seo

Posted by russvirante

It was a little over a year ago that I first wrote the “Broken Link Building Bible” and it seemed like it was time for an update. If you haven’t had a chance yet, please head over to the original, as most of it is still highly relevant today, and it contains the basics which will not be covered in this post. 

Table of contents

1. Ethical Guidelines
   1. Content Commandments
      1. Cloaking
      2. Plagiarizing
      3. Bait & Switch
      4. Identity Theft
   2. Outreach Commandments
      1. Automation
      2. Unrelated
      3. Misrepresentation
   3. Conclusions
2. Advanced Prospecting
   1. Section Discovery
   2. Site Discovery
3. Advanced Content
   1. Panda Guidelines
   2. Publish Date
   3. Be Thorough
   4. Citation Focus
4. Advanced Outreach
   1. Short Form
   2. Long Form
   3. Slow Play
   4. Bandwagon
5. Revelation

Ethical guidelines: The BLB Commandments

Content commandments

• Thou shalt not cloak: Cloaking with broken link building usually takes the form of recreating content and then using either the canonical tag or traditional IP delivery techniques to point Googlebot towards a more commercial site. You really aren’t going to get a huge boost out of using this technique, and more importantly, you are missing out on the opportunity to build a genuinely great site. If you are already creating content that’s good enough to form a successful BLB campaign, why not just expose that content on your site? It’s a big risk for a little reward.
• Thou shalt not plagiarize: Sorry, folks, but you can’t just copy the old site or page off of Archive.org and expect to get away with it. You’re asking for a DMCA complaint. How hard is it to update content? Also, link to the original creator’s website for good measure!
• Thou shalt not bait and switch: This is just like slow cloaking. Why kill really good content on your site that deserves links, only to redirect to a page that doesn’t? Use BLB as a platform for developing a great, content-rich website.
• Thou shalt not commit identity theft: This one is really egregious. If you find a whole domain that is now expired, don’t simply recreate the whole site and then send emails from that site as if you are the original owner. Seriously, I can’t believe I have to write this, but I have seen it in the wild.

Outreach commandments

• Thou shalt not automate sends: The fastest way to kill a campaign is to just send out thousands of automated emails. You will get terrible conversion rates, piss off webmasters, get your IP blacklisted, and waste good prospects. Take your time to hand-select your targets and customize your emails.
• Thou shalt not send unrelated emails: Not all broken links are good opportunities. Only send emails to prospects whose sites have a good likelihood of playing ball. I have seen campaigns where success rates are 10%+ because the link builder was careful enough in the prospecting process. If you send too many requests to unrelated sites, your deliverability will suffer.
• Thou shalt not misrepresent: There is no need to lie to your prospect. Don’t pretend to be some kid working on a project or say “I was visiting your site when…”. You will see in the outreach templates below that there are some really strong pitch emails that don’t require you lie. You’ll sleep better at night, and trust me, genuine-sounding emails do a lot better than disingenuous ones.

Advanced prospecting techniques

Section discovery

1. Go through the normal procedures of identifying relevant BLB opportunities following the steps outlined in the BLB Bible.
2. Use a backlink tool like Open Site Explorer to export the Top Pages from the site that has the broken link opportunity. For example, if you found a broken link to http://www.joesite.com/important-page.html, you would want to run a Top Pages report for the joesite.com domain.
3. Export the results by setting “filter by status codes 400 or greater” (this will pick up both 404s and error pages). Finally, visit the archive.org versions of these pages to see if any are strong opportunities.

1. Click on the list icon next to the opportunity you want to examine for section 404s
2. Click on the Archive link to look at the archive pages to see if it matches your campaign
3. [Pro Tip] If you find a great opportunity, mine its backlinks for more broken link opportunities or use it as a URL campaign inside BrokenLinkBuilding.com

Site discovery

1. Register the domain using your valid contact information
2. Do not re-launch the site
3. Begin reclaiming links through Broken Link Building like you always have
4. If and when the original webmaster reaches out to ask why you now own the domain s/he accidentally dropped, offer to transfer it back to them and build a relationship that could earn you a link from that site as well.

