Author Archives: Quentin Pain

About Quentin Pain

Founder of Accountz helping businesses succeed.

The Truth About Backlinking After Penguin

Backlinking after the Google Penguin updates has probably had more written about it than any previous update, except perhaps Panda.

But obviously the real issue is how the logic is affecting your ranking positions.

I have been trying a series of experiments on old and new domains to see what is actually working today, and you know what? it is pretty surprising.

I know a lot of people have complained bitterly about losing not just ranking position, but worse their entire livelihood after both Panda (spammy content) and Penguin (spammy backlinks).

And obviously, if you have a site that was doing very well with Adsense or some other affiliate deal, that has got to be really annoying.

But the changes are making ranking for long tail keywords a lot easier.

And I think the changes can be a game changer if you do it right.

Ranking Theory

It’s important you ‘get’ this next bit.

Google (and any decent search engine) wants to return results that solve a problem. I know you understand that already, but think about why it is important.

After Alta-Vista and earlier search engines, the only reason we all changed to Google was because firstly the results were far more relevant, and secondly they were returned far quicker than anything previously.

On a dial-up modem this was really important. Nowadays with broadband you would think it hardly matters, but the number of indexed URL’s was already past a trillion 4 years ago (according to Google’s Jesse Alpert), so speed matters still.

Ranking on Page 1?

Now here’s the thing. If you look for any long tail keyword (that is, a keyword with very low traffic) and build a page for it, it is the easiest thing in the world to get it ranking very high.

Where it ranks and for how long, post Panda, depends on just two factors:

Relevancy
Bounce rate

Yes, I know many have said this before, but it holds true even more so after the algorithm updates. And it makes sense too.

If a search engine matches your page with a search query it does the following things:

It ranks it (on what page and what position to show it) depending on…
It checks its relevancy compared to all the other pages and…
It checks what the visitor does should the page get clicked

That means if you have a title that closely matches (or answers) what somebody is searching for (myth explosion coming in a second…) the visitor is more likely to click on the link (it has very little if anything to do with whether Google sees the Title as being relevant – to look at it that way misses the point entirely).

The same goes for the meta description. You can keyword stuff it and do what you like, but to do so again misses the point (another myth busted here – it’s all about the visitor NOT the search engine).

It is a well known fact that search engines like Google don’t rely on the meta description. This was talked about back in 2002 on Sitepoint.

All we have to do is look at what the visitor does. If the information on the page is what the user wants, or solves the problem, they will stay and read it all. The bounce rate shoots down. Google sees that it has delivered something useful. That fact is recorded against the URL for that page.

If the user clicks away, that of course is recorded too.

Either result will determine where it gets displayed next time for the same keyword.

And remember we are talking about long tail here, not hard to rank for keywords.

CTR (click through rate) is also vital. If a page appears at position #8, is shown 1,000 times and is clicked on 10 times, we have another vital metric. It has nothing to do with what Google ‘thinks’ about the title. It has everything to do with what the searcher thinks about it.

If the page at #7 was shown 1,100 times and is clicked on 10 times, then there is a chance that it will be pushed to #8 and your page pushed up to #7 shortly.

And that depends on what the searchers do when landing on the page. If they stay there longer for your page than the page above you, then again there is a good reason to move your page higher up the rankings.

So how do I rank post Panda and Penguin?

Relevant content. Make sure the page title promises to solve the problem. Make sure the content solves the problem. Make sure the visitor stays on the page long enough to chalk it up as relevant – simply by staying there longer than the page that is ranking one position higher.

That’s really all you need to know. But understanding the logic as explained above means that you really will ‘get’ it and also see why this is actually a very good thing for the web.

The playing field is being levelled again. You have just as much chance as anyone else provided you stick to ranking long tail keywords.

If you want to learn simple logic about internet marketing and get your business ranking, just fill in the form (top right) and join my inner circle. I welcome you.

Quentin Pain
Cambridgeshire, UK

Why is my site not ranking anymore?

Leave a reply

Over the last few months I have watched a page on one of my sites slip from position #3 down to #1,114 on Google for a specific keyword that had 40,500 phrase match searches a month in the UK.

