Yahoo to Buy Tumblr

News is emerging about Yahoo’s potential purchase of Tumblr. Sources expect the deal to break this morning, but in the meantime John Batelle has written about it. He believes the acquisition is partly because of native advertising and all the benefits it brings, to a search company ever desperate to compete with Google.

Matt Cutts  & the 9 SEO changes we should expect

Google’s Matt Cutts released a new video to explain what webmasters can expect to see in the next few months in terms of SEO. These are the changes he mentioned:

1. Next Generation of Penguin – Penguin 2.0 will try to target more black hat web spam.
2. Advertorials – Google will strengthen its efforts to ensure they don’t spread PageRank, it has to be clear it’s paid advertising.
3. “Payday Loans” in .co.uk – he just said they will deal with this and similar problematic searches without saying how.
4. Devaluing Upstream Linking – another enigmatic declaration, what’s clear is that they are working on making link buying less effective.
5. Hacked Sites – they want to create a next generation of hacked detection, giving webmasters more specific information.
6. Authority – they want to make sure those sites rank higher than others.
7. Panda – They are looking for additional signals for sites that are in the “grey area” and looking for other signals that suggest the site is truly high quality.
8. Changes to Cluster of Results From the Same Site –the purpose is to avoid showing a cluster of results from the same site on the SERPs.
9. More Information for Webmasters – they want to provide them more specific information via webmaster tools.

If you want to see the all video just click here.

G+ gets new features

Last Thursday Google+ made some improvements on their features, here is quick list of what’s new:

1. Multiple columns – will help to see more info at once.
2. Hashtags – click on Hashtags and see related content.
3. Pimped photos – there’s a new highlights tab and there’s new editing software and auto-enhance options.
4. Hangouts expands – you’ll be able to Hangout when someone from an enabled circle sends you a message or invites you to a video – no need to accept a request first.
5. Help and UX – now has a new intuitive interface.

Company Logos on Google Search Results

Company logos will now appear on the search results. The logo designation is part of the organization markup within schema.org. Thanks to the markup, the Google Algorithm will now understand which image on your server is your preferred logo. From this change you can draw two different conclusions:

1)   Google may be expanding their Knowledge Graph results in the near future.

2)   Google could possibly include on-site images with page results, similar to authorship markup.

Bing  - Social & Search all in one

Bing is becoming more social everyday. Last week they announced the ability to comment on Facebook directly from the Bing Social Sidebar. This will allow you to engage with your Facebook friends directly from the search results page. Thanks to this new tool you’ll be able to find on your sidebar, friends’ posts relevant to your search.

What we learned at SMX London

Last week we went to SMX London. We heard some great talks and we wanted to share what we learned with you. James went to hear a session about retargeting, while Clarissa went to hear a session about Google+ and its flexibility, unique features and impact on social search.

A good read

If you want to know more about the importance of Social Medias for businesses, there is a great eBook that can help you with that. Philip Sheldrake wrote  Attenzi – a social business story. The book begins exploring the evolution of the customer-centric mindset that has dominated management thinking for the past two decades. Curious? Download it for free.

Kevin Gibbons, MD at BlueGlass Interactive UK

‘Google+ and Authorship’

Kevin started his session by providing the audience with insights from a recent study he conducted where he compared SEO clients who did not have a G+ account in place with clients who did. The results spoke for themselves. Clients who had a G+ account saw a 42.6% increase in organic search whilst the others saw a 19.5% decrease in organic search.

However, nowadays all of Kevin’s clients are on G+.  Apparently 36% of fortune top 100 companies have G+ profiles whilst only 3% of them have the authorship mark up in place– meaning they are missing out massively! On the other hand, 45% of tech sites though use Google authorship. What came as a surprise though is the fact that only 7% of Google’s own blogs use authorship.

The question on every body’s lips was – so where are Google going next with G+?

According to Eric Schmidt G+ is a verification network for authors “Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance”.

Kevin then moved on giving his verdict on Penguin and G+. Is this the end of guest content then? Clearly, the aim of Google’s ‘verification network’ is to put a face to content that’s being published. As we said previously – we are moving from domains to people. When you think about SERPs, you are far more likely to click on a search result that features a thumbnail photo of the particular content creator – it automatically imposes a sense of authority and trust, right?

A blog post from a CEO is probably more valuable than a post from a junior, the only issue though is that CEOs don’t really have the time to blog. So one solution would be to hire ghost writers and not necessarily copywriters – therefore Kevin’s guess was that ghost writing will soon be on the rise.

