Penguin - What works now?

manny521 said:

One thing I don't understand about facebook likes, isn't facebook a walled garden and google can't crawl these likes?

Am I wrong here? How can google know about facebook likes when facebook is a walled garden to google?

If anyone can explain this, it would be appreciated...

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Google can still crawl facebook pages and profiles. As long as the profiles are public, which most are not.

MrBeastsOnToast said:

ahh right, thanks, thats penguin solved then...

im guessing that your post has NOTHING to do with the huge ass BST banner you have in your sig...

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Actually...it didn't. Which is why I didnt bring up the fact I sell the services. I've been posting from my phone today because I came out to a college baseball tournament in Ohio. I used to have my sig not appear when posting from my phone but I forgot that I changed it awhile ago.

As an act of good faith, I went ahead and removed my sig on that post.

Penguin is not solved by social signals but I believe them to be one of if not the biggest factor in penguin. For a couple of reasons.
1) social signals do not target keywords through anchor text.
2) social signals can not be penalized. If they were any site that ever went viral would get hit.
3) Google said before the penguin update that they were moving towards a more social search engine. I don't know of any other way to trigger their social cues than to add social signals.

Are social signals alone enough to get you ranked? In some cases...yes. I still believe that they should be mixed with other seo but the social aspect of seo should always be in your arsenal.

Here is another thread I started that didn't get many responses: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...-internal-linking-structures.html#post4230931

the thread has to do with authority sites and interlinking...its worth a read...

Guys, I don't wanna this thread turn towards any flame war..Stick with the topic...

I'm getting requests from SEO companies wanting to put contextual links on my blog.

Like I'm talking a long article with 1 URL anchored by the keyword in it. Also, these are pretty big SEO companies, offering low $XXX a year for 1 blog post pretty much.

I doubt they'd be doing it if it wasn't helping.

Not sure if this might be related or not but one of my sites was going from position 3 to 2 back to 3 for a number of weeks. It settled at number 2 and didn't seem like moving. When I read about Penguin I removed the backlinks towards the post from a sig in a forum..

I did this two days ago, checked my rankings today and i'm now number 1. I have no backlinks towards this page now, I have about 50 internal links towards it though with a 8 year old domain. All internal links are posts with PR 3 and above..

But I thought it was interesting that I removed the sig links from the forum and made it to number 1.

BB with all the respect you can't say Google doesn't care about On Page SEO, we all know On Page is a signal and it helps google to understand what your site is about, your site just ranked fine because of your Exact Match Domain.

Nice read so far....here's what we did.

Some of our sites got impacted by Penguin, but not all - Both types had a mix of unique and spun content, good and spammy backlinks, so there was no clear pattern of which ones were being targeted by G.

Two things we started doing/changing for all our sites was to focus on private blog networks and no more mass linking to money sites. We continued to push scrapebox links to tier 2 and 3 links using our AA lists. We have seen quite a few of our sites getting to page 1 and this has been an encouraging sign.

Again, there are some sites that refused to improve - we plan to continue this strategy for some more time on these sites and see if they improve.

Dan Da Man said:

Only because it is effecting you. This could be the same for whitehat only sites. "Oh look at these blackhat sites using AMR and zennoposter. This isn't fair, I am building my links manual."

So what! I applaud them for gaming the system. YOu would do but you just don't know how. Neither do I but it is the same reason people hate because they can't compete.

As long as you are not hurting someone else, I don't see anything wrong with what they are doing. They are just doing it better then I am so I guess I have to step up my game and learn a few things

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If success in SEO meant hacking other sites, even if I could do it, I wouldn't. I would go to PPC or something. Hacking sites is not only illegal I just don't agree with it. I know how hard I work on my sites and if someone hacked them I would be pissed beyond belief.

BB i think it'd be fair to say social signals matter when you don't use EMD. I've bought social signals myself to several of my sites and I can see them not working at all while on the other hand i have a EMD site with no social signal at all and it's ranking nicely atm.

I posted on a thread I bought from but I got mauled by penguin. Top 3 positions to page 80.

I ordered a 50x web 2.0 and google plus service from jabong and i'm testing out using your mini pyramid link on one of my major sites bb.

The Jabong services recovered me from page 80 to about page 8 to 20.

I'm not sure about the mini pyramid yet as you're still obviously working on that order. I do have a good feeling that it will fully or nearly fully recover the site once you're done working that magic of yours.

Web 2.0's with actual unique written content, google plus 1's, definitely helps. I haven't found a way to eliminate a penalty fully yet.

