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.

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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.

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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 7^th 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.

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What’s the fastest way to get your links on a handful of High PR EDU Sites?

Quick answer?

Get yourself onto the distribution list for each volume of Back Links Heaven. Or it used to be except that now the Weekly / Monthly memberships are now closed leaving only a handful of Series Memberships still available.

I was speaking to a member of SLS earlier today and we were discussing the practicalities of the Back Links Heaven Packages and what they entail and as I explained more in detail the actual enormity of what they provide hit me.

Now I know most of you out there will be thinking “So what Steve, you put the packages and the idea together, so how come you’re having the AHA moment?”

And you’d be right.

Except for the fact that when I put the whole concept together, it was more of an explanation of Forum and Blogging Platforms with a batch of extra links and Urls thrown in for good measure……or so I thought?

The Challenge that was made to me was to go into Volume 3 of this Series which covers the forum platform punBB and then take out some of the Urls and work them?

OK, I looked at this week’s Url lists and within 20 minutes I now had confirmed memberships and access to 5 PR5 EDU Forums plus 2 PR 6 and one PR8…and also a PR2.

This was a result of having filtered through the Urls and processed just 20 out of the 130+ EDU Domains that can be found in this week’s list alone!

I hadn’t even begun to approach tackling the 85+ .Gov Urls we had.

Then there was the small matter of the other 9,500 Domain Urls that remain to be worked through.

All of this for $16?

Now as I said, I know this might come across as being dumb but my role in this whole project had been very much on the “global concept” side of things and not the “roll your sleeves up and get working side of things” but when I looked at what I had generated then the penny dropped big time.

Now we will be changing the format of this program as to be honest we are massively and I mean massively, under charging for this information and material and as such we will be closing the doors early and re opening them for roughly the same price but a tenth of the size of the product delivery as to be honest that is still one hell of a steal.

Consider the following. If you were to buy links on 2 PR5 sites, inside the sites I grant you, then currently you would be looking at $3 per month at the very least per Url and that would be cheap according to current market prices

That would make it about $36 per annum per links making the cost for the two of them $72 for the yearly rental.

For $16 I’ve just managed to unearth a lifetime source of 5 PR5, 2 PR6 and one PR8 (and the rest).

Talk about a no brainer or what?

I’m taking this program off the market with immediate effect ( http://backlinksheaven.com )but will honour all our existing Series Subscriptions taken out to date. That is only fair and I’ve never gone back on a deal in my life and I don’t intend to start now.

As I mentioned, though we’ve closed the Weekly / Monthly memberships there are still a handful of the Series Memberships available for $175 and for readers of this newsletter I’ll keep those places open for the next 24 hours and then shut the doors and when we’ve re-examined the whole proposition and priced it correctly then we’ll reopen the doors.

Those interested in this and the ramifications of this are pretty dumb-assed as well. For $175 you get access to 50 odd other volumes, each as powerful as Volume 3.

At current investigation levels that means you could get access to 350 plus PR5 and 6 EDU Forums and then there’s the small matter of the other 495,000 Forum Urls as well.

“I’m off to see my shrink”

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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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I was talking to one of my valued friends amongst the SLS Community today and the subject came round to what we both felt was working for our respective business operations and especially with regards to current practices and the conversation swiftly moved round to the “why and how”?

The answer to this was obvious and it was this. Simply put, Simple Leveraging has evolved considerably over the past two and half years of its existence and it helps explain why the practices and methodology taught remains at the forefront of current SEO and Internet Marketing in general.

Now my philosophy behind this again is quite simple, you have to evolve in this game or you soon cease to exist in any meaningful manner and hence the reason for the constant exploration for new tools, techniques and utilities that make SLS still pack the punch it does.

Nowhere is this more so that in the area of taking SLS and really scoring with the use of Press Releases.

Now those of you who remember the various Skype Webinars we carried out in late summer will probably wonder what happened to the end product.

Well the initial studies of the project into the success of SLS and Press Releases made some pretty bold (but backed by fact) claims in that we did go through the nuts and bolts of a Campaign that went on to generate over $240,000 in four days.

Pretty bold huh? But nonetheless fact.

Well what I wanted to do was to take this approach and run it across various Client Campaigns over the past few months and see overall how it worked. These Campaigns were run during some of the busiest periods of the online year and I must confess the results were pretty amazing.

The first Campaign took place in the run up to Halloween and involved a Client in the Catering and Food Industry and using the techniques and practices we discussed, our Client saw an uptick in Traffic levels of 127% on last year with the Organic Search sector of their activities seeing a jump of 197%.

