One of the clearest signs that Google looks for when trying to determine whether a site has an unnatural link profile is the use (or over use) of exact match keywords in the anchor text of links. A natural looking link profile will usually be dominated by brand terms and generics like ‘click here”.
There are no official benchmarks from Google, but we have considered general opinion in the SEO community and studied a lot of our own clients, competitors and other sites’ link profiles to get a feel for what ratio is natural. We advise all clients to avoid trying to get too many targeted keyword links and should instead be trying to achieve a more natural looking link profile. There is a tendency to want to boost rankings for particular keywords by using methods such as buying links, however these short-term gains run the risk of longer-term penalties that can be very difficult and time consuming to overturn. Time that would be best spent on content and raising your profile/authority in relation to those keywords.
Please note we are applying this to followed links only, however with regards to the overall link profile there should also be a natural level of followed/no followed links.

Anchor text definitions

Branded anchor text

• Anchor text including any use of the sites brand name or url

Exact match anchor text

• Anchor text matching core keywords for the sites industry
• This requires some user interpretation, but is fairly logical if you understand the high volume exact match keywords for the industry.

Other anchor text
Includes all other anchor texts

• Images
• No anchor text
• Random anchor text
• Diversified / long tail anchor text
  • Relating to exact match terms

Link profile analysis

As the target benchmarks apply to the overall link profile, the link profile must be first analysed, to be able to then put in place a strategy to redress the balance if necessary. We advise that all clients should undertake this analysis and it involves the following

• Compile complete list of all inbound links using
  • Majestic SEO
  • Open site explorer
  • Google webmaster tools
  • Combine and de-duplicate

• Categorise anchor text
  • Branded anchor text
  • Exact match anchor text
  • Other anchor text

• Aggregate data to calculate overall % by anchor text type, filtering by followed links only

Understanding monthly natural links

As well as understanding the current link profile, it is also important to understand the natural level of links the site receives monthly, and the anchor text type of these links. For this you’ll need to use Majestic SEO and follow this process

1. Enter root domain of site e.g. “redmudmedia.com”
2. Select fresh index
3. Select the tab “backlinks”
4. Download
5. Categorise anchor text as above
6. Sort by column “FirstIndexedDate” – column E when you first download
7. Delete data so you are left with 2 full calendar months of data
   • Fresh index will give you data from last 3 months
8. Delete any artificial links you are aware of
9. Aggregate data, filter by followed links only and calculate number of inbound links, by anchor text type and % of anchor text type
10. Divide numbers by 2 to get average data for 1 month

Understanding these numbers allows us to incorporate into a longer term strategy, however this should be continually monitored and the strategy updated as it changes.

Strategy with link profile analysis

If there is an understanding of the current link profile and the monthly natural links that are being generated then a linkbuilding strategy can be created around content and outreach (inbound marketing) to achieve the target benchmarks over an agreed period of time.

Example strategy (taken from actual client data and strategy)

Current link profile of client

From this data there is a requirement to decrease the amount of exact match anchor text, and to increase the amount of brand links. The monthly natural links there is no influence over need to be accounted for and then it is possible to set some benchmarks over a 12 month period.
12 month strategy to hit anchor text benchmarks

• 22 brand links per month -  based on current monthly inbound links taken from Majestic
• 8 further links per month required
  • 4 branded (In total with current natural links = 26 per month)
  • 4 diversified keyword (other)

This strategy works to a benchmark slightly better than the target by a few % points

Forecast link profile after 12 months

It is evident from the foreacst that if the monthly benchmarks were hit then there would be much more natural link profile after 12 months.

Strategy without link profile analysis

In some cases it may not be possible to review the current link profile of your site (or your clients site) due to the consultancy cost associated; in this case we would have to guess the best strategy taking into account. This is not advised but of course in some cases has to be done.

