“It’s been a success from our standpoint”, Cutts said.

When asked about the issues of false positives (people who feel they’ve been unfairly hit by Penguin when they weren’t doing any spam) Matt went on to clarify,

“We’ve seen a few cases where we might want to investigate more, but this change hasn’t had the same impact as Panda or Florida,”

“No algorithm is perfect. While we’d like to achieve perfection, our litmus test is, ‘Do things get better than before?’”

Matt also went on to clarify that penguin was designed to be quite precise, only acting against pages where there was a high confidence of spam being involved.

So what should you do if you were hit?

Google have said that those hit by the penguin update will need to make changes to their website or link profile in order to recover.

As we’ve mentioned before, bad linking practises seem to be a major cause of this penalty. Some of the things to look out for include,

1. Paid text links using exact match anchor text: For companies that want to rank for a certain term (such as “red widgets”) one way to accomplish this is by buying links from other websites with that exact matching anchor text. This is against Google’s guidelines, as Google would consider this a paid link that exists solely to manipulate PageRank, rather than to provide any value to visitors.
2. Comment spam: Two things proved problematic for websites trying to unnaturally rank for specific keywords: signatures in comments that contained exact match anchor text; and people who used a spammy user name (e.g., Best India SEO Company) as exact match text.
3. Guest posts on questionable sites: Although guest posts are a legitimate way to earn links to your site, sites dinged by the Penguin had links pointing to their website from sites filled with low-quality articles where the focus was on the anchor text rather than the content.
4. Article marketing sites: Thin content featuring links with exact match anchor text were another common factor among affected sites.
5. Links from dangerous sites: Do you have inbound links from sites that have been flagged for malware, numerous pop-ups, or other spammy issues? This was another factor that caused websites to lose their Google rankings, so links to and from web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” are a danger.

If you’re looking to clean up your link profile one technique you can try is called link pruning. This basically involves identifying poor incoming links to your website and taking steps to remove them.

Here is a basic outline of the steps to take,

1. Identify: You need to gather a comprehensive backlink profile for the site in question. There are several tools available that would accomplish this, including Google Webmaster Tools Backlinks Report, Majestic SEO Site Explorer and SEOmoz Open Site Explorer.
2. Investigate: Go down the list of backlinks to find the rotten ones. It’s a time intensive step that requires you navigate to each link to evaluate its quality. After a while you may start to get a sense of what’s bad by the URL of the linking page alone. If you opt for using Majestic SEO, you have the benefit of their proprietary ACRank, a quality score that you can use to judge link value.
3. Send Requests: Create a template email requesting link removal that you’ll send to the webmasters in charge of the links identified as low quality. The template should candidly explain that you are an SEO or site owner trying to recover from a Google penalty and would he or she please remove the following links. List the URLs where the links can be found, the URL on your site they point to, the anchor text ─ all the info needed to easily find the link you’re requesting removed. To send the request, you may find contact info on the site, you may need to do a whois search, and you may need to do some sleuthing to get names and email addresses.
4. Follow Up and Repeat: Expect to receive four types of responses to your requests:● Remove link and tell you.
   ● Remove link and not tell you.
   ● Not reply or do anything.
   ● Will remove the link if you pay them. 

   In the case of the first, verify by going to the page where the link was and if the link was removed, check it off the list. If you haven’t gotten any response back from a contact in 2 weeks, check to see if the link has been removed. It may or may not. If it’s been removed, cross it off the list. If it hasn’t been removed, send a follow-up request.The process of link pruning requires multiple cycles. Each successive cycle will see more links removed. If you run across a webmaster requesting payment for link removal, let’s just say there’s a search engine who will be very interested to hear about this.

5. Communicate with Google: Throughout this process you must keep detailed records of your actions. A spreadsheet with columns for the linking URL, the contact name, the contact email, the date a request was sent, and responses or actions taken by the linking site. In the end you will not be able to extract all dubious links from the site but you will want to be able to show you’ve done everything in your power to extract manipulative links from your backlink profile.

Have you been impacted by Penguin? Feel free to leave a comment below.

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SEO blogs have been buzzing over the past couple of days with news that a new version of Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines was leaked online.

The Google Quality Rating Guidelines is a handbook used by Google Search Quality Raters from around the world to rate the quality of results from specific searches. URL Raters are given a URL and a search query and instructed to visit the landing page and assign a rating based on guidelines from the handbook.

According to Google, queries are broken up in to three categories,

After understanding the intent of the query, users then rate web pages on the following scale,

Google’s Criteria for a “Useful” Webpage is rather broad and states that a single query can have many useful webpages. As with any manual rating system the answers will be subjective, however raters are asked to decide if the webpage is a “good fit” for the query. Some examples state that the page may be “highly satisfying, authoritative, entertaining, and/or recent (such as breaking news on a topic).”