Using the same Client, we then analysed their promotional activities over Thanksgiving and the corresponding results were pretty amazing. Overall their traffic was up 192% on last year with the Organic Search sector of their promotional activities seeing a colossal increase of 440%.

Finally we analysed the first sector of their Christmas activities and again the results bear very interesting reading. So far with regards to overall activity, their traffic levels are up by 163% and again in Organic Search terms they are 443% up on last year.

As they say, the Jury is well and truly back in on this one and it is working with a vengeance.

Now I bring this subject up because one of the core components was linked to being able to produce and distribute a fair amount of Press Releases and this, if you are not very careful, costs.

However with our colleagues at Mass MediaSEO we are able to pass on to our SLS Members savings that if taken correctly will save them at least $480 over the next 12 months.

What you have to do to qualify these savings is to send me your membership details and I will pass these onto Dennis and his team and together we’ll get you sorted out and up and running.

Now what we’ve done is effectively waive our commissions on this Service with the aim of passing these savings directly onto you. It’s another way of us being able to say to you, “Thank You” for being one of our loyal members.

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Yes you read it right correctly, this is how we took a particular term that was OK a very tightly focused niche term, but one that had adverts running as far as Page 2 in Google and therefore was making money (or so Google thought so) and we ended up “owning” 95% of Google in under 24 hours.

Actually astute viewers of the video when it comes out will spot that we actually did this in just less than 13 hours!

So what did we do?

First in broad match our Press Release for the Client hit the No 2 slot out of 309 million pages in 13 hours and in narrow match we ended up with our Press Release taking 19 out of the top 20 slots in Google in the same period

Now the video, though having been recorded, is not going to appear for another 14 days or so as we are live in the midst of the Campaign for the Client and to be blunt, I don’t want any enterprising folks out there “nicking our niche” but the video proof is there and when I deem it safe the video will come out to our members only download area.

So how was this done?

1. Careful Keyword Research.
2. Timing
3. Proper and planned use of META Data

Firstly as Myra and I discussed in our recent Web Discussion, it was all down to careful Keyword Research for the right term for the client. Secondly as this particular Season Campaign has just got underway I guess our timing was pretty hot in that we hit the tracks running just before the previous Seasonal campaign had actually ended. Thirdly and last of all we made sure that our MEAT Data for the Keyword Research was included right up at the front of the Press Release.

Now astute Google watchers will know that Google have fine-tuned their algorithm recently and for the time being seem to be using for the Meta Inserts in the SERPS, the first 300 Characters of the main body copy of the piece you are trying to optimise for.

Now the Golden Rule here is to try and make sure you get your main Key phrase inserted right there at the start of your piece. Now this is not new and has been standard SEO practice for years but it did seem to have gone slightly out of fashion recently but now appears to have come back to the fore in Campaigns or so our research has shown.

So given the fact that in Press Releases our distributor automatically assigns the first 300 characters to the Meta description and this includes the beginning information, for example:

(EMAILWIRE.COM, October 17, 2011)

This means it shortens your ability to use the keywords in the first 145-155 characters in the meta description that Google displays before it truncates. So make use of your keywords in the Meta description early on, ideally right in the first part of the first sentence.

Anyway enough of this. I’ll get the video put into the Members only support area of the Forum within the next 14 days or so but to further add proof to the fact that we’re not sensationalising this, I’ve released the video to a couple of SLS members to get them to verify that we’re not making this up. I’ll get them to add their comments to back up our claims.

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One of the things I love about Simple Leveraging is that the “knowledge share” truly goes in more than one direction. This has been evidenced particularly in two incidences that spring to mind for me.

Firstly the experience working with Myra Love on our forthcoming project provisionally entitled “Multi Disciplinary Marketing” where we took the $240K in four days Campaign and analysed it’s various component parts and broke it down into stages and examined in detail.

Secondly, it was after talking to another SL member, Dave “Quinn” Thomas over cool ways to promote Wikis etc and this opened my eyes to a technique that I was aware of but hadn’t really thought about too much in detail.

I have now though, but perhaps it might be an idea to get back to basics first.

Why do we pursue this whole concept of Tiered / Layered Multi-level Linking? Firstly it’s something that we have been advocating and doing at Simple Leveraging by and large well before most others but more importantly why?

It’s a question I get asked all the time, why do you advise the constant building of links to support links to support…….etc  etc?

The answer is very simple. It is because of the transient nature of certain forms of Link Support that we use in our Campaigns. Now that is not to say that short term support is a bad thing, it’s more a case of understanding fully what is going on.

