This document discusses how to turbo-charge an SEO and link-building strategy. It suggests that user love and engagement are becoming important ranking factors for Google. It provides a 10-point checklist for auditing websites, including analyzing links, content quality, and duplicate content. The document also analyzes the sites homeandgardengifts.co.uk and tripomatic.com, finding issues like poor product descriptions, duplicate content, and many low-quality links that could explain past ranking drops. It recommends improving content, removing bad links, and focusing on user experience factors like reviews and Q&As.

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Turbo-Charging your SEO & Link-
Building Strategy
by Patrick Altoft

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Disavow Tool
http://b3.io/b3disavow

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What I’m talking about
• Future of SEO
• Checklist for your site
• Site audit - homeandgardengifts.co.uk
• Site audit - tripomatic.com

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Do people love you?
It’s unquantifiable, tough to explain to clients & impossible
to make a business case for but love is slowly & steadily
becoming part of the Google algorithm
Google can tell whether people love your website & is
rewarding the most loved websites with higher rankings.
Panda downgraded sites that people didn’t love – why
wouldn’t Google reward sites that people do love?

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How can Google understand love?
Hundreds of user engagement
signals are analysed and fed into
an artificial intelligence algorithm
The algorithm learns how to
detect whether users love a site
or not (probably with the help of
seed sites)
Remember, Chrome has 33%
market share & Analytics is in
use on over 10m websites

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How artificial intelligence
shapes the algorithm
New algorithm
• Based on what we know
about sites that are loved, do
we think that people love
your site?
Old Algorithm
• Let’s score you on various
trust signals & see how you
perform

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Great sites are winning in 2012
• Doing SEO for a great site is 10x easier than doing SEO for a mediocre site
• For most companies this is the difference between success and failure in an SEO campaign
?
Panda

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People love John Lewis

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People love M&S

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What can I do?
• Want to know how Google sees your site? Just ask
your visitors.
• Every site should be permanently asking for
feedback from different groups of people
• Adopt a mantra of continual improvement & use
survey scores as a KPI
• http://qualaroo.com

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10 Minute Checklist
1. Searchmetrics to see if the site was affected by any updates
2. Seroundtable.com to find what that update was
3. Opensiteexplorer.com to see if link profile is over optimised
4. Does the site have duplicate content
5. Does the site have low value pages
6. Do the product pages add value

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Homeandgardengifts.co.uk
Looks a great site
Has 114 linking domains
Used to rank pretty well

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Searchmetrics
Data shows a big drop in rankings 16th to 23rd June 2011 – Panda 2.2 was June 18th
Also a big drop between 3rd & 10th May 2012 which coincides with the time Google
handed out link penalties & devaluations

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Link profile
On first inspection the link
profile looks OK as there is lots
of brand anchor text and not
much use of keyword links

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Link Profile
On closer inspection we can
see what the problem is – most
of the links are from directory
style sites
The vast majority of directory
sites are bad links and need to
be removed from the link
profile.
The only way to recover from
this is via a full link audit &
removal of 95% of the bad links

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Content Check
This is the first product page I
loaded & it has a product
description of 32 words.
This is nowhere near enough
for me to want to buy it or for
the search engines to be able
to say the site is a quality
resource
Other product pages have a
similar amount of content

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Duplicate Content
Insert a string of text from the
product description in quotes into
Google
You should see no other sites using
your descriptions
Here we see 12,800 results
Not only are the product
descriptions short but they are
duplicate content too

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Reviews
If you don’t have a user
review strategy – why not?
This site has space for
reviews but doesn’t have
enough

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Questions & Answers
Why wouldn’t you do this?

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Moving forwards
This site has been penalised twice and will probably continue to be penalised by
future updates unless it is aligned with what Google wants an ecommerce site to be.
This is what has to be done at a bare minimum to recover & safeguard the sites
future
• Link audit & removal of 95% of bad links (use disavow tool)
• After this you will probably need to build (quality) new links to replace those lost
• Have a team of product experts rewrite the product descriptions up to 300 words
taking care to really add value and make them useful to visitors
• Implement a strategy to get more reviews
• Add Q&A to the product pages and encourage staff to add popular Q&A content

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Questions?
Patrick@branded3.com
http://www.branded3.com/