In this time of mass-scale algorithmic penalties to combat decade-old SEO techniques, many established websites are finding that they have to answer for search strategies implemented years ago and since forgotten.

Getting an algorithmic penalty such as Penguin revoked is not an easy task, but after months of hard work, many webmasters are finding that getting the “all clear” from Google has no effect on their rankings.

What’s going on?

So before I begin, let’s be clear – after having a Penguin penalty revoked, there are many reasons why your site may not recover. The main one is that you now have no link equity – after removing or disavowing all of your spammy links, you’re probably a significant way behind your competition. Your domain is probably rated as untrustworthy, so you need to be extra –whitehat from now on if you want to get back in to Google’s goodbooks.

While Google has never really talked about how Penguin really works, the fact that “Penguin 3” was announced as a “data refresh” rather than algorithm change strongly suggests that it’s an offline calculation – imagine it as an anti-PageRank – your website’s entire link profile is analysed, then Penguin scores are given to your domain/pages/keywords. The search algorithm then uses these scores when giving a user the search results.

By this logic, regardless of when your penalty is revoked, you will not experience any ranking recoveries until your Penguin scores are recalculated.

As the analysis of your backlink profile needs to include analysis of the backlink profiles of every site linking to you, and every site linking to them, and every link on the internet to identify bad neighbourhoods, link farms, and linkspam techniques, this calculation likely takes a long time to do – even with Google’s massive processing power, this could take weeks or months to accomplish.

This means that if you had your Penguin penalty revoked on October the 6^th (The day after the last Penguin update), you are still being penalised today, almost seven months later.

So far I’ve just been presenting an argument about how we think it works, here’s a bit of proof.

WPMU.org – one of the only public Penguin case studies.

WPMU were hit by the initial rollout of Penguin on April 24, 2012, and quickly managed to recover – while the case study doesn’t say when the penalty was revoked, their rankings and traffic recovered pretty strongly on May 25 – the rollout of Penguin 2.

Site 1.

Hit: Penguin 1  - April 24, 2012. Recovered: Penguin 2 - May 24, 2012

Site 2.

Hit: Penguin 1  - April 24, 2012. Recovered: Penguin 2 - May 24, 2012

Our advice for those stuck waiting until the Penguin data is refreshed?

Short of pleading with Matt Cutts to release an interim refresh, there’s nothing you can do to about your penalty. If you can identify specific pages which are under penalty, and they’re not getting much direct traffic, empirical evidence shows that by burning (404’ing) those sections of your site, and copying the content to new URLs, the new pages will not be under a penalty.

Yes, you may be starting from square one, but doing something is always better than doing nothing. Besides, you can always bring those burnt pages back to life once the penalty data has been refreshed. Treat this time as the last hour of your prison sentence – build your authority using whitehat techniques and make a big comeback.

Previously, if you were targeting the UK market, it made little sense to try to rank in Google.de (Google Germany) – your page in English had little chance of ranking, and building links and authority in a market that would probably only send you a few qualified visitors; the effort required to rank well simply wasn’t worth it.

However, with HREFLANG your internationalised pages inherit some of the link metrics of your main market’s page – meaning that ranking well in international markets can be as easy as translating a few pages, and making sure that non-English users get a good (and consistent) user experience.

The are loads of guides on how to implement HREFLANG, and quite a few case studies too. This post is another case study.

As you probably don’t know, I run a small travel website called broke.travel. One of my highest traffic pages offers users discount codes for hostelworld, and ranks quite well. Given that I have been in the number one spot for a long time, and have done a load of SERP snippet testing to get the maximum CTR, I wanted to try to rank this page number one in other languages too, just to squeeze that little bit more traffic out of it.

I had a couple of friends translate my page into their mother tounge, giving me a Dutch and German equivelent of my page:

 

As my site is based on WordPress, this part was pretty easy – the “language” of a page is set by an Advanced Custom Field, and the state of being the same page is a Posts2Posts connection

The Result

Of course I wouldn’t be writing a case study if it wasn’t at least a little successful.

It took about 10 weeks for anything to happen, but overnight the rankings of these pages went from position nowhere to the top of page one.

 

Traffic began to come in pretty much as soon as the rankings shot up, and it converts at roughly the same rate as English-speaking users.

Conclusion

By promising a couple of my foreign friend’s beer, and implementing a couple of WordPress hacks, I squeezed out some extra sales from one of my most well-optimised pages.

Before we get too carried away with the link love, and at risk to this sounding like a Oscar acceptance speech, it’s worth mentioning the amazing team, with weird interests and diverse skills that is helping to shape our future, and the future of search.

We celebrated last night with a suitcase of booze followed by a massive whole joint of steak that bleed all over the table and was so offensive to our vegetarian employees, they left in protest. Thankfully, the steak didn’t last long with the carnivores that we are. Epic meal time anyone?