Advanced content creation

• Think Panda: If you have never read through the Panda Questionnaire before, take a look at it here in the section labeled “Briefly: What is the Panda Algorithm“. Your BLB content should try and hit these guidelines with perfect precision. Make sure your content is insightful, well written, thorough, and cleanly designed. Spending extra time with your content will make a huge difference in conversion rate.
• Be obvious about the publish date: The last thing that a webmaster wants to do is replace one broken link with another. They need to feel confident that the replacement you are offering them won’t get outdated any time soon. The easiest way to do this is make it clear that the content has been updated by a certain date. In fact, I recommend including this in the outreach email, saying something like… “this one was updated recently and seems to cover the same content…”
• Be thorough: The webmaster you reach out to may only be interested in a small part of the page they once linked to. A giant resource page on cancer may have a specific statistic they are citing, or a description of a particular treatment option. Make sure that your content covers all the bases. Once again, this ties into the outreach itself and explains why the one-to-one email campaigns do better than automated campaigns. If you look at your target’s site before emailing them, you know which sections to point out in the outreach email that show why the new link you propose meets her/his needs.
• Citations: Unless your site is already a well known and respected brand, chances are you need to build up your credibility a bit before you start asking people to link to your content. Make sure your site is Wikipedia-esque in its outbound linking and citations. You will often find that many of the sites which you are reaching out to actually have great content that you can cite in your own work. Nothing increases the likelihood of a converted outreach email than the webmaster finding their own content properly cited as part of the body of research behind a strong content piece.

Advanced outreach

Short-form

• Subject: found a broken link on ##page##
• Body: Just wanted to let you know there is a broken link to ##broken## on your page ##page##. Found this instead ##replacement##. Might want to fix it.

Long-form

1. Inbox justification
2. Custom pitch
3. Thank you

1. Inbox Justification: Go ahead and get out on the table why you are emailing the webmaster. They don’t know who you are and the least you can do is offer them early on a reason to read your email. Don’t lie. You don’t have to say “I was reading your website and I found…”. Just say something to the effect of: “Hi, I am ##name## and I noticed that you have a broken link to ##broken resource name## (##broken resource link##) on your ##page name## (##page url##).” No need to mention the replacement yet.
   
2. Personal Touch: Here is where you explain why your replacement is a good fit and why you are personally invested in it. Go ahead and say if you are the business owner. If you created excellent content, there is nothing to be ashamed of! Tell them why you care about people finding the right content and how yours improves upon the one you are replacing. Give them a reason to believe if they add your link that it will stay updated for the long haul. Normally, you want to touch 3 main points: it’s new and improved, it’s here for the long run, and you are personally invested in guaranteeing that.
   
3. Thank You: Finally, be cordial and grateful that someone took the time out of their day to read your email. Don’t just say “thanks,” but actually express some gratitude for not hitting the delete button the second it showed up in their inbox. You’d be surprised, but genuine thankfulness is so rare in emails these days that many people are shocked to just have someone be nice. Honestly, when is the last time you wrote an email where the send off was something more than “thx” or just your name?

Slow play

The bandwagon

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Posted by Isla_McKetta

Picture it. A room full of executives from a company you never thought you could land as a client. They’re so engaged in what they are saying that they’re leaning forward in their chairs. The CEO looks poised to ask a question but you can tell she doesn’t want to interrupt your flow.

This is the moment content strategists dream of.

But if you’re like me, it’s easy to get caught up in how new the field is and wonder, “Am I even doing this right?” There are lots of posts to help you, such as  How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy and Content Strategy: You’re Doing it Wrong. There are also comprehensive guides to creating content strategies. There’s even an epic list of content strategy resources. And there are books (my favorite is Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach’s Content Strategy for the Web).

Still, sometimes you just want to peek over someone else’s shoulder at a concrete example to see if there’s anything you can learn. This can be especially true if you’re working in-house and don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of.

So, I built a template:

Download the content strategy template

What a content strategy should look like

Content strategies take many forms, from a 50-page word document to an hour-long PowerPoint presentation. That means this template is not meant to be gospel. Instead, it introduces you to the many moving parts that make up a content strategy and gives you an example of how I, based on the years I spent consulting on content strategies for everything from stock photography to software as a service, would write it up.

