[Penguin 2.1]I'll give you guys a nudge in the right direction

lakim0 said:

Everything leads to a quality market, better sites will get better positions.

I have a friend, who has a blog, he does 0 SEO himself, but ppl share it everywhere coz it has quality content and that blog is ranking for helluva competitive keywords.

Anyway, I like SEO and search engines more than ever, it's pretty easy to rank if you spend money on natural sources.

P.S I got a coupon from fb and have been running my website link / fanpage on their ads, real likes were coming and it gave a huge boost to rankings.

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So, just sharing blog posts gets you ranked? I don't think so. What are highly competitive keywords in your opinion? Don't say high competition, ie. Adwords, that means nothing. What is the niche? Or if you can't share, give us an idea of the type of keywords.

IProvideSEO said:

How much is Matt Cutts Paying you to leave these blog posts?

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I thought this was a forum? As an SEO, I would figure you'd know the difference?

RedMango said:

So, just sharing blog posts gets you ranked? I don't think so. What are highly competitive keywords in your opinion? Don't say high competition, ie. Adwords, that means nothing. What is the niche? Or if you can't share, give us an idea of the type of keywords.

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As Blackhat as I am, in terms of ranking power and longevity, nothing beats great content which is shared. You get traffic from non-Google places, your content gains links on-stop for the next 6-12 months depending on the niche and people are engaged and return to your site. The benefits are too numerous to list. Also, Google ranks the site better than anything.

archon10 said:

I thought this was a forum? As an SEO, I would figure you'd know the difference?

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You really hate this place don't you Archon :yikes::44:

RedMango said:

So, just sharing blog posts gets you ranked? I don't think so. What are highly competitive keywords in your opinion? Don't say high competition, ie. Adwords, that means nothing. What is the niche? Or if you can't share, give us an idea of the type of keywords.

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lol, I don't mean adwords competition, I mean competition in search engine. I can't share kws but they are from health niche, pretty hard to rank. It's not just sharing posts that gets you ranked, I would call it viral SEO or smth like that, when content is good, it goes viral + gets lots of quality backlinks, that's what Google is trying to achieve, quality websites at the top.

Who have been hited, please save and post penguin ips

So I have thought about the tiered linking theory as well.
If you do tiered linking like me you may have 1 thousands tier 1 links...about 50% hand written and 50$ spun but can read well.
I am in control of those sites.
If google did mean that by "going upstream" what would stop me from changing the tier links to a competitor and taking him out?
Google is not going to downgrade via the disavow tool sites like wordpress.org, weebly, tumblr, etc.

I think the update really has to do with one of your points which is targeting too many money KW's and too many links.
Agreed that I wouldn't use my m0ney keywords much at all anymore.
If you have a site that sells "leather shoes" I think targeting the KW exactly is futile.
Something more like "the online leader in leather shoes @Tomsshoes.com" is more appropriate.

Think about especially locally.
An area that only has 300 searches per month for "plumber in Minnesota" and this rinky dink ass website has even 20 links for "plumber in Minnesota" that says, hey I am doing SE0 check it out.

On the other note...so newer websites are able to get away with a few local directories and maybe a relevant sitewide link for their money term and rock. I think since they have so few referring domains they stay under the radar.

I don't think tiered links are the cause of this penguin update though...I still think it is too many exact match keywords being targeted and too many links from obvious low quality sites.

gorang said:

You really hate this place don't you Archon :yikes::44:

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Nope. I love this forum. It's amusing.

What we've noticed when monitoring client rankings / sites on a large scale is people who have overly optimized anchor text got hit especially. Everyone should start thinking more like this, give service providers a LARGE list of keywords, here's rough guidelines:

BrandName
Brand Name
BrandName.com
Brand Name Main Keyword
BrandName Main Keyword
where to find Main Keyword
how do I get Main Keyword
Main Keyword xxx xxx

Use lot's of partial match and different queries people would search, think questions like "can i buy an xxx at best buy" where xxx is your keyword. These partial matches give you plenty of juice to the main keyword and give you something more of a natural anchor profile. Use a list of 100+ keywords, you only want a very small % of the same keyword at any time on your site's anchor profile, get the 20% main keyword notion out of your head that does not look natural.

You want your URL /brand and variations to always be your most used anchors, some people don't realize the power you get to say keyword "car games" from using for example "gamegenie car games", partial match is really the way to go.

Great post:

"This doesn't mean we go whitehat, we just understand the algorithm's boundaries and we take advantage of the lack of competition we now have. The smart players will take advantage of Penguin 2.1, now is a better time than ever to quickly hit very competitive keywords"

Whilst everyone else is crying about updates, I'm finding it fairly easy to rank for competitive KWs with a few strong backlinks, great content, and by building a brand. You only need to look at the top ranking sites for very competitive KWs to see this is the strategy to go for.

For example then doing autopost use real names and last names for example take facebook name database...

I have a site that got hit over the weekend and started noticing most of the keywords hitting page 1 again... A though the homepage still isn't!

After my analysis of the top 10 results for my own money site keywords, I have attached the results of screen shots from the Excel file. I analyze each website with moz's open site explorer and majestic SEO's link index. I then wrote down the Domain Authority, Page Authority, Linking Root Domains, OSE links, Citation Flow, Trust Flow, Majestic Total links, % of branded anchors & generics, % of keyword rich anchors, if the Title tag was optimized and if the backlink profile contained spammy links such as blog comments, lots of no follows, websites that say "www.example.com/links" etc. (after a while it gets easy to see who has a spammy backlink profile).

