing with Penguin is that your best tool is “Common
Sense” and make sure you stop yourself from getting too clever.

As I mentioned, we’ve found going back to basics helped and one other thing
is starting to emerge – the relative power it would appear of nofollow links.
Now this might sound as if we are riding a coach and horses right through
Google’ algorithm at the moment but in our experience and that of others we
are seeing a huge benefit to our Campaigns when we’ve added Press Releases
into the mix and these ( in our case) only involve nofollow links.

That’s one of the reasons why are now starting to use nofollow links from
EDU’s and Govs whenever we can lay our hands on them as well. They are not
only adding another dimension to our Campaigns with the additional IP
spread but the authority status of the sites themselves appears to be
really having a benefit.

Now I know I mentioned in my last Newsletter that we have some nice EDU High
PR Links Packets but an additional inspection of one of these packets reveals
that they also contain some nice High PR Gov’s and .mils in there as well.

There are a few packets of these still available and they are $75 for 2,000
High PR Links (PR3 – 6 and all on the page not domain) so those who are
interested then send the $75 via PayPal to info@simpleleveraging.com and
we’ll get you sorted.

Similar packets will be available on Traffic Planet shortly but the packets
available on TP will only contain links ranging from PR 2 to 4 whereas these
remaining packets here contain some PR5′s and 6′s as well.

More Google Post Panda Testing

Jan 29th, 2012
by Admin.
No comments yet

Just thought I’d drop a quick update to yesterdays email where I discussed an ongoing case study we were carrying out on some brand new domains and also checking how well the SLS Network was performing at the start of 2012.

OK interim stats are as follows:

1. 15 Domains bought and launched

2. All 15 were indexed and were starting to rank (albeit in a limited manner) within 24 hours.

3. For Narrow match terms, 4 had hit Page 1 in Google within 3 days, 5 had hit Page 2, 1 was on Page3, 1 was on Page 4 whilst the remaining 4 were lost in the mire (sub Page 5 but we’ll get them to where we want them to be ( it’ll just take some more time). So that’s a 60% success rate at Page 2 plus within 3 days.

On one of the sites we carried out more of an in-depth analysis and I am forwarding this video to my small “Peer Group Review Team” to confirm and the results picked up from that were really exciting. OK it was a tightly focused Niche we were after but still in narrow match had 411,000 competing pages and the results we had were as follows:

The time period was as mentioned three days since we bought and registered this domain and we were looking at the following results for one term (our main and keyword targeted term) plus as we had launched a while network of sites there was also some collateral penetration as well in that some of our other sites were also showing up for this term:

1. 5 Places controlled by us on Page1 in Google.

2. 4 Places on Page 2.

3. 5 Places on Page 3 (including Bookmark Directories).

4. 7 Places on Page 4 (including Bookmark Directories).

5. 5 places on Page 5 (including Bookmark Directories).

Plus when we expanded the Search queries it showed on Pages 9 & 10 that we had in some cases 90% of the page tie up for our sites / terms etc when we also took into consideration the member Directories of SLS which had also started to appear.

All we used in this promotion were a couple of items that we discuss in the members area of SLS plus the Bookmark Network using one account to deep link the sites.

So the quick response to does Social Bookmarking still work in 2012 (heck there was a post in the Warrior Forum recently that predicted the “death of…..” yawn) is yes and is alive and kicking.

The key thing that you have to bear in mind and I’ve stated this on countless times over the years, SEO is a constantly moving form of marketing. You have to keep evolving or you are finished and that’s what Simple Leveraging does, it moves constantly with the times and if it seems that in 2012 we are massively different animal to how we were in 2009 when we first emerged then in certain cases we are but in our core methodology? Nope, our principles and approach have stayed the same, just the implementation of them has been slightly “tweaked” that’s all.

If you read nothing else today, read this…these results are that good.

Jan 27th, 2012
by Admin.
No comments yet
“I love it when a plan comes together” or so said the late great George Peppard as Col “Hannibal” Smith in the A Team (in virtually every episode) and in this case perhaps I should paraphrase the quote to run “I love it when someone pays attention, takes action and then hits the target”.

In this case I mean by taking my recommendation regarding the use of the various Simple Leveraging techniques and getting them to work extremely well.

Literally a few hours after my last email I received this quote in from one of our members who I “talked through the process” of putting this sort of plan together only a few weeks ago.

