Negative SEO : How to Uncover an Attack Using a Backlink Audit

Ever since Google launched the Penguin update back in April 2012, the SEO community has debated the impact of negative SEO, a practice whereby competitors can point hundreds or thousands of negative backlinks at a site with the intention of causing harm to organic search rankings or even completely removing a site from Google's index. Just jump over to Fiverr and you can find many gigs offering thousands of wiki links, or directory links, or many other types of low-quality links for $5.

By creating the Disavow Links tool, Google acknowledged this very real danger and gave webmasters a tool to protect their sites. Unfortunately, most people wait until it's too late to use the Disavow tool; they look at their backlink profile and disavow links after they've been penalized by Google. In reality, the Disavow Links tool should be used before your website suffers in the SERPs.

Backlink audits have to be added to every SEO professional's repertoire. These are as integral to SEO as keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building. In the same way that a site owner builds links to create organic rankings, now webmasters also have to monitor their backlink profile to identify low quality links as they appear and disavow them as quickly as they are identified.

Backlink audits are simple: download your backlinks from your Google Webmaster account, or from a backlink tool, and keep an eye on the links pointing to your site. What is the quality of those links? Do any of the links look fishy?

As soon as you identify fishy links, you can then try to remove the links by emailing the webmaster. If that doesn't work, head to Google's disavow tool and disavow those links. For people looking to protect their sites from algorithmic updates or penalties, backlink audits are now a webmaster's best friend.

If your website has suffered from lost rankings and search traffic, here's a method to determine whether negative SEO is to blame.

A Victim of Negative SEO?

A few weeks ago I received an email from a webmaster whose Google organic traffic dropped by almost 50 percent within days of Penguin 2.0. He couldn't understand why, given that he'd never engaged in SEO practices or link building. What could've caused such a massive decrease in traffic and rankings?

The site is a 15-year-old finance magazine with thousands of news stories and analysis, evergreen articles, and nothing but organic links. For over a decade it has ranked quite highly for very generic informational financial keywords – everything from information about the economies of different countries, to very detailed specifics about large corporations.

With a long tail of over 70,000 keywords, it's a site that truly adds value to the search engine results and has always used content to attract links and high search engine rankings.

The site received no notifications from Google. They simply saw a massive decrease in organic traffic starting May 22, which leads me to believe they were impacted by Penguin 2.0.

In short, he did exactly what Google preaches as safe SEO. Great content, great user experience, no manipulative link practices, and nothing but value.

So what happened to this site? Why did it lose 50 percent of its organic traffic from Google?

Backlink Audit

I started by running a LinkDetox report to analyze the backlinks. Immediately I knew something was wrong:

Upon further investigation, 55 percent of his links were suspicious, while 7 percent (almost 500) of the links were toxic:

So the first step was to research those 7 percent toxic links, how they were acquired, and what types of links they were.

In LinkDetox, you can segment by Link Type, so I was able to first view only the links that were considered toxic. According to Link Detox, toxic links are links from domains that aren't indexed in Google, as well as links from domains whose theme is listed as malware, malicious, or having a virus.

Immediately I noticed that he had many links from sites that ended in .pl. The anchor text of the links was the title of the page that they linked to.

It seemed that the sites targeted "credit cards", which is very loosely in this site's niche. It was easy to see that these were scraped links to be spun and dropped on spam URLs. I also saw many domains that had expired and were re-registered for the purpose of creating content sites for link farms.

Also, check out the spike in backlinks:

From this I knew that most of the toxic links were spam, and links that were not generated by the target site. I also saw many links to other authority sites, including entrepreneur.com and venturebeat.com. It seems that this site was classified as an "authority site" and was being used as part of a spammers way of adding authority links to their outbound link profile.

Did Penguin Cause the Massive Traffic Loss?

I further investigated the backlink profile, checking for other red flags.