For example, one of the first things we want to do with a site is build in Authority links as soon as is possible. Now in most cases this means getting links on High Page Rank Social Media sites and / or Press Releases.

Now in a lot of cases the Home Page PR of a lot of these sites is fairly high ((5+) and the knock on effect is a fairly vigorous (if we’ve planned and executed it properly) short term “hit” on our sites that results in a rise up the “SERPS”.

Now as they all say, “What goes up always has to come down” and that is the case with the effect received from those short term links but there are steps that we should do almost immediately to mitigate any potential downfall.

I explain it with diagrams and a PowerPoint in this short video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxboJJneJg0  but the upshot is that sooner or later pages gaining the benefit of links from these High Page Rank Home Pages drop the moment that the links themselves disappear and the inbound links form these sites tend to come from less powerful inner pages.

Hopefully by then, all good promoters / Link Builders will have already had in place additional Link placements to add support to these pages. In the case of declining Press Releases, usually a fairly vigorous Link Building Campaign (from SLS etc) is good enough to not only arrest the decline but in most cases reverse it.

I’ve also uploaded to the Members Only Downloads area of the Forum another more in depth video that goes into detail a very useful little technique that drives excellent authority links from a PR8 Site to all of our Press Releases no matter how many we have, within seconds. You can also use this to replicate this technique with at least one other Authority site also. The video can be found here:

http://simpleleveraging.com/slschat/index.php/topic,187.0.html

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So, unless you’ve been hiding under a stone recently or have just arrived here from the Planet Zarg then it’s a safe bet that you’ve been hearing loads about Google+

So then why is it that yours truly is urging caution and reticence regarding this one in the latest series of offerings from our almighty Search Engine, the Big G.

Well first up, Google + is operated and run by Google.

Secondly, it’s run by Google…

And so on.

What more do you need here folks?

Lets be honest, Google’s track record in releasing offers like this is not exactly exemplary. Hands up all those who remember Google Buzz, Wave and Voice plus not to mention all those glorious Updates?

No my reasoning is more to do with the fact that I trust Google about as far as I can throw them at the moment but let me explain further.

It’s like this. You have a great website and you want to get some more action in Google over it but as we all know Google frown about all sorts of activities that might in some way give your site a slightly more competitive edge over the competition. So what do you do?  You get all your friends organised into one of these Google+ circles and get them all to “vote” for your site and then sit back and watch as your site climbs the charts?

Hmnnn, let’s think about it folks. You’ve been using a service run by Google to actually help in your intended aim of “gaming” Google.

The best bit of it all is that sooner or later some clown will come out with a WSO or E-book claiming that this is all one big Google Loophole and that this is going to be the next killer application and this is how you make it much better.

Just how dumb can we all get?

It’s like taking a big stick and standing there somewhere in the heart of the Congo Rain Forest and poking a big Gorilla with it. Folks, this, like the Google scenario, is not going to end well. Someone is likely to end up needing fairly intensive surgery and let me take this opportunity to say “it ain’t going to be Google…or the Gorilla.”

I mean, how clever is it to scheme up some really smart plan of actually creating a structure that is designed purely and solely for the purposes of getting round Google’s filters and structures….and then telling Google how we are going to do it…and when?

Let me finish this short newsletter with a quote taken from “The Filter Bubble” by Eli Pariser. In this short extract he describes the end of a conversation with a “Google insider” in which the subject of the Company Mantra “Do Not Be Evil” comes up:

“I once explained to a Google Search engineer that while I didn’t think the company was currently evil, it seemed to have at its fingertips everything it needed to do evil if it wished. He smiled broadly. “Right,” he said. “We’re not evil. We try really hard not to be evil. But if we wanted to, man, could we ever!””

Please treat Google+ with a huge amount of caution, especially if you are trying to use it as a form of SEO Weapon?

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Recently I wrote about some information we had gleaned about the latest Panda Update and touched upon the concept of “Trust rank” and as such have had quite a few emails asking could I elaborate on this further?

Well the story behind Trust Rank is this.

As a concept it has been researched by two separate organisations, Google and Yahoo. As a concept behind the scenes it had been around for some time in the Google camp but it was actually Yahoo who first went public about it really when one of their researchers alongside some research personnel from Stanford in 2004 put together a Paper entitled: “Combating Web Spam with TrustRank”. For those who want to pursue this matter further the paper has been retrieved and put online and can be found here:

http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF

Apparently at the same time Google had been doing some behind the scenes work on a similar concept called Trust Rank and registered the Trademark “Trustrank” as Matt Cutts (the public face of Google) explains here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8mUXQzwEvs

Now where all of this falls into place with my feelings in my last Newsletter are this. Google has been searching for some time to further provide more background analysis on the “worthiness” of Web Sites and how they stack up.

