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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?

 

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.

Post Penguin Views and Great Value Back Links Offer

Aug 10th, 2012
by Admin.
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Before the weekend officially gets under way I thought I’d drop everyone a line to answer a few questions regarding the recent events and goings on over SEO in the last few months and certainly regarding Panda, Penguin and SLS.

Well first up, I get asked regularly about has SLS and its network been affected by the Penguin Update and the answer it would appear (touch wood he says) is that we seem to be OK at the moment as we do appear to have maintained our “low key” below the radar status.

I ran a test for a client last week on one particular keyword phrase and after the Press Releases had appeared in the top 5 slots in Google (well 4 out of the top 5), positions 7-10 were occupied by our Bookmark Directories.

Also I spoke to one of our longer standing SLS members the other evening and we were talking about SEO and Promotion in general and how sites were starting to come back post penguin and I mentioned that in our case we hadn’t changed anything in terms of promotions Post Penguin and that the one site we did have that had been affected was now showing a month on month increase in Google traffic by about 15% for the past 4 months.

The moral of the story it would appear was that yes you couldn’t deny the Penguin Update had had an effect but that by just keeping on with the basics, we had managed to survive without buying the plethora of “shiny new toys” or reports that always seem to appear post a Google Update. One wonders whether in fact what some folks would do if there never were any Google updates at all.

Ok, another question that came in recently was “what the heck is Back Links Heaven all about”?

Simple, loads of places (probably more than any other source) where you can put your own back links.

I recorded a brief video guide about Back Links Heaven here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP7KlGdiqK8

We still have a few packages of the first six Volumes of Back Links Heaven available at $45, which effectively prices them at $7.50 per volume for 2.5K Links.

The platforms covered in the first six volumes ranged included:

AEForums

UseBB

PunBB

ESyndicat

phpDug

MoinMoin (wiki Platform)

Also as a quick Weekend Promo for SLS users and Members we have the following happening.

A few JV partners have approached us to see if we could put together a brief mini-series of Back Links Heaven and we have and it’s comprised of the following.

Volume 1 will contain links from 10 different Platforms and the OTO that will be on offer only to those who have bought the deal will offer 30 Urls from each of the 10 Platforms for $35. These will all be links from Sites with a minimum Home Page Rank of 4. The sites will include the following platforms:

PunBB

VBulletin (Blogs here not forums)

MoinMoin,

Elgg

ExpressionEngine,

TikiWiki

DokuWiki

JomSocial,

SMF,

phpFox.

There are some nice unusual Software Platforms there as we are expanding rapidly our range of Platforms on offer in Back Links Heaven

These packets will only be available as a OTO or to members of Simple Leveraging so anyone who wants some links from some nice PR4+ sites (mix and match of NoFollow and Dofollow) then send over the $35 via PayPal to info@simpleleveraging.com and we’ll get you sorted.

For those who wish a bit more coverage and want to go for the Proper Volumes of Back Links Heaven and want the half price offer then send over the $45 to info@simpleleveraging.com and we’ll get you sorted.

In the meantime have a great weekend.

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.

Sometimes you just have to sit tight with Google….and some”hot” dofollow Academic Wikis available.

Apr 24th, 2012
by Admin.
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The world of SEO is not the greatest place to be in at the moment as the likes of Google play a perverse online version of Basket Ball at the moment with their index and to say it makes for nerve racking client meetings is a gross understatement.

However despite all of the online shenanigans, sometimes it pays to just go back and be “old school” for a while and sit tight when all around you is bouncing around maniacally.

This is not easy I can tell you and when you have a client getting near hysterical because their main keywords have gone “walk about” and wiped out about 75% of their traffic, sometimes the answer they least want to hear is…”lets’ just sit tight and see what happens”.

You have to be very careful at junctures like these as though to “sit tight” may well be the best course of action, as I have said; sometimes it is the least sort of thing a hysterical client wishes to hear.

We’ve been in just such a situation these last 10 days or so with one of our clients who has a nice site that’s based in the Health Niche and to say we’ve been under pressure is playing down the situation “big time”.

The trouble as I’ve said is that when an array of hitherto rather stable keywords and SERPS disappears almost overnight it is very easy to break out into wholesale panic. The trouble was that the more we analysed the situation and thought about it, the less inclined we were to actually effect wholesale changes to our SEO approach and “game plan”.