His Money vs Brand ratio looked perfectly healthy:

His ratio of "Follow" links was a little high, but this was to be expected given the source of his negative backlinks:

Again, he had a slightly elevated number of text links as compared to competitors, which was another minor red flag:

One finding that was quite significant was his Deep Link Ratio, which was much too high when compared with others in his industry:

In terms of authority, his link distribution by SEMrush keyword rankings was average when compared to competitors:

Surprisingly, his backlinks had better TitleRank than competitors, meaning that the target site's backlinks ranked for their exact match title in Google – an indication of trust:

Penalized sites don't rank for their exact match title.

The final area of analysis was the PageRank distribution of the backlinks:

Even though he has a great number of high quality links, the percentage of links that aren't indexed in Google is substantially great. Close to 65 percent of the site's backlinks aren't indexed in Google.

In most cases, this indicates poor link building strategies, and is a typical profile for sites that employ spam link building tactics.

In this case, the high quantity of links from pages that are penalized, or not indexed in Google, was a case of automatic links built by spammers!

As a result of having a prominent site that was considered by spammers to be an authority in the finance field, this site suffered a massive decrease in traffic from Google.

Avoid Penguin & Unnatural Link Penalties

A backlink audit could've prevented this site from being penalized from Google and losing close to 50% of their traffic. If a backlink audit had been conducted, the site owner could've disavowed these spam links, performed outreach to get these links removed, and documented his efforts in case of future problems.

If the toxic links had been disavowed, all of the ratios would've been normalized and this site would've never been pegged as spam and penalized by Penguin.

Backlink Audits

Whatever tool you use - whether it's Ahrefs, LinkDetox, or OpenSiteExplorer – it's important that you run and evaluate your links on a monthly basis. Once you have the links, make sure you have metrics for each of the links in order to evaluate their health.

Here's what to do:

• Identify all the backlinks from sites that aren't indexed in Google. If they aren't indexed in Google, there's a good chance they are penalized. Take a manual look at a few to make sure nothing else is going on (e.g., perhaps they just moved to a new domain, or there's an error in reporting). Add all the N/A sites to your file.
• Look for backlinks from link or article directories. These are fairly easy to identify. LinkDetox will categorize those automatically and allow you to filter them out. Scan each of these to make sure you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, as perhaps a few of these might be healthy.
• Identify links from sites that may be virus infected or have malware. These are identified as Toxic 2 in LinkDetox.
• Look for paid links. Google has long been at war with link buying and it's an obvious target. Find any links that have been paid and add them to the list. You can find these by sorting the results by PageRank descending. Evaluate all the high PR links as those are likely the ones that were purchased. Look at each and every one of the high quality links to assess how they were acquired. It's almost always pretty obvious if the link was organic or purchased.
• Take the list of backlinks and run it through the Juice Tool to scan for other red flags. One of my favorite metrics to evaluate is TitleRank. Generally, pages that aren't ranking for their exact match title have a good chance of having a functional penalty or not having enough authority. In the Juice report, you can see the exact title to determine if it's a valid title (for example, if the title is "Home", of course they won't rank for it, whether they have a penalty). If the TitleRank is 30+, you can review that link by doing a quick check, and if the site looks spammy, add it to your "Bad Links" file. Do a quick scan for other factors, such as PageRank and DomainAuthority, to see if anything else seems out of place.

By the end of this stage, you'll have a spreadsheet with the most harmful backlinks to a site.

Upload this Disavow File, to make sure the worst of your backlinks aren't harming your site. Make sure you then upload this disavow file when performing further tests on Link Detox as excluding these domains will affect your ratios.

Don't be a Victim of Negative SEO!

Negative SEO works; it's a very real threat to all webmasters. Why spend the time, money, and resources building high quality links and content assets when you can work your way to the top by penalizing your competitors?

There are many unethical people out there; don't let them cause you to lose your site's visibility. Add backlink audits and link profile protection as part of your monthly SEO tasks to keep your site's traffic safe. It's no longer optional.

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10 Dead SEO Tactics (And Their Alternatives)

SEO is a constantly changing industry, and much of what you read in a passing introduction to the subject is outdated. We’d like to take this time to discuss several SEO tactics that are dead or dying. We’re not necessarily claiming that these tactics never work (although that’s true for a few of them). We’re simply pointing out that these tactics are losing value and place the future of your site at risk. All of these tactics are frowned upon by Google, and many of them can get you penalized. Some are more “gray” and still work, but can’t be expected to last long enough to be worth the investment.