G+ emphasis is clearly focused on topical relevancy and authority. In other words, who links to you will become even more important. Danny Sullivan’s opinion will be higher rated and valued than mine for instance. Google is purely trying to connect the dots between people hence the introduction of G+ in the first place.

Kevin advised the audience to move away from copywriters and focus on hiring real authors and niche influencers – to give your content that special trust and authority anchor. Tools mentioned to find those influencers and authors were:

• Google+ Ripples
• Jobs.ProBlogger
• Followerwonk
• Journalisted
• FindpeoplePlus
• And last but not least Linkdex

This doesn’t mean though that you should give up on backlinks, no but use authorship to truly support your SEO efforts and not to replace it! In terms of social ranking factors – human interaction and user activity signals do play a role since they are far more natural and harder to fake. Think of all the content your friends and peers share with you – content gets recognized via social shares. The road to success is pretty straight forward – good content will have good links, social shares and gain higher visibility within SERPs.

So what have we learnt?

• Brands are slow to adopt Google+ and Authorship
• Make the effort to get your team to actively use G+
• Author authority signals are much more trustworthy

What is Retargeting (aka ‘Remarketing’)?

Remarketing is smart way of advertising to people who have already visited your site. Because the adverts are aimed at a specific audience, it can greatly improve conversions. According to Anna’s sources (Criteo), remarketing has shown to make the audience around 70% more likely to convert, moist likely because they’ve already shown an interest in your site and what you’re offering.

Another interesting statistic was that the average CPC for remarketing adverts is only 40p and the average CTR is 0.18%.

How do I get started?

• Add the remarketing code (e.g. above. See Anna’s post for more)
• Update your Privacy Policy to explain how you’re using it
• Agree to the Google Terms of Service
• Link your accounts (it wont work if your Analytics and Adwords accounts aren’t connected)
• Create lists to gather people and then build targeted campaigns.

Lists and Ad Creation

Once you’re ready to create some remarketing adverts you need to do two more things.

1. Create lists and target different segments

When creating lists to deal with different people, ask what you’re going to promote and who the leads are. You might target people based on:

• Pricing
• Seasonal behaviours (Anna’s example was that, if they have bought flowers on Valentine’s day, maybe they’ll buy some on Mother’s Day)
• Locations
• Abandonment – i.e. you can convince people to complete their purchase if they were close.
• Device and technology
• Cross selling
• Target email readers
• Offer rewards
• Target social fans or people who have spent a lot of time on your site researching.

2. Create an advert

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of retargeted adverts around. Anna pointed out that you should consider call to actions, brand colours, clear information, animation, tempting offers, make them relevant to use, include USPs, and use eye catching images.

Of course you then need to optimise and measure

Anna was kind enough to create and share a dashboard to help you do that, which you can find here. She also posted a link so you can see what data Google is gathering on you for remarketing purposes. Thanks to Anna for a great introductory look at remarketing.

Yahoo is thinking of Google

Rumours say Yahoo is trying to escape its 10 years search deal with Microsoft and wants to team up with Google. The agreement was made in 2009 and the purpose was to try to steal some market shares to the Search giant. Bloomberg affirmed that Marissa Mayer has been trying to get out of the contract for almost one year, unsuccessfully. Why did they change their mind? It looks like Microsoft failed in helping Yahoo reach the promised RPS goals. Now the question is why didn’t Yahoo use this failure to terminate the contract? According to the WSJ:

“Yahoo is unlikely to get out of its contract with Microsoft until at least mid-2015, the midway point of the 10-year agreement, when either party can potentially opt out”. 

Will Yahoo be able to find a loophole? We’ll keep you posted!

Bing wants to win Google Town’s heart

There is a town in Kansas, Topeka that decided to temporally change its name to Google in order to honor the popular Search Engine. Probably you’ve heard about it, it happened in spring 2010. The real news is that Bing chose Google City to launch their national campaign “Bing It On Challenge”. They will ask people to perform five separate search queries on BingItOn.com and then choose their favorite unbranded results. After the choices they will be told if they prefer Bing or Google.

The campaign was previously launched in September 2012 and according to a study, commissioned by Bing, their search results were chosen nearly 2:1 over Google search results in blind comparison tests. Will these efforts help Bing to steal users from their main competitor?

