SEO is the acronym for search engine optimisation.

It is the practice of designing, building and producing content

for websites which serves to increase the authority and

relevance of that site; with the equal aim of ensuring it also

appears more highly ranked on search engine results pages

(S.E.R.P’s).

The phrase ‘search engine’ largely refers to Google because

although there are other search engines, like Bing and

Yahoo!, Google still holds the largest share of the search

engine market, estimated at somewhere between 65-70% of

the whole (imforza).

That statistic alone

means you need to

know your

penguins from your

pandas if you’re

going to be

successful in

handling your SEO

strategy.

The Panda algorithm focuses

on targeting low quality, thin

and duplicate material.

The Penguin algorithm

focuses mainly on identifying

and penalizing sites that are

engaging in activities like

using: link spam, paid links,

link farms and overly

optimised anchor text.

Changes to these algorithms are designed to remove

‘spammy’, irrelevant or poor quality sites from Google’s

S.E.R.P’s, in order to improve the relevance of these results

for users and their search queries.

These algorithms have a hugely negative impact on sites

engaging in such practices.

YouTube gained visibility with the

last Panda refresh as the site

relies heavily on user generated

content which is therefore relevant

to users and unlikely to be

duplicated or unnatural.

Wabauto.de is a site that also saw

an increase in visibility after the

last Panda refresh, they recorded

a rise in visibility of 132.77%

(Orchid Box).

Interflora lost visibility in 2013,

and no longer ranked in Google

for their own name, let alone their

most valuable keywords (Martin

Macdonald)! It later transpired that

Interflora’s SEO team had been

acquiring paid links through the

method of sending a free product

to bloggers.

This is a classic example of

engaging in unnatural or “Black

Hat” back link building which

means it was the Penguin

algorithm that Interflora fell afoul

of.

The distinction between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO is

widely debated and has even led to the suggestion of a third

type; Grey Hat SEO.

White Hat SEO refers to: a method of search engine

optimisation that is generally approved by search engines.

These methods look to improve the rankings of a website in

an ethical manner by staying within a search engine's terms

of service.

In simple terms, this means the website is designed, built and

optimised in a way that will naturally appeal to search engines

rather than attempting to deceive them. White hat SEO tends

to produce successful long term, high value and low risk

search engine rankings.

Black Hat SEO refers to methods of search engine

optimisation that are considered to be unethical or that

contravene a search engine's terms of service. Such

techniques will often create a poor user experience or present

content in a different or non-visual way.

Examples of this include keyword stuffing, invisible text and

doorway pages. Black hat SEO can be described as a short-

term and indeed short - sighted solution to a long-term

problem as websites using such techniques may eventually

be banned (either temporarily or permanently) once the

search engines discover what they are doing, making black

hat SEO high risk, short term and low value.

Finally Grey Hat SEO refers to SEO

strategies that (as the colour

suggests) fall in between Black Hat

and White Hat SEO.

As such, so called Grey Hat

techniques can be legitimate in some

cases and illegitimate in others

(Redalkemi).

To give your our opinion, there is no Grey Hat SEO, penguins

and pandas are black and white as are all SEO techniques.

They fall either in to the Black Hat SEO camp or the White

Hat SEO camp. By clearly distinguishing between the do’s

and don’ts of SEO and choosing not to acknowledge the grey

areas it makes it easier to ensure your practices are low risk.

Back link building has been a large contributor to the

arguments for positing the category of Grey Hat SEO.

Indeed some definitions of White Hat SEO would state that

full service white hat SEO includes link building services

which involve:

1. Article Marketing,

2. Social

Networking,

3. Online Publicity,

4. Directory

Submission,

5. Video Marketing,

6. Blog

Commenting,

7. Local Profiles

8. and Blogging.

However, Google’s official position is that back link building is

a Black Hat SEO technique, so there are no White Hat back

link building techniques, (SEOhaven) hence the ‘grey area’ of

SEO.

So, here’s some guidelines you should apply to ANY links

pointing back to your site:

Ensure the links you have to your site are quality.

Build a concurrent social media presence that’s strong and

well connected to support your backlinks. Keep Google extra

happy and include Google+.

Always produce content for your blog, social sites and

webpages that’s high quality, referenced and original because

great content will gain links naturally.

Indeed, content marketing is a growing trend in the search

industry with 54% of B2B companies intending to increase

their content marketing spending in 2013 (Content Marketing

Institute).

So adapting your content marketing to also include SEO is a

great way to streamline your whole marketing operation and

make content production more successful long term.

We recently published our Content Marketing Guide for

business which you can access here in full:

http://blog.cloudspotting.co.uk/2013/05/02/content-marketing-

strategy-guide/

To expand our philosophy of SEO further, we could go as far

to say that SEO is not even about “White Hat” versus “Black

Hat” techniques; SEO is about low value versus high value,

high risk versus low risk and long term versus short term

techniques.

Low value SEO is most commonly recognisable as the use of

SPAM, however a point to note is that not all low value SEO

techniques are illegal and not all are necessarily unethical

depending on your views, but all low value SEO techniques

are done purely to affect and theoretically benefit an SEO

campaign.

High value SEO techniques are those that are employed not

only to serve the need of SEO but to also provide the site and

site visitors with either beneficial material or a favourable

experience.

Black hat tactics certainly, and even some

“grey hat SEO” tactics have become

considerably riskier than they once were, that

means you need to be able to afford to lose if

you’re going to make a risky move.

With the latest Panda and Penguin updates,

affording to lose is a much bigger decision

that it once was.

By sticking to White Hat SEO techniques you

are avoiding any behaviour that may prove

risky.

Deciding on the difference between using short term and long

term SEO tactics is very much dependent on your business.