Before I share with you what I discovered, you may want to check out your own site from Google’s perspective. Replace the domain google.com at the end of this URL with your own site:
Google Safebrowsing

For the site in question, this comes up as clean I am delighted to say, so I still had the problem of discovering why it tanked for a specific keyword. More of which in a minute.

But first I tried a little experiment with Google’s safebrowsing tool. I tested it on… Google’s own site. And this is what came up:

If you left the link as is (so it actually tested Google’s own site), you would have seen a pretty strange result. Here’s how it looked when I did this on 9th June 2012:
Google Safebrowsing image

Just to show that I am completely impartial, I also did the same test with Yahoo and Bing. Try it for yourself.

Whilst this will give you an idea of what Google thinks about your site from a bad neighborhood point of view (more of which later) it doesn’t tell you anything about why.

So, I wanted to find out how my particular page could have slipped so far behind its competitors. I compared:

the current top 5 pages for keyword density
the number of page backlinks
the number of domain backlinks
quality of page backlinks
quality of domain backlinks
the domain age

These results are post penguin (June 2012) and one thing that stands out to me is domain age.

In 2011 it was possible to get a zero age domain to rank #1 for any long tail keyword within a few weeks with some simple SEO.

Internet marketers were buying .info and similar like there was no tomorrow since vendors such as GoDaddy were selling them for $1.

Here’s what you typically did:

On page optimisation (kw in url, title, h1, h2, bold, italic, image, video, metas etc.)
Off page optimisation (kw in anchor, articles, bookmarks, images, videos)

And generally you only needed a little of the above.

You could push a tougher kw with a whole host of methods that included backlinking backlinks. Everything back then was pretty simple really.

In early 2011 Google released its Panda updates targetting poor quality sites (too much advertising, scraped content, sniper sites, bad quality content, duplicate content, no original content etc.).

They got this slightly wrong at first, removing some quality sites in the process. Around 12% of sites were affected according to Wikipedia.

One of the main casualties that I remember was top article directory EzineArticles, who lost something like 30% of its traffic.

Check it out on Alexa and you can see them falling off the cliff. (click on the Max option from the drop down menu under the graph to look from early 2011)

Then in 2012 Google released the Penguin update. This was aimed squarely at curing the backlinking problem (linkwheels, spammy backlinks, irrelevant backlinks – all tied up with the single phrase ‘unnatural backlinks’) and put the concept of bad neighborhoods into the frame.

There were some famous cases, and also some examples of paid backlinking services such as BuildMyRank being penalised.

No one outside of Google knows how their ranking algorithm works of course, but we are given insights by various Google employees including Matt Cutts.

There are masses of videos on this on YouTube worth checking out if you are new to it, but here’s one that recently caught my eye: Matt Cutts on Human Raters

As Google move more into human evaluation, some may remember that the only reason Google trounced Yahoo and dominated the search space was by not using human’s to rate sites (thereby speeding up search).

Another of the famous cases involves blogger and SEO expert Dan Thies. Dan is a friend of Matt Cutts but does not work for Google.

Dan and Matt believe in good old clean white hat SEO and great content. They both hate spammers with a vengeance.

What happened next if you don’t know the story is that spammers attacked Dan’s site. They spammed it by sending a flood of links from bad neighborhoods.

The next thing that happens is Dan gets a Google warning about unnatural links. Fair enough you say (or not!!). But here’s the thing.

Back in 2011 Google said said there was no way anyone could attack another site this way. Then in late November 2011 they said there was ‘almost’ no way this could happen.

Post Panda, they have changed their mind completely, as Dan’s case testifies. None of this makes any sense and it is reason I wrote a post on Negative SEO a short while ago.

So what can you do?

In a nutshell, very little. You can contact Google and ask them to review your site. But you must show them that you have done everything possible to remove the links (the links you never put there in the first place remember).

Then wait and hope. The problem is that even if they remove the ‘penalties’, assuming they accept you cannot get rid of the bad links, they are not going to tweak their algorithm just for you.

I have read a whole bunch of papers on this subject and the bottom line is this:

Make sure the majority of your content is original. If you do content curation make sure the curated part is less than the whole of the post (i.e. quote dilligently and sparingly).
Use Google Webmaster Tools site link option to find the backlinks Google knows about and check them out.
Contact all bad neighborhoods you find linking to your site and ask them to remove the links.
Use completely white hat SEO methods to get your backlinks. Guest blogging and forum posts is probably the best way to do this – and it brings in non-SE traffic too.
Ask Google to reconsider your site (via Google Webmaster Tools).

