Click to Enlarge

While I did not get any official notification from Mr. Cutts, I did see that the 1st page results for a search on “SEO” is now completely different. There are several websites that are no longer there. The one in particular that I pointed out on my previous post titled “Dear Matt Cutts, The Panda Update Missed This” has been removed. As of the time of this post it is now banished to spot #55. Ouch!!  Also notice that the one above the highlight example in the previous post is now gone as well.

Thank You Matt and Team.

I can’t help but wonder if my post had to something to do with the drastic change. The timing was just too perfect to think otherwise, but I will never know. Unless Matt is at SMX Advanced and I get a chance to ask him.  And even then, I probably wouldn’t get a straight answer.

Note:

I will probably do a followup post in the next few months once data starts coming in.  It will be nice to see how the sites where affected.

Down the SEO Rabbit Hole

When was the last time you did a Google search for the keyword “SEO“.  Being an Internet Marketer and an SEO, it is something that I have not done is a long time.  The reason I was doing the search in the first place was to just see who was bidding on the term in my little neck of the woods.  Then I scrolled down to the organic listings and everything seemed in place until I got to one listing I never heard of before: www.vinniecurto.com

After clicking on the listing and looking at the site I didn’t see anything that, in my opinion, put it as a top 10 most relevant result.  This got my spider sense tingling because as we know in the businesses if there is nothing fishy going on onsite, there must be something going on offsite.

Backlink Analysis

There are many tools that are now available, for a price, that allow us to look into such matters.  I ran the site through my top three Opensiteexplorer.org, Linkdiagnosis.com, and Majesticseo.com.  I got some very interesting results.

Majesticseo.com

As I suspected, there was a major increase in the number of backlinks that were found. This is where Majesticseo.com really shines. It gives you the history of the links and not just a snapshot.  And this data correlates well with the information coming from SEMRush, as seen below.

Linkdiagnosis.com

The above chart is looking at the site’s top backlink anchors.  It is very clear that this site has been optimizing for SEO related keywords.  While this is not unusual, it is just another indication that these links are not natural given the excessive amouts for the various terms and more importantly what is not there, the company name and/or website (i.e.www.vinniecurto.com)

Opensiteexplorer.org

Here is where it starts to get interesting, looking at the exact pages that link to the site I noticed that they are all homepages and not internal pages.  This is rather interesting.  Given that this is an SEO company, they could be footer links, so to make sure I visited a few of the sites where the anchor text was “SEO”.

Content Spam Everywhere

Site after site, ended up with the same results, content spam.  These are pages/sites which are just full of different sentences strung together to form long content blocks.  Additionally, where they got really clever was instead of having post after post of new content, it was all on the homepage.  There were no other real pages, just a homepage full of BS content.  Homepages tend to carry more weight, but I am surprised that after the Panda update that these types of links made it through.

Doing one quick search for a sentence in Google results in multiple sites with duplicate content.  These sites are still indexed and all have the similar one page structure.

Digging Deeper Into It

Okay now that I know where the links are coming from and I have a solid set of websites to look into, I took my time digging into some stats on the websites/domains.  I took a look at the websites whose anchor text was “SEO” which was about 56 different websites.  Using this sample the first thing I wanted to know was about was whether they shared IP addresses at all or if there were any similarities.

None of the sites shared IP addresses and none of them even shared the same class C address block.  This tells me that the person is going through great pains to hide what they are doing.  Digging into the whois information I get that some of them or all of them (I hit my cap to look them up) were being hosted through seo-host.com. Also, there were 21,122 domains associated with the email used by seo-host.com. That site allows for this type of hosting with multiple IP addresses spread across the world.

Still Digging

Not satisfied, I wanted to dig further.  I decided to look up the creation date, last modified date, and ns records.  And what I found tells and interesting story.  Below is a timeline for the last updated date for each of the 56 websites.  As you can see, there are a few dates in which multiple sites were last updated on.  Somebody went on a buying spree.

Note: Best viewed by changing the zoom date to 1 year.

Note: All but two of the domains had the registration information hidden.  For the two that I found that did have the info available, they had the same name, but different email address.  One was a gmail account and the other was a yahoo.ca account.

A Possible New Ranking Signal Needed

While I am just a armchair quarterback in this, I think there may need to be a new ranking signal (or two).  The signal that may make sense is to look at the last updated dates for the domains and correlate that date to the backlink profile of the site which is getting the link.  If there is a lot of overlap as seen above this could rule out a lot of ballot box stuffing.  I have not completely thought through all of this since I do not know how all of the signals Google uses interact with each other, nobody does (except a few at Google), but I wanted to throw it out there as a suggestion. Also, I know that the Panda update was designed to address duplicate content from ranking well, but this is a similar form of duplicate content.

As for the second signal, which is more an update to a current signal, rengineer the Panda Update algorithm to catch these offending sites.

