Google Disavow Links Tool

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Ian Wortley

The tool that many webmasters have been waiting for is finally here. The Disavow links tool lets you tell Google that you don’t want specific links or even entire sites to count as part of their assessment of your link profile. This allows for recovery from unnatural links warnings as well as negative SEO attacks.

In this video Matt Cutts explains the intended use of the tool. Watch it and then continue reading for more in-depth analysis of what the new tool means for SEO from this point on.

Who should use the Disavow Links Tool?

As Matt mentioned in his video, the tool is mainly aimed at webmasters who received an unnatural links warning from Google in their webmaster tools. While he wasn’t explicit in saying that only people who received those warnings should use this tool, he did mention more than once that most people will not need to use this tool.

This warning was taken from http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487

In other words, do not use this tool if you are not 100% certain that dodgy backlinks are your problem.

Are you sure Penguin is affecting your site?

Google have released several Panda and Penguin updates lately, not to mention EMD (exact match domains) and page layout updates. All of these potentially damaged your sites performance

Penguin is the one that deals with spammy link patterns and the last update (at time of writing) was on 5th October 2012. This was the third update commonly referred to as Penguin 3. The others occurred on 24th April (Penguin Release) and 25th May 2012 (penguin 1.1). So if you see a significant drop in traffic around these dates then it is likely that Penguin is to blame.

SEO Training has received a lot of questions about which animal is responsible for damage to site ranking, and I may visit the topic in my next post.

Does this mean that you should dump all your links as fast as you can with the Disavow Tool? No it does not.

Did you receive an unnatural link warning from Google? This would have been in the inbox of your webmaster tools. If you didn’t then don’t be too quick to shed links. Links are still the currency of the web.

Be careful of your Link Profile

If you never built a link to your site and just built good quality content then you will find that your backlink profile contains a mix of high and low quality links. By high quality I mean sites which are trusted by Google. In general this can be seen by sites with a high Page Rank. Defining high quality is not a problem. It is low quality links where the waters get a bit murky. However, links coming from blog comments, and forum posts must, for the most part be considered as low quality by comparison to a link from The Irish Times for example.

I suspect that we are about to see a lot of webmasters go out of their way to disavow any link of low value, leaving only high value links. That in itself in unnatural. There is evidence that Google looks not only at your own link profile but compares it to the link profile of other sites in your vertical. So, there is a danger that you could actually end up harming your site in two ways.

How Using The Disavow Tool Could Harm Your Site

By removing a large number of links. Having less links is not always bad. But if you accidentally remove links that are not damaging your site, you are in effect undoing some of the credit your site already has.
By changing your link profile to make it unnatural. By getting rid of too many low value links, you are likely to make your link profile considerably different to other sites in the same vertical. For instance, If I was to disavow all links that came from pages with a Page Rank of less than 3, then I am not using the tool as it was intended. The tool is there to help Google with combatting spam. I’ll say it again….. Spam. A link can be of low quality without being spam.

Forum Spam and other areas where you may want to dump links

If you have created a lot of profiles containing links on a lot of forums that don’t necessarily relate to your business, then you could be in trouble. If those links all contain the same few anchor text terms then they are nearly certainly doing you more damage than good. A lot of forum spammers don’t even bother posting. They just create profiles which contain links. Signature links are not a good idea either for the most part. However, this does not mean that links from forums are bad. On the contrary. If you are writing on a topic that relates to your business and it is natural to include a link to your site then why not? The chances are, if it is a relevant link that other users participating in, or just watching the thread will click on it. That makes it a useful resource rather than spam.

If you have been using Xrumer, or ffiver.com for your SEO then you surely have a lot of cleaning up work to do. If you have been spinning articles of little to no value, or if you have been inserting links with no relation to the text of an article then you are going to be busy fixing it about now.

If you have created microsites, which have sitewide links with targeted anchor text back to your main site, then you’ll need to clear that up a bit too.

If your company has more splogs (Spam Blogs) than employees, then it’s time to assess their worth.

When Using the Disavow Links Tool is a Bad Idea

For most Webmasters, do not even consider using this tool unless you have received a unnatural links warning in your webmaster tools. It will take weeks for your links to be disavowed, but even longer to get links to count again if you make a mistake… with no guarantees!
If you are not really really competent when it comes to the internet. If you are not sure how you are going to assess links for example, then don’t use this tool or get some help from somebody who really knows what they are doing. You don’t want to cause more harm than good.
If you have not seen a drop in traffic. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it right (or at least you have not been caught doing something wrong with your SEO).

How does the tool work?

You upload a list of pages with links to your site that you want to disavow. These should be in a text file with one url per line. eg:

http://www.spam.com/somepage.html

http://www.anothersite.com/links.php

http://myoldlinkbuildingsite.ie/great-links/subdirectory/blah/theresalinkhere.asp

However, to make life a little easier it is also possible to disavow whole sites like so:

domain: pornorgamblingsite.com

It takes a few weeks for Google to process it.

Where Can I find the Disavow Links Tool?

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

You will have to log in before you use it, then pick the site you want to disavow links for from the list and click on the big disavow links button.

What Google can do with the information it gets from the use of this tool.

I suspect that the use of the disavow tool is going to be a major information boon for Google. Webmasters in their thousands are going to be submitting lists of sites where they created spam links. Wow.

You can guarantee that this will pick up more sites that had gone under the radar. If I ask for a link on a site to be disavowed, then what are the chances that other links on that site to other sites are also likely to be spam? I’d say they are fairly high wouldn’t you?

This is Google allowing SEO’s who breached their guidelines to hold their hands up and say “I dunnit, fair cop, I confess, and here’s all the details of what I was up to when I was trying to cheat you”.

It’s a fabulous move of Google’s part to release this tool. They will get the people who they had already caught, but they will get more information from them. They will also get a ton more that they hadn’t caught, but think they have been caught. How sickening would it be as a webmaster to disavow a load of links only to find that nothing changes because it was actually a Panda update that did the damage?

I suspect another round of major SERPS shakeup is not far away!

Google Penguin From Birth to 1.1

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Ian Wortley

Google Penguin Update. Google say it targets webspam. A lot of SEO's aren't so sure about that. Apologies to Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz for using his face to represent SEO - it's a compliment Rand - honest.

On the 24th April a lot of websites got hit by Googles latest action against Webspam. The then unnamed Penguin update had rolled out across the globe.

Matt Cutts, head of Googles Webspam team had warned of the upcoming update weeks before in San Francisco. At this stage it was being referred to as an “Over – Optimisation Penalty” since it had no actual name. Also, prior to the update being rolled out a fair few websites were issued with unnatural link warnings from in their Webmaster Tools.