Factors to consider

• Size of brand and likelihood of natural brand links
• Previous linkbuilding

Rough guide – just some examples

1. Big brand with a good volume of on-going natural links. In this scenario less emphasis is required on increasing brand links, and more work can be carried out to encourage non brand links.
   • 25% brand
   • 37.5% other
   • 37.5% exact
2. Small brand with no/small amount on-going natural links. In this scenario we most likely have a small amount of inbound links, and so the strategy should attempt to match the anchor text benchmarks we are trying to achieve.
   • 50% brand
   • 25% other
   • 25% exact

The links – How does Google attribute value to links?

• One of the most important factors is that the link in a piece of content must add value to the piece of content. Google can measure this by the number of times readers actually click the link.
• It must also be relevant to the overall context of the content
• The higher up the page, the more important it is deemed and if there are multiple links to the same site in the same page, then the first link tends to count for more.
• IF there is more than 1 link in a piece of content and they all link to different sites, then this does not necessarily mean your link loses value, but within reason e.g. 2-3 links in a 3-500 word page would be a healthy number.

The content (best practices to help optimise links)

• As Google gets smarter the semantics of the content should all be relevant to the keyword
• The keyword can also be used within that article outside of being used in the anchor text
• The keyword can be broken down into components if longer than 1 word and are in close proximity to each other
  • E.g. “cheap holidays” can be split so that “cheap” and “holidays” are in close proximity.

Anchor text guidelines by type

Branded links

• Anchor text to include brand and can be an exact match to the brand name or url
• The target page should ideally be the most relevant to your priority keyword.
• You stand to benefit if the surrounding text to the link contains some or all of the components of the target keyword phrase

Diversified links

• Anchor text to include all or some of the components of the keyword phrase
• The target page should ideally be the most relevant to your priority keyword.
• The surrounding text to the link should contain any components of the keyword phrase not used in the anchor text

Exact links

• Anchor text to include an exact match of the keyword being targeted
• The target page should ideally be the most relevant to your priority keyword.
• Point to remember is that exact match anchors can be natural – but this may depend on the keyword
  • E.g. a travel keyword may be “Car hire Majorca”
  • However this can never be used naturally, as it doesn’t fit into a sentence in its exact match form

 Summary

With the next Google Penguin update on the horizon, over optimised anchor text must be addressed, and the consequences of not doing so can be disastourous due to the large gap between Penguin updates. Everyone should  have an understanding of their overall link profile to be sure they are not at risk, and for many sites (especially those that undertook aggressive linkbuilding campaigns) an anchor text strategy will then be required to redress the natural balance.

This seemingly irreplaceable tool is one of, if not the most treasured possessions in the SEO and social media toolbox. So much so, that one individual took it upon themselves to appeal to Google in way that Google will hopefully appreciate…. a piece of engaging content that users are likely to link to and share.

At the time of this post the video had been up for a couple of days, there were around 5,880 views, but we think this one might go the distance so we’re going to watch the views go up and estimate that it might hit 100,000 pretty quickly.

How many views do you think it will get by the end of March 2013 (that’s midnight PST)? The person with the closest estimate gets £25 to spend on Amazon.

Interflora looking a bit wilted this week

We’ve received quite a few questions from bloggers about “The Interflora Situation”, so here’s our clarification, with general suggestions for bloggers who don’t want to lose their reputations.

In case you missed it, last week Google penalised Interflora and regional newspaper networks – decimating their rank status – because (ahead of Valentine’s Day) Interflora bought around 150 advertorials from various regional newspaper networks. They all contained links to the Interflora site, riding rough-shod over Google’s long-standing official quality guidelines re. selling links that pass PageRank.

There’s nothing wrong with disclosed advertorials in themselves (providing they’re not terribly boring) as long as they don’t contain a followable link to the sponsor’s website – which every one of these posts did.

What’s more, they were all published within a couple of networks of associated sites, so they were really easy to identify.

