Time to Change Your SEO Mindset

I posted this in another thread, but I wanted to post it for more people to see. Over the last 6 months SEO has drastically changed as we all know. The times of getting first page rankings by blasting links to your site are all but over. It is time to change your mindset and embrace the new changes.

So what is SEO all about now? One word - Authority! We used to have a blueprint, and honestly it got really easy to game Google's algorithm. Build links with heavy anchor text. Try to get as many as possible. Basically that was it. Not anymore. The game is much more sophisticated now. Although backlinks are still a big part of the algorithm, they have been drastically diminished in their value. It is all about authority now.

Anyone who has a good SEO tool can see this. Just reverse engineer the top ten competitors and you will see. Here is just one example.


This is for the keyword "Mini Split" which is one of the top keywords in one of my niches.





Notice how 3 of the top ten sites have zero links pointing to the target page, and the rest have very little?


Now check this out:





This is the number one guy. Notice how not one of the links uses the anchor text "Mini Split".


Don't believe me? Try it out for yourself (using Market Samurai Competition Module by the way). Obviously there is going to be exceptions. Remember this is Google we are dealing with, but I can only hypothesize that eventually a large part of the index will start looking like this. Google essentially is telling Webmasters to fuck off.


If you didn't read the recent interview with an Ex Google employee, here are some interesting tid bits from the article:

Question 5. What are common trends you looked for to determine a spammy link profile?


There are a good few elements taken into account here, like how many links are there in total? A very important one; what is the quality of the pages they come in from? Do the pages look ?real? or are they just there to host the links? What anchors are used? The commercial vs. non commercial ratio of the anchors. In reality it?s very easy to recognise a blackhat profile, all you have to do is imagine what anchors would have been used if the linking happened completely naturally and compare it with what is going on in reality. Anyone can do it, just think logically and keep in mind which keywords convert to money.

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Question 7. What are 3 off site (link building) tactics that you recommend?


Off site link building has dramatically changed since the recent updates. Anything that you can do automatically or at scale putts your website at risk. So keep the following in mind; Link building has changed from an almost purely technical process into something that resembles a relationship management campaign. Building a network with owners of sites that are related to yours for example. If your website is about cheese production, reach out to people in the milk industry, like I mentioned before, relevance is the new PR. Second, don?t dismiss directories completely. I have heard people talking about directories being altogether bad and advise people to avoid them. This is not the case, good quality, moderated directories, or niche directories are still worth looking in to. Third, to stay focussed on quality of pages linking in to you, Google judges your link profile by the quality of pages linking to your site, getting 3 links from authentic pages will do much more than 1000 links from splogs, so invest your time into getting quality, not quantity.

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So in conclusion, what can we do? Build authority sites with good content. Stop building garbage. Build relevant links. Make your anchor text profile as natural looking as possible.

That's all I got.

Yeah, those are good observations and to tell you the truth I have not done any link building since I got out of the first penguin...

Well, to be more specific, the only link building I have done is building new articles on my site with massive internal linking structures, like seen on wikipedia and top authority sites...

I see link building to be dangerous right now as we still are trying to work through exactly what is going on and there is a lot of good advice out there, but I see most of it as conjecture and not fact at this point...

Yeah, that article with ex-google employee is a good one.

But is still just a game.
"all you have to do is imagine what anchors would have been used if the linking happened completely naturally"

So, new SEO = imagination?

I remember the days when all you need was ScrapeBox and you're pretty much guaranteed #1. The rule then was simple: the more links you build, the better. So fire up ScrapeBox, SEnuke, etc. 24/7 and watch as every site of yours reach the front page or top spot. Amazing how much has changed in just under a year. I'm afraid to imagine how much more difficult everything will be one year from now (assuming the world doesn't end in 12/12/12).

manny521 said:

Yeah, those are good observations and to tell you the truth I have not done any link building since I got out of the first penguin...

Well, to be more specific, the only link building I have done is building new articles on my site with massive internal linking structures, like seen on wikipedia and top authority sites...

I see link building to be dangerous right now as we still are trying to work through exactly what is going on and there is a lot of good advice out there, but I see most of it as conjecture and not fact at this point...

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And how well are your websites ranking then?

One of the best thread that i read last time, thanks OP!

The question is: how to built such authority site? Or better - is it even possible to fool google and built a site that would look like authority one with kinda black hat techniques?

AMEN! This is exactly what's working for me right now.

Dj Co2 said:

And how well are your websites ranking then?

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The rankings for my short tail keywords were mainly affected by panda 3.3 and penguin...I have never lost my long tail rankings...

My rankings are okay now and I don't think they will ever be what they were and I learned a lot on the way so I'm not too concerned.

I sell a educational program and things are changing so much now that almost all my sales are through apps in iTunes and Android...I never thought this change would happen this quick...

It's still a game, even if the rules are getting complicated. Let's play then!

D.

parasitus84 said:

AMEN! This is exactly what's working for me right now.

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So do you have some real authority domain and you are ranking inner pages?

jacobpov said:

Where do you get all of this information from ? what is this an official SEO thread that talks for all of us? , for me this is completely not true man SEO is still the same and I am still ranking number 1 for VERY competitive keywords (ranked in the first 1 month , 3 months already ranking now. no drops just increases) .