The messages went like this…

Dear site owner or webmaster of ….
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Then on 24th April Penguin struck, and it wasn’t only sites who had been issued with warnings. Forums around the globe went nuts for a while as websites lost 50% or more of their traffic. Entire businesses were wiped out in a single stroke. Panic was rife. At this stage it still had no name and so searching for “Over-Optimisation penalty” should find you some early information on it.

What did the Penguin Update do?

On the afternoon of April 24th, Matt Cutts gave a few examples of things that would be affected by the Penguin update in a post on the Webmaster Central Blog. In the blog he gave two examples of webspam:

Keyword Stuffing
Links from spun content

He said that he would not be giving away specific signals though. However the post did specifically mention Link Schemes and sure enough a few blog networks bit the dust. Indeed one of the biggest networks Build my Rank posted this on their blog. ELN, Linkvana (Elite/SEOLinkvine, too), High PR Society, Backlink Buddy, SEO Link Monster and SEO Nitro all died overnight too. And they were not alone.

What really got people worried though was realising that their version of white hat SEO may not be in line with Googles idea of it.

The Penguin update affects 3.1% of queries according to Google. That’s much smaller than Panda, but still a sizable figure.

From the data that has been coming in over the last few weeks it seems clear that excessive use of keywords in backlink anchor text has caught out more than a few webmasters.

It May Not Be Penguin!

Actually though, this was something that was the case before the Penguin update. My own site Webshed suffered from the use of sitewide links with keywords in the anchor text. I’d pushed it too far by including two keyword phrases site-wide on several of my recently designed sites linking back to me. To my shame I didn’t notice the damage until after Penguin because as usual I was more focussed on client sites than my own…. some day I’ll get around to making it into something good.

How do I know Webshed wasn’t affected by Penguin

I did a backlink cleanup. I removed site-wide keyword anchor text from most sites I still have access to. I then submitted a reconsideration request. I did this on Tuesday. Today, being Wednesday, I am back on page 1 of Google for “Web Design Wicklow” and a few other keywords that I’d removed from most of my anchor text on site-wide links. As I’ve just demonstrated, that doesn’t stop me from using the anchor text elsewhere. Web design is after all one of the things I do, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the backlink keyword density.

If I had been hit by Penguin I would not have jumped back up (from page 6) today. Penguin is a filter. It is run periodically by Google. That means you will not recover until the filter is run again. The 1.1 update happened on Friday. By Tuesday I was still nowhere for the affected keywords. Reconsideration requests will not work for Penguin because it is algorithmic, not a manually imposed penalty.

How Do I Know if I’ve Been Hit By Penguin

If you were hit by the Penguin update, then your analytics graph should show a fairly dramatic drop in traffic from April 24th. One case that got a lot of attention was that of WPMU.org. Their traffic graph looked like this…

A drop like that isn't something any of us look forward to waking up to!

What did James Farmer and the team at WPMU.org do wrong?

This was the thing that put the wind up anybody who saw their post about it. James et al had really done nothing wrong at all. They had a great site with lots of visitors, fantastic social signals (over 10,400 facebook likes alone) and had never engaged in the keyword stuffing or link systems tactics Matt Cutts had mentioned.

What WPMU had done wrong was to build wordpress templates with a link back to them on it. At least that seems to be the case. They were lucky / clever enough to get one of Australias largest news networks to ask Matt Cutts specifically about their site. The reply included some links which “could be” sample reasons for why their site tanked so dramatically with the Penguin Update.

Those sites were of poor quality (splogs) and a site that was pirating their software. Not mentioned in the post, but the anchor text was WPMU in the splogs case.

So here was a case where a site had developed a product and when that product was used they get a backlink with it. They weren’t doing anything shady like I was with the anchor text. They just got a backlink. A site-wide backlink coming from low quality sites.

They were not the only ones. Web Designers and Template Designers got hit hard in more than a few cases. In fact Penguin seemed to hit the web industry harder than a lot of others, with the notable exception of affiliate marketers, a large proportion of whom saw their entire revenue vanish overnight. . . . and those where among the ones that survived the Panda updates.

What else Causes penalties in Penguin?

The folks over at Microsite Masters have some rank tracking software. That gave them access to data on a large number of sites, some of which were damaged by the Penguin Update. Their stats are very interesting and they happen to write in a way that I like too, so I’ll give you the link to the full article once I’ve summarised it for those who don’t want to read the whole thing because God knows this blog post is more than long enough!

Here are some pretty graphs that show actual data – a rarity for Penguin at the moment.

Graph "borrowed" from Microsite Masters showing that of sites penalised by Penguin in their sample all of them had keywords accounting for over 60% of their backlink anchor text.

No links from websites in your own Niche, there's a good chance you're flagging yourself for a penalty!

I think the data speaks for itself. Only 5% of affected sites had a url as 2 or more of their backlink keywords.

As promised here is the link to the whole article. So in summary, make sure that your backlinks are:

coming from related sites
use a diffuse range of keywords and also some urls (eg. http://mysite.com)

It is not that black and white though. The data above suggests that under 60% keywords is safe and that anything over that will give you a penalty. There is another graph on the link I gave that shows that there were unaffected sites with 100% keyword backlinks. These look certain to be signals, but are not the whole story. We know nothing of the linking domins for all the sites sampled for example. What kind of link neighbourhoods did they have, what sort of content did they provide etc.

It is very easy to jump to conclusions with data like this. Use it as a guide only. Remember, when it comes to Google’s search algorithms there is always going to be a bit of educated guessing involved simply because we don’t have access to the actual algorithm. If you see a child with red hair does that mean that it’s fathers hair is red too? What about the mothers? There is a probability that at least one of the parents has red hair, but it is not guaranteed. You see, if you only see a result you can’t ever be sure about what created that result without more information.

Rand Fishkin on Penguin

Just to make up for putting his face in my title picture I think I’d better share his thoughts on the matter – also he puts it very well and we all love video right?

http://tinyurl.com/rand-fishkin-on-penguin

The Video is just over 11 minutes long and suggested viewing. Of particular note, Rand points out that the Penguin update does not focus on improving the search results. This one is all about catching out over-optimisation and demoting or removing offenders.

Got the best site in the world? You will be downgraded if you’re caught out using manipulative practices.

Negative SEO

The forums were, and still are awash with worry about Negative SEO as a result of cases like that of WPMU (go back and read it if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

The theory behind Negative SEO is that you can create a load of bad links for a competitor and cause them to drop in rank as a result. This was never possible before because Google only ever discounted bad links, they did not allow bad link schemes to give you a penalty. I have heard the words “there’s no such thing as a bad link” said on many occasions. Well now there are such things as bad links.

