How to Be a Badass Link Builder

There's a lot of panic and turmoil right now in the world of link building, but there doesn't have to be – you just have to learn how to be a badass link builder.

SEO has changed. We can't rely on spam and automation to boost traffic and search rankings anymore. A few years ago, link builders never gave that kind of stuff a second thought – it's just how things worked.

The industry is different now, but the good news is that you can still be a badass link builder in the post-Penguin era. The better news is that you only need one tool to build the best links in the world: your brain.

We need to think like human beings because we affect other human beings with our work. The age of robots has ended.

Keeping that in mind, you can build some killer links that hold up to algorithm changes and make the Internet a better place – you just have to be smart about it. Being a badass link builder requires hard work and even harder thinking, but you already have the tools to succeed.

2 Simple Steps

A badass link builder knows that the process of link building can be explained in just two steps:

1. Find a target site.
2. Get a link on that target site.

That's it. It's really that simple.

The important thing is how you approach those two steps. If you go about them the wrong way, your links won't be counted, and they might even be penalized. What's worse is following those two steps in such a way that makes the Internet a worse place for the average reader or user.

Future algorithm updates will throw those links aside, but the damage that spammy links do to your brand will be much more painful. You have to do it the right way.

While reading these steps (and the rest of this article), keep this mind: a relevancy-first approach is the only sustainable link building strategy.

Finding the Target Site

• Write down your keyword on a whiteboard or a large piece of paper, and then write down every term you can think of that relates to your keyword. For example, if your keyword was "audiophile headphones", you would also write down "DJ Gear", "portable music players" and "recording equipment."
• Look at your terms. Which ones might have dedicated online communities? It's likely that all of those example terms are being blogged about.
• Use Google to find target sites. Be creative. You might search [recording equipment “write for us”] or any variation. Find the relevant sites and put them in a spreadsheet.
• Use the smell test! This is important. Because you're going to represent yourself as a real human being and put in the time and effort, you want to make sure you're only listing sites that are curated by real people. Is there steady content on the site? How recently was it updated? Does the content use proper spelling and grammar? Are the display ads reputable? Is the site owner's contact info listed? You want to find sites made for humans. Even if the site's audience is small, it's still an audience. Link farms and spam blogs aren't going to help you, regardless of their PageRank or domain authority.

Getting the Link

• Once you've found a site, come up with a concept. Would a simple link to your site be a resource for that page's audience? Can you contribute unique content? Find an angle. If your site isn't a resource, you need to provide unique content.
• Find the webmaster or blog owner's name. Read their site. What do you like about it? Is there anything missing, especially something that you can provide? Get to know the site.
• Write an email. Don't make a copy/paste form. Just write the webmaster a real message. Talk about what you liked, who you are, and your ideas. Let them know you're a real human being. Form a relationship if you can.
• Don't try to sneak crappy, irrelevant anchor text in your content. If the anchor text isn't a natural fit in the content itself, put a link in your author bio. Don't abuse the blog owner. Give them something useful.

Like a Human

Notice how much emphasis I placed on building links like a human being? There's nothing more important in this business. Putting careful thought and hard work into each link ensures happy blog owners, happy audiences, high quality links, and long-term rankings.

The point of that whole keyword whiteboard exercise was relevancy. A link to your "audiophile headphones" page coming from a birdseed retailer is useless. It doesn't help anyone, and it's really just a slightly more advanced form of spam. For a badass link builder, relevancy has to come first.

If it doesn't make sense for a webmaster to link to your site, don't pursue it. A link is a vote of confidence, and you need to be confident that the link is a good fit.

Also remember that you're asking for a link. You're either exchanging unique content or providing your site as a resource. You're always going to stand behind what you create, but the owner of the target site might not. That's OK! It's their site, not yours. Be polite and move on where you're not wanted.

It's also important for a badass link builder to give other people some love. Link to others whenever it makes sense, cite your sources, and do the research. Once you create a link, you can always link back to that first post in a future post. That gives that first blog owner some serious link love. Treat them like you'd like to be treated.

Content for the Benefit of Humanity

Good content and relevant resources work toward the benefit of humanity. Spun articles and rehashed ideas don't help anyone, so avoid that entirely. They look bad for your brand and there's a good chance the link will either be penalized or simply not counted. They're also burdensome to regular Internet users.

It can be frustrating when people sound the “content is king” trumpet. Finding the perfect idea isn't an easy task, so it's best to look inward.