You could almost cut the sense of relief with a knife when thank god, the clients main term came back onto Page 1 in Google after a 10 day absence touring round “the nether regions” of online obscurity.

This was not, as it turned out, anything to do with the so called current “Panda Massacres” or anything like that but a phenomena that was more familiar.

A good old fashioned “Google Dance”.

Unpleasant nonetheless and if you are suffering from any form of “gastric issues” then this sort of occurrence could be defined as almost the perfect form of “online laxative” such was the very “uncool” situation client wise.

The trouble is nowadays it is very easy to over react and abandon Tactics and approaches mid Campaign if suddenly your SERPS go awry but sometimes that is the last thing you should do.

It is sometimes beneficial when the “brown smelly stuff hits the fan” to actually sit down and think logically at times as these such is the crazy world we inhabit called SEO.

When the bottom has seemingly appeared to fall out of your marketing world sometimes it pays to sit down and analyse why you think this has happened before you make a move and sometimes the result of that analysis and introspection is actually to do nothing especially if your previous actions had been well thought out, researched and seemingly well implemented.

Too often we seem to hear nowadays of client scenarios appearing to go badly wrong and all the blame seems to be laid at the doors of the “manic Panda” when actually it is something different altogether.

Think before you make a move….always. You’d be surprised at the numbers of those who don’t.

Lastly, last week, we informed you of the fact that we had some rather nice dofollow wikis that folks could use for their Marketing and Link Building Campaigns. There were 120 dofollow wikis that were based around the Apple Snow Leopard OS and the cost of them was $80 for the 120.

This week we have something hat is even tastier and much much rarer and that is 80 rather nice Authority sites based around the Academic world. Now the euphemism for this is usually the “EDU market” but that would actually be a gross over simplification as in this case, in this list is a very prestigious German University that is certainly not an EDU domain suffix (but is Still a PR8) and several Academic Institutions in the UK (all ac.uk) plus some nice Colleges and Universities in the Far east that are also not EDU’s. Plus also within this list are a long time favourite of mine and that is some nice “K12.us” domains which represent the US education sector just below the University and college sector.

I personally love these as they seem to get crawled very quickly and stay indexed due to their very nature plus even if the wikis get restricted, quite often the pages don’t get taken down so your links remain “in situ”. They also often have some nice PR on the homepage of the site and quite often this is PR4 or 5.

Anyway we have a very limited number of these that are available as we like to use these “in house” in a lot of our domestic Campaigns so we’re limiting the number of lists we’re making available to 12 copies and these will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

Priority will also be given to members or readers who have already bought the 120 dofollow list to be fair.

PR on these sites ranges from PR8 at the top end (a nice number plus as I said some nice prestigious European Uni’s from at least 3 different Countries so a terrific IP spread) to those we have not yet had the time to allocate Page Rank to but in a spot check just before this newsletter was published I took 3 of the N/A Page Rank assessed sites and two of them turned out to be PR4′s on a manual inspection!!

Anyway this list is available for $80 and as I’ve said is available on a first come first served basis. Our PayPal address is as usual info@simpleleveraging.com .

We will also be running another webinar on these within the next 7 days and priority on that webinar will be given to those who have bought the lists which is only fair.

Google up to it’s tricks again

Apr 9th, 2012
by Admin.
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Google is up to its old bullying tricks again. Its behaviour resembles that of a 900lb Gorilla rampaging around inflicting pain and aggravation because it’s testicles have just been reshaped by a kick from one of its colleagues.

Not a pleasant concept and folks the world over are feeling the pain and pressure it is inflicting with its current activities. To be honest it is doing so much at present that you’d almost be pushed to try and fathom out where to start, what to take notice of first?

Well the subject I want to discuss today is that of the current so called “Over optimisation” slap that currently appears to be doing the rounds either brought about by or part of the current war against High Page Rank Networks.

The latest casualty appears to be Build My Rank hard on the heels of Authority Link Network and a whole host of others. At the same time Google appear to be firing the starting shots against some of the major Press Release Agencies who supply (for a fee disguised as an upgrade / premium fee) dofollow links in their Press Releases. The most notable name that has appeared here is PRWeb.com.

As well as de indexing and downgrading sites that have getting links form these networks there also appears to be a huge increase in the so called “Google Re indexing Request”. Now this is where via Webmaster Tools, Google kindly informs the recipient that they have been guilty of dubious linking building practices and are going to be de-indexed but that they will be eligible for re indexing if they clean their act up and stop these nefarious activities etc.

