SEO Blog – cognitiveSEO – SEO Tools, Tactics, Strategies & Resources

After our guide on how you can easily identify low quality links and link networks, we decided to host a webinar where we did in-depth analysis on the “Google Penguin” update.

The following video is an advanced seo training on how you can identify the links that have caused your site to be affected by the unnatural link update aka Penguin.

Be prepared! … it is an 1 hour and a half training video. You can either browse to the topic you are interested in (by clicking on the links below) or watch the full video.

The topics covered in the video are :

• What is the Penguin Update?
• Real World Case Studies on affected Penguin Sites
  1. [Niche] – Web Design Company – icuk.eu
  2. [Niche] – PHP Programming Company – nettrackers.net
  3. [Niche] – Shoes – kurufootwear.com
  4. [Niche] – Food Reciped [de] – www.kochmeister.com
  5. [Niche] – Iphone Water Damaged – www.iphoneantidote.com
  6. [Niche] – Printer Toners [ro] – www.cartuse-imprimante.net

• What it still works after the Penguin Update
  1. An in-depth study on the super competitive “payday loans online” niche.

• Live Questions & Answers with the attendees of the webinar (30 minutes)

Watch the video

This video will help you identify why your site has been affected by the “Penguin Update” … and if it Really was!

Takeaways:

• Find your low quality links in seconds.
• Identify Penguin Affected sites easily.
• Understand the differences between the Penguin & Panda updates.
• How to recover from the Penguin update
• What Link Building Strategies work

Thank you for watching and hopefully you will recover faster now from the Penguin update.

As we are getting more and more customers, we are striving to improve the overall feeling inside the application and we are adding more useful features to it.
With our release dates scheduled at 3 months intervals, we are adding some new ones in version 2.5
Here is a list with what you will get with the new release:

• Competitor Common Backlinks
• Condensed View for the Backlink Reports
• Better Backend Rank Tracking functionality
• Servers Upgrade and Speed Improvements
• New Charts in the inBound Link Analysis
• More “Link Previews” to improve productivity
  
• To-dos Mail Notifications
• Various Bugs corrected

Competitor Common Backlinks

We improved the ability to compare your backlink profile to your competitors by adding the ability to view the common/uncommon links that the selected sites have.

This will help you target, the most easily to get, links that your competitors are being linked from.

Condensed View for the Backlink Reports

If you have a smaller resolution it might be easier for you to view the charts in the Backlink Reports one by one. This is called “Condensed View”. Now you have the ability to view the same report in 2 different ways: Condensed and Expanded View.

Better Backend Rank Tracking functionality

We improved the rank tracking functionality. If in the past you had multiple days where your rankings were missing, this has been corrected now and it will happen with a much lower ratio.

Servers Upgrade and Speed Improvements

We have moved the application to a mainframe of more powerful servers. To put it simple, this means: faster load time of the application.

New Charts in the inBound Link Analysis

We added the missing charts that appeared in the Backlink Reports to the inBound Link Analysis area also. These charts include : Rating Distribution, Deep Link Ratio and Deep Backlink Ratio. We also added these new columns & filters in the inBound Link Portfolio.

More “Link Previews” to improve productivity

While we had them, we were not showing them in some parts of the application. We have added them there also, so now it is easier for you to visualize those link previews in different areas in the application.

To-dos Mail Notifications

When a team member is adding or commenting on a To-do, you will receive an email notification about it. This is great for your productivity.

Various Bugs corrected

As with any software application, bugs always appear, where you least expect them. Thank you for reporting them and continue to do it. No app is perfect. Rest assured that if a bug is found we are working on correcting it immediately.

Enjoy using the new version of cognitiveSEO!

Were you hit by the “Google Penguin Update” on the 24th April 2012? If you are not sure of your answer, check your rankings and see if there was a drop on that day. ( note: there are several webmasters that reported receiving the unnatural link building message from Google Webmaster Tools starting with the beginning of 2012)

Update [May 14 2012]: Due to the popularity of this article I have created a set of case studies on the Google Penguin Update (video) where you can see, how to really identify how your site has been hit by Google “Penguin”. This webinar was recorded and it is available to everyone here. It is 1 hour and 30 minutes of “Golden” Penguin Case Studies.