Tactic #1 – Exact Match Domain Names

Like most of the tactics mentioned here, this can still work, but only if none of the other search results have anything going for them. There was a time when your domain name could give you a boost over your competitors, but this tactic was so abused that Google released an algorithmic update just to target exact match domains. (Here’s our infographic on the updates that came out in 2012.)

Today, exact match domains only really matter for branded searches. If somebody searches for Amazon, they’re going to get Amazon.com. Google is getting increasingly skilled at telling the difference between a branded search and a phrase search. If your domain is built to target a specific phrase, Google can usually tell, and this will only get more important in the future.

Alternative

Instead of choosing a domain name that matches a commonly searched for phrase, choose a domain name that will stick in people’s heads. Look at all the successful tech companies and you’ll see that very few of them are keyword-driven. Google, Facebook, Kickstarter, Amazon, Zappos: these names are designed to be remembered, not to inform.

It’s also important to realize that the end of exact match domains doesn’t mean the end of keyword research. It simply means that keyword research is far more important for individual pages than it is for domain names. This actually leads us right into our next point.

Tactic #2 – Exact Match Keywords in Titles and Meta Tags

Keyword-stuffed meta descriptions are as dead as an SEO tactic can be. They offer no value whatsoever, except to encourage a click-through from the SERP. We can’t stress this enough. It’s good practice to get a call-to-action in your meta description, and that’s the only reason you should be using it. Stuffing it with keywords is only going to scare away users.

Exact match keywords in titles are a grayer area. If you can fit an exact keyword into the title, it’s still worth doing it, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about cutting and pasting a keyword out of the AdWords Keyword Tool and giving no thought to your title. This should be avoided almost every time.

It’s not hard for Google to tell if every one of your page titles is simply stripped right out of the keyword tool, and users subconsciously pick up on it as well. This gets especially bad when the keyword phrase you’re targeting isn’t grammatically complete.

Alternative

Work a variation of the keyword phrase into a title that encourages click-through and social activity. Put the focus on grabbing attention and encouraging clicks, rather than on the keyword.

You should still try to work the keyword phrase, or a subtle variation of it, into the title, but not at the expense of a memorable and eye-grabbing title. Don’t concern yourself with getting the exact phrase into the title. Adjust the tense and conjugation of your words as needed, and please don’t be afraid to add
punctuation or adjust the order of the words.

If you pay attention to the search results, you’ll notice that exact match titles don’t show up as often as they used to. Instead, the keywords increasingly show up scattered throughout the title and the body. Google is getting better at interpreting the meaning of your query, and your approach should reflect this change.

Tactic #3 – Meta Keywords

I hope everybody who’s reading this already knows this, but meta keywords have absolutely no influence on search results whatsoever. This has been true since the end of the ‘90s. It can be good practice to include a few keywords in case your site gets scraped by some tool that still uses the meta keywords, but as far as SEO this one is just plain useless.

Alternative

Focus on increasing your percentage of repeat visitors from the search engines. Google can measure how often users return to your site, and they use this information to determine how relevant your content is. I sometimes think of this as the present-day stand-in for meta keywords, since links are more accurately thought of as authority signals than as relevancy ones (though this isn’t completely true).

Analyze Google Analytics to find the pages on your site with the highest percentage of repeat visitors (the lowest percentage of new visitors). These are the pages that you want to promote and emulate the most. (Make sure that you are filtering yourself out of Google Analytics before taking this data too seriously).

Tactic #4 – Building Links with Duplicate Content

This one is not only dead, it never worked very well to begin with. Google can clearly identify when a piece of content is copied, and if you submit multiple pieces of content it will, at best, ignore all but one of them.
In the past, this may have been a decent way of capturing a link from the highest PageRank site willing to post your duplicate content, but today it’s actually just a good way to get yourself penalized. Google knows that spammers are trying to use this tactic in order to manipulate their rankings, and it very rarely works.