If you know your business is only functional in the short term

for example if you are targeting a particular trend or event

relevant within a specific time frame, like Movember perhaps,

then you can take risks and use short term, techniques

relatively safely, that other more long term business can’t.

Generally, if you play the SEO game purely to win SEO

points, you may win a few rounds, but you will ultimately lose

the game.

The proof is in the pudding: JC Penny, or rather the SEO

company they employed, built their SEO strategy based

solely on short term, high risk and low value techniques.

Upon investigating JC Penny’s remarkably successful

performance in Google S.E.R.P’s, which saw them ranking in

the 1st and 2nd position for a vast plethora of search queries,

it was revealed that a vast number of seemingly unrelated

websites and webpages were linking back to the JC Penny

site. Equally most of these sites had incredibly detailed

anchor text, leading to the suspicion that someone (JC

Penny’s SEO team) had arranged for those things to point

back to JC Penny. In a word, it looked unnatural.

The general conclusion drawn from the JC Penny case is that

they or their SEO firm had bought into a paid link network, a

huge violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Thus, Google promptly and majorly dropped JC penny’s

rankings for all the terms they had previously been ranking

very highly for. Matt Cutts from Google stated that this was a

result of the algorithms and manual action (Search Engine

Land).

The lesson to learn: Once Google sets a panda or penguin

loose on the low value SEO tactic you’re using you’re dead in

the water. By their very nature, low value SEO techniques do

not provide for the future and consider SEO only in isolation.

So the best option is to conduct a long term, high value and

low risk SEO strategy because, even if you are affected by a

Google algorithm change at some point, because your SEO

strategy is focussing on improving the user experience as

well as your S.E.R.P placement, you will be using a diverse

range of techniques to do this.

Thus whichever one technique an algorithm may pick up on

and penalize you for, you’ll have another technique they are

not penalizing you for, essentially ensure you never go back

to square 1.

Quality Content

Clean Code

Link Credibility

Using Parked Domains with excessive advertising above the

fold is not recommended (this is also an issue which tackles

link credibility) So the fold in the point at which you have to

start scrolling to see the remainder of the webpage you’re

viewing.

To assess whether your advertising above the fold is

excessive of otherwise, Google provided this tool, or rather,

grid:

That’s our website

underneath that grid,

and you can just

about make out, that

we are doing ok as

far as our ad layout is

concerned.

Interesting though,

look at this Google

webpage:

Sadly, the Google Ad

Layout tool doesn’t

seem to allow you to

test a Google search

query page, no doubt

because if it did you’d

see that there is an

excessive use of

advertising appearing

above the fold. At a

quick glance, about

80% of content

above the fold on this

page is advertising.

Just an interesting

point.

Do not produce low quality/ thin content and consolidate

similar pages to minimise duplicate content.

Move any offending pages to a new domain or 404 them and

provide a site map to help Google index your site and help

users find valuable content.

Create content that is: useful, informative, clear and

accurately described and use your keywords in your on page

content, to ensure your site’s relevant to users

Use text not images where possible and ensure ads don’t

affect S.E.R.P’s by using Google’s AdSense as its not

crawled.

Make pages primarily for users not search engines and make

your website stand out from competitors.

Don’t stuff title and meta tags, anchor text or navigation links

with keywords.

Vary anchor text again avoiding duplicate content

Use the ALT attribute for images by including descriptive text.

Make sure ALT attributes and <title> elements are descriptive

an accurate.

Check and correct any incorrect HTML.

Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since

HTTP header, this will alert Google if your content has

changed since the last crawl.

Use the robots.txt file to indicate which directories to crawl.

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Do not use cloaking, it is a form of search engine subterfuge

where visitors are not shown an indexed web page when they

click on the link to it in Google. Cloaking can work in either

direction, e.g. the visitor is cloaked from Google or Google’s

indexed content is cloaked from the visitor. Cloaking achieves

a high PageRank to content that would normally receive a low

PageRank (SE Partner).

Using redirects is a tactic which sends a user to a different

page from the one they actually clicked on in the search

results, often the page they are redirected to, is less relevant

than the link they clicked on suggested. (Paul de Sousa).

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Similar to using redirects, doorway or entry pages as they are

also known, send visitors to an entirely different site than the

destination they thought they clicked on in the Google

S.E.R.P’s. (SE Partner).

When it comes to SEO, having affiliates can boost PageRank

through associations, the least orthodox methods of using this

method is having affiliates publish product reviews and

services offered by one another. This is similar to the

practices that got Interflora in to trouble.

•

Build high quality and relevant links to your site and delete,

destroy or dilute suspected low quality links your site.

Cancel or remove any unnecessary footer links

Be conservative with internal linking

Avoid or limit buying sponsored links: organic is better.

Design and build a site with a clear hierarchical structure

complete with text links. Every page should be accessible

from at least one static text link.

Keep links on any given page to within a “reasonable number”

(sadly, there is no real, specific guideline for this).

Check and repair any broken links.

•

Test your site

Optimize load times to give users with the best experience.

Don’t deceive users

Avoid tricks to improve search rank

Avoid: automatically generated content, link schemes, cloaking,

sneaky redirects hidden text or links, doorway pages, scraped

content, affiliate programmes without sufficient value, irrelevant

keywords, malicious behaviour like phishing, installing viruses

Trojans or other “bad ware”, abusing rich snippets and sending

automated queries to Google.

Monitor your site for hacking and removed hacked content

a.s.a.p. and prevent and remove user generated spam on your

site e.g. blog comments loaded with links.

.

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If you would like help or advice with your SEO strategy,

get in touch today…

T: +44 (0)113 234 1542

E: info@cloudspotting.co.uk

www.cloudspotting.co.uk

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penguin-era-survival/59415/

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