However, don’t get too bogged down in worrying about negative SEO. The changes to the wording in the Webmaster Guidelines show that it is possible to be affected by negative SEO however Matt says that they have put a lot of effort into making the algorithm robust enough to not be taken in by negative SEO attacks.

That said, Dan Thies got a warning from Google about unnatural links after he was targeted by some SEO’s who wanted to see if it was possible. They used Xrumer to spam and created a LOT of bad links very quickly (30,000 in 3 days). The reason they gave for targeting Dan in a forum was “we don’t like him” (that’s the nice bit). Read the whole negative seo experiment. This was just before the Penguin update.

Dans site recovered though. My own theory (and it’s only a theory because I have no data to back it up) is that new sites may be more vulnerable, but that sudden spikes in backlinks may be discounted if the overall link build looks natural to Google. I do think that a sudden surge in backlinks will have at least a temporary effect on a small site. This site for example has never had any link building done on it at all. It has a low Page Rank too. Maybe that’s why it ranks well <grin>.

How to Recover from Penguin

If you’ve been affected all you care about is how to recover from the penguin update. You wish that I’d written this at the top instead of making you scroll all the way down the page. I’ll start with a caveat: there is no certainty that anything here works for sure. More particularly it would be a mistake to think that one action is enough to make you tank or to make you recover. The Penguin algorithm clearly works on a combination of signals. Despite small amounts of data that I’ve shared here, nobody has all the answers yet. It is possible to recover, but nobody can say for certain which actions cause recovery, just that a combination of actions can lead to a recovery in some cases.

Now for the good bit… Remember WPMU.org? Well heres what their analytics graph looks like now…

A return to normal traffic after the push of Penguin 1.1 on Friday

Wow, what looks like a complete recovery, given that it was a weekend. So what did they do. Here’s the short version:

They now have over 500,000 (yes half a million) less backlinks as a result of clearing out a lot of site-wide links in wordpress themes. Obviously they were not able to get all of them but they clearly got enough. They did some other work too under the guidance of Ross Hudgens. This was mostly basic on-site SEO work like cleaning up duplicate title tags. You can read the full article here.

Here are Webshed’s recommendations for recovering from a Penguin penalty:

Clean up your backlinks. If you have a load of spammy backlinks, and particularly if they are site-wide then you need to do everything you can to get rid of them. Similarly links from sites that have been de-indexed are certainly not going to be doing you good. If you do a search for the site like “http://thesiteinquestion.com” and it returns nothing in Google then it’s been de-indexed. Any spamming of forums etc you have done should be dealt with too. You won’t be able to clear it all probably, but the object is to get those keyword stuffed backlinks down to a manageable percentage of your total backlinks (the research from Microsite Masters would suggest that under 60% would be advisable). Don’t forget that it is probably not just one factor hurting you but a combination of signals.
Clean up on-page over-optimisation. Keyword stuffing on your pages has always been a no-no. It does seem though that the limits have shifted a bit. If marginal stuffing exists that may have been ok a little while ago, that in conjunction with matching backlink keywords will probably have you in deep water. Obviously there are limits, but it’s too early for anybody to have conclusively tested what you can get away with, and frankly, its just too hard to get it right. It’s not 1997. Keyword density on it’s own is not a ranking factor.
If you are really a false positive then submit a form to Google. If you’re not don’t bother. On that note, if you don’t know how many backlinks you have and from what domains then this is not the first thing you should do. If you don’t know how to find out then get onto your webmaster or ask somebody who does know how to do it. It may cost you, but so does not having any traffic. You should be able to find guidance online, but it’s easier sometimes to talk with somebody face to face, so that they can see what you’re understanding and what needs further explanation. The form can be found here: http://preview.tinyurl.com/7ugcqxr
Examine your competitions backlinks. If you have a noticeably different link profile then you could be in trouble. This is particularly true if the spread of your links does not look natural. Most good sites will have their link spread with more of lower value (low PR of linking page / domain) but with a spread across the board. Unnatural link patterns often have just higher PR or just lower or no PR backlinks.
Watch out for spikes in your link acquisition. For example. If you spam blogs using automated software you are likely to get a sudden jump in low value links. This is not going to make you look good to Google. Of course there can be spikes when it comes to getting back links. For instance, when stuff goes viral. However, the spread will be much more natural than if you do it yourself (mainly because it is natural).
Wait for the next time Google push out Penguin. Nothing will happen until then. Hopefully it won’t be too long. Then you will know if your efforts have been successful or not.

Lastly. Make sure you’re really honest with yourself. When you’re cleaning up your site ask yourself, “will my users miss this if I get rid of it?” If the answer is “no”, then you probably don’t need that element. If you’ve spammed you know it. Fix it. . . at least until you have got rid of the penalty. Then you can test limits again in a controlled way if you really want to.

Actually, that was second lastly, this is lastly (for this section anyway).

What if I do it all and none of it works?

It may be as well to start over with a new site on a new domain. That’s tough if your domain is your business name though. It may not be possible to clean to a sufficient degree to get yourself out of trouble though.

When Penguin first rolled out I was contacted by somebody who had lost nearly all their business. They had hired an SEO firm that had charged £1500stg a month to outsource link building to India where it was for the most part pure spam. Then they got a unnatural link warning and then Penguin hit.

My advice then was to build a completely new site while trying to fix the backlink problem. I suggested that because I was not confident that I’d be able to get enough of the bogus backlinks removed to get the site clean again.

If this sounds like the position you’re in then it’s about the best advice you will get at the moment. It’s an expensive option, but if your business is not making any money because it relies on the web then you need to take drastic action. In a best case scenario, your original site can be fixed, and you can point your new domain to it or keep it as a second site. Just don’t use duplicate content. Makes sure they are different enough not to be penalised for that.

Penguin 1.1 Update

Matt Cutts on Twitter Friday 25th May 2012

On Friday 25th May Google rolled out the first Penguin update. Matt in his heads up tweet called it a “Minor Weather Report”. And it only affects 0.1% of English searches, so it would indeed seem to be minor.

What does the Penguin 1.1 update do? Well a few sites are reporting recovery (those that acted quickly enough to have changes ready for the update when it came). Other than that it’s really not clear. Presumably they’ve looked at what went wrong and fixed a few small things but there are certainly no big changes or surprises with this update.

The Future of SEO

I’ve been hearing cries of “SEO is Dead!” for as long as I can remember knowing what SEO was, which in itself was long before I was an SEO. That is plain wrong (on a level).

