Link Practices: Keeping You Out of Jail By Megan Geiss

#SMX #14A @MeganGeiss

Megan Geiss, Director, Marketing Strategy, Merkle | RKG

LINK PRACTICES: KEEPING YOU OUT

OF “JAIL”


Megan Geiss

Director, Marketing Strategy

Merkle | RKG


Major financial company 4 domains (2 with manual action penalties)

270,000 Backlinks

4100 referring domains

Reconsideration granted on first try

HOW DID WE DO THAT?

CLIENT EXAMPLE


Assessing Your Risk

Penalty Rescue

TODAY’S DISCUSSION


Are you at risk?Backlink Profile Audit


Penguin or Manual Action Penguin = Algorithmic Penalty

Manual action = Notification

What to look for Assessing the overall health of a backlink profile

Patterns, trends, red flags, anomalies

Potentially threatening egregious backlinks

Do you need a penalty rescue?

BACKGROUND


There are clear signals that will help in determinations Quality metrics

Referring Domains

C-blocks

Anchor Text

Geo-Location

Sitewide Links

Advertorials

Relevancy

RISK ASSESMENT


Link Velocity Newly discovered backlinks

Referring Domains Link network detection

ID client owned domains

C-block analysis

Anchor Text Low ratio of referring domains to backlinks

High % of sitewide links

High %'s for money terms/phrases

Exact match anchor text % relative to entire backlink profile

Followed images ("advertorials" passing PR)

Links to home page vs. deep pages

TIME TO BE A DETECTIVE


Majestic SEO Comprehensive inventory of inbound links

Ahrefs Deep dive into anchor text analysis

Moz Open Site Explorer Analyzing authority and trust of backlinks

Google Webmaster Tools Sample data from Google’s index

TOOLS


ANALYSIS

Majestic SEO can help determine UNNATURAL spikes in inbound links


AND MORE ANALYSIS…

Pivot table anchor text data to determine ratio of referring domains to links


…AND MORE ANALYSIS

Use Majestic SEO to pinpoint geo-location red flags


AND MORE ANALYSIS….

Highlight low Citation and Trust flow via Majestic SEO


EVEN MORE ANALYSIS….

Use MOZ’s Open Site Explorer to look at page level link data


Penalty RescueHas Your Site Been Hit?


A significant drop in traffic and that is not due to other site architectural or

crawling issues

HOW WILL YOU KNOW?


Gather all backlinks

Rank by quality

Analysis

Outreach for removal requests

Follow up

Disavow tool

Reconsideration request

PROCESS, PROCESS, PROCESS

1

2

3

5

6

4

7


Create a comprehensive inventory of all inbound links.

There are 2 primary sources: Majestic SEO (fresh index)

GWT for representative sample of Google’s Index

GATHER ALL THE BACKLINKS1


Consolidate and de-dupe Majestic and GWT Remove nofollows

Filter by Citation Flow (we use 30 or below)

Look for IP patterns or trends within C-blocks

RANK BY QUALITY2


Analyze and evaluate the filtered master list.

Determine if a backlink or domain is outside of Google’s quality guidelines or falls within an identified link scheme.

Manually review domains

ANALYSIS3


Gather contact information for the identified removal targets Can be done during manual analysis

Minimum 2 outreach attempts Be kind…. This is human interaction

Document as much of the communications as possible to later include in the reconsideration request.

OUTREACH FOR REMOVAL4


Typical removal request responses: Webmaster removes link

Webmaster requests payment to remove link

Webmaster removes link and doesn't tell you

No response

FOLLOW UP5


Completed due diligence to remove low-quality links

Create file in .txt (must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII) – one URL per line

Disavow entire domains with this notation: “domain:example.com”

Include additional information with the "#" character All lines beginning with # will be ignored

Avoid common mistakes:

Disavowing “just enough” to get by

Disavowing everything

Upload a new list overwrites the old

DISAVOW TOOL6


Tell the story…

Google is looking for the following: Admit the mistake

Website has stopped the violations

Has cleaned up egregious links as much as possible

A good faith assurance

RECONSIDERATION REQUEST7


HAPPY ENDINGS


Rebuilding a healthy backlink profile can lead to more than just links 39% rate of influencer engagement

2,383 social mentions during (Likes, Shares, Tweets, etc.)

Site Visits from Campaign: Incremental 17k

44 Unique Article Posts

2,034 organically earned backlinks

WHAT’S NEXT?


THANK YOU!

Megan Geiss

Director, Marketing Strategy

Merkle | RKG

[email protected]