So I guess this is a just a small thank you to everyone I’ve met and had the privilege to work with. It’s been a great journey so far, and not just been one big party but filled with valuable moments and looking forward to all the future milestones.

I think we’re all in agreement – 2012 was a massive year for the British royal family, with the Queen’s jubilee and the world’s never-ending obsession with the Duchess of Cambridge. But do we know who’s won the award for most popular royal? In a nutshell, no.

Google Zeitgeist 2012 tells us that Queen Elizabeth was in fact, the most searched-for royal family this year. Which may well be true – the old girl has had a big year celebrating 60 years on the throne and jumping out of helicopters with James Bond. Unsurprisingly, Kate Middleton makes an appearance high on the list at number two. But hang on – aren’t we forgetting something? A glimpse of royal boobs is bound to gain a high amount of searches – and we know whose boobs we’d rather see. But according to Google Zeitgeist, boobgate wasn’t enough to pip the Queen to the post – or was it?

Ok, let’s compare these findings with Google Adwords data:

Hold on a minute – why are we seeing a completely different set of results? The Duchess is leading this popularity contest by a long shot.

The same issue arises when we look at TV shows:

You’d expect Google to provide us with the same data right?

Wrong. So this begs the question: is Google Adwords data useless or is Google Zeitgeist just completely wrong? Or are they both as inaccurate as each other? Or perhaps they use different data sets. If that’s the case, how useful is any of this data? Apparently the Zeitgeist search data takes into account a whole variety of metrics, including what’s trending – and one could argue that that’s more relevant to today’s society.

As ever, Google remains pretty secretive about just what it bases its data on. But does all this uncertainty spell the end of the Keyword tool as a stalwart resource in the SEO community?

Interning at Red or Blue gave me the chance to both learn new notions and skills and to apply the the ones I developed during my previous life as a student, which was a great combination if you ask me.

On one side, I was provided a comprehensive SEO training including link building, keyword research, authorship, and outreach strategy. I was also shown how to use (almost) a thousand platforms, such as Buzzstream, AHRefs, Followerwonk, Soovle, Google Keyword Tool, Google Analytics, and Raven.

On the other side, I was able to do what I do best: researching clients, desigingn strategies, managing social media accounts, creating media and blogger lists, and pitching article ideas to journalists. Yes. I finally did it. In the real world. And it’s not different in any way from what I have learnt at university. No sir! Just apply all the campaign planning steps and don’t get lost; your instincts (combined with your background knowledge) will do the rest. Certainly talking to a Guardian’s journo was a first for me. But as scary as it may sound, my first ‘big’ journo pitch went down really well and I have learnt a lot from it.

What I LOVED about Red or Blue is the chance to contribute with your personal input and expertise to whatever’s boiling that you are constantly offered. For instance, I was involved in a meeting of awesomeness with Linkdex founder Matt Roberts, was able to participate in brainstorming sessions, and was asked to find and close a deal with a media directory provider. Also, the Red or Blue people really involve you into everything they do, including their Christmas parties – which are something not to miss, believe me.

Last but not least, I attended two conferences on content marketing, which were very interesting and let me do some nice networking, too. Well. I’m a PR after all, aren’t I?

So having this PR’s journey in SEO (almost) come to an end, I can say I feel a bit changed. I knew SEO and PR should now integrate each other and that this is the direction the industry should take; however I only had a rough idea of how this theory actually translated into practice. Well, I think I now can envision the future and believe me – although it’s still a bit blurred, it’s an exciting one.

Tactic 1: Create something truly terrible or utterly rediculous

Things get ridiculed on the internet everyday – it’s a fact of life that we all accept and celebrate. This has worked on the side of SEO’s in a surprising way, as links to terrible content require very little effort.

Case in point – Street Cleaning Simulator

This is a PC game which is exactly what it sounds like – you get in to a street cleaner, and drive around cleaning streets. In case you don’t quite understand the concept, here’s a short fan-made video of the game -

“You may be surprised to learn that driving really slowly along the road in a very straight line gets boring fairly quickly. Since this is the main aim of the game I can only recommend it to the diehard street cleaning fans, or fan.” – Metro

When we take a look at the link and social metrics for this game’s product page, however, we see some great statistics:

Referring Domains: 33 – Okay, that’s alright – probably the equivelent of a small-scale link building project

Social Shares: 

• Facebook: 1429
• Tweets: 182
• G+: 35

This game pretty much shares itself. Let’s compare that with another recent link/social building campaign by Hayes & Jarvis (they’re not one of our clients, this campaign was carried out by another SEO firm):

Referring Domains: 5

Social Shares: 

• Facebook: 5
• Tweets: 8
• G+: 3

Apparently the world would rather be sitting at home playing a street cleaning fantasy game, than at a beach playing the “let’s relax” game.