Now back to my disappearing page. As I said, domain age is definitely right up there now. I checked out long tail words going down to 40 broad searches a month and found all top 10 domains were well aged. This is so different to a year ago.

I also found that depending on the country you were searching in, the domain extension is almost universally .com. Even results in the UK major on .com rather than .co.uk.

I also found that on the whole for major keywords the backlinks still make a difference, but as you go down in search numbers, they are far less important.

For example the long tail keyword I used had 3 sites with 1,000+ backlinks and 7 sites with either zero of just a handful.

One of the other things I found was that keyword density was vitally important, but for the opposite of what you would expect.

For my major keyword, the #2 site had a density of 1.3% and the #1 site had a density of precisely 0 (yes the keyword was not present at all).

The worst part of all was the discovery that someone had placed 1,170 links from a single site to my page. All the links that Google saw from this site were redirected to other sites when clicked on.

I followed a trail on the Google Webmaster forums from others who had complained about this particular site.

The thread ends pre-Panda, but the reply is not to worry about it as Google will ensure that sites like this are not counted.

So there you have it. The site concerned has been attacked on 14 keywords and traffic has dropped by 66% for the pages concerned. Unless the algorithm is changed the only get out clause I can think of is to start from scratch on those pages.

I wish there were an easier answer to all this, but from an SEO perspective I don’t think there is. This is one good reason why any webmaster should be looking at alternate traffic sources such as social media and direct traffic.

The State of Advertising 2012

Leave a reply

holy cow of advertising image Greg Voakes recently wrote a column in Business Insider on the ‘current’ trend of so called authenticity prevalent in the advertising world.

The irony of authenticity is that the last thing you ever need to do to achieve it is ask for it. It’s rather like the word ‘quality’. Academics have been trying to define that one for a long time.

Anyway, the thing I absolutely loved about Voakes article was his reference to an open letter from Johan Liedgren, ex Microsoft Director of Channel Policy and now an independent consultant.

If you haven’t read any of Liedgren’s other stuff, go seek it out. Here’s one I particularly like.

His open letter is published as an image on Imgur.com and should make you laugh.

This is how to speak to your audience and have a pretty good chance of going viral all in one. Here’s the formula for doing this sort of thing yourself:

Look at all the holy cows in your industry
Question every one of them
Find one that doesn’t hold muster
Get creative and milk it for all its worth

Telling it like it is wins trust and if you do it enough customers may actually trust you enough to buy from you!

Why is Google asking for a captcha?

Leave a reply

Like many people, I have been using Google search for a long time, but today for the first time I was challenged by Google when I searched for ’0118′ (I was trying to find the location of this UK STD number).

Google said that in order to check that the search was not coming from a ‘bot’ it needed to check that I was human.

Now here’s the thing. Google said it would block me from searching for anything else unless I complied.

Being someone that has spent most of his life fighting beaurocracy, red tape and authority, I wondered if anyone else was experiencing this.

So I fired up Firefox (I was using Google Chrome when I got the message) and searched via Yahoo and sure enough it is hitting a large number of people, and has been for some time now. I guess I have just been lucky.

As this was happening, a colleague searched Google for ‘why is Google asking for a captcha’ and irony of ironies he got the same block message as me!

My guess for all this paranoia from Google is that the number of scammers, hackers and black hat operators is increasing so fast, they are finding it almost impossible to keep a cap on it.

The Panda and Penguin updates to stop scammy sites, link-wheel and other backlinking techniques have been having a large effect too but have also hit legitimate sites.

The internet is a massive battlefield and whilst it seems the machines are taking over, we can rest-assured they will fail so long as humans still have some input.

Super Simple Productivity

Leave a reply

Productivity triangle image The blogger Seth Godin has said in the past that the only thing that matters in any business is shipping; that is, the ability to finish something and ship it to customers.

Another hero of mine, CD Baby founder, Derek Sivers, has an interesting chart that compares ideas with actions and the value of them. In short, the best idea on the planet is worth didly-squat in comparison with the worst idea that has been actioned.