As Matt said when announcing the release of Penguin,

Google has said before that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be positive and constructive —and we’re not the only ones. Effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages more accessible and easier to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that normal people will never type.

This is where people seem to be confused. For most people SEO actually means cheating your way up the ranks of Google and other search engines. Black hat SEO means outright spamming and White hat SEO is deemed to be cheating “within the rules – ish”. Google doesn’t have those definitions. For Google, SEO means making a site easy to crawl and index and easy to navigate with great content. It does not include ANY off-page SEO like link-building. However, link building continues to work. Black hat methods still work but are much riskier. Frankly, if your competition is link building and not picking up penalties you don’t have much option other than to do some of your own, unless of course you do what Google says and build such fantastic content that people flock in their millions to your site and link to it.

If you’re confused about what to do about your online marketing now and you live in Ireland or the UK then maybe it’s time to get yourself some SEO training. If you don’t live within a distance where I’m likely to be able to help ( I like to meet my clients for the most part) this blog has always given good advice and several of the places I’ve linked to in this very post are also extremely good sources of advice on SEO.

The Dangers of Outsourcing Your SEO

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Ian Wortley

Backlink Fail of the Year!

The backlink fail of the year award goes to EDIT: I have since been in contact with the company in question. It seems they were unaware how SEO work was being conducted on their behalf by a “reputable Irish company” . Accordingly, I have removed their name from this post. I would have no problem naming and shaming if I was convinced it was willful, but on this occasion it appears the blunder was foisted upon them rather than directly created by them. Business’s make mistakes, just like all of us. Something tells me they should have read this blog before they started their SEO campaign.

A while back I wrote about link building (or off-page SEO as I put it). In that article there is a sub heading about what NOT to do when link building. One of those things was paying somebody to do your link building without knowing what they were doing. Today I found an example that really illustrates the dangers of outsourcing your SEO.

I was researching a clients competitor on Alexa when I came across this little gem of a backlink…

SEO Fail! No company wants to have backlinks from a fetish site made public. It’s just plain embarrassing. The picture shows backlink results for a company which are freely available on Alexa to anybody.

Embarrassing for the company in question, since recruitment and a fetish site are not really related. Theoretically It could happen to anybody. I have no power over who links to this site and from where they link.

However, according to my research, in the case of this particular company they have actually paid for these links. How did I come to this conclusion? Well, lets have a look at that fetish site and in particular where the link is (purely for professional reasons you understand)…

A spam forum profile created with links as the signature. Unethical SEO to whip/ beat / spank your competition.

The links in the case of the Fetish site are in a signature of a profile in a forum on the site. They use two keywords as the link text directed to two separate pages on the target site. The forum “user” has made no posts, just created a profile with the signature.

Forum Spamming

Looking at further backlinks to the to the same company using Alexa and other better tools it quickly becomes apparent that this process has been repeated across a multitude of forums with no regard to the forum topic. In fact the number of links from completely unrelated sites far and away outnumbers the small number of relevant backlinks obtained. I even found a post about a rival company with the links pointing to the site in question.

Another recurring theme is the location of the user being given as Delhi. It is not a huge leap of logic to conclude therefore that this company have either directly, or indirectly outsourced a link building SEO campaign to a less than scrupulous Indian SEO company. Edit: It turned out to be that they outsourced to an Irish company who in turn outsourced their work. I say less than scrupulous because what they are doing is forum spamming. Spamming is rarely a clever move when it comes to SEO. I did say rarely. Here is why…

When is Spamming a good idea?

Spamming works. This is how this particular company came to my attention. Their intense session of forum spamming led to a quite radical jump in their rankings. This makes it a good short term, if highly unethical, practice. It is perfect if you need to promote a once off event like a concert and you don’t care if the site gets hammered by Google afterwards.

Why outsourcing your SEO to spammers is a bad idea

Search engines like Google spend a lot of resources on counteracting spam and paid links. They brought out a set of Webmaster guidelines. With that they are effectively saying that anything that falls outside those parameters is liable to be punished when caught. In Google’s own words….

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

In other words, if you get caught you can expect your ranking on Google to take a huge nosedive. It can be really difficult to recover from this too. Removing all the offending links is not always possible, particularly if you have not kept a careful record of where they are and what your usernames and passwords are. Until they are all removed you can find yourself on page 50 instead of on page one.

If you are in a competitive niche its an even worse idea to use black hat SEO tactics. That is because it is so easy to report a site for breaking Google guidelines.

How to report a website for buying links

Reporting a website for buying links is really easy. All you have to do is follow this link http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

How to outsource SEO without the risk

If you want to outsource your SEO then there are some simple steps to take to minimise the risk of ending up in the same predicament as my hapless example:

Ask Questions. Ask how the SEO campaign is to be carried out. What methods are going to be used. You can bet that the Irish company used in this instance said that they only practice “White hat SEO”, but they clearly don’t.
Insist on detailed SEO reports. Your reports should include the addresses of where links have been created.
Get references. Get feedback from other clients. Ideally you want clients that have been using the services for years, not weeks or months.
Get informed. Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines yourself. Know what is likely to be risky and what is good practice within those guidelines.
Keep it local. While it is tempting from a cost perspective to go with a company half a planet away, they are less accountable than somebody who is in business just down the road.

SEO vs User Experience

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Ian Wortley

It can seem like an impossible choice. SEO or Usability. Where is the compromise?

SEO is vital to the success of any website. After all, if you can’t get found, then you can’t give your message. However, once you have been found, it would be nice if people actually stayed on your site and read some of your content instead of clicking off somewhere else within seconds. Content writing skills are extremely important.

Why are SEO and User Experience often opposites?

It all comes down to how the human mind works and how algorithms work. Take pictures for example. Google can’t “see” your graphics in the same way as humans do.

Despite huge improvements in search algorithms, the bottom line is that they still place a massive emphasis on original text content.

This contradicts what humans like to read. We are the exact opposite. We don’t really like reading online. We like pictures and lots of them.

Heuristics – what have they ever done for us?

Jakob Nielsen is regarded by most as the father of usability heuristics (heuristics simply means that the rules are only loosely defined rather than strict). It is worth reading through them. What usability heuristics do is give us a rough template on how to not annoy users of both applications and websites (websites being a type of application really).

Keep Visitors Longer

By sticking to heuristic principles we have more chance of keeping our visitors for longer on our site, and of giving them an experience that in all probability they don’t particularly notice. Not getting noticed in this case is a good thing. We have all been frustrated on websites by not being able to simply navigate to where we want to go. Mostly we just look for a new site when that happens. This is the converse of heuristic principles.

