Ranking Factors, Algo Changes, Google & You

Ranking factors

Google+ followers: Social Dominion+Social Dominion+ Facebook & Twitter: “Pay with a tweet” How to influence these factors Backlinks: SENuke, PR websites, Wiki sites, oDesk. Fiverr only if desperateSENuke

Dealing with penalties Is it a manual or algorithmic penalty? Manual Clues Webmaster Tools messages and site:yoursite.com searches Brand name searches - not a good indicator Algo clues Traffic drops within a few days of algo going public* Lack of manual penalty clues *Google updates:

Dealing with penalties Dealing with the algorithmic “penalty” Fix issues that the algo update addressed (e.g. Page Layout Update)Page Layout Update Increase presence on social media Improve on anchor text variety (“Click here”, “ naked URLs) Increase a number of “NoFollow” links Increase a number of deep links Increase a number of citations Wait for a re-crawl

Dealing with penalties Dealing with the manual penalty Clean up any BlackHat stuff, including, but not limited to: Hidden Text/links (CSS, JS or HTML) Scraped/Automatically generated/Hard-to-read content Cloaking (Mobile browsers OK) Excessive ads Keyword stuffing Rich Snippets abuse Excessive backlinking that may have hurt you User-generated spam (spammy free accounts, spammy posts on forums & blogs) See more herehere Disavow tool links: links-main (use sparingly and with care) links-main Check for malicious code (Webmaster tools does a pretty good job of notifying you of a compromised site) Reconsideration requests

Social Media Chatter = Branding What are the most important social media signals Facebook likes and shares (public) Authorship & Google +1’s Tweets and retweets Social bookmarks Blogosphere chatter Press Releases and sharing of the same Usage of shortened URLs on Social media CTR on shortened URLs (ShortTask.com)ShortTask.com Notes: -Do not rely on just one tactic for obtaining all of the above. Instead use a variety (pay with a tweet, Social Dominion, crowdsourcing & outsourcing) -Use the full the brand name whenever possible, unless it reads awkward

Snitching on your competition and other useful resources Rich snippets issues: pets_feedback pets_feedback Reporting rich snippets spam: h_snippets_spam h_snippets_spam Report webspam: Report buying links: Free WP authorship plugins: Google Author Link & AuthorSureGoogle Author Link AuthorSure