This article is meant as a guide to help you easily identify the unnatural links (link networks and low quality links) that, maybe, caused the drop in your rankings. After reading this you will be able identify low quality links that might hurt your rankings (if they did not do it already). This is the list of link topics that I will present:

1. Link Networks
2. Footer Links
3. Blogrolls & other blocks of links
4. Site-wide Links
5. Blog Comments
6. Forum profile links & signatures
7. Web Directory links
8. Article Directory links
9. Anchor Text Distribution

1. Link Networks

Over 90% of the Link Networks are easy to spot, both by the human eye and by the Google algorithm.

Most Link Networks have the following common patterns:

• Architected from Blogs and Forums, because they are easy to automate and replicate.
• Links try to look as natural as possible by being put inside the content of a blog post or forum thread.
• The owner of a link network rarely puts the effort to generate links back to each of the generated blog posts. This means that each and every post has a probability of having 0 or a small number of backlinks pointing to them.
• Each site from the link network, links out to at least 2 common money sites.

To find the links coming from link networks to your site you need to filter down the backlinks by blog posts and forum thread links, that are positioned in content, and have a low metric (Pagerank, Mozrank, ACrank etc) and a low number of incoming links to the actual backlink. The hardest part is to filter large lists of links by in Content and type of link (blog post, forum page etc). You can either do it by hand or use a tool that has the ability to make these classifications.

2. Footer Links

Footer links are totally legit, when they appear in a natural number, correlated to the distribution of the visual positions on a page, of all your backlinks.

When these numbers tend to go up, and there is no other competing site in your niche that has stood the test of time in the same SERP positions, than this will raise a red flag to Google.

Usually footer links are aquired from sites that:

• sell links
• are involved in link exchange schemes
• have widgets or plugins installed (usually for SERP manipulation)
• “powered by” links ( ex : WordPress)
• partners of your business
• clients that link back to you

If you only find a few links compared to your entire backlink profile than there is no real problem here. If instead you get a long list of links, you might have a problem. There are situations when Google does not flag footer links … BUT … no one says that they are not discarded from Google’s ranking algorithm. One situation is for Godaddy, where they have almost 90% of their links coming from footer links. We checked their site with our tool after we saw the post by Yoast where he explained “GoDaddy’s spammy link building techniques”.

3. Blogrolls & other Blocks of Links

Blogrolls were abused so much, that they tend to be very carefully analyzed by the Google algorithm nowadays…

This category includes both blogroll links and groups of links that do not fit into the blogroll pattern. Here is such an example that is used to abuse the search engines and is not a blogroll. These examples are widgets that are installed on various website and where webmasters get place their link. They might also be considered a “link network” but a public one with no exact control of who includes the widget on the site. Too many links that fit these patterns, might be viewed as unnatural by the Google algorithm and you might get penalized for them. Some of those links can be sitewide links or not.

Advanced link widget networks will be carefull to not have those links listed as site-wides, as they might get flaged faster. Like with all of the other types of links presented in this guide, it all comes down to how they integrate in your link profile.

A natural distribution of anchor text would look like this.

An artificial anchor text distribution looks like this.

We have been extremely busy since our initial launch back in December 2011. We gathered a lot of feedback and based on that we worked day and night at Version 2.0
Here is a video that will guide you through what we changed and improved in Version 2.0

Version 2.0 has 4 main topics that we focused on:

• Fast Backlink Checker – You will get the Best Link Data Ever – great Yahoo Site Explorer Alternative
• Refined inBound Link Analysis – Better Insight into inBound Link Profiles
• Daily Rank Tracking – Get more Control on your Rankings
• A Better Plan Structure – Anyone from Webmasters to Angecies and Enterprises have a place here at cognitiveSEO, now!

Fast Backlink Checker

The new module that was added in version 2 is the “Backlink Reports”, which is the Top Backlink Checker tool that will give you the Best Link Data Ever, by aggregating backlink providers such as MajesticSEO, Blekko, Ahrefs and SEOKicks. This generates backlink reports that contain the most uptodate backlink data.

What do you get with the New “Backlink Reports“ module:

• hundreads of backlink reports to be generated monthly
• generate reports on the fly using bookmarklets
• its fast also
• analyze up to 20 thousand backlinks
• filter backlinks
• search results
• actionable charts
• export data

Refined inBound Link Analysis

A major improvement was done to the inBound Link Analysis module where we added the option to do indepth link analysis based not only at the domain level but also at the URL level. You can now analyze specific URLs.

