Penguin Winners vs.Penguin Loosers

By Michael Busch on 16. October 2012

Link Building Case Study on Penguin Update
Penguin Update – Link Building Case Study via LinkResearchTools.com

The Penguin Update is not exactly new any more – there was time enough to dive into the data and have a look what distinguished the Google Penguin Update Losers from the Winners. One of the best experts to do an analysis like that is Christoph Cemper. Why is that – because he has one of the best toolsets in the industry at his disposal and he is a renowned specialist when it come to link building and link analytics.
Click on the infographics above and read the complete case study.

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CTR vs rankings (about ads above the fold)

By Michael Busch on 15. October 2012

Did you read that notice from google, too? “We are adapting our ranking algorithm a bit – it concerns only 1% of all searches, and if you listened to our previous adsense advise you are now screwed” … well, that is not verbatim, but it was something along these lines.
What has happened? Actually not necessarily a bad thing. Google is taking into account what readers will see above the fold (i.e. what you see without scrolling) – if you plaster that space with ads only and make it hard for your readers to find the actual content that they have come for, that creates a bad user experience and bad user experience is the red flag for google. You will eventually loose rankings.
But what about the former advise to put large ads at the beginning of your text – well that has somewhat been revised, you are still encouraged to find spots with good CTR and that still applies very much to that space above the fold, but you should take care that there is actually some content and not only ads. This is especially important if your site has a two sidebars design with ads on both sidebars. When you then put another ad at the beginning of your content you might very well already be over the top. I have not yet read much about whether this applies to all kinds of ads or only to adsense, but my personal bet is that google has become smart enough to recognize most ads and thus this will apply to any over full ads page…

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What will change in 2011

By Michael Busch on 12. October 2012

Funnily Matt Cutts is answering his own question this time. He is explaining what the google webspam team is going to implement in 2011.
He calls it “back to basics” – but see for yourself:

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Is there a google search operator to find dofollow blogs?

By Michael Busch on 21. July 2012

I sometimes get asked whether there is an easy way to find dofollow blogs with a simple google operator.
And while it would be really nice if we could find follow blogs just by typing in something like
dofollow:on mykeyword
it just does not work. And all rumors that this might come is nothing but wishful thinking – I don’t think that google will ever have an interest to show that data. And to be honest – for the vast majority of google users it also has no value at all.

Of course there are other search tricks that can help you find good candidates, for example if you search for “You comment, we follow” – but ultimately all this just finds user statements and is not 100% reliable as even if the blog owner had intended to make his or her blog dofollow there might be technical problems preventing it (outdated plugins, coding errors, you name it).

This means we will have to cope with the methods we have currently, like the blog search here on the start page of seo-traffic-guide.de.

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Have you been hit by the latest google algo update?

By Michael Busch on 26. April 2012

…If so then you have probably used too little variation in your anchor text.
It is not really new knowledge that having only a few anchor texts and thousands of links with that might not be a good idea and makes your backlinks profile stick out a bit. What is new is that google now pays even more attention to that and you will loose a lot of rankings if you don’t act now.

When Google announced the latest update they said it would come “in the next few days” … well actually it came the very next day. Rand Fsihkin of SEOMoz created a very good video in which he explains what you should do BEFORE the Algo Update comes … well the update is there so if you need hints what to avoid, now is the time to get your site straight:

Rand clearly teaches a very “white hat” approach and there might be a lot of SEOs who will tell you “…but method xyz still works” … and they are probably right.
It is a question of what you want to risk and how well you can manage those risks with methods that are little more on the grey side of white hat 😉

Incoming search terms for the article:

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Two kinds of google penalties

By Michael Busch on 18. February 2011

Most probably most of you are aware that there is such a thing as a google penalty – Your site will vanish from the search results or at least be sent to one of the last pages if you don’t behave well and do nasty things like hidden text, keyword stuffing, etc.
What many are not aware is that there are two types of penalties – the automatic or algorithmic one and the manual one.
And depending what lead to your penalty the way to lift it might be different.
As so many times before Matt Cutts brings us the answer in an excellent short video:

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