Now I know that this is a gross over simplification of the issue but sometimes it is best to strip these down to the basics and then try and work your way up from there.

Firstly in a lot of cases this is long overdue and I am surprised it has taken so long to happen as some of these Networks were extremely over the top in the way they promoted themselves and what membership of these networks would achieve.

After all consider the following. Why would Google continually allow such networks to prosper when their main aim is to undermine what Google is about?

Consider the way that most have continued to go about their activities:

“Join us and with our help we’ll make sure that you get No 1 slots guaranteed in Google despite their updates!” etc etc.

Answer from Google? “No you’re not and we’re going to de index you and punish all the folks who have had anything to do with you”

Going back to my gorilla analogy, it’s like sitting next to the aforementioned big hairy fella, continually poking him with a stick and then wondering why he has just picked up an even bigger stick and hit you with it?

So what is there to do and what advice can be given?

Well strangely the first thing to do is sit tight. Do nothing, don’t reply to any so called Google Messages as I have a sneaky feeling these are auto generated (well really Steve? That’s a surprise) and that they are just “shaking the tree” as we say over here in Northern Ireland and waiting to see who runs for cover and who falls out?

Don’t give them the pleasure but sit tight, watch and wait.

If you have a site that has been de-indexed or downgraded then go back and re-evaluate what you’ve been doing and what your involvement in any of the above High Page Rank Networks was.

Take this information and effectively reverse engineer it i.e. if you’ve only been targeting certain terms or anchor topics then widen your target base “as of yesterday”

Also consider your Anchor Link Density ratio and then expand upon that.

“Throw some dust up” and get some activity and signs of life surrounding your site and Google will have to re visit the site. Get fresh links but from different sources and don’t get beaten out of shape over Page Rank. It’s a busted flush, gone and not worth worrying over.

Nice if you have it but don’t lose any sleep if you haven’t.

Google are slowly pulling out of Page Rank anyway so why bother with it in the long term (the subject of another webinar basically but we’ll cover it in some detail in our next one).

Remember, Google wants to see a Back Links Landscape that as closely approximates a human powered one as possible. So if all Google sees on its occasional check is about 600 links all of which are coming from only PR4 sites and above, all on the same anchor subject and all from a limited number of IP’s then it is going to look very gerrymandered and false.

That’s why we’ve been “banging on about” these Wikis for the past few weeks. They are the perfect tool in your armoury for generating large numbers of any sort of links you want from 16,000 different IP’s. For literally a pittance you can create large numbers of sacrificial links that otherwise would be too expensive to procure or set up and then you can widen your back links base to as large a spread as you need.

For diluting a heavy links concentration they are perfect. They are also extremely useful in other areas and anecdotally we are in receipt of a number of case studies where they have been shown to have positively impacted upon increases in SERPS.

Now in case folks think that we’re ignoring what is going on at present and trying to pretend that nothing is amiss, we’re not. We’re just as anxious as the rest over what is going on but we’re anxious perhaps in a slightly more laid back manner.

Those of you who know me fairly well with confirm that my view on Google is that I listen to everything it says, don’t believe a word of what it says and trust it about as far as I can throw it.

I intensely dislike what it does and how it conducts itself, the breath taking hypocrisy that it comes out with time after time but sadly it is a fact of life we have to deal with it and live with it.

In this instance sit, watch and wait.

Latest Updates from Google, EWP and Our expanded Wiki List

Mar 16th, 2012
by Admin.
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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock recently you can’t have escaped the fact that our friends (ho ho) at “The Mighty G” <wink> have thrown another series of updates and general aggravation at us all again.

Now this email is not a complete chapter and verse analysis of what exactly is going on with the latest update rather the point I wish to make is that these updates tend to get classified as if they are just one action i.e. the update does just one thing when in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

First up, Google no longer releases Mega Updates, those days are long gone. The days of the “Florida” and “Big Daddy” updates are well behind us and actually Google is permanently updating and “tweaking” its algorithm, it’s just that we’re not always aware of what it has been getting up to.

We only become totally fixated with Google as and when it gets round to one particular aspect of our SEO and in this case the latest update appears to come down hard on High Page Rank Blog Networks and similar High Page Rank Home Page Links. To be honest, the fact that Google has hit these types of activities is not actually much of a surprise, the only thing that really surprised me was that it took so long.