YouTube launches Paid Channels Pilot

We’ve been expecting it – since January 2013 – and it’s finally happening: YouTube is launching Paid Channels. By now is just a Pilot program for a small group of partners that will offer paid channels  stating from $0.99 per month. Each channel offers its customers a 14-days free trial. Subscribers will be able to watch paid channels from their computer, phone, tablet and TV. This is a great opportunity for Content creators who will be able to monetize their videos without necessarily using advertising. So far there are only 53 channels on the Pilot program. Content creators that want to build their own paid channel can apply through a Sign Up Form.

Naver: South Korea’s King

China and Russia are not the only countries where the most popular Western Search Engines are not dominant. Have you ever heard of Naver? Probably yes, if South Korea is one of your main markets. Naver is the biggest Search Engine in this Country, it hogs around 70% of the market. If you don’t know Naver yet and if you want to target South Korea there is something you need to know: it is nothing like Google!

The results in the SERP are totally different from what we are used to. For instance the result page is veeeery long and it’s composed by different sections. The first one, the longest is almost always links to paid search results or social media and user generated content. The second is a mixture of whitepapers and academic reports, related books and images, videos, shopping and locations. Only at the end of the page you might be able see some organic results. In a totally different search world you need to use different tactics, so read this article to find out what you can do.

The week ahead

This is the week of SMX  London and Linkdex is going to be there. The conference and the exhibition will take place on 15-16 May at Stamford Bridge. If you are planning to attend, come to our booth and say hello, we would love to show you our latest platform updates!

Great Speakers

Leading speakers who are working with some of the biggest brands in the world will be sharing their thoughts on how to create, publish, socialise, optimise and measure the impact of great content. Speakers include:

• Simon Penson – Zazzle Media
• Andrew Smith – Escherman
• Marcos Guerrero – Thomas Cook
• Mat Morrison – Starcom MediaVest
• Danny Denhard – VoucherCodes.co.uk
• Matt Roberts – Linkdex
• Jonathan Alderson – Twentysix Digital
• Phil MacKechnie – MoneySupermarket

Great Venue

It takes place at the Grange Holborn Hotel, the event will be followed by complementary drinks at the hotel’s Sky Bar (below) but, like our previous events, it is invitation only since tickets go so quickly! If you would to join the waiting list for a ticket please email us now!

Baidu Opportunity/WeChat Marketing

China is rapidly evolving and becoming the world’s largest economy whereas online transactions have now reached a staggering $190 billion. As with any ecommerce market, search is a vital source of building brand awareness and attracting traffic meaning businesses have to start optimising for Baidu to get a piece of the 83% market share. In order to better understand the potential opportunity for European businesses Econsultancy talked to CharmClick’s Johny Zhu. Apart from that we also saw WeChat arise – another valuable marketing opportunity that should be taken into account by anyone keen to enter the Chinese market.

Pinterest

A recent study by Digitas and Curalate has suggested that 70% of brand engagement on the photo sharing site is generated by users. Did you know that only 18% of fashion retail brands pin items on Pinterest? Whilst the average retail fashion pin by a brand receives about 46 repins. This shows the lack of brands using Pinterest leaving a gap in their overall marketing strategies. Brands need to start leveraging their heritage to tell their customers compelling visual stories that create emotional connections.

Primark

There’s no doubt that ecommerce is on a massive rise – but how come then that one of the biggest retailers Primark has not yet jumped on the bandwagon? Apparently its most recent trading statement does make no mention at all of any motivations entering the ecommerce market. Considering that sales were up by 24% in the 6 months to the beginning of March 2013 – there doesn’t seem to be a rush to get involved, but then again aren’t they missing out on further growth online? Read on to learn about the brand’s perspective on the drawbacks of ecommerce….

LinkedIn

In recent weeks we have seen improved search features and last week the site has added even more features such as the ability to upload resumes, presentations, pictures and videos in an attempt to become more social! But LinkedIn’s business faces the same challenge confronting all web companies, as consumers increasingly access the internet through smartphones instead of PCs – as a result it has introduced a revamped mobile app encouraging users to spend more time on the site. So far those efforts have proven to be successful with reports showing that page views increased by 63% – but are the opportunities really endless?

