Google’s 2012 Phishing Expedition: When Matt Cutts Goes Fishing You’re the Fish

As SEOs and Inbound Marketers it’s important that we keep our finger on the pulse of what changes Google is making with Search, but oftentimes doing so whips our community into a “the sky is falling” frenzy that often results in a flurry of “SEO is dead” posts. It seems that over the first quarter of 2012 the Ministry of Truth that is Google’s Webspam Team has been on a fishing expedition and SEO’s and marketing managers are the fish.

If you have recently received a warning from Google Webmaster Tools about suspicious inbound links to your site you are not alone… Google’s Tiffany Oberoi shared with the SMX West crowd in late February that Google has sent out over 700,000 messages via Webmaster tools in the first two months of 2012.  This number is unprecedented:  the first sixty days of the year has seen roughly as many messages as were broadcast in 2010 & 2011 combined.  Juxtapose this with the recent announcements from the Inside Search blog about the change in link evaluation and then by Matt Cutts during SXSW around Google’s intentions to discourage not reward over-optimization, and you can see where things are heading.
Google is well aware of the power they have over the SEO community and it’s their ambiguity that leads unseasoned marketers to scramble to make changes to their sites. Rule of Thumb: Until you have data that backs up Google’s claims, it’s better to not make a move.
There’s a lot of discussion buzzing around the community regarding this topic, so we’ve taken the last few days and discussed experiences and perspectives with several of our partners and colleagues across the industry to try and provide some clarity and context.  Our job as SEOs is not just to reverse engineer algorithms, but human intention as well.

Sorry to drag up what may amount as bad memories (for at least some of you) but that statistics class you took years and years ago:  remember type I and type II errors? Type I describes a false positive, and type II describes a false negative.  The easy example for this is to think of a base concept of our justice system: given a choice it is far more preferable to allow a dozen guilty persons to go free (Type II error) rather than accidentally hang one innocent person (Type I error).  This is the tacit cost of a free and just society.
This same logic has and always will be applied by search engines when it comes to suspicious links pointing to a website.  Since any site can link to anything, it’s difficult and risky for search engines to identify suspect third party website links and penalize the recipient.  If that were not the case, the SEO industry would (unfortunately) be filled with Google Bowling services building suspicious links to your competitors’ sites.

The search engines recognized this conundrum and long ago resigned to the reality of living with type II errors.  String every outwardly guilty looking site up by the neck with a penalty and pretty soon everyone will be hanging around with their feet off the ground… The only real thing the SE’s could do is discount links that appeared contrived.  And that’s been continual process over years and years.  Florida Update and the Hilltop filter long ago wiped out thematically irrelevant sites and A↔B linking schemes.  We’ve seen the rise and fall of effectiveness of services that offer automated link networks that utilize ad servers, link boxes (standalone anchor text links resting on the sidebars and footers often stacked up on top of one another), and the like.  Despite popular rhetoric, these kind of sloppy automated link building approaches don’t tend to cause penalties; they are just simply discounted by the algos and rendered moot.  We’re simply witnessing another aggressive step in this evolutionary process.

Reverse Engineering Human Intention

Naturally, Google has the ears and eyes of the search marketing world, and if you’re in Matt’s role and you must improve search quality, what do you do? Asking people to turn each other in didn’t work so well, so what is the next logical tried and true approach by leaders throughout history? Scare tactics! Google delivers in extremely vague messages along the lines of I know what you did Last Summer, but point out no specifics and as a result panic ensues!
You’re sure to get a percentage of folks to have a come-to-Jesus moment, report themselves, and request reconsideration.  They’re likely to not only acknowledge the things that were suspicious, but they may well additionally remove things that were not considered suspicious. You’ve almost got to admire this crafty textbook example of manipulating human psychology. Ladies and gentlemen we are in the middle of the Google Phishing Expedition of 2012 and you are the fish.
Of course a larger subset of recipients will not admit anything around removing existing links nor apply for reconsideration.  They may however have the fear of God Google scared into them and discontinue any future initiatives. Large volumes of vague and looming threats are going drive behavior change: it’s a smart play if you are working at a SE and your mission is to discourage artificial activities.
What’s the aftermath behind these emails?  In a small minority of cases rankings are eventually being affected.  There certainly a lot of articles posted to help companies seeking remedy from the cut corner tactics that have landed them in the Google pickle jar.  After conferring with several agencies and knowledgeable practitioners it’s apparent that a small percentage of sites that have been warned are subsequently seeing instances of certain head term rankings taking a hit a few weeks after receipt of these emails.  It’s important to note however that in most instances folks are reporting no noticeable consequence…