So when it comes to productivity, only one thing counts: action.

There are hundreds of books on the subject, and I have read quite a few of them (mostly when I should have been taking action) but it all boils down to the following steps:

Write a list of your most important projects (do this first and amend as and when)
Write a list of the actions you need to take to progress each project (as many as you can think of, and amend as and when)
Each evening or first thing in the morning (and that is the most important bit), prioritise the top 3 or 4
At the start of each day, do those prioritised tasks before you do anything else (i.e. no email, facebook, twitter, pinterest, linked in)
There are some different takes on this, including a great tip from another supreme marketer and all-round great guy, Brendon Burchard.

He recommends making a list of those people on whom you are waiting for something. Then opening your email and only scan the From field to see if any are there. Then see if the subject is about what you were expecting, and if so open it. But the most important thing is to only do that. Do not open any other emails. Only those. Then close up your email client until you have finished all your tasks.

Productivity is all about doing, and the main thing that stops you from doing is distraction. The question I always use (and ask my staff to think about) is ‘will what you are doing increase sales?’. The answer can be subtle of course. Reputation management may be a priority if someone has placed a bad review somewhere – so whilst it may not increase sales, it will help stop them getting worse.

If you liked this short and productive bit of help, enter your email in the box on the top right and help yourself to a lot more. I would be delighted to have you on board.

Quentin Pain

How To Be A Best Selling Author

Leave a reply

In March 2012, the U.S.C.B. (United States Census Bureau) estimated that the total world population went past the 7 billion barrier, so if there is one thing you should take away from this, it is that there is a never ending supply of new readers out there, and how to be a best selling author just got a whole lot easier!

Like life, nothing is static. As well as humans, new words and ideas are born every fraction of a second of every minute of every hour of every day. And that opens up new avenues for writers to explore.

Put all that together and you should be able to see the possibilities of becoming a best selling author no matter what genre you choose for your next novel (or subject for your next ‘how to’ book to promote you or your business).

How To Be A Best Selling Author On Amazon

Brad Gosse, a “self published best seller”, used some remarkable methods to get his new book ‘Chronic Marketer’ to #1 in all relevant categories on Amazon and into the top 40 on Amazon’s main best seller list. You can read his excellent tips here, but before you do that, take note of how best selling authors have been achieving success for centuries.

Plots and Plans

Whatever you write about, fiction or non-fiction, you must have a compelling plot or plan. For fiction, this is easy. You have Shakespeare for a start. Choose any of the standard plots from there and you are away. Mix them together and you can’t go wrong if its intrigue and surprise you are after.

For non-fiction, there is only one way to break through, and that is ‘step by step’. People are inherently lazy and in our society of abundance, we have more free time, and we get lazier with it. That means you have to spell out exactly what to do if you want people to like and recommend your book.

Write Write Write

The most successful authors write. Period. They are driven by it and for it. If you are the sort of person who has plenty of ideas, but never start (or start and never finish), then hire a ghost writer instead.

The more you write, the more you can publish. And the more you do that, the better you get at it and the more your words (and message) get out.

Use the free publishing platforms to do it. A successful author is a successful author because that’s what they do. One novel will not make you a successful author.

Persevere

Much the same as above. Don’t give up. If you give up, then that makes you a non-author! What do you want to be?

Set a Deadline

Above all else. Set yourself a deadline. It must be doable though. Don’t miss that deadline. Shipping, as Seth Godin says in his excellent book Linchpin is the difference between success and failure.

Not all successful authors do this of course, but to be an author means you write books. Not one, but many. Are you an author? Get writing and become one.

Tell Everyone You Know

Write the book first, then tell everyone you know. Friends, family and acquaintances. Join every social network you can find and setup a Facebook fan page so you can connect with your readers.

Get copies of your book out to all these people. Printed copies via Print on Demand (POD) publishers like Lulu.com if you can afford it, or PDF if not). Get feedback from them and rewrite sections if necessary (but always listen to your heart first – it’s your book).

Once you are happy, go ahead and publish it.

Go Global

Get it translated once it starts selling. There are numerous sites to get this done. Always test out potential translators (and only pick native speakers). Send test pieces, then ask other native language speakers what they think. Look at the feedback. Don’t pick the cheapest.

