Advanced link buildingpost Penguin

Speaker: Nick Garner, CEO, SearchWorks / Brand Ambassador AnalyticsSEO

A clear plan on how to linkbuild using methodologies outlined in the presentation: - the sort of sites you should get links from- the sites not worth dealing with - how much you should pay for 'content placement'- how you calibrate the quality, relevance and number of new links over time, - how to avoid a Google penalty, whilst pushing your SEO hardA budgeting formula you can use, to work out what it takes to rank their site on a given phraseA analyticsseo.com 'fremium' account with unlimited functionality for one domain,

Summary viewIf you're not that technical...

Penguin

It's not a bird with a chainsaw

It's a search engine on a link slashfest!

Links● A link is a vote● Google has made it so votes are harder to fake easily.● Google likes this because it makes industrial scale link building harder● And this theoretically makes the search results better because spamming doesn't win● And pushes brands to use adwords more because SEO is harder and less accountable (not provided)● And Google makes more profit...

Google $$$

Adwords

Penguin

After: Base of links you can use to get ranked

Before: Base of links you could use to get ranked

Now we get technical...

Insight into Penguin

You can get answers to the following questions (and more!)● Is this all just a conspiracy to sell Google Adwords?● Are footer links a cause of a Penguin penalty?● Does the age of my domain play a role in this update?● How important is link velocity (AKA link growth)?● What about the number of linking root domains (domain popularity)?● Does the number of indexed pages of a site decide between winners and losers?● Are site-wide links a factor in the Google Penguin 3 update?● Does the hosting country of my site matter?● Does it matter from which country my links come from?● Do social shares help boost rankings?● How can TitleRank be used in the post-penguin era? and what does it tell?● What does Power*Trust have to do with it?● How does Google look at the Deep Link Ratio site?● Are big sites with a lot of rankings in favor over small ones with only a few?● How does Alexa as a traffic indicator matter in the Penguin 3 update?

Read more: http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/google-penguin-3-update/#ixzz2JpnjNAwY

Link building

1. Plan out: a. Number of links to rankb. Quality of linksc. Rate at which you need new links

2. Decide on anchor text mix3. Begin Outreach

a. Research processes b. Solicitation tactics

"it's amazing how it all works outwhen you have a good plan" Quote: Clever person with a plan

Competitor / competition analysis

Google SERPS data.

Excellent Link Data

For Onsite housekeeping (soon to have 'deep' link analysis)

Because clients like Moz

Excel - Lots of Excel!

http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/

This guy is a hero to SEO!

Understanding Landscape

Direct and indirect competitors

Get Share of Search

Share of search comes from using a basket of phrases and scraping Google SERPS from a given country TLD of Google. Once we have this data there are 3 things that you will find useful:

● Who has the greatest share of search amongst a given keyword set and so know who you compete with overall and where you stand against them using a simple percentage metric

● Sites you can approach for links● Ranking sites and suitable inbound links to those sites discovered by Majestic.

Get Share of Search (free Excel tool here: http://searchworks.eu/tools )

SiteFinder. How to use it.

1. Make sure you have SEO tools enabled in excel 2010 or newer2. Pick your keywords...carefully. Avoid brand phrases. 3. Paste the keywords cost per click and search volumes into SiteFinder4. Config to country version of google you are interested in5. ... and like magic you have share of search!

Share of search is based on this formula

● Volume of searches > denotes general interest in a phrase● Cost per click > denotes commercial value of a phrase● Ranking > the click through rate dependent on the search result position● Equals a metric like this: VOL:1,000 x CPC:£10 x CTR:10% = 1000

i.e. a theoretical value for this traffic is £1,000 if this was adwords paid for traffic. The benefit is a simple metric to order the commercial importance of a keyword. i.e. the bigger the number, the greater the commercial competition and thus a useful metric.