The combo of announcing “this is an advertorial” + the followable link + all being within the same network = a crackling neon sign that blinked “POLICY VIOLATION!” to Google’s detective robots, which (SEO industry’s best guess, since Google’s algorithm is not in public domain) work by looking for such combinations.

Once a few advertorials were detected, they all went down. The entire newspaper network’s ranking has now flatlined. Interflora’s paid Google ads are still up, so they are accessible, but they’ve dropped out of the actual search results.

It’s important to note here that Google’s quality guidelines on paid links have not altered for about 10 years. Interflora were just especially aggressive, and it’s possible that they had already been warned against this type of behaviour.

However, as a blogger, it’s always worth being sure that:

• You’re not signed up to any cross-linking rings 
• Nobody’s selling your site as part of a link-scheme network – with or without your permission. We have been approached by “middlemen” claiming to represent bloggers we’re already friends with. When we’ve spoken to those friendly bloggers, they have no knowledge of this “representation”. You should be wary of accepting “guest content” willy-nilly without knowing where it’s coming from. Also remember that joining a link network increases the risk of being penalised, since you only need one site on the network to be found, and you all go down together.
• Everything you publish, whether you write it yourself, feature guest posts, interviews with your blogging buddies, anything you pay people to write for you when you’re on holiday, or whatever, is 
  • relevant to your blog’s themes
  • really good quality; we suggest that you don’t publish anything you wouldn’t be happy to put your own name to
  • unique – it adds something of value to the web that you can’t find in a hundred other places already
• All link-outs are relevant to their context. They provide further reading on a topic that’s too complex for a single post (or already covered very nicely elsewhere), or a useful resource for your reader, or a funny picture that concisely illustrates whatever you’re trying to communicate. 
• You don’t link to the same URL lots of times across your blog. Wikipedia is probably alright and of course you’ll have favourites, but repeatedly linking to the one place looks odd. Even if you’re not being paid to do it, it might be time to broaden your horizons!
• Your footers and comments are not full of non-contextual external links
• Your content doesn’t contain the terms “advertorial”, “paid post” or “sponsored post” in context with an external followable link.

The primary key here really is quality and relevancy. Don’t run a blog full of rubbish and hope to keep making a living from it. Make sure your content is written by you or someone you trust, and that’s it’s all relevant to your blog’s themes and focus.

Google’s advice: “Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself: ‘Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?.. We wholeheartedly agree with this statement.

Screenshot of Twitter’s Top Tweets

The new streaming-only filtering_level attribute will assign a value to metadata of tweeters posts. These values will be used by Twitters streaming API – Application Programming Interface – to help the developers be more specific when filtering the immense amounts of status updates that are received every day. The designated values could be one of “none”, “low”, “medium”. The “High” categorisation has been kept for future use. The “medium” and later “High” valued posts will be associated with the Top Tweets results which have been searched for on Twitter. How these Tweets will be ranked, we are still not entirely sure.
 
When new changes or developments arise on such platforms, that many are comfortable and accustomed to, there can be a sense of disapproval from the onset. Although, it has been said that this will allow certain types of content which are being searched for, to be more visible and easily accessible from the large amount of feeds which are on Twitter.

The new lang attribute identifies the language of the user’s Tweet. The language identifiers can detect any of the languages which can be found in the “advanced search”. It is a great tool for individuals who are searching for Twitter data namely, analytics and search streams which will indicate the specific language of the Tweet content.

Changes Are Inevitable

These changes, it has been said, will be implemented from the 20th of February, 2013. The new development is something that Twitter is excited about and they are expecting some great results from this. The intention is to make the Twitter streaming API more useful for developers and users. It will help in specifying what types of tweets you would like to surface on a given subject. For users, you could stand a better chance of better content surfacing in your top feeds. Is there a reason for concern? Who knows?

What are your thoughts on this latest update? For it or against it! How do you feel about your tweets being valued and rated?

If small tasks are important to you, you should pay for them.

Have you ever wondered what your retainer actually pays for?