This eye tracking study shows how we tend to read in a vaguely f shaped pattern online. This shows the importance of top google ranking too by the way.

How humans read web pages

We, as humans, read web pages quite differently to how we would read a book. Broadly speaking, we scan down the left hand side of a web page, reading headings and only some of the words in the paragraphs below them. How much depends on the level of interest the headline and the first few words invoked.

Thus, the way I wrote that last paragraph was not ideal from a heuristics point of view, since I essentially repeated the heading in my first line. However that was ideal from an SEO perspective. I train people to write like that.

Humans like short and snappy text, preferably backed up with pictures. Google likes text, text and more text. This is why content writing is such an artform.

How to please both humans and search engines with your content

I was recently working on a site relaunch for a recruitment agency specialising in Medical Jobs. The website ranked really well for their chosen keywords within a very competitive niche market (no prizes for guessing who does their SEO!). However, the front page had a LOT of text on it that 99% of visitors would never read.

For the relaunch user experience was high on the list of priorities. But we were faced with a problem. A good user experience and lots of text on the front page do not good bedfellows make.

The solution was to turn to javascript and make the front page into a slideshow. Not any javascript will do, and Ajax will not do at all. The key to this is to make sure that when you view the source of your page, all the content is visible. This means that search engines get to read all of your text.

Users get movement and interaction (which are plusses) while having the information broken down in such a way that they are more likely to read more of that text.

Did making a slideshow help keep visitors?

Yes it did. Putting the information into a slideshow increased the average time on the front page of the site by 16 seconds straight away. This means that people are actually staying to read the information, which is what you want if you have a website.

Benefits of Heuristics to SEO

Google take things like bounce rate and time on site into consideration for SEO too. So, by providing a better user experience and keeping visitors longer through the use of heuristic principles, you are also improving your standing with the search engines.

How do I know if I should break up text on my page?

It is not always the case that text needs to be broken up for humans to appreciate it properly. It is very simple to find out if your page needs help. Use your analytics. The key factor here is the amount of time spent on the page. If it is really low on a page that has a lot of text then it stands to reason that your users are not reading it. If that doesn’t upset you it should. The only reason it would not upset you is if the content is really only there for the search engines. In other words it’s spam content. There should be nothing on your website that you do not want people to read. Spam content can be recognised by search engines simply by measuring the time your visitors spend on your page. If it’s too short for the amount of content, then the quality of the writing must be really bad. Thus at the very least, the page does not deserve to be ranked highly.

I don’t like slideshows (other ways to break up text)

If you have a lot of text on your page that you realise could not possibly be read in the time your analytics say people are taking to read it then you need to make some changes. The following are ways of breaking up text in a page to make it more accessible…

Lists. Put your content into lists. They are easier to read than straight paragraphs.
Plenty of headings. These hugely increase the chances of people reading more of your content.
Boxes. Place your content into bite sized individual boxes.
Pictures. Pictures and picture captions are about the only thing that will distract us from reading down the left hand side of a page at the speed of light. We love images. However, stock images that we have seen before tend to be ignored. Your pictures have to get attention too.
Ruthless editing. Big long sentences are bad. Get rid of your verbose ramblings and stick to the point. (I could do with remembering that one).
Highlight text. Using bold or italic text helps to get pertinent points noticed.

As always, remember that keyword stuffing is really annoying to users. I don’t want to read about seo training in the latest seo training article on this seo training website. Neither do search engines. It may work to some extent, but it’s effect on users is to make you look bad, so don’t do it!

How Google Works In Simple Terms (off-page SEO)

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Ian Wortley

In my last post I wrote about on-page search engine optimisation. Of course that is only half the story. Unless you are lucky enough to operate in a vertical with no competition then you are going to need to do some off-page SEO too. Understanding how google works is imperative if you want to make progress in this area.

Build links to elevate your website in Google (SEO for SERPS)

Off page SEO is where most sites fall down.

Most sites fall down somewhere in their SEO efforts. If you are happy that your on-page SEO optimisation is up to scratch then it is time to look at off-page optimisation.

How Google rates your site in plain english.

The currency of the web is links. Every link provides important information for search engines like Google. This information is used to rank your website in terms of importance when somebody does a search.
There are some key factors in establishing which sites are most relevant for whatever has been typed into the Google search bar. In establishing how important your page is relative to others, these are some of the more important factors: -

How many other pages link to your page? Look at it logically. If I find a great bit of information on something I’m writing about then I will link to it. If it is rubbish then I will link to something else. Therefore, the more inbound links a page has then the more likely it is to be a useful page. That makes it more important.
How relevant is the content on the linking page to your page? Is the page that the link is on covering a similar topic? Indeed is the website itself generally writing on the same topic as your page? If it is not then your link will carry less value. There must be relevance.
How important is the linking page? How well does the page the link comes from rank itself? If that page also has a high trust and multiple inbound links to it then it will increase the value of the link to your page.
How many people click on that link? Think of each click as a vote. The more people that follow the link the better.
What do those visitors do when they reach your page? Do they stay and read for a while and visit other pages on your site or do they just leave straight away? If they leave (bounce rate is high) then that will devalue the link too since it is obviously not providing visitors with a good experience.

Turbocharge your links

Ideally you want keywords in the link text. This will turbocharge your links. This site is about SEO training, and my main site also has a page on Search Engine Optimisation on it, so linking to it like that makes sense. It is relevant to this site and provides a further resource for people who want to have their website optimised. Because I have used the text that I want the page to rank for (in this case “search engine optimisation”) as my link text, I am telling search engines that the page I linked to is important for that phrase.

SuperTurbocharge your links

Don’t forget to add in your title text to your links. This is another opportunity to tell both humans and search engines more about the page you are linking to. In this example I have used the text “SEO consultant Wicklow”. By hovering over the link this text will come up. The code for doing this is <a href=”http://whatever.ie/whatever” title=”SEO consultant Wicklow”>

Where can I get links to my site?

At some stage every webmaster (that’s what you are if you run a website) runs into the problem of where to get links back to their site. Here are six ways to get links…

Ask for them. Ask people who run relevant websites to link to your website. The worst they can say is “no”.
Directories. Submit your site to relevant directories. Some of these are useless, but some still carry a little weight.
Submit Press releases and articles to press release sites and article sites. Many of these have just been depreciated with the so called Google Panda update, but as a rule of thumb if you can find a suitable site easily it probably has not been affected by the update.
Utilise social media. You will not get a lot in the way of useful links from the sites themselves usually (most have nofollow attributes on their links), but by getting your content out there in the social world there is a higher chance of somebody else reading it and linking to it (organically the way all links should theoretically be made!). It is also a good PR exercise, so no excuses for not using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg etc.
Forums. These really come under the social media category in some ways. They are of limited use but can sometimes create a good stream of traffic which is never a bad thing.
Blog. This is my favourite way. Establish a good blog and it will become a resource in itself that will gain in importance. It is a low cost way of building links for long term gain. Commenting on somebody elses blog is less useful. What about doing a guest blog post on someone elses popular blog?