Peek over my shoulder to get your next strategy started, or just to get a glimpse of how someone else approaches a strategy. Build on this template and make it your own. You’ll find that the template is written from an agency perspective (with lots of references to “the client”) but it works equally well if you are in-house and are writing for that one, all-important client—your boss.

What goes into a content strategy

The content strategy template walks you through researching and writing up the three key elements of a content strategy: what content looks like now, what it should look like, and the ecosystem in which content is created.

Content today

A strategy should provide an assessment of the client’s current content, as well as insight into their competitors’ content. That assessment may include any or all of the following:

• Personas 
• Stakeholder interviews 
• Content inventory 
• Content audit 
• Gap analysis 
• Competitive analysis

Content in the future

Then you want to show your client where the content should take them and how they can use various channels to get there. Some of many places content resides are:

Onsite content 

• Homepage
• Landing pages 
• Category pages 
• Product descriptions 
• Blog 
• Error pages 
• Etc.

Offsite content 

• Emails 
• Social media 
• Brochures 
• Packaging 
• Invoices 
• Voicemail messages 
• Etc.

Governance (aka the content ecosystem)

Finally, you want to think about the environment in which the content gets created—the governance of content. This includes:

• Brand, voice, and style guidelines 
• Workflow analysis 
• Best practices for writing on the web 
• SEO tips 
• Editorial calendar

See the template for more in-depth descriptions of all of these elements as well as some of my favorite tools to get them done.

Again, take these pieces and use them to create your own template. Each strategy you do will require its own tweaks, but this will give you the leg up to put your own stamp on this emerging field.

The storytelling of content strategy

My brand of content strategy, and you’ll see this reflected a little in the template, is that a content strategy is a story. For a deeper understanding of this, check out the Mozinar I gave a few weeks ago, The Storytelling of Content Strategy.

Basically, I advocate for taking the elements of fiction and using them to get a fresh perspective on a brand’s journey toward a goal.

Here’s how the five elements of a story are also the basis of a content strategy:

1. Brands and customers are heroes

A content strategy can either be about a brand’s journey to land a customer (useful when a brand is new or has lost its way), or a content strategy can be about a customer’s journey and how the brand can help. See the webinar for an example of each.

2. Your current landscape is your ground situation

You can’t start a strategy until you know where your hero is coming from. Most of the initial research you do—from stakeholder interviews to content inventories and audits—is to understand the starting point of your strategy. This is where the journey begins. You will be measuring all future success against the understanding you build of this landscape.

3. Goals articulate your central desire

You can’t plot a strategy if you don’t know what direction the brand wants to grow. Goals should come from the brand itself, but you might find that the brand needs a little coaching. It’s helpful if you distinguish overall business goals from content goals. They are related, but there are some goals (e.g. reducing employee turnover) that content plays a much smaller role in achieving. Setting specific goals for your content strategy also lets you get more granular about some goals in which content is the star player (e.g. increasing email open rate).

4. Competitors are antagonists

Even if you’re going to write the most TAGFEE content strategy ever, you still need to figure out where your competitors are and how you can learn from their example. And it’s important to remember that because of the way search engines work, your business competitors might be different than your SERP competitors. Ideally a content strategy will address both.

5. Plot is strategy

At this point in the story, you know who the players are, what’s working and what’s not, and have some ideas about how to move forward to achieve those goals.

When I write up a strategy, I think about them as though I were plotting a novel. Each tactic or channel is a way to move the brand closer to those goals. What obstacles might they encounter? Who are they competing with in the space? How can they master this tactic or channel? And how can content help them achieve their goals and ride happily off into the sunset?

Making a content strategy your own

Now it’s time to download that template and see what story your content strategy is trying to tell. Once you’re confident in the strategy you’re presenting, you’ll have the complete attention of every executive in that conference room. And, with any luck, they’ll refer you to their friends. 

Download the template

I want to learn from you, too. Is there anything you’d include in the template that I haven’t covered? Do you have any strategies for success in presenting content strategies or any lessons learned? Please share your ideas and stories in the comments.