Bing

Last week we saw Bing changing its SERPs – so what’s new? With the new change, you’ll likely see as few as 4 results. But you may see as many as 12 or 14 if you don’t find what you’re looking for navigating to a website from Bing’s results and hitting the back button. So how does it work? According to Bing’s click-through research findings – the back button plays a significant role in increasing the click-through rate on lower results. When users click on the first result but don’t find what they’re looking for on that page, they naturally hit the back button and return to the SERP. When this happens, click-through rates for lower positions increase by five to eight times the rate they normally would. One thing is certain though it slowly continues to gain search market share!

So what’s Content 360 all about and why you should use it?

Before I write about what we’ve just done I wanted to quickly recap on what Content 360 is about.

Inside the ‘Content’ part of the platform we want you to be able to audit and optimize your website’s content. This means we do two things. The first is to find issues like 404’s, broken links and duplicate content. The second is to bring in the data that enables you to make informed decisions on content and site architecture.

To get the data and insight to do this you simply kick off a site crawl and Linkdex does the heavy lifting of doing the crawl and mashing-up data from Analytics, ranking data and backlink data.

Your website’s pages can be viewed, filtered and sorted by types of data e.g. by pages with traffic, rank, issues, internal links, backlinks and other metrics, as well as grouped / filtered by keywords using our advanced search operators:

Intitle: page title
Indesc: page META description
Inurl: any part of page URL
Indomain: domain part of page URL
Infolder: path part of page URL
Inheading: H1 tag
Inintanchor: anchor text for an HREF pointing to another page within the crawl
Inoutanchor: anchor text for an HREF pointing to a page not in the crawl
Inalt: ALT text
Inpage: page BODY

These can be used in a simple way to find your content or in more advanced ways. For example, operators can then be combined with each other and ‘-‘ operators can also be used.

intitle:music -inurl:about

This will return all pages where the title contains “music” AND the URL does NOT contain “about”.

Multiple terms can be combined using logical operators (“AND” & “OR”). The AND “terms” will be evaluated first, then the OR terms.

We can also use parentheses to group the terms:

intitle:linkdex and (inintanchor:home or inintanchor:top)

will return all pages with “linkdex” in the title and with internal anchor text containing “home” OR “top”.

Without the parentheses:

intitle:linkdex and inintanchor:home or inintanchor:top

We would get all pages with “linkdex” in the title AND “home” in an internal anchor, OR pages with any title and “top” in an internal anchor.

When you then review groups of pages on a topic you’re able to see the pages that have:

• Organic Traffic
• Ranking Visibility
• Keyword Reach (The number of unique organic keyword phrases a page is found for)
• Internal Link Counts
• Internal Link Anchors & Count
• Backlink Counts
• Backlink Anchors & Count
• Technical issues e.g. duplicate titles
• Keywords Mapped (The keywords being rank checked that are mapped against the page) NEW
• Tags (Pages can be tagged, tags can have a Conversion and Sale/Lead Value associated with them) NEW
• Value (Traffic x (Tag: Conversion x Value) NEW

When these data points are together you’re able to see what might need to be done to improve performance. For example:

Issue:
Pages that have keywords mapped, relatively low traffic and ranking visibility.

Check:
Does the page have any technical issues?
Does page have relatively low internal link counts?
Does the page have no or low backlink counts?

Opportunity:
Assign tasks to improve metrics and track improved performance through-time.
Issue:
Reduce the number of pages that are similar to others, making little / no contribution

Check:
Find pages that have page / link equity but are not mapped to keywords, have little or no search visibility or traffic and are not paid media landing pages.

Opportunity:
Redirect using 301
Use rel=”canonical”

There are lots of other opportunities the combination of these search operators and integrated data points bring. I hope you’ve got the idea.

Names / Dates / Paths / Parameters / Agents / Proxies – NEW

To improve this area further we really wanted to capture this data through time. So from today you can name a crawl and go back and review historic content analysis.

In addition, to help target these data insights at specific parts of your website and get better site coverage you can set the path of the crawl e.g. to a folder e.g. /UK/ and ignore paths and query parameters that generate a lot of pages with no insights.

You can crawl as Google’s Web Search user agent and because it’s important to see how your site looks when crawled on a smartphone – a mobile user agent.

If your site is best crawled from the UK or the US these can be set as well as part of the crawl configuration.

What type of questions can you answer?