But it does appear to have punished these types of networks and does it mean that this is the end for High Page Rank Networks? Nope or at least not in my view, rather what has happened is that Google has singled out whole networks of sites where these sorts of links can be found and penalised accordingly. Now where does this lead this type of Link Building and Ranking as part of your SEO Arsenal?

Well I always say to folks, think like Google and behave like Google. By this I mean, you have to constantly evolve and change your marketing mix to survive. None of these activities that Google have come down will disappear but they will change and that is what I recommend you do to.

When we first started out in Simple Leveraging in early 2009 we were a vastly different proposition to the Simple Leveraging we are now and the fact that we’ve lasted this long is a testament to how we’ve changed. If you don’t change and evolve in this game, you’ll die. It’s that simple.

Anyway for those who want to find out more about what exactly Google have been looking at with their latest activities then follow this link: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html . It’s interesting to note that there are a whole range of things that Google look at constantly.

The one factor that attracted my attention was this snippet:

“Improvements to freshness. [launch codename "iotfreshweb", project codename "Freshness"] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.”

Now this to me confirms what I’ve long suspected that Google is coming down big time on the side of the provision of Fresh Content. This time they’ve just gone ahead and confirmed it.

Anyway to other updates and the various goings on at the vendors of the great wiki Submission tool Extreme Wiki Poster (hereinafter called EWP). Now this terrific tool has only been out about 4-5 weeks and they are already on version 1.3 which is in beta being tested by none others than your truly amongst others and so far so good. There are a few minor bugs but Kishor and his development team are on the case and I am sure that version 1.3 when it comes out of beta will keep raising the bar as far as submitters are concerned.

At the same time we have expanded our Public Wiki list to now include over 10,000 wikis and to answer a few questions about our “growth policy” for want of a better description it is as follows.

Our first list was 3,128 in size which we then shortly expanded to 4,000. Those who bought at the 3,128 level got the expanded list for free. We then came out with a few minor upgrades which everyone was notified about (email me if you hadn’t received any of the emails and you think you should have had as Aweber has been fun for the week or so) and the list was increased to 6,000 with the minor additions being free to those who bought at the 4k level or 3,128.

The list has now grown to over 10,000 and is on sale on Traffic Planet for $80 but for those who bought the old 4K list then you can upgrade to the 10K list for an additional $32. This also qualifies you for the free updates which will take the list eventually in this update to over 12,000.

Those who wish to update the size of their Wiki list just send the $32 via PayPal to info@simpleleveraging.com and we’ll make sure the new amended list gets sent out asap.

Lastly we had a couple of Webinars in the pipeline for early this year which we’ve had to re schedule largely due to voice issues with yours truly but we are planning to schedule the first of these is this week and the provisional date for this is Wednesday 7th March. It is pencilled in for 9.00 pm GMT (4.00 pm EDT etc) and will cover the subject of Wikis, both general and EDU / Gov as well.

It will of course be recorded and for those who are eligible, copies will be available. Eligibility for the Webinar falls to those whose membership of Simple Leveraging is current and valid or you have bought one of our WIKI Lists recently. If you fall into either of these categories and would like to attend then please email me with your Skype address and I will add you to the list.

Like our other Webinars, this will be conducted via Skype as I quite like the interactivity of it all. It will be held in the same format as our others and this will be first up presentation about the subject of wikis with guides for best practice and developments and then followed by a Q&A. If there is anything in particular that you would like to discuss or get answers to then send me an email with your question and I will make sure that I will address the issue and also do as much research into the question beforehand to make sure that my information is as up to date and current as possible.

Lastly I will make sure that there are some additional freebies available as an incentive to attend and they will also be some additional wiki Urls but these will be different. As a teaser rather than give too much information away but the clue is a two word phrase and the initials are DF.

Anyway, I think that is enough to be going on with so if you wish to upgrade to the 1Ok Wiki list then send the $32 via PayPal to info at simpleleveraging.com and if you wish to attend the Webinar then send me your Skype contact details and any questions you might have.

What Makes an Authority Site and also how to get your hands on links from 20 .Gov sites?

Mar 3rd, 2012
by Admin.
No comments yet

What makes and Authority site? It’s another one of those questions that we regularly get asked and again the answer could be viewed in two ways.

