Did Google penalize SAPE Links (another Link Network)?

Rumor floating around the SEO industry currently is that Google has crushed yet another link network, SAPE Links. Those using this paid service were supposedly penalized and downgraded in Google rankings over last two days. But not all webmasters agree it is the SAPE link network, rather they feel it may be a different network all together.

Dozens of threads are discussing about downgrades of Google rankings recently. Black Hat World and Black Hat Group have webmasters and SEOs who are hinting that it was due to SAPE Links. While others are not sure whether it is specific to SAPE or some other link network.

One webmaster wrote:
Anyone that use SAPE links see huge drop in rankings today?
Quite a number of Search professionals agreed but not all.

Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts tweeted on 13 February 2013 that he was investigating "naughty Russian link selling software". And coincidently SAPE Links is a Russian link network.

@dannysullivan @seocom just another day at the office for me. :) Okay, gotta look at some really naughty Russian link selling software now.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 13, 2013

Suggestions for Search Professionals and Webmasters:
Always avoid getting back-links from Link Networks. They may seem easy to get and can bring good Search Engine rankings early. But Google is all set to fight spam and low quality sites. Search Spam team of Big G cracks on culprits and penalizes and downgrads them in Google rankings. Always prepare unique content and get related quality back links. That will lead to top rankings in SERPs and qualified traffic.

Proper Keyword Distribution in Anchor Text for good Search Rankings

After the release of Penguin update by Google, sometime back SEOTacklebox did a webinar about keywords, linking and search ranking. Later they revisited that data after allowing plenty of time to gather more information and came to some conclusions about the best distribution of anchor text for ranking in Google.

It is well known by now that Google does not want people gaming their search algorithm. But still their search results are a product of computer generated algorithm. No person is sitting there to decide, which websites rank and which sites don't, for all search phrases. Due to this basic fact, there will always be ways to improve your search rankings by associating your site with what Google is looking for.

Link building for better search rankings is still necessary. Links are still the primary way, due to which Google decides what sites to rank where. The difference after Penguin update is that now the links need to be distributed in a natural manner rather than a keyword based manner. SEOMOZ published an article sometime ago, about the research on 10 national brand websites, that rank very well in the search engines. They broke down the percentages of links by anchor text. They came up with is a good formula for link building strategy.

Results found shown that about 65% of the links were exact match, phrase matching or brand matching with regards to the anchor text. The breakdown between these three categories was 18% exact match, 17% phrase match and 30% brand match. Remaining 35% back-links were evenly divided between the URL as the anchor text and other unrelated anchor text.

It presents a great scheme to design your own link building strategy. Using the ratios above, here is what a sample link building strategy might look like for a site, called "Widget World" selling "Red Widgets". For every 100 links built, the following should be done:

• 18 links with anchor text of "Red Widgets" – this is the Exact match
• 17 links with anchor text containing Red Widgets, such as "Handy Red Widgets", "Waterproof Red Widgets" etc – this is the Phrase match
• 30 links with anchor text of "Widget World" or slight variation – this is the Brand
• 18 links with the anchor text of "yoursitename.com" – this is the URL
• 17 links with random anchor text – this could be long tail phrases like "see more about Red Widgets at our site" or simple phrases like "click here"

This is a simplistic breakdown, but the data backs up these general ratios as being the target. Regardless of whether the back links are built all naturally or built by you or outsourced, if you keep to this ratio you will not be degraded by Google, and you will see your search rankings increase.

When building these links, you can consider building higher page rank or PR links for the first line item – the exact match phrase. This will hopefully transfer a little more link juice through that phrase. When you combine that with the varied anchor text, adhering to these ratios, you have a winning formula for better search rankings.