Pages earning the “relevant” rating will still need to fit the query but will have less helpful information compared to useful pages. This may include information that is older or only addresses one part of the query.

The “slightly relevant” or “off topic” ratings are saved for web pages which Google wants to avoid. In these sections Google asks raters to look past tricks tricks like including search terms in the URL, page title and copied or repeated keywords when assigning a rating to the page.

Finally, the document also discusses what makes a page bad enough to be marked as “spam”. Here are some tactics you may want to avoid,

• Hidden text or links – may be exposed by selecting all page text and scrolling to the bottom (all text is highlighted), disabling CSS/Javascript, or viewing source code
• Sneaky redirects – redirecting through several URLs, rotating destination domains cloaking with JavaScript redirects and 100% frame
• Keyword stuffing – no percentage or keyword density given; this is up to the rater
• PPC ads that only serve to make money, not help users
• Copied/scraped content and PPC ads
• Feeds with PPC ads
• Doorway pages – multiple landing pages that all direct user to the same destination
• Templates and other computer-generated pages mass-produced, marked by copied content and/or slight keyword variations
• Copied message boards with no other page content
• Fake search pages with PPC ads
• Fake blogs with PPC ads, identified by copied/scraped or nonsensical spun content
• Thin affiliate sites that only exist to make money, identified by checkout on a different domain, image properties showing origination at another URL, lack of original content, different WhoIs registrants of the two domains in question
• Pure PPC pages with little to no content
• Parked domains

Unfortunately the full 125 page document has been taken down by Google, so if you managed to grab a copy while it was online consider yourself lucky.

As always, feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions or other information to share.

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Personally, I find it disappointing to see the end for site explorer which has been one of my most frequently used link checking tools for ineedhits.com and our clients. It always seemed to have one of the most comprehensive sources of link data across the web and allows you to run an unlimited number of queries.

Here’s what Yahoo! had to say about the shutdown,

In an August 2010 blog post, we said we would continue Site Explorer with a focus on new features for webmaster community, even after the transition to Microsoft platforms is complete. We listened to your feedback, and along with the team from Bing Webmaster Center looked jointly at the roadmap for the webmaster tools. Having two webmaster portals for a single source for organic results does not add enough value. Once organic results are transitioned to Bing in all the markets, we plan to shut down Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools will be the source for Bing and Yahoo! webmaster site and analytics data.

For those of you (like me) who use this tool frequently, the good news is that there are still plenty of other link data tools we can use. Below are some of the more popular ones.

1. Google Webmaster Tools
   Google’s “Links to Your site” area allows you to drill down to a page level to see the inbound links and it also provides a ranking of the top “Anchor Text” for the links pointing to your website (helps to see if your SEO efforts are on target for the right keywords)
   www.google.com/webmaster
2. Link Diagnosis
   Link diagnosis is a free link checking tool which requires a browser plugin to analyse links to your website. While I’ve found it doesn’t find the same number of links as Google or Yahoo it does include extra information such as PageRank, anchor text and link strength which make it a handy tool.
   www.linkdiagnosis.com
3. Open Site Explorer
   Open Site Explorer offers an advanced set of link data including top linking domains, anchor text distribution and overall scores for your page and domain authority. The only downside is that you’ll need to pay to access full functionality of this tool.
   www.opensiteexplorer.org
4. Majestic SEO
   Majestic Site Explorer is another comprehensive link analysis tool that always seems to find the highest number of external backlinks for any site that I check. They’ll also provide a handy overview of your backlink history over time.
   www.majesticseo.com

While there are many more link checking tools available, this should give you enough insight to continue after Yahoo! site explorer is finally laid to rest.

Check out iNeedHits for more articles by Matthew Elshaw

There are two main considerations when building your sites navigation,

• First and foremost should be users. Your site’s navigation needs to help users find different content on your website quickly and easily.

• The second consideration should be search engines. Navigation should also be useful for search engines wanting to crawl your website and index your content.

It is possible to create navigation that will satisfy both users and search engines, so let’s take a look at some advice which can help to achieve this.

Choose Text Over Images

Simple text based navigation is the most search engine friendly. Apart from being easily followed by spiders, text based navigation gives an opportunity to include the keywords in the page content.

The keywords included in the navigation are valued by all search engines and the anchor text used for each link can help other pages to rank well.

Search engines will still be able to crawl image based links, but you will lose the keyword based targeting you can achieve with text.