Being a Best Selling Author to Build your Business

If you just want to publish a book to advertise your expertise or life story to enhance your business, great. It is good marketing. If you feel you cannot write it yourself, then use a ghost writer.

Are you going to give it away or sell it? Placing it on Amazon at a premium price gives it value. It wont cost you any more to produce it, whatever the price (using POD services such as CreateSpace or Lulu) so your prospects will feel they are getting something of value, and you will be enhancing your credibility.

This is just one of many ways to improve your prospects. If you want more, sign up to my Inner Circle for free (fill in your email in the form top right). I will help you get there.

Negative SEO

Leave a reply

Bad Neighborhood - Negative SEO Land

Google has been on the warpath of spammers for years, but the changes they are making to their algorithm is causing a lot of anguish amongst bona-fide site owners and helping to make the so called Negative SEO business go mainstream.

One of the linchpins of SEO is backlinking, and up until recently it was a given that spammy looking backlinks (and those from so called ‘bad neighbourhoods’) would simply be down-graded in terms of ‘link juice’ or at worst, would just be ignored.

Of course no one except Google know how their algorithm works, but one thing cannot be ignored. If you start penalising sites because of their dodgy backlinks, then you are making the terrible assumption that ‘bad people’ wont start targeting GOOD sites and start to ‘take down’ their competition.

Negative SEO Industry

Well, that appears to be exactly what has just happened. And as a result, an industry that was always very much on the fringe is starting to become big business – yes: the Negative SEO industry.

Imagine what you could do to a competitor if Google decided that some of the links to that site were considered spammy and actually reduced or penalised the value of that site? How much would it cost to outsource some cheap black-hat SEO company to totally trash your competitors? You can buy thousands of instant links from many sources online right now (just search for ‘cheap backlinks’).

The feedback is getting louder and louder on this one. Take a look at SEOBook‘s excellent post to see some real examples of this.

They will open your eyes to something you may find you have no control over whatsoever. It is of course not proven (and can never be so long as search algorithms are kept secret) but the evidence is pretty convincing.

http://www.seobook.com/negative-seo-outing

How Do You Get Your Bounce Rates Down?

2 Replies

Bounce rates chart image One of the most annoying metrics used by SEs (Search Engines) are bounce rates. The higher they are, the less well you will do.

What is a Bounce Rate?

Someone searches for an answer to a problem, or for some further information to help solve a problem. It could be as simple as ‘cheapest iPad’ or as complex as ‘how do I build a nuclear power plant’.

The SE brings up a list of likely pages and the searcher clicks on the most relevant looking result.

If the page they land on is not relevant they leave and search again.

They have just ‘bounced’ off the page. And that page will get flagged as ‘not relevant’ for this search. That means in future, an SE is less likely to bring that page up in the results for that term.

Are all Bounce Rates the same?

No. A bounce rate is determined by the search that took the searcher there. If a page is about ‘how to setup a Facebook timeline’ and that is exactly what the searcher was looking for and what the SE brought up in the search results, then it is probably that the searcher would stay and read the whole page. Great. Result right?

She came, she saw, she left!

Well, not necessarily. If the searcher then exited that page back to the SE to look for further information, or was just simply satisfied already and did something else, then we are back to bounce rates again. She came, she saw, she left!

But what we don’t know (because the SEs are unlikely to ever tell us) is whether the time spent on one page counts for more than the number of people hitting the page then exiting the site.

Plain common sense tells me that all those incredible brains in SE land must have thought of this, so we can assume that length of time on a page (and on a site) has a big part to play when used in conjunction with bounce rates.

We do know that the length of time on a site is important (it is one of the key metrics shown in Google Analytics for example), but as I say, what we don’t know is how that relates to bounce rates.

Non-search Bounce Rates

Here’s another scenario. Someone lands on your page through some direct link (i.e. not via a search). If they exit the site (and the statistics are being tracked through an SE) then the bounce rate of that page will increase. But in this case it is not tied into a search term. There is no relevant relevancy for the statistics! Think about that.

How to reduce your Bounce Rates

So, on to the ‘what to do about bounce rates’ part. It is all down to site navigation. Whatever page someone lands on, and however it was that they arrived there in the first place, always give them some good reason to continue reading.