However, it is important to note that Google announced nearly 50 updates to Search at the end of March and many sites across many verticals experienced “flash crashes” in number of pages indexed and rankings during the middle and end of the month. I call these flash crashes because large portions of sites dropped off the face of the SERPs for as many as 4 days and rebounded completely. You can see this for yourself across many sites in the STAT Codex. As these are not clients of ours there is no telling whether these sites received Webmaster Tools messages or not. But, if a site has these flash crashes and has read news of the devaluation of link networks like BuildMyRank,  Google’s scare tactic might cause some sites to jump the gun and admit to artificial linking done in the present, past, or even distant past.
These emails aren’t forewarnings of an impending penalty.  Things are not plummeting fifty spots down, nor disappearing off the face of the Google universe. These hundreds of thousands of warnings are simply saying that there may be as little as one backlink pointing to a site that appears suspect. We even heard of one instance where a site that did some not so intelligent link building back in 2007, and has been stagnant for five years (no new activity at all), suddenly got a warning email last month. There’s no statute of limitations to be found here.
Whether there’s a slipping in ranking following the receipt of one of these letters has everything to do with the makeup of a domain’s backlink portfolio.  Whatever Google is deeming as ‘suspicious’ is now getting filtered out much more aggressively than in the past. If 1% of your backlinks is deemed suspicious and suddenly gets filtered, there’s not likely to be any effect.  If ~70% of your backlinks are suddenly whacked by this newer more aggressive filter, then yes, rankings will certainly slip significantly.
The kind of backlinks most exposed to this recent update are the over optimized insert-your-main-keyword–in-the-anchor-text-every-single-time kind. Until recently, these keywords were being considered by the SE’s, and for competitive head keywords they were often an important pillar for these sites to rank for hugely competitive queries. Now we are hearing weekly about one spammy, automated network after another being obliterated.  Many find it surprising it’s actually taken this long…
From our vantage point we see some basic commonalities existing from an off-page perspective when sites experience a significant ranking loss subsequent to a warning letter.  The sites commonly feature:

• Volumes of over optimized anchor text (generally to the most competitive head terms)
• Links coming from multiple outside websites which show clear signs of being networked (same IP or C-Block class, cross linking, same Google AdSense ID,same/similar coding or CMS technology – double check the links your vendor gets you using SpyOnWeb.)
• Poor overall deep linking ratio to the site
• Low quality sites (repurposed content) and off topic sites

So You’ve Been Baited by a Webmaster Tools Email: What Do You Do?

There are a lot of options on how to play this out, and a wide range of opinions on what to do.  There’s no perfect answer, but here are some thoughts:

1. You have the right to remain silent. Probably best to exercise this Miranda right.
   1. If the links in question are a small portion of your overall backlink portfolio, you will probably not face a serious threat to rankings or traffic. Ignore the email.
   2. If you have engaged in heavy over-optimization of anchor text links, and/or link building from heavily networked sites, you are not really penalized from these links; they’ve just stopped taking effect.  If it’s not a penalty, then turning yourself in for something artificial within your backlink portfolio is likely not going to help you.
One of the most important points to be clear on is the difference between a penalty, and filter.  Make sure that everyone on your team understands this critical difference.





2. If you have seen a large portion of your links suddenly become discounted and rankings are tanking, there’s no immediate fix.  Build the right expectations within your company to understand what has happened and what the timeline will be to remedy the situation. SEO Directors are witnessing things called out today from sloppy link building programs conducted by predecessors years ago.  Make it clear that these warnings may stem from activity from yesteryear, and sell folks on your plan to lead the domain (and the business!) to salvation.




3. (Re)Build your domain’s authority and trust the right way. Some sidesteps may have been taken to achieve an artificial level of authority for your most competitive keywords.  These shortcuts may have worked for some time, but now they do not.  A material percentage of (what was) your meaningful backlink portfolio has been lost.  Make up for that loss through proper link building initiatives that drive the process naturally.
   