Location Matters
Generally speaking, it is best to keep your navigation along the top or left hand side of your website. There are a couple of main reasons for this,

• It keeps your navigation links towards the top of your HTML which is good for search engines.
• It keeps navigation links in the eye path which is makes it easy to locate for users.

It’s also important to keep a standard location for your navigation across all pages on your website. If navigation switches location on various pages it may become confusing for users to locate.

Avoid Using Javascript
Search engines are getting better at reading JavaScript, but it can still cause crawling issues. The best option is to avoid JavaScript based linking as it may result in search engines missing some pages and not performing a complete crawl of your site.

If your navigation has to be JavaScript based, make sure that links are still visible if your browser has JavaScript disabled.

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If you’re looking for the highest possible return for your SEO efforts, then follow these guidelines to ensure your internal links are working to improve your rankings.

1. Optimize anchor text
A simple but effective tactic is to ensure your anchor text is targeting your core keyword for the page. This is a great tactic to use within site-wide footer links or even in the navigation menu if it makes sense for visitors.

2. Ensure all links are do-follow

Google ignores link value from any links marked as nofollow so make sure that your web designer hasn’t accidentally marked internal links with the nofollow attribute.

3. Use content based links where appropriate
Aside from your navigation and footer based links, linking to your main pages within the body text of your web pages is another way to help rankings. Remember that it’s important to use your target keywords as anchor text, but make sure the link doesn’t look out of place or seem irrelevant by making the page unreadable.

4. Keep total link numbers low
Take note of the total number of links on any given page and try and keep this number as low as possible. This is because individual link juice is divided amongst ALL links (external and internal) on any page, so the less links you have, the more value each link is going to pass on.

If you follow these simple guidelines, you should start to see some positive ranking changes for your keywords. If you have any other internal linking tactics, let me know in the blog comments below.

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There are a number of reasons the tool is one of my favorites:

• Site explorer seems to provide one of the most comprehensive sources of link data across the web.
• It’s a quick and easy free tool with an unlimited number of queries.
• It can work for an individual page or an entire domain
• It has a few options which allow you to further refine which links are displayed.

How to Use the Tool
To use the tool, visit Yahoo! Site Explorer and enter the URL you would link to check. Once the information for this page has been loaded, click on the “Inlinks” button near the top of the page.

Here’s how a link query for ineedhits looks:

From this page you can use the “Show Inlinks” dropdown to exclude internal links from your domain or subdomain and also display links pointing to the specific URL you’ve entered or their entire domain. When checking the incoming links for a competitor, it’s often useful to exclude their internal links as this can skew their figures.

Getting Extra Link Information
To get even richer data from this tool, there is also a firefox add-on called SEO Link Analysis which displays additional information about each link. You’ll get details on the PageRank of each site, the anchor text used and if the link is nofollowed or not.

Here’s what the tool looks like with the plugin installed:

As I mentioned earlier, Site Explorer is a great free link checking tool – so hopefully this tutorial has given you a quick introduction of how to get the most out of it. If you have any other questions, please leave a comment below!

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Let’s take a look at a typical small business website. While this may not be the case for every business, many sites often have the following pages in common:

• Homepage
• Services/Products Page
• Testimonials Page
• About Us Page
• Contact Us Page

Using the pages above, here’s an example of how to maximize the SEO impact of your URLs.

Homepage (www.example.com)
When choosing your domain name, try and include your primary keyword somewhere in the name. A good strategy for this is creating a keyword + generic domain name. For example, if you’re targeting the keyword flowers, you might go for flowershub.com, starflowers.com, fastflowers.com etc.

Services/Products Page (www.example.com/[keyword])
On the page which lists your services or products, use another major keyword as the directory for this page. Using the example above, you might want to create the following pages:

• /flower-delivery
• /flower-types

Testimonials Page (www.example.com/[keyword]-testimonials)
The testimonials page is another chance for you to include one of your important keywords. Try using the format /[keyword]-testimonials, where keyword represents your business type or industry. Some examples might be:

• /florist-testimonials
• /painting-testimonials
• /cleaning-testimonials

About Us Page (www.example.com/about-[business name])
The about us page is a chance to make sure your website ranks strongly when customers search for your business name. Using the directory format /about-[businessname] with the business name in Meta tags and body content a good way to achieve this.

Contact Us Page (www.example.com/contact-us)

For the contact us page I’d recommend sticking with a simple /contact-us format which is standard across most sites and is easy for customers to remember.

While URL structure is no magic bullet for SEO, following the guidelines above is a good way to build a solid foundation. If you’ve got any other URL advice, let us know in the comments below!

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