It’s always important to know the questions when using technology like this. The kind of questions that Content 360 is good at answering is:

• Which pages have top 3 / 10 / 20 rankings?
• Which pages have organic traffic?
• How many unique organic phrases is the page found for?
• Which pages have backlinks and where are the links from?
• What are the anchor texts of the backlinks to the page?
• How many internal links does the page have?
• What are the anchor texts of the internal links?
• How much value is the page creating?
• Which authors write on this website?
• Which authors have written about keyword X on this website?
• Which pages don’t have analytics or other tracking scripts installed?
• Which pages have issues like duplicate content, broken links, 404’s and redirects?
• Why is this page underperforming?
• What is the potential traffic that could be generated to this page if it ranked at #1 for the keywords mapped against it?

What’s more, with the exception of the insights that need Analytics access, this data is available for any website you want to crawl.

And because all of these questions combine, it’s even more powerful. For example, which author’s content generates the most backlinks?

The power of integrated data

The ability to collect this data in one place to easily drill down on metrics is very powerful if you’re tasked with using data to making smart decisions that grow traffic and revenue.

I get the real satisfaction when I watch the tasks being generated from this data and watch the performance metrics associated with those tasks improve, which for me is the real power of integrated data.

The future of Content 360

This is Phase 2 of 4 that are planned, with Phase 3 and 4 being close behind. At a time when we’re all talking about Content Marketing, I think this is a massive help to anyone tasked with making their content perform.

Watch this space for another update soon!

Google buys Wavii for $30 million

Google could not sit idly while Yahoo was buying Summly. Wavii confirmed on Friday the acquisition by the search giant for $30 million. The app was launched last year and offers customised news feed to users, summarising online news related to their interests. Also Apple was interested in the acquisition in order to integrate it with Siri. The purpose of the acquisition might be to enhance the Knowledge Graph results.

Spammy users got Mozilla on trouble

Last week Google hit Mozilla with a spam penalty, leaving the latter agape. Even though Google promised to be more transparent about spam actions, Mozilla’s team really couldn’t understand the reason. Chris More, Web production manager at Mozilla, turned on Google’s forum to receive an explanation. It came out that the penalty was due to some spammy comments on one of their blog. Mozilla was trying to be diligent, using the “nofollow” mechanism on this comment’s links as Google recommends, but apparently this is not enough. Google finally explained that the penalty impacted just one single page out of Mozilla’s ~22 million webpages. Here‘s all the conversation on the forum.

What you need is a social proof

What is a social proof? Wikipedia says it’s a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation. It’s easy to understand why this is so important for ecommerce. People love to see what other people buy, how sheeple – but very true! Econsultancy published an article with 11 good examples of e-commerce companies who are using this tactic.

Kawasaki’s thoughts on Content, Marketing & Social Media

Guy Kawasaki is a marketing guru. For those who don’t know him here is brief description: he’s an author, speaker and adviser to Motorola. He was also one of the Apple employees originally responsible for marketing the Macintosh in 1984. Brad Miller of Search Engine Watch had the chance to meet him and he shared with us some precious tips and predictions on content, marketing and social media. For instance he predicted that “content curators will be as important as the creation itself”. He also revealed his favorite social network. Do want to know which one is it? Here is the article.

Emerging artists & Twitter Music 

What do you think about Twitter Music? It looks like independent artists really like it. It has a nice and intuitive interface and it allows you to share music with your followers and to discover what music listen the people you follow. Either  you like it or not, it’s a Twitter product and we all know the marketing power of this social media. So do many emerging artists which can’t afford millionaire marketing campaigns. ClickZ asked an artist and a marketer for their opinions, it looks like this combination of music and social media has a big marketing potential.

Boston Bombings: Truth, Justice and the Wild West of Social Media

As mentioned in this featured Mashable article (and the below piece on Bruce Clay’s blog) social media showed both its light and dark side in the wake of the Boston bombings. On one side it allowed people to stay informed and to reassure loved ones of their safety.

However, as the search for the perpetrators began, people on Reddit and Twitter launched their own investigation, scanning crowd-sourced images and videos for anyone ‘suspicious’. This all led to an innocent missing person, Sunil Tripathi, being wrongly identified as a potential terrorist. It’s another drastic and polarized example of the power of social media: to keep in touch but also to create and spread misinformation.