4. The old school rules are the right rules. Nothing has changed. Go back to the old fashioned values, they work!  Develop citations and links from trusted sites that are independent of other sites you work with.  Your backlinks should be as independent and distributed as the SERPs themselves are.  Focus on domain authority and trust, not on anchor text optimization and keyword jockeying.  Stay away from automated approaches, networks, blog posts from school children in the Philippines…
   




5. Link Reclamation services are often essential. Reach out to the domains linking to you:  see if you can de-emphasize your anchor text or find some other way to work with the site owner.  Use this as an opportunity to promote new products or enhancements to your services.  Drive a higher natural deep link ratio: get more sites to link to a more diverse number of deep pages. Don’t discount the value of an experienced consultant or agency to do this right way and maximize the reclamation opportunity (yes, there goes our shameless plug).  You only want to reach out to websites that link to you once:  have the right conversation the first time- one shot!
   

The Last Word

Finally, understand that Google’s transparency is made to serve its own objectives. Stay aware of the announcements from the Google Search Quality team, but don’t treat them as gospel until you can verify what they’ve said with your own experiences and data.  Ultimately, we are all swimming in Google’s pond but it’s up to us decide whether we are going to swim with the school of fish caught in the net or if we’re going to be the whales that offset the tide.

About SEO and PPC: Synergistic or Cannibalistic?

Many ecommerce managers wonder whether the paid search ads they place enhance or cannibalize the organic search results. They wonder, in other words, if they end up paying for clicks they could have had for free organically. A recent study by Google suggests that the relationship between paid and organic search is more synergistic than cannibalistic.

Top organic rankings in the major search engines can be construed by consumers as endorsements of those top-ranked sites. If Google ranks a site number one it must be the best site, right? Ecommerce sites in the trenches know that’s not always the case. We’ve written about ways to increase search result visibility with rich snippets in "Capture More Search Traffic with Rich Snippets," but there are other ways as well. Google’s latest findings on paid and organic search results suggest that paid and organic listings are mutually beneficial.

50 Percent Incremental Clicks

             Google's Study: "How Paid Search Incrementality Is Affected by Organic Search Rankings."

Google recently released its results in a blog post: "Impact of Organic Ranking on Ad Click Incrementality" 

Including the news that 50 percent of the clicks on AdWords campaigns that occur when the same site is also ranked number one organically are incremental. For example, if a hypothetical site typically received 100 organic visits from Google from a certain number one ranking and 100 paid visits from that same keyword phrase, the site would only receive 150 organic visits if the paid search ad was paused. So yes, the site ends up paying for some of the visits it could have had organically for free, but it can counterbalance that cost with the additional visits it wouldn’t have received if the paid search ads weren’t running for that keyword. The return on investment for this relationship may be positive or negative depending on the site and the keyword phrase.

To determine this, Google studied 390 paused search ads to determine the difference in click-though rate between organic and paid ads. The original study in August 2011 was highly questioned by the SEO community due to a low number of simultaneously occurring organic and paid search results. Google’s follow-up study controlling for simultaneously occurring organic and paid search results was released in late March 2012.

Lower Rankings and Higher Paid Ad Performance

In addition to the 50 percent incremental click through when paid and organic both rank highly, Google also found that lower ranked organic results produced higher incremental paid search click through. When the organic search result ranks between position 2 and 4, 82 percent of the ad clicks are incremental, and 96 percent of the ad clicks are incremental when the advertiser’s organic result ranked in position five and below.

Google is quick to note, as it should, that individual sites’ performance may vary. Ecommerce sites can run a variation of this test themselves by pausing ad campaigns that run for phrases that rank in position one on Google, position two through four, and positions five through 10. For example, a site that ranks number one for the phrase “hunting socks” might pause its Google AdWords ads that run for the same phrase and measure the change in organic click through from Google. When tested across multiple phrases that rank in multiple positions, an ecommerce site can determine its own relationship between paid and organic search results.

Personalized Search: "Clients from Hell & How Not To Be An SEO"

Linkdex recently announced the last month's winners of their ongoing competition to win $250. Below are three animations that take an irreverent look at aspects of the search marketing industry and satirize real life situations which we often find ourselves in.

First place went to go Alex Moss for his entry 3 Rules: What not to do as an SEO. Alex's film is a cautionary tale about boasting of your SEO achievements at a networking event.

In particular, he has an axe to grind with so-called SEOs who attribute all their success to their own efforts rather that understanding and acknowledging that rank changes can just as easily happen due to "powers beyond your grasp". In his own words, "The script I have written contains situations that are all true – having either experienced them myself or had someone I know tell me it happened to them."

