The Core

I know I've been MIA for a really long time, but it's always good to see familiar names and faces here.  3 babies later I finally am at a point where I can focus on work and am starting to rebuild my practically extinct business.  I've only just looked around a bit so I'm not sure what sorts of things you guys have been talking about but I thought I'd start by sharing some of the info that I've been finding regarding penguin.

Until now I've been running a couple of large sites, but they got hit really badly with Penguin.  I did a ton of backlinks analysis (loving linkresearchtools) to compare our site, with sites that dropped, with sites that are doing well.  I found a few things:

*  My sites had pretty high anchor density with just a few target keywords
*  All of my links were paid links
*  The backlink anchors were very artificial.  All of them were "kw kw" and we didn't have enough variety (click here for ___, Site.com, etc)
*  We didn't have much of a presence on social media sites
*  Our ratio of paid artificial links and natural looking links was just too low

The sites that are doing well have pretty good looking backlinks profiles.  Everything that I mentioned above was reversed on sites doing well.  One of the sites that has a gorgeous backlink profile:

www.brickhousesecurity.com

Consequently, I think this update has been about increasing the importance of social media markers and givin less importance to backlinks and anchor text.  By replacing social media markers with anchor density and other easily manipulated metircs Google can finally combat paid links, link networks, google bowlinig, etc.

I don't know how many of you are still doing old-school SEO with smaller sites/brands but to me this is a pretty big game changer.  I believe that to rank well now requires systems and processes for white hat link building as well as active social media campaigns.

A few ideas of the methods I was planning to use to combat this:

*  Create and promote infographics
*  Create a database of sites that accept guest bloggers and work on establishing a name as an author and then distribute content on these guest blog sites.
*  Run contests to increase likes and tweets in social media world
*  Doing old-school PR and contacting sites, establishing conversations, and trying to figure out how to get people to pick up stories and share our stuff

I am having trouble systematizing all of this.  In the past things were easy because all we did was built up a large network of people willing to sell links, then we found clients, sold links, ran reports to make sure the links were still up, paid through automatic paypal subscriptions.  Bam.  It was a hands-off, easy business model.  It was easy, made money, effort-less.

Now, it seems very labor intensive.  I hired an intern at $10 an hour who is a communications major who I believe can work on all of this, but that isn't terribly scalable.

Anyways, just thought I'd throw out some thoughts/observations and see if any of this rings a bell with anyone.

Hope everyone is doing well! 

I'm not sure social is a requirement at present but I'm pretty convinced its moving that way - not that a site needs its own huge social presence, but that within its niche it should have at least an average number of social mentions, links and interactions. I'm thinking of the social graph as a bit like links used to be - the way people talk about sites online has changed totally from where it was 10 years ago, but the 'if people are talking about it then that's a recommendation' is still as valid today as it was then, if the way they measure 'talking about it' can change.

Harder to game or shortcut to this though as I'm a lot less confident of my ability to create social links which will pass a hand inspection without hard work than I am of being able to get paid links which would pass hand inspection.  That's definitely possible at the moment but all of those social links which are being mapped are really hard to replicate in a high enough volume network to be useful, moving forward, imho.

Have you guys seen this case study? http://www.branded3.com/tweets-vs-rankings

Provides interesting reading on social signals, albeit just twitter ones

> mostly home...tanked

Ditto.

A site where I've done next to nothing linkwise for the domain but plenty for the deep pages is doing fine.

2much back in the saddle?! Awesome, good to have you back here girl

And back with a great post I think you're on the ball here - it all boils down to anchor text imo. Think it was Dave (N) that said somewhere that;

there is no anchor text

I kind of believe that as it would kill a lot of the text link spam. If Google would switch to looking a lot more at neighborhoods, context, authority and social media - they could more or less discrad anchor text - and even penialize for it as they know it's seo's that work the anchors. Everyone else is just happy with a "click here" or "read more".

It's about trying to fake a natural link profile - which is hard for an seo as when presented with a link opp, you simply can't pass the option to have a keyword rather than just the URL etc

Thanks guys it's great to be back here and I'm hoping with more valuable info than just this ;-)

I just bit the bullet and paid for a full membership of linkresearchtools and it hurt but I don't regret it.  I've been running reports on sites in my client's industry that are doing better, and sites that tanked.   The picture looks different now.

I'm almost certainly we ARE talking about an anchor over-optimization penalty.  One of my client's sites lost it's long tail and went to the 2nd page for it's main keyword (which is also it's name).  Looking at the anchor density, it's quite high.  I think if you go over 20% you trigger an alarm.

Now here's where I think it gets tricky.  I did find some sites that are doing better after penguin that have even higher anchor density than 20%.  The difference between their site, and my client's site, is that, upon human review, their anchors look more natural.

My hypothesis is that when the anchor density for a money term is too high, it triggers an alarm that gets a human to review at their web spam center in India.  Then the human determines if those links are natural or not.  The data I was seeing was not discernable to a computer but easy for a human to determine what looks real and what doesn't.

If it's just an Anchor over-optimization penalty, we should be able to recover by swtiching around the anchors on all the paid links that we have, while simultaenously building social media / web 2.0 links.

Of course the problem is doing this in a scaleable manner.  If anybody knows of a service that offers an affordable/scaleable social media service, please let me know.  In the meantime I am trying to build it myself. 

Other metrics that I used was deep link ratio, percentage of total anchors by total links, percentage of links by different categories, etc.  The only commonaliteis I found was anchor text density and anchor text profile.

Hopefully it's just an algorithmic change and the sites will improve as we switch around the anchor density.

My days of making free money are over, now I'm actually having to work for it ;-)

according to this this article, it's not just link over optimisation but it's also the relevance of the content surrounding the link
http://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-analysis-seo-isnt-dead-but-you-need-to-act-smarter-and-5-easy-ways-to-do-so/

TBH it makes sense really.
Before hand people were slapping links all over the pace with the anchor text of their chosen phrase they wanted to rank for.
People were also stuffing their links on pages so diluted in relevance even humans couldn't work out what the site was about.

From G's perspective this is sign of link spamming and something their algos can easily detect now.

I think what we will see more of now is dedicated themed link sources e.g. motor, law, travel etc which will allow a page relevant to rank for a phrase that the on page SEO is optimised for not for what the link anchor text says.

> relevance of the content surrounding the link

Yep I reckon this has been turned up. One dinged site is still ranking fine for terms containing a certain word. The ODP listing for the site goes something like:

BRAND - UK *Word* blah blah blah

So there's plenty of non-anchor links closely followed by that word spread around.