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Posted by searchmetrics

Searchmetrics recently launched their yearly Ranking Factors Study that bases numbers on rank correlation and averages of top 10 SEO rankings, and this year’s analysis shows that content on top-performing sites is much more holistic and less keyword-focused.

Everybody talks about how “content is king.” People are advised to “create quality content for users,” and not ever since keyword (not provided), some have said “the keyword is dead.” Though these phrases may convey somehow understandable approaches, they are often nothing more than empty clichés leaving webmasters alone with without any further information.

Making relevant content measurable

What is quality content? How can I create relevant content for my users? Should I still place the keyword in the title or use it seven times in the content?

To understand how search engines develop over time and what kind of features increase or decrease in prevalence and importance, we analyze the top 30 ranking sites for over 10,000 keywords (approximately 300,000 URLs) each year. The full study with all 100 pages of details is  downloadable here.

In a nutshell: To what extent have Panda, Penguin, and not least Hummingbird influenced the algorithm and therefore the search results?

Before we get into detail, let me—as a matter of course—point out the fact that correlation does not imply causation. You can find some more comprehensive information, as well as an introduction and explanation of what a correlation is, here. That is why we took two approaches:

• Correlation of Top 30 = Differences between URLs within SERP 1 to 3
• Averages = Appearance and/or extent of certain factors per position

The “Fall” of the Keyword?

Most keyword factors are declining. This is one of the major findings of our studies over the years. Let me give you an example:

The decrease of the features “Keyword in URL” and “Keyword in Domain” is one of the more obvious findings of our analyses. You can clearly see the declining correlation from 2012 to 2014. Let’s have a look at some more on-page keyword factors:

What you see here as well are very low correlations. In other words: With regard to these features, there are no huge differences between URLs ranking on positions from one to thirty. But there is more than that. It is also important to have a look at the averages here:

Explanation: X-Axis: Google Position from one to 30 / Y-Axis: Average share of URLs having keyword in description/title (0.10 = 10%). Please note that we have modified the crawling of these features. It is more exact now. This is why last year’s values are likely to be actually even a bit higher than given here. However, you can see that relatively few sites actually have the keywords in their headings. In fact, only about 10% of the URLs in positions 1-30 have the keyword in h2s; 15% have them in h1s. And the trend also is negative.

By the way: What you see in positions 1-2 is what we call the “Brand Factor.” It is often a big brand ranking on these positions, and most of them differ from the rest of the SERPs when it comes to classic SEO measures.

Actually, taking only correlation into consideration can sometimes lead to a false conclusion. Let me show you what I mean with the following example: 

The correlation for the feature “% Backlinks with Keyword” has considerably increased from 2013 to 2014. But the conclusion: “Hey cool, I will immediately do link building and tell the people to put the keyword I want to rank for in the anchor text!” would be a shot in the dark. A glance at the averages tells you why:

In fact, the average share of links featuring the keyword in the anchor text has declined from 2013 to 2014 (from ~40% to ~27). But what you see is a falling graph in 2014 which is why the correlation is more positive with regard to better rankings. That means: the better the position of a URL is, the higher the share of backlinks that contain the keyword (on average). On average, this share continuously decreases with each position. In contrast to last year’s curve, this results in the calculation of a high(er) positive correlation.

Conclusion: The keyword as such seems to continue losing influence over time as Google becomes better and better at evaluating other factors. But what kind of factors are these?

The “rise” of content

Co-occurrence evaluations of keywords and relevant terms is something we’ve been focusing on this past year, as we’ve seen high shifts in rankings based on these. I won’t go into much detail here, as this would go beyond the scope of this blog post, but what we can say is that after conducting word co-occurrence analyses, we found that Proof and Relevant keywords played a major role in the quality and content of rankings. Proof Terms are words that are strongly related to the primary keyword and highly likely to appear at the same time. Relevant Terms are not as closely related to the main keyword, yet are still likely to appear in the same context (or as a part of a subtopic). These kinds of approaches are based on semantics and context. For example, it is very likely that the word “car” is relevant in a text in which the word “bumper” occurs, while the same is not true for the term “refrigerator.”