Tactic 2: Create dangerous products

People and companies make mistakes all the time – sometimes this means bad press, product recalls, fines, or generally getting in trouble. This can have another unexpected boost for the marketing department – as well as increased brand awareness caused by press coverage, some companies get great links.

In 2007, Trek Bikes had to recall some of their models due to safety issues (apparently the frame breaking while on a relaxing Sunday cycle is not what people were expecting). The resulting product recall gave them a few .gov links. This isn’t an isolated case - a search of this one site gives thousands of product recall notices from different firms – many with links back to the company homepages.

These are certainly not what we would have done, but if they’ve worked for the above companies, then who are we to judge? (apart from the part about making dangerous products – you shouldn’t do that for links. Unless you’re a gun or knife manufacturer, then I guess it’s inevitable)

Enter Google Plus.

One of the overwhelming reasons for a brand to use Google+ is the fact that user’s actions actively modify the search engine results of their network. With thousands of blog posts documenting this, I’m not going to get into it too much here, other than this:

Plus One to get One

So, how can we get our users to Plus one our pages? Using the “Pay with a tweet” model is possible, however we need to be careful about this -

Google’s policy says: Publishers may not promote prizes, monies, or monetary equivalents in exchange for Google+ button clicks. So we can’t pay for +1′s – +1′s affect search rankings, so giving the user a prize or money for a +1 would be the same as paying for a link.

The policy also states, however: Publishers may direct users to a Google+ button to enable content and functionality. So we can use a +1 to unlock content, as long as you don’t normally charge for that content (that would be a “monetary equivalent”).

What is considered acceptable behaviour?

• Giving +1 users exclusive content related to a blog post (like the data from a study)? Definitely.
• Asking users to +1 before they can get your eBook? Probably – as long as you’ve never charged for that eBook before
• Letting users who +1 enter a competition to win a prize? I think this is OK, although it’s not specifically mentioned, the policy documentation gives me more the feeling that they’re trying to stop out-and-out buying of plusses, but unlocking the entry to a competition sounds legitimate enough.

The technical stuff

The plus button has an attribute called “callback”; this allows you to set a javascript function to fire when the button is pressed.
Example:

The code:

<script src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<div id="plusBox"><g:plusone size="Tall" count="true" callback="plusClick" </g:plusone></div>
<script> function plusClick(data){ 
if(data.state=="on"){alert("You just plussed me! Have some unlocked content love!"); }
if(data.state=="off"){ alert("You unplussed me! No content love for you!"); } } 
</script>

Depending on what you want to do – replace my alerts by setting a cookie, jQuery in some new content, or fire an analytics event.

Happy plussing!

i.e. everybody uses a lot of acronyms, and has very highly-polished opinions, and focuses largely on what might be for lunch because GOD, IT’S ONLY 10 AM AND I’M STARVING. They manage to be simultaneously out-and-out technology info-maniacs and also know the latest on Justin Lee Collins.

Related: why does everybody keep talking about penguins?

I’ve spent ten days on the verge of losing my SEO virginity, drinking up the seemingly boundless knowledge of Kun, Andy, Alec, Jack and Bassmah, who have taken it in turns to explain things to me in a language I understand- and often more than once, too- and give real-life, workable examples of the role of somebody who can write well in amongst the SEO veterans who know their SERP from their CRM.

Because that’s the thing: I know I can write- that bit is easy, because Scrabble is my middle name- but what does it mean to write for SEO?

I’m still figuring out the answer proper, but it seems to me that SEO copywriting is essentially response-orientated copy, stuff that gets favourable action from the reader; it’s not passive like a magazine article on how to get that boy to fall in love with you. Ideally, you want readers to do something with your content. Like share it, or buy from it.

BUT.

This copy also serves the purpose of optimizing whatever page it is on, too, so search engines know what every webpage is about, and can do that special thing Google do where they send robots to understand who might want to read this content.

Or something.

Writing copy that ‘spoon feeds’ the search engines to crawl, index and rank pages favourably, whilst remaining engaging for people, not search engines, seems to me to be a skill as precise as balancing a spoon on the edge of your nose: in theory it’s quite simple, but try doing it for prolonged amounts of time and you end up going cross-eyed and a bit mental.

Good SEO copy is keywords on the page, and links off the page. After email, search is the biggest game in town- statistically it’s what we log onto the internet to do. Searchers are the most motivated people who hit a website, since they were actively looking for it in the first place. So copy needs to draw ‘em in, number one, but then number two: keep ‘em there long enough to do something.

The skills Red or Blue are dishing out to me like a fat mother feeding her children include navigating the tools available to figure out exactly what words and where are needed to be used to master web copy that ticks the ‘keyword’ and ‘links’ boxes.