Firstly on a very simple basic level, an Authority site is one that is recognized as an Authority within its particular topic or niche. For example, www.bbc.co.uk is viewed as an authority site within the News and Current affairs spectrum and in the area of Aerospace then www.nasa.gov would be viewed as an authority site alongside political websites such as http://www.number10.gov.uk/ in the UK and http://www.whitehouse.gov/ in the US. It could be argued with events on both sides of the Atlantic recently that both of these sites are pretty compromised (allegedly) but I digress.

The common theme in all of these examples is that they exist primarily for the dissemination of information and have no commercial bias whatsoever and therefore their information by and large is unbiased with no commercial intent whatsoever.

It is this last category that makes EDU and Academic Domains so useful and worthwhile as they are deemed to have relative unimpeachable independent non bias. It is also this aspect that goes way and beyond the domain suffix .edu as well as the majority of leading Academic Institutions worldwide are in fact not straight .edu’s but either variants such as in Australia .edu.au or in the UK, .ac.uk

On the next level an Authority site is one that is deemed to be an Authority in its niche by virtue of the experience and quality of the editorial and information published by the site. This latter category is helped by the way that site is perceived or viewed by other web sites i.e. are many other sites of a non commercial bias linking to it for example?

It is this second Category that for our purposes is slightly more achievable for us to achieve for our own or client’s websites.

Now as most readers will be aware we have been focussing a lot of our intention recently towards Wikis as sources of links and a lot of folks have asked why?

The answer as far as we have been observing is that whether they are nofollow or dofollow neither makes any difference as far as we are concerned as it is not Page Rank we are at all interested in here. Ot is the fact that currently they are helping our Press Campaigns “hit it out of the Park” at the moment. Currently we are getting a 90% success rate in getting our Press Releases within the top 5 in Google and in the most recent case of this morning we had 2 PR’s in the same top 5 slot in Google for the same phrase and all within 51 minutes of the release coming out.

Next up is the target to keep them there!

That having been said, having other Authority sites link to you does help you “up the ladder” and it’s to that end that I want to bring to everyone’s attention some very cool very rare information we have just finished compiling this morning.

Our list of Wikis using the MediaWiki platform has risen now to over 3,000 now and within that there are 117 EDU Domains plus 6 Gov sites with 3 satellite Gov / political domains. Now these are all working Wikis that we have placed material on within the past 3 weeks so the work.

What we compiled this morning is of more interest and to be honest much more “Mega Hot” in as much as our research has unearthed signup pages and logins for 20 .Gov Wikis plus 3 satellite sites.

Now to be brutally blunt, using .Govs as part of your Link Building strategy is very much a specialised business and has to be handled correctly. Anyone who tells you otherwise is, as we say in the UK, “talking out their backside” but handled correctly can gain great results big time.

How rare are .Gov sites?

Well in our major Wiki list of 3,178 sites we have 6 of them plus 3 satellites.

In this list researched and compiled this morning we have 20 .Gov sites plus 3 satellites. Now these are.Gov sites that are truly spread across the world so the IP spread is to die for plus the geo coverage is great. There are of course a couple of mainstream US .Govs in there as well.

I am making this limited list of .Gov sites available to a very small group of people plus running a Webinar next week where we go through the do’s and don’ts of how to handle these sites properly and not get your material banned.

Now the places on this Webinar and the number of copies of this list will be limited to 15 as these sites are that rare. The cost of this list plus access to the webinar is $35 and is purely available on a first come first served basis. Send the funds via PayPal to info at simpleleveraging.com  and you’ll get out on the list

These sites are hot, they are rare so get in now to secure your place and I’ll get your place allocated.

I am also running another Webinar on the subject of dealing with and handling .EDU sites in the next 10 days and those who have already signed up will be notified of times shortly.

Back to the .Gov sites, get in quick as places are limited.

What types of Links work for me and another 500+ wikis on our list of over 2,000

Feb 23rd, 2012
by Admin.
No comments yet

People ask me quite often, what it is that I look for in a link back to any of our sites or our clients sites and my answer is always the same. I don’t really care quite often nowadays as long as the url the link is pointing to is correct and correctly coded.

Now the reason for this is that our viewpoint with regards to “Panda” and it’s glorious after affects really revolves around three things. Content is king again (and rightly so) and links do matter but where the link comes from in terms of geo location is perhaps now more important than ever and an increased variety in terms of type of link and mix and match of Anchor phrases is now more important.

Basically what Google want to see is a Back Links Landscape that as closely approximates something created in a random fashion by humans as possible. They do not want to see a Link Profile and Campaigns that are perfectly formed, perfectly calculated to the “n”th degree in terms of ratios regarding Dofollow to Nofollow etc etc.

