Fresh Egg is a digital marketing agency focused on UK clients with expertise in content, social media, SEO, PPC, UX, insights, and web/app development. The document provides recommendations on best practices for travel bloggers to identify quality blogs for guest posting, including appraising platforms thoroughly, avoiding over-programming anchor text, and building relationships over chasing short-term gains. It also discusses Google's rel=author markup and the potential for "voice rank" to augment traditional authority metrics like page rank.

1. Welcome!
Travel Babble – Search Landscape
Marketplace 2012

2. Welcome to Fresh Egg
• Who is Fresh Egg?
- Fully integrated digital marketing agency focussed on UK work
(Content, Social, SEO, PPC, UX, Insight, Web & App Dev)
- HQ in Worthing with a London presence
- 12 years of successful performance-led client work
- 120 clients and growing…

3. The Google Penguin

4. Google Penguin
• Reasonable community consensus
• First one to hit 'real' SEOs
• Reliably five main conclusions

5. More About Anchors Than You Ever Wanted
• Anchor text diversity
• <A>click here</A>
• <A>my brand</A>
• <A>what my brand does</A>
• Depth – Root, L1, Article
• Variety – avoid exact-match!
• Avoid over-programming (35-65%?)

6. Bad Neighbourhoods
Class-C
Location Clustering
Concentration
Follow/no-follow ‘Splog’ structures

7. What is your recommendation on how I can rectify this problem?
Recovery

8. Making the Right Decision
• Weighing our options:
- Do nothing
- Fix ourselves or seek out professionals?
- Abandon site and start afresh
• Recovery – do we ditch sites?
- Yes, potentially…
- Or ditch methods, keep the site

10. Tooling
• You’ll need in-depth analysis tools to accomplish this
• Popular options:
• Price vs. functionality
• Or… bring in an expert

11. Data screen shot
Normality in - <A> text, TLD, ‘Follow’, Class- C

12. Data screen shot
Anchor Text Keyword Graph

13. Can you identify quality travel blogs to guest post on?

14. Protect Your Sources
• Yes, lots
• Words of caution
• Valueless to tell all of you – stop chasing the game
• Work toward a methodology – build relationships

15. Re-cap Best Practice for Identification
• Appraise your platforms thoroughly
• Tripping no-follow rates
• Spurious domain profiles
• Overly programming Anchor text
• Taxonomy planning

16. Questions:
I’ve heard a lot about rel=author lately and that it is important to
utilise in order to improve rankings – what is this about?
Is there increasing recognition in the Search community that fresh,
original, high-quality travel content makes a difference to Search and
Inbound Marketing? And are we seeing more companies willing to
invest in securing that content?

17. Google Developments
• What is rel=author?
• Additional, optional mark-up in links and microformats
• Higher visibility in SERPs
• Greater content consumption in circles
• Extensible authorship association beyond Google
• What is agent rank?
• Google Patent Sept 2011
• Intended to augment PageRank initially
• Overall attempt to improve authority and reduce clutter

18. A Look to the Future – from Platform Rank to Voice Rank
• Platform authority – domain and PR
• Agent/Author authority
• Object based semantics?

19. Add More Value and Control Your Voice
Journalistic commoditisation:
Cars, Jobs, Homes, Holidays
Change the way you think:
Plug content gaps - perhaps not typically/previously related to travel

20. Thank You!
#TravelBabble