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I think the op is just stating what he thinks and he is generating a conversation based on his results. If your results are different, this is okay.

jacobpov said:

Where do you get all of this information from ? what is this an official SEO thread that talks for all of us? , for me this is completely not true man SEO is still the same and I am still ranking number 1 for VERY competitive keywords (ranked in the first 1 month , 3 months already ranking now. no drops just increases) .

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Where do I get all this information from? I get it from reverse engineering hundred and hundreds of keywords. I also have many many clients that I do work for. Ultimately, I don't have to get it from anywhere since an Ex Google employee is already telling you. Straight from the horse's mouth bro.

Again, there are many many exceptions to what I am saying here. You have to realize the sheer amount of sites on the Internet is stagering. These algo iterations don't hit every site and keyword out there with every refresh. These Panda, and Penguin refreshes are most likely here for a while if not indefinitely and I can imagine it will take years to hit every keyword. BUT..What I am trying to point out that this is where I think SEO is heading or is already at. I have literally reverse engineered hundreds or keywords and I am seeing these types of results more and more. So, I am not disagreeing that old school tactics don't still work, because I know they do. I am saying that these techniques are not long term and it is putting your site at risk. It's just a matter of time before your site gets wacked.

jstover77 said:

Where do I get all this information from? I get it from reverse engineering hundred and hundreds of keywords. I also have many many clients that I do work for. Ultimately, I don't have to get it from anywhere since an Ex Google employee is already telling you. Straight from the horse's mouth bro.

Again, there are many many exceptions to what I am saying here. You have to realize the sheer amount of sites on the Internet is stagering. These algo iterations don't hit every site and keyword out there with every refresh. These Panda, and Penguin refreshes are most likely here for a while if not indefinitely and I can imagine it will take years to hit every keyword. BUT..What I am trying to point out that this is where I think SEO is heading or is already at. I have literally reverse engineered hundreds or keywords and I am seeing these types of results more and more. So, I am not disagreeing that old school tactics don't still work, because I know they do. I am saying that these techniques are not long term and it is putting your site at risk. It's just a matter of time before your site gets wacked.

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So your saying just to keep building a shitload of quality pages with minimal quality backlinks?

bigballin6161 said:

So your saying just to keep building a shitload of quality pages with minimal quality backlinks?

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Build high quality websites, ad fresh content frequently, build relevant links, and make sure your anchor text profile is natural looking. That's basically it.

Out of the many sites I have looked at, a lot of them don't even have the exact match anchor text for the keywords they are ranking for. They have a lot of naked URLs/Brand, and like terms.

So you will see a lot of this in anchor text profiles:

Keyword Ranking on first page - Dog Food

Anchor text Profile

organic dog food
healthy dog food
healthy food for your dog
Click Here
dogfood.com
http:// www.dogfood.com
DogFood
Healthy Dog Food - DogFood.com
Etc
Etc

traged said:

So do you have some real authority domain and you are ranking inner pages?

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I wouldn't say that I have a "real authority domain" but I'm trying to get there (less spammy links, more fresh content and solid on-page). I'm not ranking any inner pages coz they are my target pages I concentrate on the homepage instead using my url as the main anchor. It's been running like this for a few months now.

I honestly believe a lot of what OP says seeing the result changes. Personally I'm going to shift my strategy to 90% of anchors being brand name like brand.com www.brand.com or brand. I think having 10% keyword anchors is all you need, once Google knows what your site is about it doesn't matter anymore. Also I'm going to significantly scale back the quantity of links and focus on contextual links and niche related sites. So not adding so many broad backlinks like social book marks, general directories, shitty types of web 2.0s, or links from other low quality domains etc. Also going to start publishing 10+ articles a week with pictures from guest bloggers to pump up my content. I also am going to focus on sharing my blog posts etc on social sites in a very natural way. Remember, it's all about being NATURAL. Look at authority sites that got their naturally and try to reproduce it even if you can only do it on a smaller scale. Most authority sites don't have 10 billion generic link directories, social book marks and crappy web 2.0s (I'm still a fan of quality web 2.0s, but even then those are such obviously self crafted links that I think they don't matter as much). They have contextual links, home page links, links from link pages on quality sites, niche directories, high value citations, press releases, so on and so on.

I think everyone is seeing the changes of seo on a daily basis. My question is this, whats going to happen with the tier 2 links. Keep clean tier 1's to the ms, but is it now time to keep tiers 2 natural and clean? Linkning is going to always be around, just wait when there's a over social optimization penalty, and we're back to links again. And with google coming out with the narc tool, and having the ability to report bad links, this probably will affect tier 2 links.

Great post John. +16.
Totally agree its about authority now, and more its just google saying ok our simple algo has been taken advantage of. Now we know, if a site has 10k sites linking to it with same anchor, it's fixed.

Read an article recently that said exact anchor should be around 10% which isn't far off by your experiments.

I have also seen some high competition keywords with the top players having very few direct anchor links.

Do you guys really believe an ex google employee is allowed to publish some of the company's policies and algorithms? I bet there is a NDA attached to their contract so they can be held liable for any leaking that might affect the company even after he is officially out of it.

Scripteen said:

Do you guys really believe an ex google employee is allowed to publish some of the company's policies and algorithms? I bet there is a NDA attached to their contract so they can be held liable for any leaking that might affect the company even after he is officially out of it.

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Yes, as someone mentioned above though, it's wasn't anything mentioned that wasn't public knowledge.