It is common practice for SEO agencies and consultants to slap on a monthly retainer fee, but very often, there is a lack of transparency from the provider on what the client stands to benefit from this arrangement.

We typically give clients a choice on whether they want to pay a retainer or not and when they do, then we agree a set maximum number of hours (give or take) based on our standard day or hourly rate.

In a general sense, there are typically two schools of thought on the matter when a retainer comes under scrutiny:

CLIENT: “I pay my SEO agency £XXXX a month, but I have no idea what it’s for. We get our weekly reports from them, but those are quite obviously automated, and then there are the occasional emails and phone calls, but nowhere near the value we are actually paying for.”

AGENCY: “We have to charge a retainer to cover the time spent offering phone and email support, attending client meetings, trouble shooting and other ad hoc requests. If you monitor your time in the way a solicitor would, you will be shocked how much time actually goes unaccounted for.”

The common denominator, or rather missing denominator, is transparency. Although painful to maintain, time sheets are a very effective method for clients and agencies to see what the outputs were each month so that time management on both sides can be more efficiently maintained with no costly hours being wasted on menial tasks or “meetings for meetings sake”.

The Virtual SEO Manager

Our retainer is a pay as you go model which we have aptly named the “Virtual SEO Manager” service. This gives clients the presence of an accountable SEO resource who takes care of all matters relating to SEO from strategic input at marketing and IT meetings to managing 3rd party relationships and presenting business cases at internal budget meetings. By making it a pay as you go model, clients are in control of how much they use us and so can decide whether it’s for ad hoc requests that require a few minutes each day or to implant us as a member of their team.

The most common use of our time on a retainer tends to fall in the following areas:

• Project Management – Once a strategy is delivered to a client, it is quite common for progress to stall because there is no-one in house to drive that strategy forward and work with IT, product development and marketing teams in a coordinated fashion.
• Trouble Shooting – There are always questions relating to particular implementations or challenges thrown up by whatever CMS a client is using and then quite often questions related to best practice in general from technical to content and outreach.
• Data Requests – Whether questions have filtered down from senior management or a client wishes to understand why certain things are happening, this inevitably leads to some number crunching, report running, data presentation time.

The one thing that is and SHOULD be covered by a retainer which has proved costly for a couple of clients who chose the non-retainer route, is monitoring general SEO health. I don’t mean checking weekly reports, but making it part of the service to login and check things like webmaster tools and analytics every other day.

Some clients can expect this as part of the service, but let’s be honest, it doesn’t matter what line of business you’re in, this seemingly minuscule task is time consuming and should therefore have a fee associated with it. If you’re eating in a pricy restaurant, you can expect to have your coat and bag taken to the cloak room for you and the waiter can expect a decent tip. However, if you’re stopping at your local delicatessen, you can’t expect the staff to open doors and take care of your coat and bag for you…. unless you tip them handsomely.

Examples Where An SEO Retainer Pays For Itself

In one instance, the client over-ruled our recommendations around boiler-plate copy and the “significant risk” it posed in terms of a penalty. We used the exact words “significant risk” when identifying the threat, but the client decided they had got away with it long enough for it not to be a concern despite the recent Panda updates.

The second instance was where we identified a duplicate domain threat and advised the client to redirect one to the other or risk losing the primary site from the index. Three weeks later and this issue had not been addressed and sure enough, Google had started to de-index the domain we were focusing our efforts on in favour of the local domain.

Had we been on a retainer, these problems would not have surfaced because we would have managed the threats up the chain until they were dealt with.

One might argue that as the SEO consultants, we should have pushed harder for the problems to be addressed sooner, but where do you draw the line between doing what has been asked of you and pursuing a concern in your free time that the client has already chosen to take upon themselves?

How Would We Have Managed This On A Retainer?

