Things have been recklessly busy as of late. I have been moving into my new house and as I was unpacking stuff I came across the first web marketing/web design book I ever bought. I have attached a scanned image of the page on “Announcing your site”. It made me laugh. This was only 8 years ago.

It is worth noting Google wasn’t even included on the list, funny stuff. Here is the excerpt if you cannot read the image:

“Publicizing your page in the major search services helps Web surfers find your site. You should try and get your page listed in as many search services as possible.

The following table describes how to add your site to several of the popular Web Search services. To list your Web Site in the search service, go to the URL and click the link indicated in the last column of the table.”

“You can save yourself some time by submitting your Web site to a submission service called Submit It at www.submit-it.com (which is owned by Microsoft now for something completely unrelated). This service can submit your Web site to more than 400 search engines for a modest fee of 59$.”

For the first time in my history of webmastering, Matt admitted in the Q/A at SMX Advanced that there is a level of manual intervention and detection with regards to backlinks. I figured the likes, but its interesting to see he is no longer trying to take a claim of “we are solely algorithmic”… Continue Reading »

Apparently, Google doesn’t really care about penalizing sites in their index, whether that is by the page level, or flat out kicking you out of Google, no matter how legit your site is you have a giant target on your back if you are not careful. Over the last year there has been a lot of talk from M.Cutts about the “problems†with buying links. He has been pretty persistent with telling webmasters that they do not condone it.

I don’t really care much for the idea Google can tell you where you can and cannot buy advertising. However, it is their index and they can do what they want.

From what I have seen so far, as far as the penalizations go they are not across the board. I still feel like it is a manual handcheck and perhaps with some level of algorithmic manipulation.

The following are 9 reasons you should be worried if you are buying links:

1. You are buying links through a network

2. You are buying links in chunks, 3-5 at a time on one page.

3. You are buying all your links on sidebar, footer locations.

4. Your entire niche buys links.

5. Your site sucks, as in no one in there right mind would naturally link to you.

6. All of your links have perfectly, articulated anchor text that simply looks fake.

7. You are not a 300+ Million dollar brand name.

8. You are doing really, really well in the SERPS, and rank in the top spot for a majority of the money terms.

9. 70+ % of your sites traffic comes from Google organic results

The bottom line is if you are buying links you really have to be under the radar. I know this has been said for a while but more so then ever. If your entire niche is buying links then there is a much greater chance your site is going to get checked out in my opinion.

Don’t go overboard, actually buy links that will get you traffic and conversions.

PS. If your link profile is made up of 1/2 to 3/4 paid links you might as well stop now, and start building defensible traffic.

If you are in the Raleigh area, and want to discuss advanced SEO and SEM tactics, I encourage you to come out. I am holding the first of hopefully many more Advanced SEO meetups. We are holding the first session on Wednesday April 16 from 7pm to 9pm at the Carolina Ale House (Brier Creek Location).

The idea is to get together and share ideas, tactics and tricks that are working in the world of organic search optimization and paid optimization. SEO/SEM 101 is left at the door. This is the place to share in depth tactics that are working, and working well.

Feel free to signup over at spongecell for the Raleigh SEO Meeting. http://spongecell.com/event_page/view/594997

UPDATE:

After further notice it appears to be somewhat algorithmic in nature, and somewhat manual. Some sites I have noticed have gotten completely docked, and some sites have only had penalizations at the page level. Will keep an eye on this as it unfolds.

I talked to Matt Cutts, and he explained that if you are trying to recoup some of your lost rankings, then the best course of action is to get the paid links removed by contacting the site owners and telling them to take them down. Once you have made a good faith effort of removing the links then they might consider the reconsideration request.

Not sure how feasible it is to get this done, but this is what he said none the less.

It looks like Google has finally started pushing, what appears to be in typical “scalable” fashion, a paid link algorithm that is completely knocking out pages (not entire sites) that it feels have been heavily gamed via paid links.

This is going to open up a whole new can of worms, and will be interesting to watch how it unfolds in the coming weeks and months. Competitor sabotage here we come?