I did a presentation at BrightonSEO with AnalyticsSEO on Penguin where I outlined some ideas: Google is a middleman. They sit between a user and a business and the gateway is adwords. teh greater the competition for the ‘connection’ the greater the adwords cost. More revenue for them (assuming flat market share) is directly from squeezing search results for revenue i.e. fewer competing middlemen (affiliates) getting the clicks A link is a vote. Once most sites had the power of a vote, now only relatively few sites have ‘voting power’ and this is where you need ‘big SEO data’ to keep up The importance of ‘link velocity’ so you are similar to competing sites, but not to prominent such that you woudl get flagged up by Google How to budget for your SEO project… The full presentation with transition effects etc is here bit.ly/aseobrighton

1. BrightonSEO: Penguin

2. Nick Garner
Nick Garner: Head of search Unibet
Working across all Unibet's 24 international
markets, specialising in:
● SEO
● Online PR
● SMO (Social media optimisation)
● Refer a Friend
● PPC
Me
● My Linkedin
● My Slideshare Presentations
● My Twitter Feed @nickgarner
● My Delicious Bookmarks

3. Google, Some Background

4. Information / Commercial Internet
Google: Align user dis-'love' of commercial SERPS when researching.
Mix in commercial with
$15.62 per person per year in the UK*
information as much as
possible
Rank (fairly) easy Rank (fairly) hard

5. Harder To Manipulate SERPS
Relevance of links
Reasonable Surfer
Spam = Rankings
Not Provided
Volume of links
Anchor text weightings
Penguin

6. Google: Good - Not The Best

7. Google: Good - Not The Best

8. Google: More Revenue, Less For You.
Revenue growth comes from 'squeezing' the SERPS

9. We Love The Google Brand Halo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

10. BTW I still...

11. Google's Formula To $$ Billions
Make changes that monetize effectively
AND
Either keep user experience neutral or positive.
Be the web's middleman

12. Our Demo Site

14. SEO Content Marketing
(White Hat)

15. SEO Content Fail
Have great Content:
● Zillions of 'natural' links
● Links point to 'Popular' pages
● 'Pop' Pages are typically not 'Money Pages'
Therefore:
● Rank on the right phrases to the wrong pages
● Rank on the right pages with the wrong phrases.
Answer:
Control your link placement.

16. Content & SEO
Formula:
Great Content
= High 'Plausible Deniability'
= Higher 'Quality' sites working with you
= Less ££ to get placement
= Rank faster, safer for less ££
Hopeless Content
= Low 'Plausible Deniability'
= Lower 'Quality' sites working with you
= More ££ to get placement
= Rank Slower, more danger for more £££

17. Penguin

18. Onsite Optimisation

19. Keywords
● What do you rank on?
● What do you want to rank on?
● Decide on target phrases & competitiveness
for phrases

20. Keywords
Not ranking on money phrases

21. What words are on your site
● Title tags
● On page words
● Description tags for clickthrough

24. Offsite Optimisation
Manipulating links well...pays

25. Links

26. Think like a 'Human'

27. Google AND Humans
Relevant sites that humans AND Google love.
OLD NEW

28. The 'Human' Check
How would a Google
Quality rater asses
the site?
(Download here PDFcast.com)
They're all like this ;-)

29. Links
Right:
● Place
● Placement
● Pace
● Price

30. Place: Got Traffic?
Any traffic showing
on Compete.com or
Alexa.com?

31. Place: Do The Metrics Look Good?

32. Place: Rank For Anything?
Does SEMrush.com show any ranking phrases?

33. Link Noise

34. Place: Exclude Bad Noisy Sites
What sites should you exclude for being 'noise'?

35. Place: Include Social Noise
What sites should you include as 'padding'?

36. Link Placement

37. Placement: Links. Reasonable Surfer
Not every link from a page in a link-based ranking system is equal, and a
search engine might look at a wide range of factors to determine how might
weight each link on a page may pass along.
SEO By The Sea