We have simple processes in place to help us cover our clients SEO health which include:

1. Check Webmaster Tools every Monday and Friday e.g. look for crawl errors and other warnings.

2. Check Analytics Daily for Traffic Status e.g. anomalies in traffic.

3. Monitor industry movements and announcements and alert client to anything that may have an effect on them e.g. algorithm updates.

Takeaway

So in concluding, there’s no point arguing about whether you’re getting or offering value unless you take the time to substantiate and agree exactly what it will involve.

If you choose the retainer route, make sure you know what is expected of both client and agency and ensure communication is open and honest. In other words, if a client has bought 8 hours of your time in a month and they are using 16, then tell them and show them where the time is being spent.

If you choose the non-retainer route, then make sure both parties know what is expected of the other and most importantly, make sure that the client understands that it is their responsibility to fill in the gaps that would otherwise have been filled by the SEO retainer.

According to an excerpt from his forthcoming book, “The New Digital Age”, Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, sees, amongst despots uniting to form a Good Fellas version of the EU and machines that algorithmically suggest outfits based on your day’s scheduled routine, there is also something for SEOs to ponder.

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/02/01/the-future-according-to-eric-7-points/

So it looks like Google are sticking to their mantra of “not being evil” by not only forcing people to get on to Google+ to “get ahead” in SEO, but now it’s a case of if you don’t join the party legitimately, you’re out on your ass.

Rel Author Rel Publisher, Professor.

I must admit that I’m a fan of rich snippets, particularly things like rel author and rel publisher, because it adds a layer of authenticity and verification to any links one might obtain. It actually makes our job easier and more difficult at the same time, but this is a good thing.
Easier in the sense that this move by Google means we can push back on clients who are chasing the dragon and want as many links and results for specific keywords as possible for their budget. We can now show them that this is unwise and that it is better to invest in “doing it properly” because of the clear information being provided by Google.
It makes our jobs harder because it is more difficult to get the right types of links and co-citations, but at least there are fewer smokey mirrors between what we do and what clients expect. This is a straight forward academic path, one that anybody who’s been to university or even school can understand. You aren’t going to get an A+ if you can’t tell your professor where you got your information from

Image borrowed from the article referred to herein, “9 SEO Leaders Reveal Their Most Significant SEO Wins”

Coming up with great content is no mean feat. With the Penguin and Panda updates, however, even the least creative of us has no choice, but to up their game to produce good quality content that is useful and engaging to the end user.

Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself

It’s easy to assume that the curators of brilliant content just knock this stuff together in their lunch hour. I mean how else would they do it with all the other day to day stuff going on, right?

OKCupid is often cited as one of the content success stories and in a recent thread on Quora, “How important was blogging to OkCupid’s success?“, Chris Coyne (Co-Founder) explains that they had “sexy data” and “posts each took 4-8 weeks of full-time work”.
If you’re a small business or a startup, chances are you simply can’t work on content full time, but consistency is key so at the very least, try and allocate a bit of time each week. For example, you could install the Evernote app on your phone/tablet and jot down ideas and drafts during your commute.

Find Your Expert Niche

If you focus on topics where you have a genuine interest, it is widely accepted that content ideas tend to come more naturally. The brilliant examples I refer to in the title of this post are a great execution of an SEO and Social Media expert sharing what they know and presenting the information in a manner that is both useful and easy to digest.

Without further ado, I give you Will Critchlow‘s ‘Most significant SEO win of 2012” where he shares examples from a content-driven link building project for Simply Business:

WordPress for Small Businesses

Step-by-Step Guide to Social Media Success

A Small Business Guide to Google AdWords

So there you have it.

Special thanks to Dan Barker and Gus Ferguson for spotting the Quora thread. Thanks to Eric Siu for the useful Treehouse post.

Google Doodle to celebrate 150 Years of the London Underground.

What a rapid fire year of algorithm updates that was from Google huh? Don’t worry, this is not a “recap of 2012″ or a “resolutions for 2013″ blog post. No, both have been done to death and besides, I’m too busy trying to keep up with this crazy fast-paced world of SEO in the modern age.