Write about your experiences and your thoughts. Do some original research and go down a rabbit hole.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel; you just need to share your unique perspective on why the wheel is important. People love reading stories and connecting with others, so give them that opportunity because that kind of content benefits humanity.

Let's look at an example. Your keyword is "audiophile headphones" and you're writing for a blog that focuses on recording equipment. You can cook up a great post about headphone mixes on old analog recording equipment. That community would love to read your thoughts and experiences on how to get the most out of your headphones on an old Tascam 4-Track recorder. It doesn't have to be rocket science as long as it comes from a real place.

The Takeaway

If you build links like an actual human being, then you're building links like a badass. You're making friends and your links are bulletproof.

There's only one catch to this method – it's hard work. It takes time, energy, and brainpower.

You don't need hundreds of links, but building 10 or 20 of these high-quality links is no small task. Each one is worth it in the end, though, because you're increasing search rankings, increasing traffic and doing it the right way.

The path of a badass link builder is never easy, but it's always rewarding.

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Google Penguin 2.0 Update is Live

Webmasters have been watching for Penguin 2.0 to hit the Google search results since Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts first announced that there would be the next generation of Penguin in March. Cutts officially announced that Penguin 2.0 is rolling out late Wednesday afternoon on "This Week in Google".

"It's gonna have a pretty big impact on web spam," Cutts said on the show. "It's a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentinally only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas."

In a new blog post, Cutts added more details on Penguin 2.0, saying that the rollout is now complete and affects 2.3 percent of English-U.S. queries, and that it affects non-English queries as well. Cutts wrote:

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.

This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally. For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.

Webmasters first got a hint that the next generation of Penguin was imminent when back on May 10 Cutts said on Twitter, “we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks though.”

Then in a Google Webmaster Help video, Cutts went into more detail on what Penguin 2.0 would bring, along with what new changes webmasters can expect over the coming months with regards to Google search results.

He detailed that the new Penguin was specifically going to target black hat spam, but would be a significantly larger impact on spam than the original Penguin and subsequent Penguin updates have had.

Google's initial Penguin update originally rolled out in April 2012, and was followed by two data refreshes of the algorithm last year – in May and October. 

Twitter is full of people commenting on the new Penguin 2.0, and there should be more information in the coming hours and days as webmasters compare SERPs that have been affected and what kinds of spam specifically got targeted by this new update.

Let us know if you've seen any significant changes, or if the update has helped or hurt your traffic/rankings in the comments.

UPDATE: Google has set up a Penguin Spam Report form.

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How to Turn Events into Link Building Opportunities

SEO and public relations have much potential for synergy. Not only can you get media coverage, you can encourage editorial links.

One basic PR practice that works well for link building is the 12-month planner. Everything that happens in your industry can create link building opportunities. But if you just react and do things at the last minute, you aren't going to get maximum return for your effort.

However, plan ahead and you'll see many opportunities open up – and you'll be able to give them the time they deserve in advance.

Your promotion doesn't happen in isolation. You have to compete for attention and links with competitor activity, industry events, new product launches, research reports and breaking news stories.

If you launch a piece of content at the wrong time, your story just might not get noticed. So it's a good idea to map your campaign ideas and initiatives against what's happening in your industry.

Once you understand what's happening in the year ahead, you can plan where to invest your time, resources, and energy.

Some of what's going on in your industry might be unpredictable, particularly competitor activity. But most of what's happening is predictable and will happen at specific times.

Now you probably know most of the major events in your industry, but you probably don't know them all. So it's worthwhile doing some research into your industry and build as comprehensive a list as you can. Every one of the events you identify can give you some great link building opportunities.

For example, if you're building links for a gourmet chocolate website, you should know that:

• July 28 is National Milk Chocolate Day in the U.S. – indeed there are 28 National chocolate holidays according to Foodimentary.com, a blog about food history, origins, celebrations, and holidays.
• American Chocolate Week is held every year around the third week of March - you could take part nationally or you could piggyback and target some stories to bloggers or local press.

Why are these types of events useful?

• Journalists are likely to be aware of such holidays and so will be on the look out for stories – especially if the stories have a creative or unusual angle.
• Sometimes the organizations behind the holidays don't do a good job of promoting them and may be open to working with others.
• It also gives you an excuse to create a story that might otherwise be seen as a spurious, publicity stunt.