Even more, the credits system has improved allowing you to use multiple credits to analyze more or less backlinks per site, thus allowing you to optimize your site credits usage.

Daily Rank Tracking

Moving forward we switched from Weekly to Daily Rank Tracking in all the big 3 search engines : Google/ Bing and Yahoo.

You will now have more control on your rankings + we added some advanced features to the rank tracking module so you can fine-tune your rank tracking even more.

A Better Plan Structure

We added more plans to our offer and now it all starts from $19 per month.

If you are a Webmaster, Small Business, SEO Professional, Small or Large Agency or an Enterprise(big or small) you have a place here.

Let us know your thoughts and opinions on the features that were added to this update.

The full name of the post actually is:

“cognitiveSEO Private BETA is Closed – Launch Count-Down Starts …”

(way too long to use it … from an “SEO” perspective )

After announcing it by email to our group of Private Beta testers , one week ago, we are making it public.

Starting June 2011, when we launched cognitiveSEO at the
SearchMarketingDay.com conference, we’ve had an impressive number of
beta testers taking part in the Private Beta phase of our application. And
since then, our team has been hard at work on making the tool better
and better.

We’re so grateful to all those who shared both their positive and negative
feedback, submitted bugs or requested other features.

We couldn’t have built such a powerful tool without you!

Your help and support pushed us to make a remarkable SEO application,
one that will change the way you analyse, track and increase your search
engine rankings.

We are preparing now for the final pre-launch BETA, which will be released soon.

If you want to be part of it, Register your e-mail on our main page.

To your success,
Razvan Gavrilas
Founder & Chief Architect @ cognitiveSEO.com

Notice : As we are approaching our commercial launch in November (the exact date is not disclosed yet), we are starting to “leak” features and info about the cognitiveSEO product.

Yesterday Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google is indexing Ajax / Javascript.

Today we are announcing that cognitiveSEO is doing the same thing … but from an SEO point of view.

What are the “Link Previews” ?

In the past 12 months we have been working on a unique and powerful feature, called “Link Previews” (the actual geeky R&D name was “Visual Based Location”) .

To put it short :

cognitiveSEO “Link Previews” are practically Google Instant Previews for inBound Links.

We have developed a powerful and highly automatized visual crawler that can render any webpage (including Javascript/AJAX based ones … just like Google does) and has the ability to identify the position on the page of the inBound Links you are interested in. Our system will give you the full screenshot and then highlight the identified links on the page. We go further and check if the link is a Javascript Link or a Hidden Link.

This is pretty neat, as now you will be able to browse your backlinks visually.

Imagine that! Here is a visual preview:

The “Link Previews” identify where your inbound links are positioned and if the links are visible on the page. To be more exact, this is what our seo tool can tell us about a link:

• The Link is positioned in the Header of the page
  
• The Link is positioned in the Body of the page
• The Link is positioned in the Footer of the page
• The Link is Hidden or “Javascript Genererated”
  

It is important to mention that the visual renderer does this on a large scale for hundreds of thousands of links … and it works pretty damn quick, squashing every CPU cycle from the crawling machines.

5 outstanding things “Link Previews” can do for You

1. Fast Analysis & Browsing of Backlink Profiles

2. Find Hidden and Javascript Links (facebook comments for example)

3. Understand how many backlinks are positioned in the Header , Body or Footer of the page (you can do this for either your sites or your competitors)

4. Identify unnatural patterns in Backlink Profiles

5. Manage & Monitor your Links visually

In the following days we will update the blog with more outstanding features from the cogntiveSEO toolset. Stay tuned !!!

If you did not register yet for the cogntiveSEO Beta please do so. You will ne notified before anyone else when we launch this month.

What do you think about the “Link Previews” feature and concept ?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas. What other creative use cases would you find for the “Link Previews” ?

Disclaimer: this is the author’s personal opinion and is not the opinion or policy of cognitiveSEO or of the little green men that have been following us all day.

Our weekly link building technique column has been dormant for a while as I was link building by guest posts on other SEO blogs myself. You might have noticed or read these postings already. Maybe I will collect them at the bottom in the comment section for those that haven’t yet. This week I’d like to write about a technique that you don’t use for a site that represents a legit business.

The loss of a positive image and reputation can sometimes by itself be more devastating than the actual gain in new links.

I don’t want to preach the obvious things that comment spamming or using linkfarms may seriously harm your business or that you have to use paid links at your own peril.  I hope you know the basics.