In Conclusion

It looks like the Panda update missed this type of duplicate content as seen by the massive jump in rankings for the offending site above.  I didn’t look into other sites who had links on these pages/sites, but I suspect similar results.  So Matt, if you could please update the the Panda update or add a new signal (if it makes sense) so that sites like these don’t get credit for the things mentioned above

Lastly, if anyone is interested in the data that I have collected please let me know either via the contact form or in the comments below.

If we do a simple search on Google – allintitle:”domain expired” we see that there are over 35,000 results. Now this is not a accurate number, but still, that is a lot of pages with that in the title. However, we do notice that there are other results that are not expired domains. I am lazy like the next guy, so I want to see more than just the standard 10 results so lets modify the search query to see 300 results at a time instead: “Expired Domains”

We have scroll all the way to the bottom of this list, but once we do we see that there are a whole bunch of results similar to the initial one I found. Google will only show you approximately the first 890 results, but that number of over 35,000 remains consistent even when we go back to the last page.

Now I now what you are thinking, did you find any other good domains when doing this?. Well I spent a little time doing some initial research into some of the domains, and there are some decent ones to potentially grab.

One I found was: www.blizzconsweepstakes.com – This appears to be somewhat of an official site and would probably be good for some WOW affiliate sites. According to Open Site Explorer its a decent site.

Another one that seemed promising was: anseattle.org – This was a site that has some medical related links, so it would probably be great for all of the scammers and spammers out there. According to Open Site Explorer the site has even more Domain Authority than the previous one.

Happy Domain Hunting

UPDATE: As of 8:00am CST on 6/23/10 I no longer have access to this Nostradamo page, I am now back to the normal Google External Keyword Tool.

Google Suggest SEO is...

I feel a little special.  Well at least I am going to take credit for it.  Although I know it just couldn’t have been little old me who did it.  What am I talking about?  Well I am talking about influencing Google Suggest results.

At the end of January I wrote a piece about the hand job for “SEO is” on Google Suggest.  In that article I referenced the picture you see to the left.  In it you can clearly see that results are a little skewed to the negative side of SEO to say the least.  Additionally I came to the ultimate conclusion that the suggested searches did not seem to equal what was being searched for.  On top of that I also said the following:

We can check that by doing a search for “seo is bullshit“, ~389,00o results, or more precisely “allintitle:seo is bullshit“, ~217 results.  So there are sites in their index with these keywords.  But to counter, a search for “allintitle:seo is easy” has ~3570 results, and has a 36 for Global Monthly Search Volume.  So why is “seo is bullshit” in the suggestion and not “seo is easy.”

Google Suggest SEO is Easy

In that post I called out why “SEO is Easy” deserved, on all accounts, to be in the suggested searches.  Well, today I feel as though I have some small power over Google, or rather maybe just some psychic abilities.  Take a look at the screen grab to the right.  Do you see what I see? Yep. That very last result says “SEO is Easy”.  I did it,  I put that there, well, I like to think I did.  And at the very same time I did my part help our community by getting one negative suggestion out: “SEO is Snake Oil”.

No need to thank me my fellow SEOs and SEMs   Google Suggest fascinates me to say the least.  I think I am going to be spending more and more time digging into it.

Google Suggest SEO is...

It came to my attention yesterday from a coworker that I should type into Google the following “SEO is”.  And to my <sarcasm>shock</sarcasm> we got the results you see in the picture to the right.  In case you are unable to see the picture I will list them:

• SEO is bullshit
• SEO is dead
• SEO is a scam
• SEO is a Joke
• SEO is useless
• SEO issues
• SEO is overrated
• SEO is bs
• SEO is snake oil

Like many of you I took offense to this and started to wonder how these are the ones being suggested and where are the coming from.  First according to Google:

If you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, suggestions are drawn from searches you’ve done, searches done by users all over the world, sites in our search index, and ads in our advertising network. If you’re not signed in to your Google Account, no history-based suggestions are displayed.

So they say it comes from my history and the  searches I have done previously.  I can attest that I have not looked for any of those, except in the past with a recent article about ‘”SEO is Dead.”

The next part indicates that they come from searches done all over the world.  Well let see if that statement holds water by checking Google’s Keyword Tool.

If we search for “seo is” we get the following results with global broad match search volume:

• search engine optimization seo is the: Not Enough Data
• search engine optimization seo is the process: 46
• seo is like: 22
• seo is: 12,100
• seo is a scam: 46
• seo is dead: 170

Well there are at least two of the results, ‘seo is a scam’ and ‘seo is dead’.  But what about the rest.  Even looking through the rest of the “additional keywords to consider” we do not find any of the others listed.  The next logical step is to look for the exact terms to see what the tool indicates for estimated volume.  We get the following results for global broad match:

• SEO is bullshit: 46
• SEO is dead: 170
• SEO is a scam: 46
• SEO is a Joke: Not Enough Data
• SEO is useless: Not Enough Data
• SEO issues: 320
• SEO is overrated: Not Enough Data
• SEO is bs: Not Enough Data
• SEO is snake oil: Not Enough Data

Okay so there are a couple more that contain some search traffic, “SEO Issues” and “SEO is Bullshit”.  This still does not complete the list.  Okay maybe these are keywords that are trending up right now so let us take a look at Google Insight Trends.