In the PR industry, Chase's Calendar of Events is a terrific resource – it lists over 12,500 events worldwide and costs around $75. And if you're looking for something free, specific to the U.S., check out www.brownielocks.com, not the prettiest site in the world, but it lists daily, weekly, and monthly events. Great material if you're stuck for inspiration.

And from a quick bit of research in a chocolate cookbook, I found that asparagus and chocolate combine well to make a delicious dessert that apparently has aphrodisiac qualities.

That could be turned into a great story or piece of link bait. How about a piece of content targeted at the start of the asparagus season around May?

Here's a very simple template for the planner:

And here's how to use it:

1. Industry Events – What's Happening in Your Industry?

List all the trade shows, exhibitions, and other events relevant to your business. Even if you don't have any intention of going, list them so that you can either piggyback on the publicity they attract or avoid a clash.

2. Your Company Events – What's Happening in Your Company Each Month?

Incorporating company events into your link building promotion means you'll have a good, varied focus for your link building campaigns. And it also means that your return on investment for your other activities will be boosted by the additional traffic your links can attract.

Are you launching new products or ranges, are you running sales events, or special offers? Are you taking part in charitable events or sponsorships? These are all things that can help your link building and you should be aware of them.

3. Relevant Holidays – Seasonal Opportunities

Many businesses have times of the year when demand for their products is high. And interest is also likely to be high among the bloggers and journalists who comment on your industry. Think and act well ahead and you can secure some valuable links.

4. Initiatives – Events You Create Yourself

Complete the first three columns of the worksheet for the full year. You'll then be able to see any months when nothing is happening.

Ask yourself if you are happy with that. If so fine, but if you're uncomfortable with a month where there is no real promotional activity going on around your company, that's the perfect month to create an initiative.

So for those blank months, you can create events from nothing. For example if you did sell gourmet chocolate, you might build some content around that "chocolate and asparagus" idea we talked about earlier.

This template for planning is simple yet extremely effective in helping your public relations and link building activities work together.

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The Myth of Content Marketing, the New SEO & Penguin 2.0

"What Should Lead Your Online Marketing Strategy: SEO or Content". "Why Content Marketing is the New SEO". "Is Google's love affair with content marketing usurping SEO?" "Content Marketing is the New SEO "

These are actual titles from article in the top search results for [content marketing and SEO].

Content Marketing Isn't New

CONTENT MARKETING! DO IT! It's the NEW SEO!

In fact, it's so awesome you don't need anything else! Just produce awesome content and you will be in SEO nirvana! It's like double rainbows and Matt Cutts got together and had baby NyanCats!

Old SEO is dead. This is the new SEO and it's beautiful!

Sound too good to be true? That's because it is.

Content marketing isn't new. It's just a new buzzword picked up by other industries that suddenly found out they could to "do SEO", but they didn't want to "do SEO", so they tried to make it more special. It isn't.

Content marketing has been around since SEO on Google has been called SEO. To not understand this is to not understand what Google and its algorithms measure and how this might affect your site.

Now with the arrival of Penguin 2.0, you might be just setting yourself up for a fall – right out of the rankings. And yes despite all our talk of rankings not mattering, they do, because if you go from somewhere on Page 1 (with personalization) to nowhere on page 51, you will suddenly say, "Oh no! My rankings!"

Rankings matter. SEO matters. And content marketing is SEO. It always has been, and always will be – well, at least until the search engines don't use algorithms and content, but that's a long way off.

Need more proof of the power of content? Back in 2008, I ranked a website in the top 15 for a one-word term in competitive vertical with no links, a domain that was less than a year old, four weeks from launch, with 1,500 pages of unique, solid, quality content. Every word on the site was original, even the Contact Us.

How do I know content was the reason for getting the site ranked in the top 15? Content! To be fair, I can only be 99 percent sure that content, thanks to a Google engineer at a party at an SES Conference who confirmed it was "most likely the reason".

Like I said, the importance of unique, quality content isn't a new concept.

Just What is "Content Marketing"?

If you want the best literal explanation, this quote from Quora (found via Ann Smarty and Authority Labs) works very well:

"Content marketing is the umbrella of all techniques that are used to generate traffic, leads, online visibility, and brand awareness/fidelity."

If you want the one that really gets it, then this one from Sugar Rae says it best:

"Content marketing isn't a new strategy, it's merely a new word.

Why ... do we as an industry feel the need to invent a new buzzword for the same services every few years? We've been doing "content marketing" forever.