Simon Heseltine has been announced as a runner up for his entry: The Client From Hell. Simon's film is a classic challenge you can face in the boardroom of hell.

In particular way , Simon's SEO film script focusses on people's tendency to "believe that SEO is a switch that you turn on and off, it’s a magic wand that you wave to make things happen right away. The truth is that SEO takes time, and depending on the competition, and the artifacts that you have available to you, that time will vary. Sure you can make some things happen in 7-10 days, but you’re not going to knock out major news sites with legitimate, aged, ranking articles about the company in that time frame."

For obvious reasons, SEW wasn't eligible to enter the competition but Linkdex kindly turned a script I sent them into an animation. My film deals with a question I have been grappling with this year, namely what is the actual point of integrating social data into search?

My script is only the true insofar as I often burst into Mike Grehan's office with a question about "the latest thing" and usually his answer is that social data is transforming the web. The film imagines a future of mobile search where voice activated personal assistants like Siri are ubiquitous and social sign-in on e-commerce sites has become so advanced that they can predict exactly what you want to buy based on your social data and sharing habits.

In the cartoon there are numerous clues as to what data might be used, such as the flags on Mike's desk, the background scene through the window and the writing on his mug upon which the punchline is based... hopefully it is not lost on you!



These are just the SEO film scripts that have been animated so far by the Linkdex Stories competition. Linkdex tell me that the competition is ongoing and they plan to make more – so get a pen and start writing to win $250 and get your video made next month!

An SEO: Pre-Audit Preparation Process

An SEO Pre-audit process will be a little different for everyone. Even if two SEOs followed the exact same template for pricing and scoping the audit, conducting the audit, doing the analysis, and outputting the findings their path and the things they identify would be slightly different. That said there’s still a lot of great content on the subject of carrying out an effective SEO audit out there, and for anyone looking to build a new SEO audit process or refine an existing one understanding some common best practices and other people’s workflow can be very powerful.

Series of articles I’ll try to outline a flexible process for conducting an SEO audit with a mixture of specific suggestions as well as more general recommendations, similar to the approach Alan Bleiweiss took in his excellent series on the topic. This is mainly aimed at SEOs who are just starting to take on side work, striking out on their own for the first time, and/or just starting to develop a small agency, but hopefully there will be some reminders and tips for anyone who offers SEO audits.

First Step: Pricing & Scoping

Figuring out pricing in any business is hard. If you’re an independent consultant or a small consulting shop it’s even more difficult because every mistake you make hurts more than it would for a larger firm. The core factors you need to juggle here are:

1. Value – Creating value commensurate with (and really well in excess of) the work you’ll produce.
2. Margin – Building enough margin into your pricing that the work is beneficial for your business.
3. Sales – Sales can be a dirty word to some small shops that do good work and survive on word of mouth, 

but even if people rave about your work keeping your prices at a level where the customers you can connect with will be willing to pay them will keep you afloat.

Providing the value is a core part of any sustainable business model. If you can’t create value for clients at a level where you can charge enough for your services to cover your personal costs and/or your company’s costs, you really don’t have a legitimate business. The good news is if you’re a competent SEO that almost certainly isn’t the case. There are plenty of companies with an awareness of the need for SEO with sustainable business models of their own that would benefit from your (or your firm’s) expertise. It’s important, however, to make sure you’re always dedicating enough of you and your company’s time and resources to the client to meet and exceed the price you’re charging in the value you’re delivering.

It seems to be obvious, and clearly it is more of a business fundamental than anything that’s SEO-specific, but not creating margin for yourself while delivering value to the client is one of the most common mistakes I see independent consultants and small firms make. It’s important to deliver value to the client, but it’s equally important not to undervalue your own talents and services.

Another difficultly in selling out the services as an SEO is striking a price that creates enough margin for you while also being a number that a prospective client is willing to pay. Even if you can create and demonstrate value, you still need to have a price for your services that is competitive and is reasonable for your target market. If you have the capacity to do enterprise SEO and create millions of dollars in value for clients that’s great – but if you’re only able to get in front of and land clients who are SMBs, you have to adjust your pricing accordingly. Once again if you can’t do that and create enough margins for yourself, you don’t really have a business.