A variation on this tactic that has also worked in the past it to “spin” an article by running it through an algorithm that creates automated variations of it. This process results in very low quality articles that are no longer exact copies. Anybody who tries to read the articles can immediately tell that something is wrong with the grammar and that bizarre synonyms have been chosen. Google is no longer fooled by these tactics and can usually tell the difference between content written by a human and content written by an algorithm.

Alternative

It’s still possible to get multiple links from a single piece of content, and the best way to do it has always been the best way to do it: post your content somewhere where it will reach a massive audience and attract natural links as a result.

It no longer makes sense to create and submit a piece of content if the only benefit is a single link back to your site for each publication. This has never been the kind of a link Google wanted to count and it’s never been the best way to grow your link profile.

To build the highest quality links, and grow your link profile at the fastest rate, you need to get published in a place where you’ll actually get read. What is the SEOmoz or SearchEngineJournal of your industry? That’s where you need to be published, because it sends referral leads directly to your site, and creates a ton of natural links in the process.

Don’t waste time on content submission that only results in a single link back to your site under your own control. It’s just not worth it anymore.

Tactic #5 – Keyword Density

This is another outdated tactic that, much like meta keywords, actually hasn’t worked for many years. There is no specific number of times you should use a keyword on your page, or a certain percentage of your content that it should make up.

As with many of the other tactics on this list, too much emphasis on keyword density can actually end up hurting your rankings. Thinking about keyword density while writing also makes it very difficult to write worthwhile content. The more time you spend pondering how to fit a keyword into a piece of content, the less time you’ll spend thinking about how to write sentences that keep users engaged and informed.

Alternative

Instead of worrying about keyword density, you can capture a much larger space in the search engines by bringing in long tail traffic. The more in depth your content goes, the more long tail traffic you’ll bring in.

Research has a way of expanding the vocabulary of your content. As you dig deeper into the problems your users want solved, and mine the tough sources for original information, you’ll also serendipitously discover and use keyword phrases you would never have found in the keyword tool. Since they’re naturally attached to the subject at hand, they’re also commonly searched for along with your core keywords.

In addition, you can use the keyword tool to find related keywords, and discuss them within your content. When you do this, however, it should serve the end user. Don’t go out of your way to use several variations on your core keyword. Use the keyword tool to find related topics, and discuss them naturally within your blog posts.

Tactic #6 – “Unique” Content that Serves No Real Purpose

We’re currently exiting the period where “unique” meant little more than “not plagiarized.” Your content needs to be consistently creative, and there are things you can do to make that happen.

There was a time when it was easy to rank content as long as it was technically unique, in the sense that those exact words hadn’t been said elsewhere. All it took was enough links. This is still possible, but it rarely lasts long. It’s not sustainable.

Google’s Panda algorithm is designed to identify how well a piece of content serves its purpose. Leaked guidelines for Google’s quality raters make this abundantly clear.  If your content doesn’t meet its intended purpose for the user, or it has no purpose to begin with, it will eventually be taken down by an algorithm update or a human quality rater.

Alternative

Focus on the true meaning of unique, as in “unique selling proposition.” Your content must be designed to fill a hole in the idea marketplace. It must add value that no other prominent piece of content on the subject adds. That value can come from the research, the tone, the target audience, the medium, the personality, the user experience, or one of many other ways to differentiate yourself.

The point is to focus on unique value, as opposed to merely unique words. You accomplish this by identifying the specific problem you are trying to solve, and solving it for your target audience better than any other piece of content on the web can. If you can’t do that, you need to choose a different topic, because you’re chasing a fool’s errand.

Tactic #7 – Exact Match Anchor Text Links

The anchor text of a link hasn’t lost all of its value, but it’s no longer the most important ranking signal out there, and if you pursue anchor text overzealously you will end up with nothing more than a penalty to show for it.

Over-optimized anchor text sends a very clear message to Google: you have direct control over the links pointing toward your site, so they are not natural. In their eyes, this also means that they are irrelevant as a sign of your authority on the web.