After reading a recent post on SEO Book, I decided to explain why link baiting by pissing in your own pool is a bad idea. In this post a guest author whose most outstanding contribution to the SEO industry in the recent years are a few posts on Search Engine Watch in 2007 and being an editor for the niche social news community Sphinn until 2009 lashes out against “celebrity” SEO bloggers.

Don’t get me wrong, I love outspoken individuals that have something to say, especially something that improves the overall quality of the SEO discipline. I have made a name for me initially be being critical of SEO myself. There is a fine line between getting attention by saying outrageous things and link baiting by attacking people that are a thousand times better than you though.

When you represent a legit business you don’t want to offend people that made the industry what it is.

By legit I mean the business model, the niche you’re in and the products or services you offer. Some businesses like gambling, weapons or porn remain questionable even in case you have a sound business plan and only use legit tactics in SEO and beyond.

For SEO, which is by itself a legit business, unless you mistake SEO for spam, this tactic is a nono. You might think you are a “SEO star” or work in a self proclaimed “world’s leading SEO agency” and even write a blog post here or there as long as you keep you mouth shut and don’t offend people other professionals may ignore you so that you can keep bragging.

When you decide to attack the true industry leaders to get links you’ve better have good reason to do so.

In this case there is no such reason. In my example the guest poster on SEO Book uses a whole paragraph to tell us how exceptional his SEO company is. Then he goes on to complain how he can’t get enough true SEO experts to work for him. That would be just a boring guest post. Then he goes on to blame SEO bloggers at large and implicitly the most important publication out there, SEOmoz. He explains that as SEOmoz gave up consulting services they can’t write about SEO anymore because they have no real practice. He goes on to explain that the lack of proper SEO professionals today is to blame on SEO bloggers like SEOmoz who have no clue what they write about.

I’ve written a post on how you get links by nurturing relationships. This is perhaps the most important long term link building strategy. You depend on your peers for getting links. They link and share the content you write and make it thus available to a broader audience. In case you don’t have an audience yourself, nobody knows you or consider you an expert you can’t just exclaim that you are one and that you’re better than longstanding industry “celebrities”.

Apparently some people assume that talking often enough at expensive conferences is akin to gaining authority.

Speaking in front of a paying but limited audience might get you some recognition but it’s the resources you share with the public that make you what you are. Just saying you are the “world’s leading” or “best” SEO company doesn’t suffice. You have to prove it publicly by giving away your knowledge. This way peer review and actual demand decides whether you get the recognition as true leader in the industry.

I’ve been to just a few conferences as a speaker and wasn’t particularly impressed. It’s great for networking but is not enough to become an authority in your trade. When I can’t remember anything of lasting value you have contributed you can’t convince me that you are better than somebody who contributes meaningful resources all the time.

I don’t want to dwell too long on this example but this author blames the lack of educated SEO professionals on SEO bloggers not the lack of actual SEO education. He wants ready made experts to apply at his company but not invest in “years” of education himself. Instead he warns that reading SEO blogs by “celebrities” may even harm these SEO professionals in the making. Instead of reading blogs they have to read books.

I can’t imagine any industry or discipline where reading blogs is meant to be a substitute for formal education, education on the job or reading books.

Are cycling bloggers guilty of not teaching professional cyclist how to win the Tour the France? Are bloggers who write about space exploration to blame for the lack of properly trained astronauts?

I’ve written in the past that you can gain links by being ridiculous. You can’t do it by accident though. Sounding ridiculous without noticing is the worst you can do. Especially when you attack somebody who is way above you and more trustworthy. This is not about self proclaimed SEO stars only. This is about any industry or niche: You don’t want to shout that you are the greatest while spitting on the people who are really great. This is how not to build links as a legit business. After you do it your business looks a lot less legit and you lost much of the support by influencers from within your industry.

Don’t piss in your own pool for link building.

Btw.: When you write in your title tag that you are the” world’s leading SEO agency” at least try to rank for [seo agency] otherwise you also ridicule yourself. Bragging properly must be learned as well. Also advocating paid links in public is no proof of your expertise.

*

In this week I prepared something special in our link building technique column: Building links by being ridiculous.

Some people believe that trust, authority and credibility are crucial when it comes to organic link building. Why else would be people want to link back to you? Well, they would because you are ridiculous.