So how do you think about pricing something like an SEO audit so that you can serve all these pricing masters? You have to be aware of:

The Output

Determining the value of your SEO audits will generate can be tricky. One critical factor for mapping a site to an estimated value is the business fundamentals of the company – how much traffic are they driving? How many leads or sales? What’s the value of all that activity to the business? If it’s a large site generating lots of revenue for the company and you can quickly spot some potential issues, you’ll know you can create more value for that client. If it’s a well-optimized, medium sized site the value will be less and so on. This analysis is less about trying to extract maximum value and more about trying to ensure that you’re providing the value you’re charging for. If you view your time as being worth X, and it takes you 10 hours to do an audit, you need to make sure 10 xs is an amount of value you feel comfortable charging for a prospective client.

Your Inputs

You have to understand what generating your SEO audit will entail. This can be vary pretty wildly depending on the work you’ll do and the deliverable you’ll hope to produce. SEO Moz’s Lindsay Wassell mentioned on the SEO Moz blog that her SEO Audits typically take around 50 hours to complete.  If you’ve ever seen the output from some of the “free site audits” offered by SEO companies you’ll know that many of those likely take minutes (or are even simply automated). In many cases the only real hard cost in your SEO is going to be billable hours (your time) so this is actually relatively straight forward to track. Have an understanding of what you and/or your team are putting into these audits in terms of hours and of course, have an idea of what you need to be charging for that time.

If you’re new to independent consulting and aren’t sure how long an SEO audit will take, a great way to get an idea is to do one (or even a couple) for free to extremely cheap – volunteer to help out a cause you’re passionate about or a friend or family member’s business for free and then map future audit scopes to that one. You’ll likely still make some pricing mistakes in evaluating different types of sites, sites of varying sizes, etc. and you’ll have to refine the process over time, but it can be a valuable starting point. (This can be a great way to get started with independent consulting in general – several years ago when I was first getting into SEO I did some volunteer work for a cause I was interested in and built a relationship that has lead to several paying client referrals over the years).

The Competitive Landscape and Perceived Value of Your Services

Finally, you need to understand what similarly priced services can be obtained for. If you’re creating $5,000 worth of value for a client but they can get the same service for $2,000, you won’t be able to charge $3,000 for it even if it seems unfair. So how do you know what people charge for an SEO audit?

It’s pretty easy to ferret out – Alan outlines a price range in this post and if you dig around some SEO sites and ask around you’ll get a general range. You also need to be aware of the fact that a number of agencies offer SEO audits for free. This can, of course, be hard to sell against but the reality is doing a thorough, in-depth and high value SEO audit for free is clearly impossible. One good means of selling against these types of audits is to encourage a prospective client to get the free audit and compare it to a sample audit that you can provide them with. You want to be careful to here not to give away anything proprietary here while still sharing enough to give them an idea of the value and thoroughness of the report.

Finding a consistent means of balancing value, costs and margins, and competitive pricing can certainly be tricky, but we like to strive to create projects with the following distribution of costs and value:

And thinking about this type of value creation, pricing, and cost structure will help you to better price and scope all of your services, including your SEO audits.

Paid Searches Cuts in SEO Revenue

Paid Searches Cuts in SEO Revenue : For the first quarter of 2012, paid search has recorded 30% gain over the same quarter in the previous year. At the core of this increase was a boost to paid search revenues for the Bing/Yahoo of over 46%. This left Google as a relative failure with a 24 percent increase.

We say relative because, when Google sees a 24% bump upward, it amounts to quite a few more quid than that earned by Bing and Yahoo combined. Bear in mind also that these figures are globally based, not solely for the UK. In the UK, Google’s dominance for all things search is absolute and unshakeable. Bing and Yahoo manage to scrape together just 4% of all United Kingdom search biz.

The increase in paid search revenue does however affect those in the Search Engine Optimisation business. Regardless of where your SEO firm is located, there are always only so many marketing and advertising dollars or pounds to spread around. An increase of 30% for paid search revenues means that SEO agencies will have likely suffered.

The reasons for this are simple. Every time Google changes their algorithm drastically SEO experts are scrambling to both explain the latest changes to clients and counter any negative effects. Customers accustomed to buying ad space seldom understand the overall cost advantages to being patient with SEO. These buyers know that paid search properly handled offers guaranteed results. Read again the words “properly handled.”

With SEO costing in the neighborhood of 10% the price of paid search, relative to return on investment, it will always be the better web marketing bargain. It is up to the sellers of said SEO services to make sure clients not only are aware of this but constantly see low cost results.