Want to have a go? - download the excel doc: http://searchworks.eu/tools/

Zero into SERP sets

We want to understand why No1, No2 & No3 etc are ranking. So we compare based on rankings

Guess why a domain ranksFor this exercise, were only looking at links and anchor text. Relevance is another story for another time.

Pick 10 SERPSThe more competitive, the more harmonised the onsite SEO will be, therefore its easier to analyse the linkscape

Look at Link growth over timeThese are the raw link growth numbers which we have make our assumptions from...Since sitewide links etc... skew results, we also look at number of inbound linking domains.We organize the data by top ranking down. Where there are irrelevant or skewing domains, remove them i.e. wikipedia.

Link growthBy comparing cumulative link growth, we can see who has been busy.By downloading a full lnk report per domain from Majestic, we can see discovery date, Citation flow of link and actual number of links per domain. But thats a lot of data. So to save processing we can draw certain extrapolated conclusions about number of domains over links from Majestic's historic links and historic new domains data.

Project the link growth numbers

Link growth: staying in line...

A rule of thumb on link growth: be like everyone else, just a bit better.1. An aggressive domain might get penalised2. A smart domain sits in the pack and gets higher quality, more relevant links than the rest. This way he doesn't get flagged up for unusual behaviour. He's just the clever one!

[1]

[2]

Link analysis: Understand what quality of links you need... Majestic TrustFlow / CitationFLow and AC Rank for all links to poker.williamhill.com

Definitions:Citation Flow – This number predicts how influential a URL might be based on the number of sites linking to it. The more links that the site has, the higher it’s Citation Flow.

Trust Flow – This number predicts how trustworthy a URL might be based on a backlink’s proximity to trusted domains. Links from within trusted neighbourhoods are more trustworthy than links from spammy neighbourhoods.

888.com vs Spinpalace.com vs reddit.com

Correlations to decide on metricsThe same data in graph form. The important part is that Citation Flow and AC Rank correlate 97% of the time, so we can use AC Rank spread as a shorthand way of understanding link strength across a domain within certain data Majestic gives us. Citation Flow is the best metric to work with though.

Quality of linksMajestic data again...Look at the AC Rank spread in our set of domains going from 1st ranked to 10th. Look for patterns. In this case, as a proportion of all links, higher ranked sites have fewer 0 AC rank links. (were moving to Citation Flow as our core metrics shortly)

Anchor text

Analyse & categorise anchor text.

To make sense of anchor text, its good to break it into 3 profiles:

● The keywords● Phrase type● AC rank

GroupingWhy? so we can plan understand what anchor text for what quality of link.The data comes from the anchor text report in MajesticAC rank grouping is

● 1* AC 1+2● 2* AC 3+4 ● 3* AC 5+

Anchor text for 1* rating / ranking

Here you can see for 1* links, on average 48% are phrase match links.Top ranked sites have more links and less exact match. Because Penguin is looking for 'unnatural' anchor text, it's very important to carefully balance your anchor text i.e. more random phrase match and brand When you do the analysis, patterns will emerge that work for your keyword / competition levels.

Anchor text for 2* rating / ranking

Here you can see for 2* links, there is a weighting on the top ranked SERPS towards Brand and Brand Phrase.

Anchor text for 3* rating / ranking

Here you can see for 3* links, there is a weighting on the top ranked SERPS towards Brand and Brand Phrase.... again

Anchor text overview

Anchor text by *star grouping The main point behind this exercise is not to set 'rules', but to look at the patterns that emerge because the data is organised in a structured way around winners and losers i.e. top or bottom top 10 SERPS. Consistent patterns do emerge, like winners having more links and more random phrase match links giving a more 'natural' appearanceIts critical you account for the overall strength of a domain i.e. if you are analysing a big domain, to focus on the relevant subdomain ,subfolder, page, rather and have a weighting to account for the power of the domain. i.e. big domain will give any links more power to rank , therefore you need for instance 40% fewer links.

Putting it together

And finally we have a table with number of links, assuming 1.3 links per domain, discounting things like sitewide links that skew results.