If we do a search in Google Insights for Search for “seo is” we get the following breakout rising searches

• why seo
• seo is dead

Now I am not surprised at all with these results, if we remember there was a lot of recent activity about the “SEO is Dead” topic.  But, once again, we do not see any references for the other keyword suggestions.  To add insult to injury if we do a worldwide search for the term “seo is bullshit” we get “Not enough search volume to show graphs”.  Wow, there just doesn’t seem to be people out there searching for these terms.

Google indicates that they come from ads in their ad network.  Now this one is harder to check, but if I do a search for these keywords, I should see some adds in theory, Right?  Well here are the results of that experiment:

• SEO is bullshit: No Ads
• SEO is dead: No Ads
• SEO is a scam: Ads
• SEO is a Joke: No Ads
• SEO is useless: No Ads
• SEO issues: No Ads
• SEO is overrated: No Ads
• SEO is bs: Ads
• SEO is snake oil: No Ads

The last piece indicates that they come from sites in their index.  Well that is true, there are sites in their index.  We can check that by doing a search for “seo is bullshit“, ~389,00o results, or more precisely “allintitle:seo is bullshit“, ~217 results.  So there are sites in their index with these keywords.  But to counter, a search for “allintitle:seo is easy” has ~3570 results, and has a 36 for Global Monthly Search Volume.  So why is “seo is bullshit” in the suggestion and not “seo is easy.”

So where on earth are these suggestions coming from.  My hunch is they are hand selected.  I can neither confirm nor deny and nor can Google, but it is my story and I am sticking to it.

Additionally I am currently ranked #1 for the keyword “Janesville SEO” in Yahoo as well.  This really goes to show that even with a brand new site with no history, the domain name is incredibly important.  However, to keep things in perspective, “Janesville SEO” is not a difficult keyword to obtain.  There is next nothing when it comes to real competition and on top of it all, there is hardly any search traffic for it.  But the good news to that is, if it does start to pick up from nothing, maybe its more brand awareness on my part.  Only time will tell.

Since I have been doing this Search Engine Optimization thing for quite some time now, I was amazed that this was the most direct way to get indexed.  I say this because I installed Google Analytics, signed up with Google Webmaster Tools, and submitted an XML Google friendly Site Map and there was no indexation by Google.  These are a lot of signals that I provided to Google and yet they did not pick up on them.  So let that be a lesson, if you want to be indexed quickly, submit your site directly to Google. Another interesting fact is that one of the fields that you are able to fill out when submitting your is labeled “comments”.  This indicates to me that someone, a real human and not a bot is actually looking over your submission.  Can you imagine how many submissions they get a day or even a week.   I can only imagine what that job would be like.

Linkbuilding Slowly Begins

The other thing I did was sign up and submit my site to Blog Catalog.  I thought this would be a great initial start in building good backlinks to this site.  This was easy and free to do, which is great.  So if anybody is out there is starting a blog, I would recommend this site and others similar to it to build good backlinks.  Another great benefit for this can be seen in the search engine results page for the search of  “Janesville SEO”.  I currently rank 1, 2, and technically 3.  I say this because my listing on Blog Catalog is in the 3rd spot.

Ranking Results Are In

So in a short while I have obtained the top 3 spots for 1 main keyword I am focusing my rankings on.  The other keyword of choice at the moment is “Janesville Search Engine Optimization”  I am not doing as well there, yet!  Currently I am number 10 (Blog Catalog) and number 15 for janesvilleseo.com.  I am sure within a short period of time I will obtain top rankings for these keywords.  The best thing I have in my favor is my domain name.  Keep that in mind if you have a local service and are in need of a new website/domain.  Get one with the key + city if you can.

What Have I Done Thus Far

I have covered all of the basics:

• Signing up for a Google Analytics account
• Submitting the site to Google Webmasters Tools
• Submitting a XML sitemap to Google through Webmaster Tools

What Are The Next Steps

If we keep the two major tenants of SEO in mind, Content and Links, then those have to be the next steps.  As we speak I am continuing to add content to this site.  In the coming weeks and months I hope to not only document my journey to top rankings for the keywords Janesville SEO and Janesville Search Engine Optimization, but also write about other search marketing news and tactics and try to to apply them on a local level here in Janesville, WI.

In terms of building links, I will start with blog directories and local directories.  This tends to be a great starting point for new websites.  By adding to local and topical directories it not only tells Google and the other search engines what you are about, but it can help speed up the process of getting indexed.

I will keep you all posted as to when I get indexed within Google, as well as, Yahoo and Bing.  My guess is that Google will be first and within the next couple of days with Yahoo and Bing to follow shortly.

The Goal of Janesvilleseo.com

The main reason I started this blog is to have a place of my own to store my thoughts and ramblings in the wide world of SEO/SEM.  I hope to provide value to the ever changing world which I and my colleugues are apart of.  Please feel free to leave any comments whether they are constructive or not.  Sometimes I just like to be picked on for the heck of it.