Proof and relevant terms to define and analyze topics

Let’s have a look at an example analysis for Proof and Relevant Terms regarding the keyword “apple watch,” done with the Content Optimization section of the Searchmetrics Suite:

The number behind the bar describes the average appearance of the word in a text dealing with the topic, the bar length mirrors the respective weighting (x-axis, bottom) and is calculated based on the term’s semantic closeness to the main keyword. Terms marked with green hooked bubbles are the 10 most important words, based on a mixed calculation of appearance and semantic weighting (and some further parameters).

As you can see, the terms “iphone” and “time” are marked as highly important Proof Terms, and “iwatch” is very likely to appear in the context of the main keyword “apple phone” as well. Note that simply reading the list without knowing the main keyword gives you an idea of the text’s main topic.

The above chart shows an excerpt from the list of Relevant Terms. Note that both the semantic weighting and the appearance of these terms is somewhat lower than in the previous chart. In contrast to the Proof Terms list, you won’t know the exact focus of the text just looking at these Relevant Terms, but you might probably get an idea of what its rough topic might be.

Content features on the rise

By the way, the length of content also continues to increase. Furthermore, high-ranking content is written in a way that is easier for the average person to read, and is often enriched by other media, such as images or video. This is shown in the following charts:

Shown here is the average text length in characters per position, in both 2014 and 2013. You can see that content is much longer on each and every position among the top 30 (on average) in 2014. (Note the “Brand Factor” at the first position(s) again.)

And here is the average readability of texts per position based on the Flesch score ranging from 0 (very difficult) to 100 (very easy):

The Flesch score is given on the y-axis. You can see that there is a rather positive correlation with URLs on higher positions featuring, on average, easier-to-read texts.

But just creating more (or easier) content does not positively influence rankings. It’s about developing relevant and comprehensive content for users dealing with more than just one aspect of a certain topic. The findings support the idea that search engines are moving away from focusing on single keywords to analyzing so-called “content clusters” – individual subjects or topic areas that are based around keywords and a variety of related terms.

Stop doing “checklist SEO”

So, please stop these outdated “Checklist-SEO” practices which are still overused in the market from my perspective. It’s not about optimizing keywords for search engines. It’s about optimizing the search experience for the user. Let me show you this with another graphic:

On the left, we have the “old SEO paradigm: 1 Keyword (maybe some keyword variations. we all know the ” An SEO walks into a bar joke“) = 1 Landing Page – Checklist SEO. That’s why, in the past, many websites had single landing pages for each specific keyword (and those pages were very likely to bear near-duplicate content). Imagine a website dealing with a specific car having single landing pages for each and every single car part: “x motor,” “x seats,” “x front shield,” “x head lamps,” etc. This does not make sense in most cases. But this is how SEO used to be (and I must admit: the pages ranked!).

But, to have success in the long term, it’s the content (or better, the topic) that matters, not the single keyword. That is why landing pages should be focused on comprehensive topics: 1 Landing Page = 1 Topic. To stick with the example: Put the descriptions of all the car parts on one page.

Decreasing diversity in SERPs since the Hummingbird update

How these developments actually influences the SERPs can be seen in the impact of Google’s Hummingbird. The algorithm refactoring means the search engine now has a better understanding of the intent and meaning of searches which improves its ability to deliver relevant content in search results. This means search engine optimization is increasingly a holistic discipline. It’s not enough to optimize and rank for one relevant keyword – content must now be relevant to the topic and include several related terms. This helps a page to rank for several terms and creates an improved user experience at the same time.

In a recent analysis on Hummingbird, we found that the diversity in search results is actually decreasing. This means, fewer URLs rank for semantically similar (“near-identic”) yet different keywords. Most of you know that not long ago there were often completely different search results for keyword pairs like “bang haircuts” and “hairstyles with bangs” which have quite a bit of overlap in meaning. Now, as it turns out, SERPs for these kinds of keywords are getting more and more identic. Here are two SERPs, one for the query “rice dish,” and one for the query “rice recipe,” shown both before and after Hummingbird, as examples:

SERPs pre-Hummingbird

SERPs post-Hummingbird

At a glance: The most important ranking factors

To get an insight of what some of the more important ranking factors are, we have developed an infographic adding evaluations (based on averages and interpretations) in bubble form to the well-known correlation bar chart. Again, you see the prominence of content factors (given in blue). (Click/tap for a full-size image.)

