search engine optimization

Google KO’s Even More Affiliate Marketers

by Brad Campbell in SEO

The saga continues.

GOOGLE-tang is here forever.

98% of you won’t get that reference, but that’s okay (remember, rap music is my drug of choice).  In layman’s terms, Google’s mission to reward high quality sites – and slap lower quality sites that have worked hard to manipulate their rankings – is on like Donkey Kong, now more than ever.

While some SEO experts saw the recent de-indexing of blog networks as nothing more than a scare tactic, I think everyone is starting to see the light now.  Google continues to clean house and there’s no reason to think that this trend won’t continue. 

But if you haven’t gotten hit yet, should you panic?  And what’s the future of affiliate marketing in the post-Panda era?

The way I see it, there are 3 basic categories your affiliate marketing websites could fall into that’d place you in the danger zone:

1) A thin, crappy little affiliate site with piss-poor content that only exists as a means for you to siphon buyer traffic and get easy commissions… but that you haven’t went out of your way to link build to…

2) Everything I said above, plus overly aggressive link building that utilized spammy, unnatural methods like blog networks, automated software, paid links, etc…

3) Or, maybe you were one of the few super affiliate marketers who realized the importance of top notch content that’s written to provide extreme value to your visitors… BUT you combined this with suspect linking methods to help rank faster…

If your blogs fall into either of the first two categories, you’re screwed.  More than likely, if they haven’t tanked yet, consider ‘em to be on life support.

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Should You Worry About Negative SEO?

by Brad Campbell in SEO

With the recent onslaught Google’s been dishing out to blog networks like BMR or any webmaster who’s been engaging in paid link building, those in the know about SEO are growing more and more concerned about “negative SEO.”

What is negative SEO?

Basically, it’s when competitors spam those outranking them with enough paid, over-optimized and/or low quality links in an attempt to push ‘em down in the rankings.

And the scary part is, this is a legitimate concern.

Theoretically, based on what’s transpired over the past few weeks, it’s easy to see how some shady online marketers might try to exploit this.

Now, my hope is that Google is smart enough to have envisioned this problem way before they began wiping out blog networks and penalizing website owners.

I believe the answer to whether or not you should concern yourself about negative SEO has a lot to do with whether or not you believe sites that have tanked recently have done so because of an actual “penalty” or simply because many of their links were devalued due to the de-indexing of blog networks they were using.

In almost all cases, I’m fairly sure it’s the latter.

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Google Ain’t Playing Around

by Brad Campbell in SEO

In yesterday’s blog post I talked about Google’s latest spanking episode and what it might mean for webmasters going forward.

After a little more digging around today, I confirmed one thing…

Google ain’t playing around.

The pimp slapping of weak affiliate sites is something I have been forecasting for a long time now, but it always seemed like Google was dropping the ball.  In achieving all of my top page one rankings across so many different websites and niches, I’ve spent a lot of time in the trenches, reverse engineering how various sites were getting their top spots in good old Google.

Time after time I was shocked and disappointed that spammers seemed to still be cashing in.

But finally, Google seems to have cracked the code.

Because websites are dropping like flies.  I checked in on some of my old, thinly built affiliates sites earlier today — these sites have had top three rankings locked up for many months.  They hadn’t budged.

Until today, that is.

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Minimizing Bounce Rate

by Brad Campbell in SEO

In one of my most recent 2012 Internet marketing predictions posts, I said that user experience would become the new SEO.  At the end of that (geeky) cliffhanger, I said I’d be following up with some aspects to think carefully about in regards to maximizing your visitors’ onsite experience.

One of those objective units of measurement to look closely at is bounce rate.  According to Google, bounce rate is defined as the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.  Therefore, a high bounce rate would imply that either:

  • A) the page they initially landed on was not highly targeted to their original search query, which implies your current ranking page may not be the best option to list high on page one for that keyphrase… OR…
  • B) the quality of your site, structure of your site or quality of the content on that page is unsatisfactory, which once again would mean you don’t deserve to capture that free organic traffic for the intended search term…

Obviously, I’m only speaking in terms of search engine optimization here, but for those who’re paying for Google Adwords, you can essentially come to the same basic conclusions and therefore plan on getting dinged for higher CPC’s.

Regardless of the underlying culprit, it’s easy to see that bounce rate is one fairly black and white way by which Google can determine who deserves to be ranked at the top and who doesn’t.  Even better for Google, bounce rate can be monitored by their robots, so it’s a pretty easy measuring tool for them to implement, track and use to adjust their algorithm accordingly.

I’m sure if you thought about it long and hard, you could come up with a few rare instances that would make for an exception to the rule, but in general, I agree that any website with an extremely high bounce rate probably doesn’t have much to offer it’s visitors.

Conversely, websites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Google and so on, all have ridiculously low bounce rates and you can see why — they have so much to offer their traffic and all provide an unparalleled experience.

Now, I’m not saying you have to be the next Facebook to survive in 2012, but I am saying that you need to be the Facebook (or insert any other legit mega site) of your sub-niche.  In other words, you need to strive to be the best damn resource that’s presented in the best damn way possible, within the topics or services you cover.

You need to constantly ask yourself how you can create such an amazingly worthwhile experience on your website that the average targeted visitors would be insane NOT to click through to at least one more page (if not, dozens more)…

And when you can crack that code and implement it, you’ll earn yourself an impressively low bounce rate.  In return, Google will undoubtedly reward you with potentially higher, faster and/or more long-term page one rankings.

I’ll be back tomorrow with some examples of techniques I’ve used to keep my bounce rate in check.  Then, in future posts, I’ll continue discussing other factors that effect overall user experience.

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Fresh Content and Search Engine Optimization Continued

A couple weeks ago I did a Google Caffeine 2011 video post, where I pointed out that Mr. G had improved the previous algorithm update that dealt with speed of indexing, freshness of content and so on. With this newest update, they’re apparently even “awesomer” at spitting back SERPS that contain both the most relevant [...]

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SEO Tip: Strategic Anchor Text Variation

Hey everyone, let’s talk SEO strategy real quick. (… I’ll be back with the next step in our Affiliate Marketing Tutorial shortly… ) There are many different moving pieces that make up the entire SEO ‘machine’… … and that actually makes it pretty tough to accurately and definitively test out different elements and gauge the [...]

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