In other words if your Back Links profile looks to good to be true then Google err on the side that it probably is too good to be true and will ironically punish you for it.

An example of that came up recently when I was advising on a prospective client who had come to me seeking advice because their portfolio of sites had been hammered by Google and he was now looking a portfolio of sites that had only about 30% of them indexed on Google.

I sat and listened to this “sorry tale of woe” (and it genuinely was a sorry tale as I do not wish to cause offence) and when asked about Back Links, the reply came back that everything had been carefully planned and they’d only gone after carefully screened keyword rich phrases from one a certain profile of site.

Then it hit me? Was this a link profile that looked as if it had been created and morphed by human hand or was it just too good to be genuinely true? My advice to the client was to go back and radically rethink their Linking Strategy and to not be afraid of a wide mix of link types, and certainly to think about varying their link sources and also the IP location of their links.

Next up the topic of Wikis and the power of links within them?

Now at the end of the day, unless you are talking directly to the person within Google Algorithm team who is responsible for the final tweaks that go into their algorithm changes then any comment from anyone about Links and Link Building is a “best guess” or “educated hearsay” – yes even mine.

Where we come from is that we will only pass on comments and tips / tricks and techniques that we have already tried on our own sites and know to have worked. How they have worked and why, we can only give our best shot in guessing or estimate but it is never more than that and anyone who can say different is by and large lying.

That having been said supplying information backed up by empirical verifiable evidence is fairly conclusive and that’s where we come from. We’ll only write about something either “after the event” or towards the end of a promotion that we feel us commenting upon, won’t adversely affect the outcome or success of that promotion.

So how does this affect our views on Wikis and such like?

Well basically I like them and at the moment along with SLS (of course) we are using them to support our PR Campaigns for one client and over the past five days have captured 4 Page slots (including 2 No 1 slots for two PR’s plus Client internal page) just using Press Releases backed up and supported by a wide variety of Wikis and SLS links.

The List we supplied to folks last week of Media Wikis has now expanded and instead of the 2026 Wikis we had in this list we now have over 2,500 (and it’s growing so don’t be too surprised if by this time next week it’s over 3,500!) so to all of those who bought copies of the 2026 list we’ll mail out the increased sized list for no additional charge so that about an extra 25% for free.

Now as to the power of this List? Well I spoke to one of our more senior members last week and their comment was that using one of the newer Wiki Submitters they had submitted to all of the Wikis and had successfully managed to submit to over 1,600 of them. Now this didn’t mean that the other 400 were useless, far from it. What it meant was that probably for a number of reasons the target wikis weren’t able to accept automatic submission or for some reason there was an “interface” issue but manually the Wikis would have accepted the submissions.

I personally think a success rate of 1,600 out of 2,000 is awesome and backed up by SLS gives one hell of a Link Support “Baseball Bat” to whatever you were trying to promote and our recent client success with PR’s has borne that out to be true.

Asked how powerful this list was and this type of promotion?

The answer that came back was that the evidence showed that these Wikis were strong enough to get pages moved from Page 2 in Google onto Page 1 and to be fair, that’s what we’ve found as well.

It’s great being able to go to a client or prospective client and then say that you’ll come back to them in a few days with some representation for them in Google on their first page and that’s what these Press Releases backed up by the Wikis and SLS is doing for us here.

The Wiki list is going onto Traffic Planet for sale tomorrow (slightly delayed through editing again) and the price will be $45 for 2026 wikis but those who are interested in buying from us directly for the next few days will get the extra 500 Wikis thrown in for no extra fee so will get a list that is 2,500 strong.

Now if certain types of Domain suffixes” floats your boat” (know what I mean?) then our Wiki List contains over 110 EDU Domains – that’s 110 unique EDU Domains not just different wikis on the same domain plus 9 .Gov’s.

Not bad eh?

The other thing I wanted to mention briefly was that following hard on the heels of these Wikis is our research on another platform of Wikis and these links for these wikis are auto approve and also Dofollow.

Now at the risk of winding folks up, we have a database of these that stretches to over 12,000 Wiki Pages spread across 850 Domains so far so this one is going to be “interesting” to say the least.

Anyway to sum up if anyone is interested in the existing 2,500 list then send the $45 via PayPal to info@simpleleveraging.com and I’ll get you sorted.

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