One thing is for sure, and I apologise for using another tired and quite frankly lazy excuse for SEO writing, SEO is not dead, it’s evolving all the time and involves many disciplines from technical to PR, usability, creativity and of course…. the darling of the the day… social media. Yes, mobile has finally arrived, but the basic common sense rules of SEO still apply and SEO is the “daddy”… Or “new links”… For SEO in 2013.

So where do we take this whole SEO and Social Media marriage of convenience? Well given that the likes of Facebook and Twitter limit Google’s access to their content, they carry far less SEO value than my favourite, Google Plus.

5 Quick Ways To “Get More SEO” From Google+

1. Optimise your G+ profile by:

• Writing a descriptive, accurate and keyword focused “About” page.
• Link to your website (G+ makes contextual linking easy and links are “followed”).
• Link to your other social media (and other?) online profiles like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn… And all the others.

TOP TIP: Sort your authorship out and include all blogs and sites where you are a contributor.

I doesn’t matter if you change jobs (or careers) because your personal profile will follow YOU as an individual so you can continue to build “brand you”.

For more on authorship see the Google blog posts or visit Schema.org

2. Carefully Craft Your G+ Posts Using Keywords.

Like meta descriptions, Google has now moved to randomly selecting what they see as the most relevant piece of content on the most relevant page on your site that most accurately reflects what that particular user is searching for according to their particular personal profile and other circumstances surrounding their query at that particular time and place…

Yes… You need to become the master of newspaper/magazine cover headlines.

3. Join and get involved in communities that are relevant to your target topics.

This is not limited to G+, but for the purpose of this post… It is. At this point in time, Jan 8, 2013, the Google+ landscape is proverbial virgin territory. Get in know and it’s easier to get noticed… If Google succeed in making this a success you stand to become a social media celebrity.

Sceptical about room for another? Did you notice MySpace have resurfaced? Did you notice the apparent crumbling of Apple now that Steve is gone and Bill is back?

Google are investing heavily in this platform so if I was a betting man… An SEO betting man… Quality content and Google+…. Discuss.

4. Make friends with influencers.

This is where you look for people in your niche and follow them, comment on their blogs, share their stuff and mention them. Basically massage their egos and then say hi.

5. Share new content from your site on G+ to get it picked up quickly.

G+ is a great way to get the over enthusiastic Labrador that is Google+ to crawl and index fresh content. Just make sure it’s steak and kidney and not “nutritious” dog food.

The inspirations  for this post came from Cyrus Shepherd who has a ton more suggestions and additional links to useful articles on Google Plus that you will no doubt find useful.

If you’ve read this far then you are the kind of guy/girl we want in our newly formed SEO and Social Media community on Google+, aptly named The SEOcial Club.

Now, if only more of my real friends were on Google Plus…

Generic email outreach templates
Probably the biggest gripe from a blogger’s perspective was the obvious generic spammy email template which gets sent, with no attempt to personalise the email (even getting the name wrong in some cases) and not even taking the time to read the blog.  In most cases, of the bloggers asked, said they wouldn’t even read this kind of email and would simply delete it. They found the “read your blog and loved it” dishonest and quickly put them off.

Failure to maintain relationships after the deal is done
Not communicating with the blogger after you’ve worked together was high on the list. Failure to maintain the relationship meant the bloggers can find it pretty soul-destroying to work with SEO agencies.  The bloggers said they were keen to have long-term relationships with SEO agencies and value SEO’s more who take the time to keep the contact going, read their future work,  and comment or share good articles.

What are SEO agencies trying to achieve?
Most of the bloggers agreed that they find it hard to work with different SEO agencies, as they all have a different set of guidelines; each one has their own set of rules, metrics that matter, and terms and conditions etc. This is hard to solve but none the less the problem exists. The bloggers asked for clarity, how does an SEO agency value different metrics and why? And what are they trying to achieve for their various clients or client in question?