Alternative

When you build backlinks yourself, you should move away from anchor text and start focusing on your conversion rates. Place links where they are more likely to be clicked, and use anchor text that’s more likely to result in a click-through. You can test this a bit by experimenting with AdWords or a different text link ad service if you wish.

The anchor text isn’t completely ignored, and it’s still used to find clues regarding what the linked page is about, but you should avoid too much emphasis on it. It’s generally best to just discus the linked content in the way that makes the most sense, and then attach the hyperlink to the part of the sentence that’s most likely to get clicked on.

In addition, it’s wise to use bare URLs, branded links, links containing the exact title of the linked page, and partial match anchor text.

At the same time, you shouldn’t spend too much time trying to make your links appear “natural.” If you’re doing things right, most of your link profile should already be natural, as we’ll get at the end of the article.

Tactic #8 – Keyword Heavy Footer Links

It doesn’t matter whether they’re outbound or internal links, keyword heavy footer links are a bad idea. The footer has been abused as an SEO tool for quite some time, and Google has wised up to the fact. The search engines now place most of the emphasis on main content, and for the most part ignore links in the footer. Excessive keyword use in the footer is just asking for an algorithmic demotion.

Alternative

Use the footer to reduce your bounce rate. Google most likely measures “pogo-sticking” behavior, where a user clicks onto a site, clicks back, and goes to the next site. Users who instead stay on the site, and don’t return to the search results, tend to be more satisfied with that result.

Instead of filling the footer with keyword links, fill it will calls to action for more content that will interest them. Test, test, test and find the links that encourage the highest click through rate. Keep users on your site so that they are more likely to remember your brand, share you with their friends, subscribe to your newsletter, and ultimately convert. Keep them from returning to the SERP and sending a negative signal to Google in the process.

Tactic #9 – Site-Wide Links

Nearly every client we’ve dealt with who was hit by Penguin or an unnatural link penalty had a problem with site-wide links, either on- or off-site. Whether they’re backlinks or internal links, a link from every single page on any website is generally a bad idea, especially if it’s keyword optimized.

Don’t get us wrong. You want a link back to your home page from every page on your site; that’s just good UI. And if a few sites happen to put you in their blogroll that’s rarely a problem, especially if they used your brand name rather than a keyword.

But if site-wide links end up making large part of your backlink profile, or nearly every page on your site links to every other page, you’re just asking for trouble.

Alternative

For your internal links, just include a few links in your main body and make a few recommendations at the end of each blog post. This keeps users clicking through and seeing what you have to offer, which is great for engagement. There’s no reason to link to a single page from every other page on your site, unless it’s your home page, or it’s part of a “best of” list in your sidebar.

As for external links, you should essentially never build a site-wide link yourself. Don’t worry too much about site-wide links if they’re natural, but as for your own efforts you should stick to contextual links or calls to action in your signature. Links should look more or less editorial (although not to the point that you’re disguising the fact that it’s your link).

Tactic #10 – Unnatural Links

In general, you should avoid any unnatural linking scheme. What do we mean by this? Well, Google’s terms of service indicate that any link intended to manipulate rankings is a violation. Many SEOs fail to understand this, and mistakenly believe that their links are within Google’s guidelines as long as the quality levels are high.
I suppose we’re pushing things a bit by saying this tactic is “dead,” as it can still work quite well, but consider yourself on thin ice. Even quality links are in Google’s gray area if you built them yourself, in particular if the link offers little or no value outside of SEO. If there’s reason to believe that the link only exists to manipulate your rankings, there’s reason for Google to disregard the link.

Alternative

Stop building links to manipulate your rankings. I know, this is almost heretical in some circles, but it really is the only way to stay within Google’s terms of service, and it’s actually the fastest way to build links.
Instead of focusing on building links to grow your presence in the search engines, switch over to building links for referral traffic. This is the only method defensible as a long term marketing strategy.

How could this be the best path to improving your rankings? It’s simple. The pages that send the most referral traffic are the pages that Google wants to rank in the search engines. Focus on building links from those sites, and you will focus on promoting yourself with the influencers that matter most.