We also have the phrases targeted in this instance and the number of links and quality of links per star grading.

Pricing model

Number of Links / Domains: 10 / Month £500 a month

£100 X 10,000 visitsConv: 2% Pot. Rev: £14,000 Risk:

30%

Competitiveness: 70%Power of home domain: 40%Onsite 90%

Time To Rank: 10 Months

Quality Of Content 50%: £20 an article

Quality Of Doner Site: 90%/ £30 a link

Link Spend: £5,000

ROI 2.835% Mktg

Whats Next?

Excel - Lots of Excel!

http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/

We use a lot of Excel because its a simple way of modelling out ideas. Using Excel Tools has meant we can play with more Majestic data, more easily and easily integrate it into the models were working on.

When data sets get too big, we then get into a combo of Access and Excel

And when an idea has 'grown up', we work with Analyticsseo.com to roll it into their platform, so expect to see a lot of this functionality in analyticsseo.com fairly soon.

Breakout of AC rank and Citation Flow

Use a 6 star system for more accuracy and work of citation flow rather than AC rank which Majestic are deprecating.

Stars AC Rank Citation Flow

0* 0 0-6

1* 1 7-12

2* 2-3 13-26

3* 4-6 27-39

4* 6-8 40-59

5* 8 -15 60-100

Relevance

We are working on a 'relevance metric' based on the idea that all keywords hav a degree of relevance to you, so by attributing your relevance rating to a phrase, we can then analyse title text and page content to score pages that are most relevant with the highest citation flow and trust flow, to then outreach to. In theory as we tune this simple algo up, we will be able to build a 'value over relevance' number that will help us in our outreach.

Relevance split out 0* - 5* by■ 0* Irrelevant and no meaning connection with my phrases■ 1* peripherally relevant i.e. core=’online casino’ 1*=’internet betting’■ 2* vaguely related i.e. core=’online casino’ 2*=’online betting’■ 3* quite related i.e. core = ‘online casino’ 3* = ‘gambling online’■ 4* closely related i.e. core = ‘online casino’ 4* = ‘online blackjack’■ 5* very tightly related i.e. core = ‘online casino’ 5* = ‘online casinos’

CorrelationsWe are doing a lot more around solid correlations that help us create useful rule sets. Of course correlation is not causation etc etc,

Here is an interesting correlation:Here the correlation for share of search and linking domains is 100%. This validates the idea that more linking domains equals a stronger ranking site (DUH!!!)

Above you can see a table of linking domains per star rating. Now we have a general idea of the number of new domains and 'power' of the domains we need to acquire to win against these Poker operators.

CorrelationsSame but visually

Final Thoughts...

As Moz always say, correlation is not causation...however we have seen certain patterns again and again in the SERP across various territories and keyword sets.

Shortly we will release the tool you have seen as an excel on http://searchworks.eu/tools In the meantime, take a copy of the share of search tool!

Bonus: AnalyticsSEO

AnalyticsSEO You get the Freemium account (1 site, 1000 pages crawled, 1000 detailed backlinks – for life!)… so long as you login once a month. And...if decide to sign up before the end of February, you will get 50% off any product using this coupon we have set up for you: WELOVELINKS

This PPT is here : http://searchworks.eu/toolsThe Free SiteFinder share of search tool is here http://searchworks.eu/tools The Analyticsseo.com free signup and 50% off offer is at http://analyticsseo.com

Nick Garner CEO

SearchWorks™ / Driven By Data.Multi Language SEO, PPC, Digital Marketing----E: nick.garner@searchworks.euM: +44 7814029751Skype: nicholashgarnerGtalk: nicholashgarner

London: 136 – 138 Holly Road, Twickenham, TW1 4HQ | +44 208 816 8208Leeds: Manor House, Manor Street, Sheepscar, Leeds, LS71PZ | +44 113 207 9283

Thanks!