At the end of each page, add some relevant links. Ideally these will be links to further pages in your site. But you can also include an external link or two if they are useful and relevant.

The most successful site in the world in terms of SEs is Wikipedia. Look at the number of internal and external links they have. They must be doing something right.

Here’s something you could also try. Give your readers a choice. Do this on your main traffic pages. Rather than go straight into the detail when they land. Write an introduction, then give them a choice of how to continue reading. For example, on a glossary I compiled, I give readers the choice of going to the A-N section or the M-Z section. My average bounce rates dropped from 90% to 46%. That also meant my overall site bounce rate reduced.

It doesn’t matter which way you look at this. If your bounce rate goes down, it is a good thing.

Gaming the System?

It could very easily be argued that this is gaming the system. Trying to cheat somehow. Well, I guess that may be true, but wait a minute. The easiest way to find things is to categorise them. To use some kind of pigeon hole and place things in there.

Connect them with easy to choose links and you get a useful system. It is what a dictionary does. It is what Wikipedia do. Organise your site so it connects together with shorter articles if necessary. Join everything up so your reader can more easily navigate your site and choose what they want to read.

Taking my own advice on Bounce Rates – NOT!

I could have done the same thing here. But I wanted to give you all the information in one go. If this page fails because some SE algorithm decides its bounce rate is more important than its content, so be it.

Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

How Do You Get More Customers For Your Local Business?

Leave a reply

Well, how do you get more customers for your local business? Let’s start with a poll I did on my free bookkeeping course site (AccountingForEveryone.com).

I asked ‘what would help your business most?’ and 54% said more customers. I guess it sounds obvious, but look at all the options:

More customers/prospects
Become well known as an expert
Create a new/better website
Get on page 1 of Google
Sell your services at a higher price
None of the above

If you search for marketing products (or get calls from marketers) they tend to be pushing SEO followed by Website Design.

Also, try phoning around your local web companies and ask them about ‘customer acquisition’ or ‘lead generation’. I can tell you now you are likely to come up with a blank.

This is because the internet may seem very old and established, but it isn’t. Most of the businesses peddling SEO and web services are techie types. The most up to date offer services such as backlinking, social media and mobile.

But they miss the point as my little survey shows. Businesses want more prospects. Everything else is boring detail or technical jargon they really don’t care about.

Now, if you are reading this because you are a small business rather than one trying to sell these services to another, please read on as this is for you…

The golden rule of marketing is to stand out. And to do that all you need to do is find out what your competitors are doing and do it better.

If you then get a little pro-active and let people know that you are better, then you had better be prepared for a lot of customers!

How do I know that? well, apart from experience, there is logic in it. If you have something that people want or need, then you are in business, right? Yes.

So if you run a restaurant, have you looked at all the other restaurants in your area? If not, take a day off and go and photograph them. You will immediately see how you can improve your biggest and cheapest advertising space: your shop front.

Do you have your telephone number up there? Do you have your web address? Do you have your Facebook page? (if you haven’t claimed your page yet, do it now). Have you got your Twitter feed setup?

Everything I have just mentioned is free. But the real point is, will it give you an edge?

Do you have regular customers? Would you like them to visit more often? Would you like them to tell their friends? Go and check out your competition. Are they offering any of the above?

What you have just in this short post is enough to get you well ahead, so I will end it here for now, but sign up on the right and join my club. If you want to get ahead, you need to research, and I will do my best to help.

US FTC Law Changed 1st March 2012 On Business Opportunities

Leave a reply

If you offer anything at all that could be interpreted as a ‘business opportunity’ then you absolutely must read this article on the new disclosure changes that came into effect on 1st March 2012.

One massive change is that you must supply full details of the purchaser if you publish their testimonial, and by full details, this means their telephone number too!

On top of that, if the buyer buys to resell your product, then you also agree that they can publish your full contact details too.

In short the US government is cracking down massively on claims made by companies and individuals that lots of cash can be made using their scheme.

Now, here’s the thing. Even if you are not located in the USA, but are selling items that could be bought by US citizens, don’t think you are immune!

Check out the specifications here (with thanks to the Internet Marketing Law Centre for this):

http://internetmarketinglawcenter.com/ftc-bizopprule.pdf