Source(s):
http://seotacklebox.com/blog/proper-anchor-text-distribution-for-better-rankings/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization

Yahoo! & Google Team Up For Contextual Advertising

Yahoo! and Google have agreed to team up for Contextual Advertising. Yahoo has just lately finalized an international, non-exclusive contract with Google to show ads on different Yahoo! sites and specific co-branded sites using Google's AdSense for Content and Google's AdMob services. Google will start managing some of its AdSense display ads on Yahoo properties, and will become one of various ad systems Yahoo! uses to fill some of its pages. Now the two organizations will have a affiliation just like the one that Google has with online publishers: They provide Google entry to some of their unsold stock, and Google places small ads it operates on part of its advertisers.

Yahoo and Google had long talks about a more engaged ad tie in summer of 2012. That involved a situation where Yahoo would generally give over its ad serving features for all of its lower-priced ads to Google. Those discussions looked unsuccessful after interim Yahoo! CEO Ross Levinsohn was changed by Marissa Mayer. But since then Mayer has employed former vice president of Google's worldwide Partner Business Solutions group, Henrique De Castro as her chief operating officer.

It's worth wondering whether the AdSense ads will result in something bigger for Yahoo! or not? Yahoo has a long-term contract with Microsoft to manage its large search ad business. Marissa Mayer has openly mentioned her frustration with the way that partnership has proved unsuccessful for Yahoo. However, any really important bond between Yahoo! and Google would surely go through loads of regulating evaluation. Possibly the two organizations think what they are up to will not result in any issues in the US or Belgium.

Sara Gorman, a spokeswoman for Yahoo revealed that the ads will be displayed on Yahoo's web pages for finance, news, sports and autos. Yahoo stock increased 1.5 percent to $20.15 in long term dealing after the declaration of the new collaboration. eMarketer reported that Google is predicted to remain on top in the 17.7 billion U.S. dollars market for display ads this year, with 18% share, while Facebook will have 15% and Yahoo share will drop to 8 percent.

Refrence(s):
Yodel Anecdotal - http://ycorpblog.com/2013/02/06/contextual-advertising/
AllThingsD - http://allthingsd.com/20130206/coming-soon-to-yahoo-ads-from-google/
http://www.webpronews.com/google-and-yahoo-are-now-working-together-on-ads-2013-02
http://marketingland.com/yahoo-strikes-deal-to-run-contextual-ads-from-google-32799
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Yahoo-teams-up-with-Google-on-ads-4258204.php

Social Media Marketing - Highs & Lows in 2012

Social Media Marketing had its Highs and Lows in 2012. So many companies just could not figure out how to use Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. It is great to hear some of Social Media campaigns were rightly done. 2012 was a good year for companies who were active on Social Networks. It was not just the big names that saw big change.

Social Media is realatively new aspect for Internet Marketing. But it has become essential for online sales and growth of businesses and products. Social Networking is necessary for qualified traffic, reputation management, brand exposure and marketing success.

Here is an Infographic:

Google Panda Update 20 Released with Impact on 2.4% of English Queries

Google confirmed on Thursday, 27 September 2012, that they have released a Panda algorithm update. This is the 20th Panda update and thus it is named Panda 20. It is a fairly major Panda update that impacts 2.4% of English search queries and is still rolling out. Late Friday afternoon, Google announced a EMD (Exact Match Domain) update that removed the chances of a low-quality exact match domain from ranking well in Google. But over the weekend, many non-exact match domain site owners noticed their rankings dropped as well. What was it?

Google confirmed that they pushed out a new Panda algorithm update that is not just a data refresh but an algorithm update. Google told us this "affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice." There is more to come with this update, where Google promises to roll out more to this Panda algorithm update over the next 3-4 days. Here is the comment Google's Matt Cutts sent us after asking about this update

Google began rolling out a new update of Panda on Thursday, 27 Sep 12. This is actually a Panda algorithm update, not just a data update. A lot of the most-visible differences went live Thursday, 27 September 2012, but the full roll-out is baking into our index and that process will continue for another 3-4 days or so. This update affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice, with a smaller impact in other languages (0.5% in French and Spanish, for example). The sad part is that there are many sites affected by either this Panda update or the EMD update and it is hard to know which update you were hurt by.

