Panda and Penguin (in their numerous iterations) hurt many sites for employing SEO practices that were once commonplace. If your site was hurt for link building, this presentation is for you. Learn how to find the links that hurt you--even out of millions of links--and how best to remove them and recover your traffic.
From Eli Feldblum, CTO & Founder of RankAbove, and presented at SMX Jerusalem, in Januery 2013.
2. Panda & Penguin Strike!
• The sites below lost significant traffic
and rankings.
• Each penalty—even those that
occurred during Panda—were
attributed to links.
3. What Happened?
Last Year, I focused on Panda and on-page
content. I said that every page needed a raison
d’etre, a reason to exist on your site.
This Year, let’s focus on links. The same rules
applies. If you can’t justify a link—it was put
there naturally, it’s from a partner, it’s a real
review—it shouldn’t be there.
More and More, we’ve been seeing sites
penalized or hit by Panda and Penguin for links.
It started with Panda hits on sites that did
nothing wrong on-page, then with sites that got
emails from Google, then Webmaster Tool
warnings and then Penguin.
4. Why?
• Shortcut Link Building
• Fast
• Easy
• Never really allowed
• But they worked!
• What am I talking about?
• Seriously, you know. Don’t pretend.
• Paid Links
• Paid Blog Posts
• User Pages on Forums
• Automated Blog Comments
• Lists of Links
• Anything you didn’t work for
5. Even Good Links…
If you have bad links, even your good links
will suffer.
FSAStore.com is partnered with
many Third Party health care
administrators, all of whom have
relevant, powerful sites—and all
of whom offered FSAStore a
banner on their sites.
Unfortunately, the links were on every page, came with
anchor text below them—and hurt FSAStore dramatically.
6. The Power of a Missing Link
eCommerce Site – implemented nofollow
Travel Site – Once they Recovery at Removals
FSAStore – Recovery at first few links removed.
8. Discovery & Analysis
Single Multiple
Link Links
Keyword Anchor (the
Anchor Frequency
reversal)
Suspicious Content Content Syndication
Content Mismatch Unspun Content
“Clue” Words Target Page Frequency
Link Placement IP/C-Block Frequency
10. Removal
• Remove as many as you can first, then disavow.
• Be liberal. You know which links are bad. If they hit more
than a couple of the above markers, they need to go.
43,268,320 25,307,003 18,029,062 7,277,941
17,961,317
Belonging to
Potential Bad Removed as not Potential Bad sister sites or Potential Bad
Backlinks fresh domains Backlinks Backlinks
affiliates
6,108,964 with 1,168,877 1,143,638 not 25,339 9,000
safe anchor text live, using
and/or safe URL Potential Bad nofollow or on Potential Bad redirect
Backlinks Backlinks links
structure dead domains
13. Can You Still Build Links?
• Of course!
• It’s just harder (and isn’t that the
theme of SEO in 2012?)
• And longer
• Quality over Quantity, for real
this time.
• Creativity is rewarded now. The
playing field is actually a bit
more level now.
• Don’t just look at what didn’t
work, look at what did.
14. Go Social!
• Alongside links, build social equity.
• I’m sure lots of other people will be talking about this today.
• Social is a completely new signal.
• It really works
15. Need More? Contact Me
Eli Feldblum
201-815-9467
050-333-0915
eli@rankabove.com
@FeldBum