38. Placement. Anchor text: Dollarshaveclub.com
'Natural Distribution' & Weighting of anchor text

39. Placement
● Is the link in fresh content?
● Is the site & content relevant to the site you want links
for?

40. Outreach

41. Placement: The right link sources
Direct outreach
one site at a time

42. Placement: The right link sources
Not on networks

43. Pace: Rate of link acquisition

44. Pace: Benchmarking Other Sites
Benchmark against ANY site that ranks in your target
SERPS

45. Pace: Pick Domains
KW 'shaving razors' / Google.com
1 http://www.classicshaving.com/
2 http://www.vintagebladesllc.com/
3 http://www.dollarshaveclub.com/
4 http://www.gillette.com/en/us/home.aspx
5 http://www.bmvintageshaving.com/
6 http://www.shaving-shack.com/
7 http://www.theartofshaving.com/razors/razors,default,sc.html
8 http://www.leesrazors.com/
9 http://www.coolshaving.com/
10 http://www.walmart.com/cp/Razors/1007399

46. Pace: New Domains Linking

47. Pricing Model

48. Price
Value of acquisitions X Volume of traffic Risk Potential
Conversion Rate Revenue
ROI of
Quality Of Content Project
Competitiveness
Time Link
Power Of 'Home' Quality Of To
Domain Spend
Doner Site Rank
Quality Of Onsite
Number of Links / Domains

49. Price
£100 X 10,000 visits Risk:
Pot. Rev: £14,000
Conv: 2% 30% ROI 2.8
Quality Of Content 50%: £20 an article 35% Mktg
Competitiveness: 70%
Quality Of Time To Link
Power of home domain: 40% Rank: 10
Doner Site: Spend:
Onsite 90% 90%/ £30 a link Months
£5,000
Number of Links / Domains: 10
/ Month £500 a month

50. Cheat Sheets

51. Recap Cheatsheet:
Onsite analysis:
● Free: Xenu Link Sleuth
● Paid: AnalyticsSEO for bigger sites/agencies (yes, it's great for this!)
Offsite analysis
● SEMRush for 'Google love' of a site i.e. phrases it ranks for
● MajesticSEO for inbound link analysis
● AnalyticsSEO is ok, but will be a whole lot better in the next 4 months
Outreach
● ZohoCRM / Raventools
Links
● Place
● Placement
● Pace
● Price
And finally, filter link data properly then 'Human' Check

52. The Full Penguin Checklist
1. Is the linking site reasonably well designed?
2. Is the content high quality and grammatically correct?
3. Are you happy having your brand associated with this website?
4. Can you see evidence of social sharing or activity on the linking websites?
5. Does the domain have any traffic at all when reviewing in Alexa or Compete.com?
6. Is the domain (or at least the page) relevant to your website? Relevant, high quality, industry blogs with traffic seem to be the safest links to build since Penguin.
7. Is the link a "money keyword" exact match anchor? These should be used sparingly. Over 70% of links coming into your domain should ideally be branded anchors, and the
more varied the better. If you are asking other websites for links are you specifying lots of “money keywords” as anchor text links? These kind of keywords can be identified easily
with using data from Google AdWords (Search Volume, CPC and Competition level).
8. Is the site indexed? Simply Google “site:example.com” and check that there are pages indexed.
9. Is the link sitewide? If so, probably it is best to be branded e.g. the company or website name, and make sure you don't have too many sitewide links, especially if part of an
exchange, network or if they have been paid as these are all against Google Webmaster Guidelines.
10. What is the PageRank of the website's homepage? If there are a lot of links pointing to the domain, but the homepage has a PageRank of zero, there could be a penalty on the
website. These are the kind of domains you need to be really careful with.
11. If you aren't sure about the quality of the link, make sure it links to a deep page to avoid a penalty on the homepage. If you ever do get a penalty, you are in much better shape
getting a penalty to any page other than the homepage.
12. Does Googling site:example "viagra" return any results? If so it is often a red flag that the site has been spammed, and as a result, links are less likely to pass any value to your
website.
13. Are there many domains hosted on the same server? This can sometimes also be a red flag. Use this tool: http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-siteson-web-server/
14. Emerging search engines like www.duckduckgo.com do a fantastic job at helping you find higher quality link prospects than Google. Try them and see!
15. Do you have lots of links coming from div elements with predominantly links and little or no content? From a technical perspective these are the kind of links found in footers
and sidebars that are often heavily scrutinised by the major search engines.
16. If you are trying to remove low quality links, screengrab and save emails to webmasters. These can be used as evidence to search engines that you are trying to improve the
quality of your backlink profile.
17. Start to consider authorship (Google+ and linked social accounts) as a quality signal for your backlink profile. You can bet your ass Google is!
18. Consider backlinks and social signals together as a ratio. Are you in an industry with a lot of social activity? If so, you should be attracting both links and social engagement.
Not doing so will also appear unnatural.

53. Nick Garner
Thanks!