I am also removing links and replacing them more with naked urls or "click here" type links as well to bring my total money keyword % to below 65% across all sites. I use majestic seo to track links and the sites that I'm doing this on is slowly getting better rankings the more links i remove. I'm being careful not to remove all links because I still want "something" to rank me for my target keywords.

I have emds with stop words in them if that means anything.

New sites or pre-penguin sites that are not penalized are definitely way easier to rank now.

I have 2 emd sites that I built like 100 profile links to that just keep going up the rankings. One at 4 and the other position 10. It has like 2 pages of real content.

I'm going to read manny's post above and see if that helps.

I hate penguins.

Good luck everyone, you will probably need more than luck.

It is again proved by BB that social signals does work. Last week I had a client order for google +1's but then client realized that he has placed orders for bulk google +1's and he did not wanted them to get delivered in bulk so he write back the mail to us to not feed them but till then we have already added his link to feed 50+'s to his website via google search results (as he had no button on the webpage).

Once we finished we sent report and that client told us that he didn't wanted bulk +1's but he also admitted that his website moved to rank 1 on google and he atleast thanked us 4 times. Upon further digging deep on his keyword I found he also had an EMD. Whatever I have posted here is what our client reported us and I can prove it if needed by posting all the email conversations with client (of course on his approvals).

So I can second these two things myself that EMD ranks better after penguin and social signals (especially google+1's) gives direct boost to your rankings.

Itachi93 said:

BB with all the respect you can't say Google doesn't care about On Page SEO, we all know On Page is a signal and it helps google to understand what your site is about, your site just ranked fine because of your Exact Match Domain.

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hi itachi, thats what surprising me, No meta description, no h1 tags, but it ranked me well. I assume, you aware some weeks back a empty blog ranked number one for the kw "make money online". I feel this update is a total mess.

My point here is , it is pretty easy to rank new sites rather penguin affected sites.



@wokaka - you may be right. Let me use only social signals in one of my site, which is not emd and let me update here with results.

Thank BB
I'm happy to listen from you.Penguin hit e very bad way ,my ranked site gone invisible totally,but I did only remove some anchor text links simply and it's work very fanatic my url automatically going up but slowly even less worked kw but I kept all unique and quality articles.
Still I have some quarries just let me know what kind of "Anchor text should preferred"
Best Regards,
d

I apologize for the question but what is EMD?
Among other things, I also have a site affected by Penguin. Last 24 hours have a great dance in SERP + / - 150 positions for keywords that I was on the first page before 24.04 and I lost rankings. Have not make anything on this site.
Sorry for bad English.

I've had a site locked on the 4th slot for the last month, extremely stable no dancing what so ever. I haven't added any backlinks at all lately as I've been building another round of web 2.0's that all have at least 5 posts before they link out (yes, senuke can and does multi post to web 2.0's very well.)

After reading this thread yesterday I got a few linke, retweets, and g + 1's and bame I'm at the 2slot today.

Anyone that thinks that social signals don't work, fine don't use them, BUT I'll out rank you...

deepswimmer said:

Thank BB
I'm happy to listen from you.Penguin hit e very bad way ,my ranked site gone invisible totally,but I did only remove some anchor text links simply and it's work very fanatic my url automatically going up but slowly even less worked kw but I kept all unique and quality articles.
Still I have some quarries just let me know what kind of "Anchor text should preferred"
Best Regards,
d

Click to expand...

check this post...

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/444983-penguin-what-works-now.html#post4281511



@asphasia - EMD - Exact Match Domain.

joshweaver9 said:

Actually...it didn't. Which is why I didnt bring up the fact I sell the services. I've been posting from my phone today because I came out to a college baseball tournament in Ohio. I used to have my sig not appear when posting from my phone but I forgot that I changed it awhile ago.

As an act of good faith, I went ahead and removed my sig on that post.

Penguin is not solved by social signals but I believe them to be one of if not the biggest factor in penguin. For a couple of reasons.
1) social signals do not target keywords through anchor text.
2) social signals can not be penalized. If they were any site that ever went viral would get hit.
3) Google said before the penguin update that they were moving towards a more social search engine. I don't know of any other way to trigger their social cues than to add social signals.

Are social signals alone enough to get you ranked? In some cases...yes. I still believe that they should be mixed with other seo but the social aspect of seo should always be in your arsenal.

Click to expand...

Apologies for my earlier post being a little harsh, id had one too many last night and was frustrated by one of my sites tanking. No hard feelings

And for the record i agree with you, in my opinion social signals are a significant factor of any well rounded SEO Campaign...

I recently ranked 2 web hosting cctld domains first 2nd and 3rd pages for chosen keywords

Now it is more hard for we to do as a seoer.