Also see: Bruce Clay - Following “First Terrorist Attacks of the Social Media Generation,” Twitter and Facebook Prove Invaluable.

ionSearch 2013 Keynote

Clarissa did a good job covering a couple of ionSearch talks including the keynote on Web Analytics vs Marketing Analytics and a panel discussion about what makes a great link. It was another successful conference and the team talked to loads of great people in the industry. If you were one of them, thanks for droppping by and saying hello

Also see: What’s a Great Link – ionSearch 2013 panel discussion

Expanding Universal Analytics into Public Beta

Google has announced that Universal Analytics, which they first discussed last October, has entered open Beta. The new expanded toolset has a number of benefits, according to Google, including:

• “Understanding how customers interact with your businesses across many devices and touch-points,
• Insights into the performance of your mobile apps,
• Improvements of lead generation and ROI by incorporating offline and online interactions so you can understand which channels drive the best results,
• Improved latency on your site by reducing client-side demands.”

Also see: Search Engine Watch’s review.

The Second Most Creative Link Building Post Ever

Last November Jon Cooper published the Most Creative Link Building Post Ever (which we covered), and now he has released the sequel! Featuring link building examples from Jo Turnbull, Erin Everhart, Eric Enge, Lyndon Antcliff, Ross Hudgens, Kelvin Newman, Cyrus Shepard – okay that’s enough name dropping now – and plenty of other great SEOs, this post is a must read (or at least ‘must scan’!).

Other News and Articles from the Past Week

• Search Engine Watch: Brands Can Now Target Facebook Users Based on Activity Outside Facebook
• Search Engine Land: New Bing Feature Lets Users Pin Images To Pinterest Straight From Image Search Page
• Search Engine Journal: 17 Things You Should Stop Doing to Your Websites

The Week Ahead

Pubcon 2013 is taking place this week in New Orleans, and Linkdex will be there to show off the platform and chat about the industry. If you can’t make it to Louisiana then keep an eye on the Twittersphere, as I’m sure there’ll be loads of great advice and blog posts coming through #pubcon.

The panel was moderated by Stephen Lock (Project Manager at Linkdex – @stevejlock), Marcus Tandler (CEO & Partner at Tandler.Doerje.Partner – @mediadonis), Simon Penson (Founder & MD at Zazzle Media – @simonpenson), Ross Hudgens (Founder at Siege Media – @RossHudgens) and Kelvin Newman (Strategy Director at Sitevisibility – @kelvinnewman).

So what makes a good link?

Kelvin: A link that you aren’t embarrassed about. Something you can take to your boss and say that you are proud of. Secondly, ask yourself if is it going to bring you traffic.

Marcus: When we recruit link builders we ask them ‘what makes a good link’ and we make them show us 3 links they are proud of. A lot of people show blog comments, seriously but that doesn’t really count. In Germany you have people working at SEO agencies but they have never really learnt good SEO.

Ross: Ask yourself would the link have value outside the search engines?

Sean: From a technical stance – relevancy is important and the impact it has. Trust is important. Google is collecting a lot of information of where good and bad stuff is happening – this should help you with your efforts.

Kelvin: Good links are the same as they always have been.

What makes a great link profile?

Kelvin: A link exists in context of your competition and not particularly Google. Everything you do is connected to your competitors.

Marcus: We don’t control anchor text and Google doesn’t need direct anchor text to figure that out. Google will pick up on the good stuff. Don’t obsess!

Kelvin: Look at your competitors link profile and if they are good learn from them. Proximity to the norm is the rule.

Sean: Try to earn the right link profile rather than manufacturing it. You won’t have anything to hide then.

Ross: If you open a link profile and you see that you can’t get those links is frustrating. Don’t try to copy your competitors too aggressively – focus on good content instead.

Stephen: Links I find difficult to get are non-English links.

Ross: If you can’t change links manually you probably have pretty bad links.

Sean: Link quality and anchor text is important. Google is looking for bad links and they are looking at where these are coming from – mostly they come from the same area of that link graph anyway.

Kelvin: If you’ve been hit by Penguin then you know it’s link related. If it’s Penguin – it’s algorithmically related. Generally, try to do positive stuff. Rather then spending all this time removing bad links.

Marcus: I get a lot of people saying ‘I got hit by Penguin’ – but they actually just have bad links. If you de-build links you need to build new but good links. If you have been hit – and want to do a reconsideration – don’t hide things  - namely links you aren’t 100% confident with.

Kelvin: You have to understand the quality team’s work flow. Last week the ex Googlers said that with the disavow process you are better off by disavow the whole website rather than the links.

Sean: We’ve seen greater positive returns from the combination of disavow and manual re-submission. Do both – but do disavow at least 48 hours before re- submitting.