Initially this was to be provided by using data from their Page Rank analysis but since Page Rank has been generally accepted to have been on the slide for the past few years (Google themselves downgraded it from being the “jewel in the Crown” in the Search Algorithm now to being “one of 200 other ranking factors” – bit of a drop in emphasis I think you’ll agree?) they have had to look further afield.

They then decided to expand the Trust Rank concept further in 2009 when as well as having the Trademark registered they registered the Patent as well. Now things were getting really serious and it is only now some 2 -2 ½ years later that we are starting to see the true manifestation in this with the Panda Update.

Looking round for methods to try and help them get some sort of handle on the generally accepted worthiness of a site, they hit upon the idea of seeing how a site was viewed by virtue of how a site was viewed by its peers hence the appearance of the “+1” concept. Now this, as in all things, can be gerrymandered such is the good and bad side of human endeavour but it goes some way to showing where they are going.

The other parts of the Trust rank concept lie in an old view of “you are known by the Company that you keep” or who links to you. Now we know also that Google tried to control this with the much vaunted “rel=nofollow” attribute but once again this has now also turned into a dead duck so where does this all lead us?

Well as I said in one of the newsletters of a month ago that I felt that with Panda, Google were turning back the clock to almost the days of the late Nineties with their views on inbound links etc.

Now my views on this are as follows. I think that there are certain aspects of Linking that Google are trying to downplay in the algorithm but with the absence of any credible alternative they cannot nor ever will truly be able to remove data from Link Building entirely. So the upshot of that being is that for the time being we are all safe there folks as far as our Back Link building efforts are concerned but what I think Google are placing more emphasis now than perhaps they have done before, is the nature of the IP spread of those links.

Whereas in the past, conventional wisdom was that with a few PR5 – PR 6+ links from a couple of websites you could drive a site up the serps, now that is no longer true in the same way. What Google now want to see are links, but instead of a few folks voting i.e. just one or two sites they want to see loads more and those votes need to come from as wide a section of the Internet population than before.

So the upshot of all of this is that you need to have your links coming from a much wider variety of sites than before.

So what about Authority and Trust?

Now to further this and aid the overall Trust and Respect for a site, if you can throw as many links to your site from as many different types of sites as possible – so much the better especially if those links are from perceived trusted domains such as .Govs and .EDU’s.

Google’s love affair with .EDU’s and .Govs lies not as most folks think, in a fixation with the domain suffix but rather with the nature of the sites themselves. Indeed we have found in our own research that a great many Education / Academic sites that are not .EDU’s for instance are just as powerful if not more so at times.

For instance in the UK, the domain suffix .EDU doesn’t exist rather the academic suffix is .ac.uk and this is a the case in a great many other territories worldwide so as we have seen the power and authority doesn’t necessarily stem from the suffix, rather the nature of the site itself and that fact that these sites (as Matt Cutts himself has been quoted) tend to have loads of authority links pointing at them as well so this in turn gives their outbound links out more power.

So where does this leave rel=nofollow links from .EDU’s?

Exactly as where it left them before to be blunt. Just as powerful but with a different dimension i.e. the fact they originate from where they do carries a different set of weight rather than any PR juice that folks think they might not be able to impart.

For your own back links profile and authority status the fact that you might be able to count as many quality EDU links in your profile goes a long way to help confer “trust status” as far as the Search Engines are concerned.

To further this we have been running an associate program to our main Bookmarking Program and this has been centred round locating development spaces within various EDU properties where you can insert your own content under your own editorial control. Called the Lost Art of Conversation we have now reached Module 4 and in Module 4 we now have 50 EDU properties that you can insert your own Links and copy. Now these properties include a mixture of DoFollow and NoFollow links but as has now been conclusively proved for Trust and Authority status the NoFollow attribute is by and large of no consequence.

As with before we will only be releasing limited copies of this Module to the general public and I wanted to notify members of my Newsletter first. The uptake of previous Modules was such that they never actually made it to public release as they were all snapped up by readers of this newsletter and members of Simple Leveraging. The cost of Module 4 of The Lost Art will be $75 and if anyone is interested then send the $75 to info@simpleleveraging.com and I’ll forward the zip file with the contents through to you straight away.

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