I think my own keyword from my introduction to SEO is research. Previously, my copywriting approach has been entertainment, entertainment, entertainment. But my training here is opening up new doors of SEO enlightenment to me: using keywordeye, ubersuggest, search metrics, adwords, topsy… the list is endless; I’ve been able to get a working comprehension of the habits of searchers as people, to write copy for searchers as machines.

Or have I been learning how to understand the habits of searchers as machines, to write better copy for people?

I’d better ask my older brothers.

Exceedingly vain, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Only joking- a bit! My name is Jen

I can always be seen holding a pen

Scribbling poems and the odd review-

Anyway! I intern at Red or Blue

Cramming in as much SEO info,

Hoping that in the new future I’ll know

All there is to know in this industry-

Like the fact good copywriting is KEY,

Link-building is a useful tool to use

Except when other SEOs sadly choose

Not quality, but quantity instead

Gone is the famous White Hat from their head.

Everyone is probably thinking ‘What?

Feels like this “Jen” has just lost the plot!’

Only two days in- SO much more to learn,

Read next week’s blog post before you discern

My mental state; read each line’s first letter

End-to-end, and then you’ll know me better.

*******************************************

As the old saying goes, you never stop learning; one of our clients had some very specific needs which took some creative thinking – If you’ve found this page through the magic of Google, here are some solutions to weird Adwords restrictions (and one competitive analysis method)….

Using the display network to get competitive & reputation metrics

We’ve known for a long time that the best statistics about search volume for specific keywords come from running PPC campaigns for those keywords; what I’ve learned this week is that we can measure the effect that bad reviews or discount sites are having on us by running PPC campaigns too.

When it comes to gauging the traffic of sites which are out of our control (for instance, competitors or third party review sites), we are often forced to use metric sites who take a “best guess” approach. However, if the site uses Adsense to monetise a certain page (perhaps it’s a forum with a bad review, or a discount code website, or maybe your competitor just likes money a little too much) we can easily gain accurate statistics about the effect of that page using Google’s display network.

If it’s a competitor site – create a quick blog on WordPress.com (we don’t want them to know you’re snooping on them), create an uninteresting image ad, and target it at the site using the delivery method  ”Accelerated”.

For maximum accuracy, run the campaign on a CPM basis, and set the budget relatively high (a few dollars per 1000 impressions) – you’ll now have loads of data about the amount of traffic going to the site, and the time of day. For even better data, duplicate the campaign many times and target each one either by country, language, device.

For bonus points, run remarketing adgroups at a higher CPM/CPC than the others – that way, you’ll be able to segment the site’s impressions by those visitors who’ve also visited you in the past few months, and those who haven’t.

Target and Exclude the same location

Our client sells widgets. These aren’t just any widgets – they’re the best widgets in the country. They’ve been cited as changing the widget world with their innovative features. It goes without saying then that their widgets fetch the highest price – there are plenty of others who will happily market their widgets for a little over £25, however our client asks for a minimum of £10, 000 for theirs. Obviously then, we’re only targeting those users in the UK who’ve searching for the “best widgets”. We’ve also found though, that overseas customers who specifically search for UK widget sellers are also looking for the best – even if they use a generic search query like “UK widgets”.

So it’s easy – we target our ads at two markets – UK-based visitors searching for the “best” and “top” widgets; and overseas users who are using a generic “widget” search query, but have a search intent inside the UK – i.e. “UK widget store”. This is where we hit a big problem – while Adwords will let you specify that you want to exclude by the user’s location (i.e. target the entire world except the UK), and it will let you target users with a location based search intent (i.e. target users who use words like “in England”, “uk” etc.), it will not let you do both for the same location at the same time.

Here’s where we need to get a little creative –

Listing the individual countries does not work – it causes an exclusion conflict, and Adwords defaults to excluding everyone. The way I found to solve this issue is to use radius targeting to target only users with a search intent inside that radius – this isn’t super accurate (perhaps you’ll pick up some users who were looking for the best widget store in the North Sea), but is the best way under the current system.

 We also had to exclude Ireland to avoid showing up as local widget sellers.

As Google wouldn’t want to miss out on an ad click – they’ll happily round this radius up to include the UK for search intent purposes

Remove an Adwords account from an email address

As a search marketer, one of the first things I did with my new work email address was sign it up to Adwords so that I could use the keyword tool. A few weeks later, I regretted this as google then refused to add an MCC (agency) account to the same email address – and getting an Adwords account removed from an email address takes days to do it officially – there’s procedures, paperwork, and phone calls involved. It’s just not worth it.

The trick to get around this is essentially to play pass-the-parcel with the account data; create a disposable email address, add it as an admin to the adwords account, then boot the original user out of the account by using the ‘Terminate access’ option. Hey presto, your email address will no longer be associated with the adwords account. After you’ve signed up to MCC, you can re-add the original account to your dashboard using the account number.

… and there you have it – three things I learned about Adwords this week.