Irrelevant Content
Sending content that’s completely irrelevant to their blog was a big bug bear to the bloggers we asked.  Once again highlighting SEO’s who don’t read or understand their blog and its audience. They suggested discussing topic ideas before the content was written would be valuable, and would limit the amount of posts being rejected.

Increasing the number of agreed links
The bloggers don’t appreciate it when an SEO agency sends the content over with more links than the agreed amount, and they found it quite deceitful.  They said if an SEO agency wants more than 1 link, then they should simply say this in the first place, don’t try and be sneaky.

It’s no secret that having successful relationships with bloggers can significantly improve the success of an SEO campaign.  This discussion has emphasised what too many SEO agencies is obvious, but highlights that so many still fail at. Starting off on the right foot and taking the time to build and maintain relationships with bloggers can only help to improve the impact of the campaigns, with far more chance of secondary shares and promotion plus most importantly creating good quality content that is right for the blogs audience. Better relationships mean both sides win.

Many thanks to Will – www.willpeach.com , Vago – www.vagobond.com , Cole – www.fourjandals.com, Anthony – www.manvsclock.com and Annabel – www.getinthehotspot.com.

We’d love to get more comments for the worst things about SEO agencies, so please don’t hold back!  Why not join us on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter as well!

So why does this matter to publishers?
The initial aim of the link disavow tool is not to immediately penalise those sites selling links, but to allow sites to unlink themselves from links they consider to be bad, and putting themselves at risk from a penalty. However this whole process, gives Google the biggest set of data to date on potential link networks and other forms of sites selling links that fall foul of the google link scheme policy. If you have ever sold links that fall on the wrong side of this policy, and some of your previous advertisers report you, it now means your domain is going to be in a Google database of potential sites violating the policy.

OK, but how will Google ever act on this?
The truth is we don’t know, and it will not be a case of penalties for all those domains that are reported. This just won’t happen, as it opens up potential for wide scale abuse of this to try and take down competitor domains. We do however think this is the beginning of the end for the worst type of link networks, and over time we’re sure Google will develop and use this data cross referencing it with other crawl data to start de-indexing sites who are guilty of abusing the link scheme policy.

So how might this pan out?
Google may well create an update which takes the domains reported from the link disavow tool, and then runs a set of criteria against this, to identify sites who they believe are selling links to a high level of confidence. Those that are identified will get a warning or penalised and Matt Cutts (head of Google Webspam team) has confirmed this has taken place in the past. This ‘publisher’ update would then be improved upon in iterations much like the panda update, and new domains are added to the crawl as and when they are reported from the link disavow tool.

So who do we think is at risk?
An algorithm/update will have to use patterns & thresholds from crawls to identify sites to penalise/warn. Here’s a list of some things that could be picked up by a crawl
•    Automated link exchanges
•    Footer link spam / side wide footer links / side bar links
•    Follow links in articles with text “sponsored post” (or variation)
•    Abused use of blogrolls

There are many more bad practices!

What should you do?
We’d recommend reviewing all of the links you have ever sold, and if they fit into the above criteria you need to get rid of them. Distance yourselves from any of the above, and don’t sell them in the future. Don’t accept paid posts from just anyone, make sure it’s relevant, and make sure the content is good and well written. The key point is that the links/content that are placed on your site should be of value to your users (not just your back pocket). If you do sell followed links make them undetectable by a robot. A good quality guest post that is relevant to your users, that drives user comments is impossible to define as paid or not paid for, and certainly not something a robot could make a penalty decision on. However those links to a casino in your sidebar that have no relevance to your users…

Give us your feedback; this is just our thoughts on what Google will do with all this new data. What we can guarantee is that they will do something with it, and it will be targeting sites who sell followed links.

This post was written by Darren Sheffield, SEO, content and social media consultant at Red Mud Media, Check out Darren’s Google+ profile.