• Website = content
• Promotion of that website = marketing

Website + promotion of said website = content marketing."

And there you go. It is content that you put on your website and promote. That can be text, video, infographics, images, whatever you think of and put on your site. When you release it as part of your site marketed materials, then it is "content marketing".

It's really that simple. Again, it's not new, it's just a new buzzword.

Now that we have that straightened out, what does content marketing have to do with Penguin, SEO, future penalties, and you?

Content marketing is not the new SEO. It is SEO and so are a lot of other things.

It's All SEO Now

One client's site I recently reviewed was brilliant. The company had never bought a link, was completely legit, and worked feverishly on their content marketing – yet they had 16 warnings and penalties. Why? Because while content is great and certainly a very important part of any SEO strategy, it isn't all or even most of what you need to be concerned about when thinking about the algorithm.

Taking Your Eyes Off The Ball

So while you were spending all that time concentrating on your content marketing, what were you doing about making sure you met the rest of the 200+ points on the algorithm? What about the other things that Penguin was meant to control?

How is your internal linking? Your anchor text either coming in or internally?

How about where your sites are linking externally? Where are you linking to and are you linking to other sites you own? (triangulation - crosslinking)

What about the other changes Google announced are coming this summer (which I will just term, the "no one is home" penalties for lack of a better term)? You know, like spam comment in your forums or blogs? Or your page speed and usability?

How about your page crawls? Sitemaps? Are you showing Google no one is at the helm while you spend all your time focused on cultivating the latest viral video or super infographic?

Starting to see the issue?

Content marketing isn't separate from SEO and isn't the new SEO. It doesn't replace SEO. It is SEO just like all the other items mentioned are SEO.

SEO isn't just search engine optimization anymore. It is, as Cutts suggested a little while back, search experience optimization and it covers everything on the website, either directly or relationally.

Once you realize that "content marketing" is just using good content practices and that you might have been neglecting the rest of your site SEO, what should you do?

12 Other Google Update Checks (Penguin Included)

1. Titles and Descriptions

Titles and descriptions still remain one of the most misunderstood items on any site and they are still as important as ever. Know what these mean and how to write each properly. Make sure you don't have duplicates, ones that are too long or over-optimized tags.

2. Anchor Text

Is your anchor text over-optimized with keywords? Are you using keywords when domain names should be used? What is the natural way someone would link to your site? This counts with inbound links as well as internally. Beware of over-optimized and overused keyword anchor text.

3. Links – Inbound & Outbound

Run a link check. How do your inbound links look? The threshold for spammy links was about 80 percent, it is now down to about 50 percent. That means 50 percent questionable links can keep your site or a page out of the index.

Know your link profile.

Using outbound links, make sure you are not sending out link juice on ad links, but still make sure you are doing some links offsite. Google doesn't like it when you hoard that link power all for yourself. Share with worthwhile sites, but never with ad links.

4. Links Cross or Triangulate

Sometimes by accident even, sites crosslink to other sites they own or partner with that site while sitting on the same IP addresses or C classes. Do you know if yours do? If they do, delink your sites or put rel=nofollow on those links, or Google may think you are attempting to put up a link network of your own.

Remember, Google can't discern intent, so the appearance of impropriety is all that you need to give yourself a penalty.

5. Page Speed

Google likes to say page speed is a small factor for websites and maybe for some industries this is the case, but in others our experience shows it isn't. This only makes sense. For Google, faster loading sites lower the load on Google's end, so take the page speed tool, check your site, and get it above a 90 percent if you can. That seems to be the magic threshold for most.

6. User-Generated Content Spam

User-generated content spam on your site is directly linked to a penalty now at Google. (Heard about Sprint's latest fiasco?)

It doesn't take a lot to indicate to Google "No One is Home" keeping an eye on things.

Make sure you have checked your blogs and comment areas for things like multiple https or for words such as "free shipping" with a database crawler or in Google with site:domain.com "words go here" and see, is someone scamming you?

Note: If the spammers are very good you may not be able to see it without a Google search.

7. Redirects

Get a tool like Screaming Frog and check your site pages for redirects then make sure those redirected pages have a 301 permanent redirect, which tells Google the page has been permanently moved and it should keep following it.

It's rare you need a different type of page redirect and if you do, then remove the page from the index with a noindex tag in the header. (There are rare cases where this won't be the case, this is just the general rule.)

Also make sure you have your canonicals in place and that they are correct. This should go without saying, but not all sites do it.