Do NOT do this to get links!

Here are some things you should definitely avoid when building links to your site…..

Buying links: This is the number one thing not to do to boost your SEO. Buying links is bad. It goes against Google policy and you WILL be penalised for it when you get caught. Think you won’t? Trust your competitors not to drop you in it by reporting you when they find out how you got above them in the Google ranks? Don’t do it.
Reciprocal Links: “I’ll give you a link if you give me a link”. My next post will probably be on Reciprocal links for more information. The short reason is that you want more links in to your website than out of your site.
Pay somebody else to build your links without knowing exactly what they are going to do: It may seem obvious but lots of people pay for others to build their links (I even provide that service myself), but many do not know where those links are going to come from or the methods used in getting them.
Go for quantity over quality: Leading on from the last point, you need quality links and quality is harder to get than quantity. If you have many links from unrelated sites it could lower the level of trust in your site. If you owned a search engine would you rank sites you trusted lower than sites you didn’t trust?

Link Building is not an exact science.

All your links are not going to be ideal. What I have done here is give an overview, but there is quite a bit more to it. There are times to break the rules and times not to. I have paid for links because of positioning and only on specific, relevant sites. This has been more to do with gaining traffic through them than what it will do for my own sites Organic Listing SEO. I have never and will never bulk buy links (I learned from others mistakes there).

If you found this useful then share it!

SHW7YNCWBZPJ

How Google Works In Simple Terms (on-page SEO)

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Ian Wortley

Do you want the content you have written for the internet to rank higher than your competitors? Of course you do. In order to rank highly you must first understand how Google works. This should be a starting point for any SEO training.

Understanding How Google Search Algorithms Work in Simple English

Here is a simple version of how Google works in laymans English. If you know how Google looks at a page then you can make sure that your content is written in a way that is complementary and therefore help you to rank higher on Google and other search engines.

At the core of Google is a set of mathematical algorithms. Their purpose is to try to determine the relevance of your page as opposed to other pages for a specific search term. Imagine being given a billion pages of text in a language you don’t understand and having to give back the most relevant page for information on a word you also don’t understand. You may know that there are pictures, but you can’t see them. That is what it is like for the algorythm!

I am going to describe the process the Google search algorithms have to go through as if I was the algorithm.

If somebody was to do a search for “flabrat” then I am first going to look at URL’s to see if any of them have “flabrat” in them. This is because flabrat.com is more likely to have information on “flabrat” than “globsheen.com”. However, globsheen.com/flabrat.html is also highly likely to have some relevance.

Unfortunately there is no guarantee that a pages content has any relevance to its name without going and reading it.

Meta Title

The first information I will find on a page is the Meta Title. This is the text that will be displayed in my search results. Does this say “flabrat” in it? If it does then I could be on the right track.

Meta Keywords

I’m going to take a cursory look at the Meta keywords too if they exist. Not that I am going to put any weight behind them at all. I’m just checking to see if they look spammy to me. If they do I’m going to assume that the rest of the page is also trying to pull the wool over my eyes a bit.

H1 tag

Next comes the H1 tag. This is really really really important. The h1 tag is the heading for the whole page. It is the heading that people will actually see when they view the page. If the word “flabrat” is used in the h1 tag then there is a good chance that the page is actually about flabrat. See The importance of h tags for more information.

Other Header tags (h2, h3 etc)

These are sub-headings and should relate to the content in the text that comes after them. They are not as important as the h1 tag but are still useful, particularly for breaking up your text and making it more readable for us humans. The header tags used in these segments are h3 tags.

p tags

Not content with just looking at the title, like Google, I will then look at the actual content of your text contained in p tags or paragraph tags. The first paragraph is particularly important, but if it was me I would be looking for the word flabrat throughout the entire document.

I would become suspicious if it appeared a lot though, so don’t overdo your keyword density.

Pictures

Google can’t actually see pictures. Google can however read text associated with pictures. For this reason your picture file names and alt text should both reflect your keywords. Think of it as another way of getting your keywords onto the page without being overly spammy. Without alt text in your images (img src=”images/picture.jpg” alt=”a flabrat in full bloom”) your pictures are doing precicely nothing for your Search Engine Optimisation.

Google search algorithms are a lot more complicated than that.

What I have just described is a very simplified version of what actually goes on to choose which page gets ranked highest in Google. There are over 200 factors involved in Google’s search algorithm and nobody knows exactly what they all are or what weighting is applied to each one.

What I have done in this post is give you a foolproof method of ensuring your on-page SEO is good enough to help you get ranked higher. Depending on what market you operate in, it could even be enough to get you ahead of some of your competitors.

On-page SEO is only half the battle though. You will need to do some off-page or external SEO too if you want your page to rank in any but the very least competitive of markets. My next post will be describe off-page SEO in simple terms.

On-page SEO is massively important. It is the foundation to getting found online. It is always my starting point. Get it right and everything else you do will work better too.

How important are H tags for SEO?

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Ian Wortley

All heading tags are important, but it is a serious offence to omit your h1 tag

I thought I’d write a little about H tags and how important they are to SEO. This was highlighted to me recently when I was given a very small budget to do some SEO work on a site. I would have liked to do a complete redesign, but there were very good reasons for keeping the budget low.

I love a challenge, so I thought I’d see what could be done with the site as it was.

The first thing that struck me was that there was a complete lack of H1 tags on the site. It had been built using a CMS and the content had been written by the business owners themselves. The second major problem with the on-site SEO was that nearly all the pages had the same title.

The coding was verbose but I could do nothing about the page structure (no access to files on the server – just the CMS).

Do H tags make a measurable difference to position on Google?

The short answer is “yes they do”. I made several changes to the site’s content. H tags were at the core of what I did though.

The Results

Original Position on Google for local search terms (ie. “industry locality“): Page 3 at highest.

New Position on Google for the same terms: Nearly all page 1 with some at position 2. Those on page 2 were in the top position there.

How I went about achieveing a page 3 to page 1 jump in rank without any inbound linking.

For on-page SEO I usually start with determining a keyword or two. This was a local business targeting the local area. The search terms that would be most likely used to find it seemed obvious and checking with Google Trends confirmed this.