I won’t embarrass him by giving out his details but his quote ran as follows:

“I ran one press release test on a new site using the PR submission service, followed by your instruction and I followed that with an RSS Submit Submission and nothing else and take a look at the results 48 hrs later. Now this is a pretty none competitive keyword with a number of local modifiers but I’ve never seen this many keyword ranking combinations ranking this fast.

My friend you’re the man. Thank you for sharing with us.

You really over deliver.”

H e enclosed an excel spreadsheet of SERPS that quite frankly if I delivered it to a client without checking I would have basically been laughed at.

It was that good.

Seriously, I mean it.

If you thought yesterdays statistics were mind blowing (and humbly speaking I reckon a 443% increase in traffic ain’t too shabby as they say over here in Northern Ireland) then pick a couple of cushions to soften your fall ‘cos this is going to knock you sideways.

His spreadsheet enclosed (and I kid you not) the following statistics taken over 1200 terms:

Google:

500 Top 5 slots (251 at No 1)

Yahoo:

607 Top 5 slots (343 at No 1)

Bing:

605 Top 5 slots (343 at No 1)

Now this was 6 weeks ago so between a few of us we random checked about 70-80 terms this morning and….yes there had been some slippage but who the heck is going to complain if a few of the terms had slipped from No 1 to………No 2? To balance that in quite a few cases he had tag teamed the No 1 and No 2 slots and this was still 6 weeks after the release!

All in all we found that 75-85% of his results still stood so extrapolate that over 1200 terms and you get the picture as to why he was so excited and why the hard-bitten SOB’s (OK guys not really) in our ClientSEO Team were so impressed.

And we thought our results were mind blowing.

Listen boys and girls, there is so much…..how can I put it, but think of the smelly stuff that comes out of the rear end of a cow, flying around being sold nowadays that it is nice when something that is so achievable and practical appears that sometimes it is very easy to overlook it.

In this case it is the execution and implementation of the process that brings about the results here.

So, before we get tooooo carried away with everything let’s put in place some caveats here to bring about a dose of reality to the situation.

Yes as he said, a lot of his terms were very very Long tail..but in most cases (90% of the terms we checked) they had adverts running alongside the SERPS so someone was bidding on the traffic so that confirms to me that yes the majority of these terms had traffic (albeit small amounts but traffic nonetheless).

Does this technique work 100% all the time, every time?

I wish I could say yes and claim 100% perfection but to be honest I failed those exams at school so I’ll settle for a slightly “grubby” 75-85% hit rate which is still well above the average and in a lot of cases delivers results that most folks out there only fantasize about.

Hmnn that’s about it really.

Too many folks have come back now with amazing results for this not to be genuine. As I’ve said, it might not hit the target absolutely 100% all of the time but the strike rate is too convincing now for it not to be included within everyone’s’ armory.

Now those of you who have been receiving emails and newsletters from me for some time will testify that we don’t go down the conventional “Guru, churn and burn” route i.e. I very rarely send out emails promoting other peoples products purely just to create affiliate income. I know there hundreds out there who do but I don’t as I will only promote something that sits alongside our Simple Leveraging methodology and also something that we have tried out, tested and found to work on our clients first.

As an organization, we don’t exist purely on earning our income via affiliate sales in fact affiliate income accounts for less than 1% of our turnover so if we do send information out about another product or service (and I think we’ve done it 3-4 times in the past 2 years) then it’s because we think it will help your service.

Also because we feel so strongly that you should be using this we are quite prepared to waive potentially $480 worth of affiliate income per user, as a way of saying “Thank You” and also to act as an incentive for you to get hustling and do something.

If you or a client are working on a project and you absolutely have to deliver on something quickly then this is the road down which you should go, even allowing for the pre Christmas rush.

When you are promoting something for either yourself or a client then you have to make one of two decisions regarding SEO.

Firstly, how quickly can I get the target page into position in the SERPS to start the traffic flowing and how much of a fight is it going to entail and also how much budget do I have?

Secondly, if I can’t get my target page onto Page 1 quickly then I absolutely have to get either a Press Release or some form of associate page there to at least get into “the action” and deliver some sort of ROI.

Press Releases, designed, implemented and submitted correctly fit the bill here. Put it together with our SLS methodology and Bookmarking Network and you really have the weapons with which to carry the fight forward towards the achievements of your goals.

If you are a member of SLS and not using this technique then the first thing you should do after reading this email is to email me by return and I’ll get you set up with our discount link and get you up and running.

$480 worth of savings is not to be sniffed at, especially in these times of hardship and recession.

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