The more important factors are given on the left side. Arrows (both on the bubbles and the bars) show the trend in comparison to last year’s analysis. On the left side also, the size of the bubbles represents a graphic element based on the interpretation of how important the respective factor might probably be. Please note that the averages given in this chart are based on the top 10 only. We condensed the pool of URLs to SERP 1 to investigate their secrets of ranking on page 1, without having this data influenced by the URLs ranking from 11 to 30.

Good content generates better user signals

What you also notice is the prominent appearance of the factors given in purple. This year we have included user features such as bounce rate (on a keyword level), as well as correlating user signals with rankings. We were able to analyze thousands of GWT accounts in order to avoid a skewed version of the data. Having access to large data sets has also allowed us to see when major shifts occur.

You’ll notice that click through rate is one of the biggest factors that we’ve noticed in this year’s study, coming in at .67%. Average time on site within the top 10 is 101 seconds, while bounce rate is only 37%.

Conclusion: What should I be working on?

Brands are maturing in their approach to SEO. However, the number one factor is still relevant page content. This is the same for big brands and small businesses alike. Make sure that the content is designed for the user and relevant in your appropriate niche.

If you’re interested in learning how SEO developed and how to stay ahead of your competition, just download the study here. Within the study you’ll find many more aspects of potential ranking factors that are covered in this article.

Get the Full Study

So, don’t build landing pages for single keywords. And don’t build landing pages for search engines, either. Focus on topics related to your website/content/niche/product and try to write the best content for these topics and subtopics. Create landing pages dealing with several, interdependent aspects of main topics and write comprehensive texts using semantically closely related terms. This is how you can optimize the user experience as well as your rankings – for more than even the focus keyword – at the same time!

What do you think of this data? Have you seen similar types of results with the companies that you work with? Let us know your feedback in the comments below.

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Posted by katemorris

It’s on the internet, so it’s true.

The bane of the existence of all search marketers is old or incorrect information given to clients at any point in time that they still hang on to. This post was inspired by an interaction with a client’s co-workers, people that are not thinking about SEO on a regular basis. This is not to knock them, but to bring to the attention of everyone that there is a continual need for education. These concepts have a way of hanging around.

And this isn’t about just clients either. This is about friends, parents, and partners. Does anyone else still get asked if they make pop-up ads when they try to explain what they do? (Just me? Crap.)

Doing research for this post, I noticed there are a ton of SEO misconceptions out there, and people are talking about them regularly, but many are related to content marketing or online marketing overall. I’m not covering all misconceptions, but those concepts that seem to be stuck to the idea of SEO and will not let go. Then I’ll give you resources to help educate the people that believe these misconceptions and alternate solutions to give them.

Putting text behind an image

The inspiration. The client is struggling with balancing revenue and content on the page. There is a large image on the page now and we suggested editing the page to add content about the product. The question was asked if we could just put the content behind the image and solve both problems.

My client stepped in and answered the question wonderfully, but it brought to mind how many times I’ve seen overstuffed alt text attributes and content in a noscript tag that doesn’t match what’s in the Flash.

Additional resource

A Comprehensive Guide to Hidden Text

Alternate solution

In this instance, we recommended putting text below the fold for the users that wanted the information and keeping the current image for returning users. Balance that satisfies both user needs and the business goals.

Copying a competitor’s actions

This isn’t as obvious as hiding text, but it’s something that companies refuse to stop doing. It’s the concept that if a competitor is doing something, it must be worth doing. This goes for competitors ranking above a business, but it also covers competitors that the business just dislikes. We all have those competitors we want to “beat” and sometimes that makes us do things that are not fully researched and planned.

Amazon.com is my biggest annoyance. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard the reasoning “but Amazon does it” by major brands that other businesses look up to. Amazon, like most major companies, tests many things, and there is a different person behind each test. If you work for a large company, you understand what I mean.