Google does not want to see your pages ranking on backlinks that you built. That’s an inconvenient truth for many SEOs, but there’s no getting around it. If you focus on referral traffic, you end up focusing on tactics that result in natural links. It’s the simple law of numbers. The more often people see your content, the more often they’ll link to it. In the meantime, your hand built links will come from the sites that send the most positive signals to Google, and actually indicate that you do have some influence.
It’s the path of least resistance. Cheating is harder.

Conclusion

There’s no point investing in outdated tactics that can’t be expected to work long term. While some of the tactics we’ve talked about can still be effective, this is only true in the short term. These are SEO strategies that can, at best, give you a false sense of security about the future, and all will eventually leave you dead in the water if you rely on them exclusively.
We realize we’ve taken a few strong stances here, and we welcome all feedback.

Post Source E2msolutions.com

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SEO Consulting Beats an SEO Package Every Time

Brands who are interested in reaching a broader online audience can easily confuse SEO consultants with SEO packages. The word “consultant” might even be more intimidating, since it implies that your own business will be doing most of the work. In reality, SEO packages can, at best, only promise superficial results. SEO consultants are happy to pick up most of the marketing work, but they work together with their clients in order to meet business goals.

In short, SEO consultants are genuine marketers. SEO packages are content mills with little concern for real marketing. They have to be, because the promises they make aren’t based on your business goals, or even knowledge of the search engines. They are merely based on meeting a set of predefined requirements.

1. Packages Are Unnatural, By Necessity

When you buy an SEO package, you are buying a set of links. You pay for a specific number of links every month. You pay for a specific number of each kind of link each month. Perhaps you also pay for some other kind of promotional service as well, but once again, you’ll pay for some set quantity every month.

In what universe can such a package create a natural link profile?

A natural site attracts links from a wide variety of sources. The kinds of links you get from month to month are going to change. The number of links you get each month are going to change.

When you work with a reputable consultant, they aren’t going to guarantee a certain number of links, because any reputable consultant should be making some effort to help you build naturallinks. Natural links are outside of your direct control, so asking for a specific number of them is nonsensical.

Yes, even reputable consultants may manually build links, but they will only do so from high quality sources. And the fact of the matter is, links from top tier sites are hard to get. If you can be guaranteed a specific number of links every month, the links just aren’t hard enough.

Some packages promise that they only do “hand built” links, or that all of their links are of the highest quality. It’s undoubtedly a good thing that the links are created “manually,” rather than from some automated piece of software. It’s also encouraging to hear the word “quality,” but it’s not enough.

Serious link building involves more than just “hand built” links and guest posts from “quality” article directories. Long-lasting, genuine links are built on relationships and reputation. Since there’s no cookie-cutter process for building relationships and reputation, there’s no way to promise a specific number of serious links each month.

A consultant, on the other hand, can promise a certain number of hours spent on outreach, relationship building, and content creation, and report the results.

2. Packages Are Bad for Brands

When you visit a site that sells an SEO package, what do you see? Do you see a promise to learn about your company and your space in the market? Do you see any discussion of your target audience and what they care about? Do you see any talk of your business reputation, customer retention, or word of mouth?

Of course not. How could a package do any of that for you? As soon as an SEO package makes any promise to learn something about your brand, it ceases to be a package and it becomes a consultancy.

Packages are “hands-off SEO,” a phrase that is practically meaningless. SEO is all about building an online reputation that boosts your visibility in the search engines. Does it make sense for a brand to hand their reputation over to an SEO package that won’t even speak with them about their business goals?

No SEO knows your business better than you do. They simply know SEO better than you do.

For SEO to work, you need links from high profile sources. That means the content is going to be seen by quite a few people. In that context, a link isn’t just a link. It’s a place to build exposure and make an impression on your target audience.

An SEO package can easily end up sending the wrong message or appealing to the wrong audience, because they have no idea what your business goals are. All they know is that you want to rank in the search engines. And that’s all an SEO package can possibly “care” about.

3. Packages Can Only Promise Superficial Results

SEO packages are built around very simplistic goals. If an SEO package promises 100 links, that’s what you get: 100 links. If an SEO package promises 10 links from sites with a domain authority higher than fifty, then, well, you get 10 links from sites with a domain authority higher than 50. And so on.