Ross: Some link profiles get disavowed – but it takes time to gain links back.

At what point is a domain so badly that you know that you have to throw it away?

Marcus: You will know! Just try something new then.

Kelvin: We’ve focused on getting good writers – and published their content on third party pages. If we’d have published on our blog the results would have been different.

Sean: it’s very much a branding question as well.

Ross: I agree with Marcus a lot. Do I really deserve ranking number one? Can I ever actually get to number one?

What are your thoughts on social media and Authorship?

Sean: it’s early days still, but the challenge is that it is really useful – validating link quality has massively changed. And social shares contribute towards the quality of the author. But the roll out will be tough though…

Marcus: There are industries though that are just not social and Google is kind of ignoring that. In terms of SEO the move makes perfect sense. In general it makes a lot of sense. It’s just another layer to trust links again. We now have so many different platforms. But now they can identify individuals – they know you – having that on a personal level makes it far harder to spam. I am very careful on what I am sending out my friends now. People are becoming conscious about their own profiles now.

Kelvin: We know that the two are correlated – if you do stuff that gets you social shares I will want to learn from that! It is a good proxy to estimate how engines work.

Ross: We shouldn’t be thinking about manipulation anymore but content marketing instead.

Sean: Just try to add value.

Whats the future of link building?

Ross: It will be called content marketing. My background is link building though. How we build links will change much more in the years to come. Penguin and Panda were just the beginning.

Marcus: SEO has transformed into a creative job. We came in as code monkeys and geeks and now it has become far more creative as we need to create good content – that people like and share.

Kelvin: I train a lot of PR people in SEO and they would love to have SEO skills. The skill set we as link builders bring to the table are great. Link builders would be great PR people. It’s a cultural change I believe. Now the pressure is on!

Sean: It will still exist but to a lesser degree – it will become far more technical though.

Stephen: People were struggling with SEO but I believe they are more likely to get content marketing.

Kelvin: It might have a better reputation than link building but it will be confusing.

All agree! But it’s definitely a better term than inbound!

What are your favourite link building tools?

Ross: Opensite Explorer, fresh web explorer from SEOmoz, and Google blog search for finding mentions online.

Kelvin: LinkedIn  – gives you names and the company an individual works for. You can use an ‘email finder’ – looking for their Avatar. Then you have their email. Okay, it doesn’t give you a link but you will be able to get in touch with that person.

Marcus: It works with Gmail as well. I use Author-rank – it shows you authors and enables you to get in touch with influential people. //////////

Sean: Buzzstream – is good to scale outreach.  Check my links in chrome – so that u aren’t missing anything. //////////

Kelvin: The idea of content is great but you won’t get anywhere without outreach. Stumple upon page discovery works well too.

Marcus: Write a very comprehensive article and be generous with linking. We will buy traffic on AdWords and we have an amazing success rate. Stumble upon page discovery is great too.

Sean: Facebook is pretty good. Especially with its latest enhancement and the potential to share that content now.

Scaling link building is a big topic now….

Ross: Build something you can gain equity with – email subscribers, followers, and friends – you will be able to distribute your content to that network.

Sean: there are left and right brain people. Some are better with the technical parts and others are better with the creative stuff – and that is something we really need to take into account now when recruiting and executing a campaign.

Kelvin: Imagine you are given the task to get links from fashion bloggers – you should not be paying for influencers to link to you but pay them for writing about you!

Marcus: It’s always good to be flattering and charming. Approach them friendly! Journalists often don’t get paid well so pay them more and they will be grateful and write a compelling article.

Kelvin: You should act as a conductor. On a film set various companies are involved and that’s how you should think about those creative projects.

What are your best tips?

Kelvin: I think it’s mainly hard work! Coming up with a good idea and doing it and sticking to it. Usually with a blog it takes about 2 years to see the results – consistency is key.

Ross: Try to produce as much content in house. If you use someone externally they will get more authority etc. but not necessarily you.

Kelvin: You need to know what risky links you have – you might not want to disavow now but knowing the risk is important. Agree with your boss on an acceptable risk level. Have an honest upfront adult conversion about it.  Look why we are at content marketing now.

Sean: The industry has been build on secrets and now it actually is really hard work. My first tip is to have a content strategy and relating that to the user.

Ross:If you can get people to convert on your site they have trust in you! If you have a new York Times testimonial on your site that will contribute to the trust and credibility factor.