Additional resource

Stop Copying Your Competitors, They Don’t Know What They are Doing Either

Alternate solution

Everyone is on the hunt for the best results and bringing in new customers, retaining current customers, and making other stakeholders happy. The way you beat competitors is to listen to your stakeholders (customers, clients, partners, employees, investors) and make decisions based on their feedback as well as what is going on in the market.

Sheer number of links equals ranking

This has been debunked so many times it makes my head swim. That doesn’t change how many people still think that the total number of links (as reported by a third party tool like Moz, Majestic, or AHREFs) is the sole factor in ranking. Want to do better in SERPs? Well, we need to hire someone to build us some links! I’m going to leave one screen shot here (Search: “insurance”) and then we’ll get into resources and solutions for when you have to face this.

Additional resource

Moz Search Ranking Factors

Alternate solution

This is more of an “additional solution,” as links and mentions are still very important, but as seen above, it’s far from the only factor in ranking. It’s best to explain the different ranking factors like content relevance to the query, some social data, query deserves freshness, local, news, personalization, and all of the other things that can impact ranking. Focus on a marketing strategy that will not only result in links, but also send new customers through those links and engage the customers into lifelong evangelists.

A loss in traffic means you’ve been penalized

The next two are focused on the issue of penalties. So many people are afraid of being penalized. I think this goes back to the days of black marks in your school record. That or people are worried about losing revenue. Maybe that.

The media gets involved with SEO when there is a penalty and so that is what most people hear about. FTD and Overstock types of situations. Then disaster strikes and revenue falls unexpectedly. After some digging, they find that website traffic is down. This paired with emails business owners get at least once a quarter (in a good year) from fly by night SEO companies telling them they can help with SEO, promise the moon and warn of penalties.

The only logical conclusion is a penalty! We have all seen it and most reputable agencies pipelines are filled with leads from companies in this exact situation. The thing is that we never know if there is a penalty unless we dive into the situation, but I have seen times where there is no penalty.

Many things could have happened including:

• A developer added a noindex tag to a section of the site when meaning to add it to one page or they disallowed that section.
• The site was redesigned with URL changes that can drop the traffic coming into many sites if not done correctly.
• PPC traffic stopped due to a corporate card expiring and not being updated.

Additional resource

Guide to Common SEO Penalties and How to Recover From Them

Alternate solution

Rather than paying the first person that will call you back, first look into what part of the site lost traffic and where that traffic was coming from in the past few months. Did you lose traffic from organic search, paid search, referral traffic, or social media? Try to narrow down what happened and figure it out from there. If you’re sure it was organic search, look into the date and ask your developers if anything changed about the site. If nothing did, check Google Webmaster Tools for any messages from Google about a penalty. If you’re sure it’s organic search and there are no messages, that’s a good time to contact a reputable agency. 

Duplicate content can incur a penalty

I did a talk on this very topic a few years back at Pubcon. So many people don’t take the time to understand what duplicate content is and how to fix it. More importantly, there is a misunderstanding that duplicate content can cause or is a penalty. 

Most clients assume that having duplicate content will incur the “search engine gods’ ” wrath, and that just isn’t true (for the most part; I mean, if your whole site is a copy of someone else’s site …). Duplicate content is a hindrance to site performance most of the time, but most likely not the cause for a substantial drop in traffic and definitely not a penalty from the search engines. 

Additional resource

Google’s Guidelines for Duplicate Content

Alternate solution

Don’t fret. Take the time to visit Webmaster Tools regularly and check out your duplicated title tags and meta descriptions for an easy look into what might be causing duplicate content or crawling issues on your site. Maintenance is the best medicine!

A call to educate

We sometimes live in a bubble where we think people know everything we do and take for granted information like everything above. If someone asked you how to create a P&L Statement, could you? Maybe, maybe not, but you get what I mean. Take the time to answer questions, whether from clients or colleagues if you are in-house. You would be amazed how much more YOU can learn from teaching others. 

So what are your horror stories? Let me know in the comments below!

Photo credits (all images are linked):

• Internet Open by Blaise Alleyne
• Hiding Cat by Aftab Uzzaman
• Penalty by Daniele Zanni
• Educate by Sean MacEntee

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