Google Issues Stern Warning to Affiliate Sites

[Simon]

Originally Posted by artwilliams

This is certainly true in mainstream marketing.

I've used email in the adult market since 1999. While the landscape has changed over the years, meaning there are more things you need to known and do to achieve good results now, I can definitely tell you that there's plenty of money to be made with mailings IF you build your own list of double opt-in subscribers. Which is almost ridiculously easy to do.

Originally Posted by artwilliams

I had a subscription to SEMRush and it was a real eye opener with respect to top search terms on websites. Not using the name of your site but rather your target SE terms is critical as you mention.

Actually, I want to clarify what I meant just a little. The reason I said that submitters should be asked to link with any anchor text *except* the name of your site is that most LLs/TGPs and other submission sites have insisted on webmasters linking to them with their site name over the years. So now the majority of their incoming links may have their site name in the anchor text. If that's true, then action should be taken immediately to dilute that percentage down to where it should be.

For those who've been studying what the latest mathematical algorithms the Big G is using seem to be doing, certain things seem to be increasing in importance. Yes, many of the traditional ways to acquire links are being penalized. But it's how those links are being identified that's more interesting. Which is why I wanted to clarify that while it used to be important to rank for your site name, and then later to rank for your specific chosen keywords/phrases, on today's playing field it's incredibly important that your link profile looks as "natural" as possible (in the Big G's eyes I mean), and tracking and managing your link velocity correctly plays into it too.

I won't go into the deeper details right now, but in very general terms a Natural Link Profile will be split into four main segments. The site name anchors are only one of those segments, or no more than around 25% of your total inbound links. The other 75% should be a carefully managed mixture of naked URLs, junk/surfer anchors ("click here"), and a certain amount of phrases which are a variation of the site name used in combination with a word or phrase that's semantically related to its primary keywords/phrases (but are *not* the actual words/phrases).

Please notice, I did not say that any of the links should be the old-style keyword-rich anchor text. The value of those dropped with the first Penguin back in 2012, and there have been four Penguins that followed, right up to October of last year. The first couple looked mostly at your home page, but later ones looked deeper. If your sites use too much (in their eyes) exact-match anchor text, you probably suffered some loss in the SERPs.

Bottom line: If you want to rank better but you already have more than 25% of your inbound links using your site name or your primary keywords/phrases, you need to work on your link profile and make it as natural looking as you can. Keeping in mind that the Big G believes that, in their perfect world, links to your site are added because your site is valuable and popular. So they expect to see not only what they believe is a proper mix of anchors and URLs, but they also expect more links to be added more often as time moves forwards ("link velocity").

I want to mention here that managing incoming links is something that the BIG tubes do very well. They have buyers with strict guidelines adding new links all of the time. One of the reasons for their rapid and huge growth is that they understood what the multiple Panda and Penguin updates and the Social Signals update were doing and took advantage of the opportunity to gain even better SERPs and traffic by managing their link building (buying) like it was media buying.

Okay...the majority of board readers probably don't have a big budget for ad buys or link acquisition. Even if you have those things in your operating budget, it's almost certainly not an amount that begins to compare to what the major players are spending today.

So if we're not going to be able to outspend your way to the top, at least we can stop sabotaging ourselves by continuing to do the things that worked so very well in the past but are now doing the exact opposite. And that's why I said "Throw away the old reciprocal links model. Completely. Don't tweak it, eliminate it." Every time a LL/TGP or other submission site insists that a webmaster links back to them using the exact same supplied text from the very URL being submitted...somewhere a big tube owner profits just a little more. And the bigger your site is, and the more submissions you get each day, the more that owner profits.

I hope that clarifies what I meant.




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