Keywords chosen, relevance must be established within the page. What I am looking for here is continuity.

URL : Try to get a keyword into the URL
Page Title (Meta) : Use the same keyword in the Page title (this appears on the tab of your browser)
H1 tag: Use the keyword here too.
H2, H3, H4 tags: Less important, but same principles apply.
p tag: Use the keyword in the body of your text, but not too much. How much is too much? As a rule of thumb, if it doesn’t read like good english then it is too much.

Basically, if you do hot have a h1 tag on your page it is like handing up a college thesis without a title at the top. You are going to lose marks for it (or in this case SERPs rank).

OScommerce Review

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Ian Wortley

Eternity Jewellery Online Shop using OScommerce

I have been working on a site for a jewellers for the last while. I decided to go with OScommerce as the ecommerce engine. The reason for that was that it was recommended to me by several people. I decided to check it out. I was delighted when I saw that it was w3c standards compliant, so I dived right in.

About OScommerce Version 2.3.1

OScommerce V2.3.1 is an open source online shopping solution. Open source software is developed by a network of developers in an open community. Therefore it is free. That means I can charge less to my clients than if I buy a shopping cart solution or have to develop it from scratch myself.

OScommerce runs on PHP and mysql – which themselves have tons of online support available.

OScommerce comes with an impressive feature set which you can look through here. It seems like they have everything covered. I particularly liked things like unlimited products and multi-currency support (although I since found out that exchange rates are only automatic if the US dollar is your primary currency).

Working with OScommerce 2.3.1 (let the review begin)

Installation

Installation was straightforward and there is plenty of online help if you get stuck. It’s not as easy as wordpress, but it is not as hard as a multisite wordpress install.

Modification

This is where things get a little less rosy. Unless you want to use OScommerce as it is then you are going to have to make some modifications. It will work perfectly well as it is and you can upload your store logo etc, it’s just that I have yet to meet anybody that wants their shop to look like anybody elses.

OScommerce is not a theme based platform. There are people out there selling “themes” but these all go further than just some changes to the CSS.

Any modifications will affect future updates! This is because just about every mod requires changes to more than one file.

There are thousands of modifications available though. Be warned. A lot of modifications require you to upload files, overwriting the ones that were there before. If you have made modifications already you may well find yourself overwriting some of those. The upshot of that would be at best stopping your original modifications from working, and at worst breaking your whole site. Backup, backup, backup!

File Structure

It’s a nightmare. To do something simple like adding a page requires changes to 3 pages (or maybe 4 I forget). Once you get used to the file structure it’s not as bad, but you can forget about putting in a page called something.php and just linking to it. It will not work. The side menus are module based. This is great in that you can position and reposition individual modules like the shopping cart and product categories easily from the admin. It is not so great when it comes to adding to a module (extra pages for example) or creating a new module (box).

OScommerce SEO

SEO is a foreign concept to OScommerce. I made the stupid assumption that because they had gone to the effort of making the site standards compliant (markup, but not CSS) that they had also put some effort into SEO. This is absolutely not the case. Problems with the SEO include:

Multiple pages with the same meta title (the store name). Products and categories have separate page titles but all the other pages default to the shop name. I confess that I got frustrated trying to work out the structure to change this and resorted to a switch statement in the header to change the page title of the other pages based on the url of the page. God help me when it comes to doing mod-rewrites of the urls!
Links to index.php. This is one of my pet hates. Why link to www.whateversite.com/index.php when www.whateversite.com is perfectly acceptable and removes a duplicate page issue. A quick mod-rewrite sorted out that.
Canonical URLS. that sort of goes with the above. Again sorted with a mod-rewrite.
Search Engine Friendly URL’s. There is an option in the admin to display search engine friendly urls. The trouble is that the solution is worse than the problem. The original url to a product could be http://www.eternityjewellery.ie/product_info.php?cPath=24_39&products_id=42. Turning on Search Engine Friendly URL’s makes this http://www.eternityjewellery.ie/product_info.php/cPath/24_39/products_id/42. What the advantage of that is supposed to be I don’t know. There is no product name in there (in this case an eternity ring). Worse than that it appears to add 4 folder levels to the url. The further away from the home page a page is (sub folders) the less important it is. Needless to say I have turned that off.
There is no description meta tag.
There is no built in sitemap (although there are mods available).
There is no auto update to google et al when a new product is added.

Another issue I have is that there is no visual editor when putting in product information. If you want to put in a list with your product then you have to code it. No problem to me, but not nice for a client who doesn’t know html from abba. Frankly that is a bit embarrassing.

There are SEO mods available, but you will need to install these first, before other mods since making an OScommerce site truly SEO friendly is not a simple task. I decided not to because they mostly include stuff that is outdated or not necessary. I’ll do it myself.

Things I don’t like about OScommerce v2.3.1

OScommerce allows you to add attributes or options to a product. they were clearly thinking of options like available in red or blue. This part of the admin is a disgrace. Each attribute has to be added in separately. With the Jewellery shop I was working with they had things like ring sizes. There were 52 different ring sizes. To individually add 52 options to each ring would take a long time and leave me with royally P***ed off clients. I spent a day making some modifications to this page including allowing multiple selection of attributes for a product and re-ordering the lists. They were ordered by id number from the database. I changed it to be ordered alphabetically or I would never be able to find anything! A search function would have been nice here too. What you end up with is pages and pages of options and then more pages of which options are assigned to which products. Oh, and similarly named products are a problem there too. You can input a code for each product, but that code did not show up in the attributes page. So two “Eternity Ring”s with different ring sizes available would get very confusing. I had to modify that to show the product code too. While I was at it I modified the breadcrumb trail navigation too.
Shipping. There are lots of shipping methods available. Combining them is not so easy. My client wanted free delivery on orders over x amount, but only in Ireland. This was achievable only by setting up two different shipping methods, one by price and the other by weight. I further had to limit the price method to only come into effect in Ireland. The documentation was skimpy and shipping took a full half day to sort out. Part of the process of setting up shipping was to input the country code of every country in the list, along with the shipping price by weight. Having a maximum of 255 characters per line in the inputs meant that I had to split one segment of countries into 4 (at the 255 character mark). A headache!
Shipping part 2. If you work in lbs, then weights are not a problem. For those of us who are metric it is not so straight forward. The database is set to two decimal places. So if you use kilos then you only get two decimal places of grams. This is a problem on light goods like earrings for example. You can change the db to reflect 3 decimal places or you can just measure everything in grams. After trying both I went for weighing in grams. OScommerce allows you to specify maximum weights for packages and increases overall package weight by a percentage after that to compensate your shipping charges. From Ireland, even if it actually worked it would be inaccurate and useless. I turned that off and just put in prices for larger weights in my main shipping section.
No wishlist. I didn’t mind that so much, but my client would have liked one. The only mod I could find for 2.3.1 to do this was on sale for $850 (which rather goes against the spirit of open-source).