From the results it looks like Google is favoring heavily authority brand name websites. Yelp, Youtube, Walmart, Amazon, Yahoo Local etc. Sometimes Yelp took up the top 2 positions.

For nationwide keywords it seems that big brands or websites with an extremely high domain authority are ranking. The total amount of backlinks and page authority of the actual page that ranks seems to be low, like in the 10-50 links range. Most of the websites have heavily branded and diverse anchor text. For example, some websites were ranking for keywords with 100% brand anchor text and only 5 websites linking to that page. The backlink profile on most of the websites was very clean (meaning natural looking website links)

For localized keywords it seems that again, websites with a very natural backlink profile and a lot of branded links are ranking well. I am talking only 5-15 linking root domains. Most of the pages had optimized Titles and keywords in the content. On average, there was an EMD (exact match domain) with a clean backlink profile on the first page as well. It may only take a website with several other highly relevant links to rank for keywords.

It will be interesting to see if the SERPs continue to stay this way. If it does, I think that the days of automated software are only good for churn and burn websites or as links to buffer sites (PR's, Yelp Reviews, Youtube).

Feel free to look at the screenshots and let me know what you think. Hopefully, this analysis of the websites I have chosen can help others see a pattern in what is working right now.

lakim0 said:

Google bot is getting smarter day by day, I'm sure there will be new techniques to rank (since we have smart guys out there) but as long as they are shared in public, everything's being tracked and finally all of them will be devalued. Even those who get top notch rankings through secret methods don't last long, everything gets revealed, SEO is that kind of thing.

Well, ranking is a constant game, you must catch up to everything, but I don't like it, coz you can go from hero to zero in one slap, time to study paid traffic people

Anyways, I keep my eyes on updates, hope your sites are ok ))

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True. I can't go with paid traffic that's why i am trying to build a authority site which gets traffic from not just Google but from lots of other sources. Such as organic, email marketing, social media, direct and lot more. That way i can be safe in future also. Just making your website brand. Simple

Nice post. I will keep an eye on it. Thanks

This is beginning of the end of black hat. Pretty soon we'll be limited to creating content on our money sites and creating backlinks on social networks. I say screw google, lets innovate and strengthen our social presents.

Edit: Great post by the way.

very very important insight, i think these topics, topics about how googles algorithms work are most important,
the better we understand it the better and with less effort we can rank.

moose942 said:

What we've noticed when monitoring client rankings / sites on a large scale is people who have overly optimized anchor text got hit especially. Everyone should start thinking more like this, give service providers a LARGE list of keywords, here's rough guidelines:

BrandName
Brand Name
BrandName.com
Brand Name Main Keyword
BrandName Main Keyword
where to find Main Keyword
how do I get Main Keyword
Main Keyword xxx xxx

Use lot's of partial match and different queries people would search, think questions like "can i buy an xxx at best buy" where xxx is your keyword. These partial matches give you plenty of juice to the main keyword and give you something more of a natural anchor profile. Use a list of 100+ keywords, you only want a very small % of the same keyword at any time on your site's anchor profile, get the 20% main keyword notion out of your head that does not look natural.

You want your URL /brand and variations to always be your most used anchors, some people don't realize the power you get to say keyword "car games" from using for example "gamegenie car games", partial match is really the way to go.

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I'm sorry moose, but I've disagree with you here.
I still think that anchor is the most important part of the Penguin algorithm and they just got little smarter.
What you are describing are compound kws and might be a part of Penguin 2.0
If you ever noticed there is something in ahrefs called anchor terms cloud.

I would also avoid related kw to my money kw, like auto games and keep the exact & related anchor rate below 10%.

IProvideSEO said:

Snip

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Great effort there.

Many sites are ranking with very few links.

It could be that the disavow database has been a great database to pinpoint spammy sites and they've devalued all of these sites. Link velocity must also play a huge part.

In essence, simply emulate the sites that are rankings.

Personal blog networks may be preferable now too.

I don't think penguin 2.1 is related to tiered links since i have some websites with direct massive spam (chunks and burn) hit this day, and some friends using only white hat seo only where hit also.

I believe in a list of honey pot targets, list made with desavoued links and paid seo list (senuke and similars, links sellers, etc ...). If you use for Tier1 same targets as others SEO you will probably be catch in the honey pot.

gorang said:

Great effort there.

Many sites are ranking with very few links.

It could be that the disavow database has been a great database to pinpoint spammy sites and they've devalued all of these sites. Link velocity must also play a huge part.

In essence, simply emulate the sites that are rankings.

Personal blog networks may be preferable now too.

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Yea that is definitely what it seems like. I think the Penguin 2.1 Refresh was also Google incorporating an aggregated list of all the websites turned in through the disavow tool. Which I am not going to hide, I can guarantee that 100% of my websites had links that someone else probably disavowed and were targeted. No more link buying from forums lol or using automated software.

I think you are right about personal networks. SEO's can't really create streamlined methods such as "Penguin safe Linkbuilding Services" & "Private Blog Networks even though anyone can sign up" because its to easy to get disavowed or penalized.

Gorang, do you think the SERPs will stay this way for a long time or the dust hasn't settled yet?

If the SERPs stay the way it is right now, it will be relatively easy to just create new websites and get 10-50 quality links from competitor links that are already ranking.