Just last week I advised you not be ridiculous so did I change my mind? No, I mean another kind of ridiculous. You are not meant to be ridiculous by accident. Instead you have to be ridiculous on purpose. Just consider these two famous projects:

• I can has Cheezburger
• The Oatmeal

You probably know at least one of them and they are truly ridiculous you have to admit. What you may not know is that the man behind The Oatmeal was a quite well known SEO specialist before he started it as a side project which quickly turned out so much money that he ended his career in the SEO industry to focus on being ridiculous full time. Yes, it’s Matthew Inman formely of SEOmoz.

Just take a look at the impressive backlink numbers both sites have in case you don’t know them or don’t believe me yet. According to Blekko icanhascheezburger.com has 730,212 inbound links while The Oatmeal still sports 164,236 incoming links. Not bad is it? As Blekko numbers are quite conservative we better compare them to something we might imagine the link popularity of, SEOmoz.

The probably most popular site in the SEO industry has 259,690 backlinks. So given the fact that Matthew Inman left SEOmoz after four years of existence in 2007 he gained so many links with his new venture in half the time that SEOmoz had for their link building. As far as I can see The Oatmeal is still a one man show so that makes it even more impressive. I can has Cheezburger is a 30 million dollar venture capital business now. That’s as much as Tumblr received this year as well. Tumblr is one of the biggest blogging sites on the Web today, even bigger than WordPress. Back when I can has Cheezburger started it was also just run by two people.

Ridiculous = memorable

So now that you see it works the only logical question now is: I can has links? Yes, you can has! You don’t have to be ridiculous full time. Sometimes just a tiny bit of ridiculousness can help you quite a bit. For instance my avatar is so ridiculous that over the years I’ve become one of the most recognizable figures in the SEO industry, at least online. I have considered changing the avatar to look more trustworthy but by now the ridiculous Mexican with the huge white sombrero and fake sideburns is already too famous to abandon it.

Ridiculous = outstanding

Not everybody can afford to be ridiculous and still look good. One way to be ridiculous is by poking fun at somebody. The best person to poke fun at to be ridiculous is you. I’ve been successfully ridiculing myself in the past numerous times. I have written blog posts like 57 reasons not to read my blog. I could do it beacuse the blog was outstanding enough to stand such a posts ridiculing itself. Also being ridiculous on purpose is outstanding by itself. People are taken off guard. I remember a guy I knew from Chicago who went to anti-war demonstrations. As the police in the US does not like people protesting and many protestors have been arrested for next to nothing he had one advice for me: Wear a ridiculous hat! Everybody will notice you but nobody will know what you are up to.

Ridiculous = courageous

These days everything is ridiculous. Just watch TV for a few minutes, consider trillions for bank bailouts or browse the Web randomly for a while.  We’re so used to it that we don’t even notice it anymore. What? Another financial crisis? Another country bankrupt? Who cares. So it takes courage and lots of effort to even try to be ridiculous enough to get noticed. You can be ridiculous where nobody expects it. Just look at the group postings I’m sometimes part of. Everybody is pictured with their real life serious or friendly looking images. I’m the only guy who has a ridiculous avatar.

Ridiculous = trustworthy

So you see, people will notice you because you’re ridiculous and then wonder “How can this guy get away with it?”. Once they realize you can and why they will adore you and respect you, not because you’re trustworthy and boring but because you can be ridiculous without having to be ashamed of it. As long as the core of your message is truthful you can dress it up in a ridiculous costume. In the past when monarchies ruled the world the jerk aka court jester was the only one who was allowed to say the truth. To this day people trust the jerks. Just consider some late night show hosts.

Ridiculous = hilarious

Most people love to laugh. Laughing at the computer screen is very difficult. Usually you laugh with other people when you’re laid back in the evening or during the weekend. So here you are staring at the screen and laughing. This is really hard to accomplish so you are so glad and thankful that you want to share the experience with others. You spread the word on social media and link back to the ridiculous aka hilarious page.

There is no blueprint on how to be successfully ridiculous on purpose.

You have to find out in your won niche, industry or country. First try by adding conventional humor to your average post or article. You can use colloquial language. Exaggerate. Use funny names for yourself and your products. Just think of Google and their data liberation front.

One day you’ll become ridiculous in the most positive sense of it. Then the overall success will be astonishing. Return on that day and comment here please. Tell the others how you did it. I can has links? Yes, you can has!

* CC image by Sharyn Morrow.