Would I use OScommerce again?

Yes I would. Now that I know my way around it, it is not a bad piece of software. It is not nice to work with but it does what you want it to do at the end of the day, so it gets a reluctant thumbs up from me. I only say reluctant because for a time I felt it was ruining my life!

Domaining – Not dead!

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Ian Wortley

Domaining, or the practice of buying other domains for SEO purposes used to be popular. That was because it worked. Now though, particularly since it is difficult to get relevant domains as .com, but also because of changes in search engine algorithms domaining is not as effective as it once was.

Brian Cowen Supports Domaining for SEO.... but it's still a good idea. (he may not actually know what I'm talking about)

Does this mean we should all give up on domaining? Not at all.

Here are 5 reasons why domaining is worth doing.

1. Domain Typos

As an example let’s say I had a site called wortley.com. Wortley happens to be my surname. The trouble with it is that hardly anybody on the planet can spell it properly! In Ireland the most common mis-spelling is Worthley. So if somebody was to try and find my site, then typing in www.worthley.com would return them precisely nothing.

So if your company name is prone to typo’s then buying similarly named domains that people may type to get to your site makes sense. You just redirect them to the correct site.

2. Your Company Name Is Often Shortened to Initials or has the word “and” in it, or other confusing letters.

If my company name happened to be Wortley and O’Connor Ltd for some inexplicable reason, then it is not going to be readily obvious what my website is going to be. Is it woc.com, wortleyoconner.com, wortleyandoconner.com or even wortleyoc.com?

For this reason I will never name a company in this way. Particularly since nobody can spell Wortley in the first place and the apostrophe in O’Conner sends people into a state of utter confusion.

If I was stuck with that as a company name I would be well advised to get all versions of it though.

3. .com or .ie

If my site was wortley.ie then (assuming people have learned how to spell it) how many people would type in wortley.com first? A lot. People assume .com endings. You may notice that this site does not have the .com version. You may also be amused to note what happens if you type in http://www.seotraining.com

If you do you will notice that you are redirected to a .org domain. (probably won’t notice that first though).

If it is possible, then getting the .com, .net, .org and .ie versions of your site makes sense. One other good reason to do this is that nobody else can come along and set up a near duplicate site to yours. Imagine if your business is an online shop with a .ie domain name and somebody comes along and sets up the same domain name with a .com ending. They could make the site similar looking to yours and sell similar products. You would lose business.

4. Keyword rich domains

If you are in Ireland and do a search for SEO training then you will find that this site comes up at the top of google. Why is that? Well the domain name is seotraining.ie, the subject matter is SEO training and generally you will find references to search engine optimisation creeping into nearly every post.

I am using this domain to target those keywords. My main site http://www.webshed.ie has no reference to seo in the domain name and it would be a lot harder to make it rank for that.

I have heard a lot of “professional SEO consultants” say that it doesn’t work anymore. Well it does for this site (and a few others I have). Also I have not put any effort at all into link building to this site. It is all about the content.

5. Company Rebranding

My last post was about rebranding your website. If your company is taken over, does a merger or simply wants to rebrand what happens to your website? You will still have visitors going to the old domains. You need to redirect that traffic to your new domain.

Rebranding your website

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Ian Wortley

Rebranding need not cost millions... but sometimes it helps!

Inspired by the very recent news that the ESB is to be rebranded as Electric Ireland I started wondering what the pros and cons of rebranding your website would be.

For starters you are unlikely to €6 to €8 million price tag that the ESB is about to incur. But other than that is there any point?

It really depends on just how much of a rebrand you are talking about. If it is more a restyling than a rebranding then it should not have too much effect on your SEO. If however you have to change domains as part of that rebranding then you should be very aware of the possible implications of that.

Let’s use the ESB as an example. Their website is http://www.esb.ie. It has been that way as long as I can remember. They have a LOT on inbound links to the site, google recognises the acronym ESB as standing for Electricity Supply Board and they are ahead of their competitors forcing them to make excessive use of PPC campaigns.

So what do they stand to lose by rebranding as Electric Ireland?

They have to start a new domain presumably (electricireland.ie since they have already bought the domain – and .com, .org etc). Time is a factor in the ranking of websites. Established sites that have been around for a few years have gained trust with the major search engines. A year or two back there was much talk of the “google sandbox” where sites were not allowed rank until they had proved themselves a bit. Whether you think this is still the case or not, there is no denying that established sites tend to rank better.
The new site will have a new look presumably too. To customers that are familiar with the old look this is confusing. It requires a great deal of advertising to get the message out there about the change. Luckily the ESB have a regular mail shot (the bill) to customers that they can use as a vehicle for part of this re-education, but they will also need TV and radio advertising too at the very minimum. In short, it’s going to be very expensive.
Goodwill. The news of the rebranding is being widely touted as a “waste of money” at the very time when the country is in dire financial shape. Spending that much money on something that is deemed a waste of time by customers is only going to encourage them to go to Bord Gais or Airtricity (the two largest competitors).
Inbound links. These are the life blood of any website and starting up a new site as part of a rebrand effectively removes all of these. The probable outcome is a site that ranks well below their competitors.

Those are the major problems facing a site that wants to completely rebrand. There are only two advantages that I can think of in the case of the ESB

They have to do it if they want to be able to set their own prices (Big brother said so!).
Some people may think they are not the ESB and they may gain customers as a result. (I know that’s a bit cutting, but that’s the sort of country we live in, like it or not)

What I would do if I was the ESB

Once I had my new domain I would do all my css styling to reflect the new brand image and then take the existing ESB site and plop it straight onto my new server.

To say that in a more straight forward way, I would make sure the content on my new site matched the content on my old site but with different logos.

At the same time it would be necessary to 301 redirect (permanent redirect) all pages from the old site to the same pages on the new site. Thus anybody following a link to the old site gets to exactly the same content on the new site.

Then I would start link building like my life depended on it. I would back that up with a ppc campaign that would put Anglo’s debt to shame.

Only after about a year and with plenty of links rebuilt, would I slack off on the PPC campaign and let the site stand on it’s own two feet.

I would start a competition (probably through facebook ads) that in some way encouraged links. I would get out into the blogging community with it too and do the same there.

Most importantly I would cross my fingers and hope that I had not forgotten something vital. Changing domains and branding in one fell swoop is not for the feint hearted.