These are not business goals.

SEOs who work for package companies have no incentive to measure the success of their efforts. They have no incentive to measure traffic, conversions, engagement, or social media activity. Very few of them will. There’s simply no reason for them to. Their only goal is to build a certain number of a certain kind of link. That’s it.

Yes, some of them will offer additional services like website audits, a specific number of on-site pages, and so on, but these are approached in the same way. You will get the number of pages they promised, and they will audit your site, but what’s the point? Will they test your landing pages for conversions or engagement? Will the audit be customized to your business needs?

The only goal an SEO package has is to meet the requirements of the package. They have no interest in your business goals and they will not design campaigns around them. The only results you can be sure to get are the results promised in the package.

Imagine a traditional marketer that tried to sell you on the benefits of their package: 10 classified ads, 5 magazine ads, and 1 radio spot each month, no questions asked about your business. You wouldn’t accept that. You’d ask for estimates of ROI or the number of people who would encounter the ad, and you’d want to talk to them about your business strategy, target audience, and brand image.

That’s how digital marketing works. Don’t let SEO packages suck you in with the allure of easy to keep promises. Hire an SEO consultancy and meet your real business goals.

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SEO Predictions for 2013

One of the keys to success, in almost any business discipline, is the ability to see things coming. Following trends and using your knowledge to extrapolate the future is a vital skill, and this is especially true for internet marketers. SEOs, in particular, need to understand how technology, commercial intent, and consumer expectations will influence Google, search engines, social networks, and influencers.

Here’s how we expect SEO to change in the year ahead. We hope this knowledge will help you stay ahead of the competition and find your corner of the market.

1. Gray-Hat Won’t Cut It Anymore

Gray-hat SEO walks the fine line between spam and Google’s webmaster guidelines. Gray-hats don’t use automated link building techniques and typically don’t buy links (there’s some debate on this).

However, a gray hat will engage in many link building techniques that aren’t justifiable as marketing separate from the search engines. For example, they’ll build links from obscure websites that are rarely visited and have little chance of growing. They’ll build links from directories that nobody uses. They’ll fill their sites and guest posts with content about a keyword, instead of content meant to be helpful for users. And so on.

The Penguin and Panda updates have already robbed gray-hat tactics of much of their value, and we expect this trend to continue. While it will likely still be possible to rank using gray-hat tactics, you will struggle more frequently, lose past results, and play catch-up quite often.

Focus on SEO tactics that have direct benefits which aren’t directly related to rankings and search traffic. Link building efforts should also be brand building efforts, and SEO campaigns should be designed so that they are profitable even in the absence of search engine benefit.

2. Website Structure, UI, and UX Will Be Primary Ranking Factors

We don’t expect these factors to overtake links as a ranking factor, but we do expect them to have an increasingly notable impact on your search traffic.

Google used a combination of human quality raters and machine learning to develop Panda, and now they are asking searchers directly to compare search results for their quality as well. We expect more updates to come, and the user interface and user experience are going to play a big part in this.

Why would Google care? Searchers think of the search results as part of the Google experience. If sites rank well with poor UI and UX, users think Google has a poor UI and UX. That’s bad branding for Google.

3. Bounce Rate and Loading Time Will Matter

It’s already been over two years since Google announced that loading time was a ranking factor, and we expect more emphasis on it this year, especially for one particular reason: mobile. The number of people who access the web from their mobile device is now nearly half the number who access from PC. Most people who access the web from their mobile device have a comparatively slow connection, meaning loading time is more noticeable.

Users tend to bounce off of a site if it doesn’t load within seconds. Eighty percent of users expect a web page to load within 5 seconds, and 60 percent expect it to load in just 3 seconds. Google has incentives to devalue these pages when there are other relevant alternatives.

Speaking of bouncing off a site, we also expect bounce rate to factor into the rankings. Yes, we know, when Danny Sullivan asked Matt Cutts about bounce rate, he appeared to say that they don’t use it. However, Matt Cutts’ answer was actually a bit evasive:

“Webspam doesn’t use Google Analytics. I asked again before this conference and was told, No, Google does not use analytics in its rankings.”