Google changed Link Evaluation criteria

What exactly did Google announce?
Google announced several changes of the ranking algorithm. The most important change was the change of the backlink analysis:

"Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often re-architect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable."

What does this mean for your web page rankings?
Unfortunately, Google doesn't go into detail. As mentioned in Google's statement, Google uses "characteristics of links" to figure out the topic of a linked page.

Characteristics of Links
We'll take a look at the characteristics below. Then we'll try to find out which element could have been changed.

Characteristic 1: the text of the link
The anchor text of a link has been the most important factor for a long time. If many sites link to a page with the anchor text "green apple" then the page will get high rankings for the term "green apple".

Characteristic 2: the link power of the linking page
Links from pages with many inbound links have a higher influence than links from pages with few backlinks.

Characteristic 3: content and page proximity
If you sell shoes on your website then the link to your website will have a bigger impact if the text that surrounds the link to your page is about shoes. If the link to your website is surrounded by totally unrelated text then the link won't count as much.

Characteristic 4: link attributes such as nofollow and title
Links that use the rel=nofollow attribute don't affect the position of your web pages on Google. Some webmasters think that using title attributes can have a positive effect if these contain the targeted keywords. Others think that this could trigger a spam filters.

Characteristic 5: redirects and shortened URLs
Redirects and shortened URLs such as http://bit.ly/a4X4th are URLs that redirect to another URL. Should these URLs carry full weight when it comes to calculate the position of a website?

Characteristic 6: the age of a website
The older a link is, the more Google tends to trust that link. Links that remain for a long time seem to have a bigger impact than links that come and go.

Characteristic 7: the affiliation of the linking sites
Links from websites that have the same owner and links from affiliates may have a different influence on the rankings of a web page than links from websites that are not affiliated with the page.

Of course, we can only speculate what Google has changed. It is likely that Google now only considers the anchor text of a link if that link is placed in the right context (page and content proximity). Another possibility is that affiliate links (redirected or with page variables) will have less influence on the rankings of a page. If you have followed the tips and tricks of this newsletter in the past then Google's change won't have any negative influence on your website rankings. Just continue to get good backlinks and optimize the content of your pages. You can analyze the different links that point to a website here.

References:
Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February
Google Changes How It Evaluates Links
How Google evaluates links: 7 characteristics

Google extended Panda Search Algorithm update to English queries

Google has extended its Panda Update in search algorithm to English queries. Google had announced search algorithm change (known as "Farmer" or "Panda") in February 2011 for the US. Google Panda update has now been implemented on all English language queries. This includes both English speaking countries (such as searches on google.co.uk or google.com.au) and English queries in non-English countries (for instance, for a searcher using google.fr or google.de who's chosen English-language results).

The launch impacted nearly 12% of queries in the United States. The impact may be similar for English-speaking searchers across the world. Google claimed that they've gotten a lot of positive responses about the change: searchers are finding better results, and many great publishers are getting more traffic. Google said that based on testing, they've found the algorithm is very accurate at detecting site quality. Google has launched two ways for searchers to block particular sites from their search results recently. The first of these was a Chrome extension.

Google has now launched a block link directly in the search results that appears once a searcher has clicked from the results to a site and then return to the search results. Google said after the initial Panda launch, that they didn't use data about what sites searchers were blocking as a signal in the algorithm, but they did use the data as validation that the algorithm change was on target. Google found an 84% overlap in sites that were negatively impacted by Panda and sites that users had blocked with the Chrome extension.

Google are now using data about what searchers have blocked in "high confidence situations" as a secondary factor. With the initial launch of Panda Update, large sites were primarily affected, as the larger sites; with more pages, traffic, and links, have more signals available. By the latest update, smaller sites will see an impact. Amit Singhal, in charge of search quality at Google said: "this change also goes deeper into the "long tail" of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before".

References:
High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback - Google Webmaster Central Blog
Panda 2.0: Google Rolls Out Panda Update Internationally & Incorporates Searcher Blocking Data - Search Engine Land