We never suspected Google was using Analytics to rank pages, at least not directly. But we arecertain Google is tracking user behavior through its search engine. How else could Google Suggest work?

We are confident that Google can and will track bounce rate by measuring when users return to the SERP. If they return to the SERP and click on a different search result, this could indicate that they didn’t find what they were looking for from the page. This is what we mean when we say that bounce rate will become a primary ranking factor.

4. Content that Solves no Problem for Users Will Rarely Rank

With all the machine learning and surveys being done at Google, they will only get better at spotting useless content. We expect this type of content to rank only in cases where there is simply no other option, where there are literally only low quality results for the topic in question.

This is especially true for topics that have a social component. Social sharing has become an activity that far more people are involved in compared to link building. The search engines can’t ignore these signals, and if there is an on topic page with social metrics, it is most likely going to outrank a page without the social networks by the end of this year.

We’re not claiming that social metrics will become more important than links. We are simply stating that they will be a necessary component in all but the most stale topics on the web.

5. Who Shares Will Matter

Perhaps more important than a growing emphasis on social metrics, we expect power influencers to have more impact on the search results. If Rand tweets something or shares it in Google+, this will have more influence on search results than if a brand new profile or somebody with few followers shares the same page.

6. Google Will Be Even More Strict About Link Manipulation

We almost feel like we shouldn’t even have to say it at this point, but links from link directories, article directories, forums, blog comments, low quality guest posts, social bookmarking sites, and so on will be essentially useless by the end of 2013. These types of links won’t likely get you penalized, but they will pass very little value and do nothing for your long term rankings.

7. Authorship Will Influence Rankings

Authorship will allow Google to follow a single writer across all the properties that they have contributed to. By tracking the results of each piece of content, the search engine will be able to issue a score to each writer. This will be factored into Google’s quality score for each page, which will in turn have an impact on rankings. Authorship will also play a part in which social shares matter the most, since influencers will tend to have a higher author rank.

8. Content Marketing and Social Media Optimization Will Be Key Ingredients

While it’s not easy or successful in the long term, it’s still possible for sites to rank without genuine content marketing or a social media strategy. We don’t expect this to remain true by the end of the year.

We expect the search engine to increasingly filter out the influence of low quality sites. There will be a threshold of quality. Sites that have no links from sites below this threshold will simply not rank for anything competitive.

The same will be true for social media. Sites that have little or no social activity associated with them will fail to turn up in the search results for any competitive search term.

None of this is to say that sites without content marketing and social media will never turn up in the search results. We just don’t expect them to show up in cases where relevant pages that dohave content marketing and social metrics exist.

9. Co-Citations Will Replace Anchor Text

Anchor text is simply too easy to manipulate, and Google no longer has any reason to use it as an important ranking signal. Google will instead look for correlations between brand names and keyword phrases. It will pull this information from search queries and it’s massive database of crawled pages throughout the web. Similar factors, like the proximity of keywords to links, as well as their synonyms, will also play a part.

10. Pinterest Will See Continued Growth

This social photo sharing site lost a bit of steam in the second half of 2012. Pinterest will most likely go through some re-branding in an effort to expand it’s audience beyond the rural homemakers that helped build the network, allowing Pinterest to break into a more mainstream market. This will reduce the click through rate a bit, but the overall referral numbers will get higher as traffic grows on the site. We expect it to be hard to ignore Pinterest as a marketing channel in 2013, although not necessarily impossible.

Conclusion

For those who have become accustomed to sub-part marketing techniques, 2013 is going to be a difficult year. We expect to see some players leave the industry in search of other short-term strategies.

For those who stick around, the focus is going to shift toward brand building and profitability even in the absence of rankings. This is going to make it a tougher industry to work in, but a more lucrative one as well. As online activity continues to grow in the US and the world, more opportunities will open up and we’ll see our earning potentials grow.

That’s our take on things. Where do you think things are headed in 2013? Let us know in the comments, and pass this along if you liked what we had to say.

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