8. Over-Optimization on Non-Content Items

A common type of over-optimization happens in the navigation, the header or footer.

This is where someone either adds a keyword to every (or almost every) word to try to rank for the term or where someone adds an overabundance of header or footer links to "help" a site position for known keywords. This won't help and is likely to give the site a penalty.

9. Alt Attributes

How are you using the alt attribute on your images? Don't stuff keywords into this text. Using good alt text, especially when images are replacing text in links, can be very good for a site. In fact, Google will treat this alt text as actual text in these cases.

Go to http://webaim.org to learn the rules for "alt text" content generation.

10. Ad Issues

Google doesn't like it when a site seems to only be there to support the ads on it, so an overabundance of above the fold ads can cause the site to receive a penalty.

What is too much? Google is a little obtuse about this, but find out what is above the fold for your screen size (not your screen, but the site screen size), then hold up a post it note, if it takes up more space than the note, it is probably too large.

11. Crawl Issues

When is the last time you got into your Webmaster Tools and checked how your crawls were going? How is your crawl rate? Are the spiders having any crawl issues?

We once had a client who had 28k crawl errors. These will affect your site strength and authority with the "No One Is Home" devaluations. So keep an eye on your crawl rate and if it is not crawling well, find out why as quickly as possible and fix it!

12. Malware or Rogue Sites

For the most part, we're fortunate that Google will email us and tell you that you have malware on your site – but be careful: this isn't always the case. Periodically you want to do a search for your site, see if you trigger malware warnings in a site search or mobile, then check your analytics to make sure no one is running anything untoward on your site like say a rogue Viagra site. If you want to see how prevalent this is, go to Google search and put in ".gov" Viagra.

Not only can these sites be doing things on your site that could be causing you "hack" issues, but also sending links to their pages on your site causing your link profile to be damaged.

What Else?

This was just a partial list to get you started. We haven't touched authorship, structured data, URL construction or a whole host of things you should be doing these are just some things you need to be checking, but hopefully you get an idea that myopic SEO is not SEO at all.

If you haven't been doing much more than content marketing and thought there was something called the "new SEO" and the "old SEO" was dead, my best advice is with the arrival of Penguin 2.0 and several other changes still on the horizon, is to conduct a site audit.

This is going to be the summer of change on Google, and this article has only touched on some of the items known to be part of the Penguin and Panda algorithms and the coming attractions. Don't get caught with your proverbial pants down, wondering, what happened?

With SEO proactive is always better than reactive, because only a small percentage of sites hit by the first Penguin have ever fully recovered. If (or when) your site gets hit, sometimes all you can do is start again.

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Google Penguin 2013: How to Evolve Link Building into Real SEO

Google has just rolled out Penguin 2.0, a large algorithmic update promising to go “deeper” than the 2012 Penguin release, which put a hurting on websites with number of manipulative links in their profile.

This prospect creates fear for many small businesses who depend on search engine optimization (SEO) for their livelihoods. But there is also a sense of confusion as the line often shifts and the message from Google contradictory.

Sorting out Panda, Penguin, and Manual Actions

Google's Panda update is a different release than Penguin. Panda is geared toward duplicative, thin, or spun content on websites.

Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts recently stated that Google is actually pulling back on Panda because of too many false positives. This is good for news aggregators and other sites that reuse content appropriately and have been hit hard by the Panda filter.

Penguin is much harder to understand, focusing on backlink patterns, anchor text, and manipulative linking tactics that provide little value to end users. To make matters worse, Google likes to take large manual actions just prior to major algorithm updates. In 2012 we saw theremoval of BuildMyRank from the index just prior to Penguin.

Earlier this year we saw major manual action taken against advertorials. Last week Google announced the removal of thousands of link selling websites and we are hearing of a manual spam penalty against Sprint this week.

The proximity of these manual actions with major algorithmic updates is brilliant PR as it associates them together in our memories, discussions and debates - but they are very different things.

Is SEO Enough?

As small business owners move through the here we go again feelings to actually decide what to do in response to Penguin 2013, sorting out the truth is paramount. Google is clearly beating the familiar drum with the same core messages:

1. Build a great website.
2. Make awesome content with high end-user value.
3. Visitors will magically appear.

But the reality is that visitors don’t magically come, at least on any reasonable scale, without organized promotional activities. Many excellent websites have died a slow death due to lack of promotion. And this is where the contradictions emerge in SEO, which has demonstrated extremely high ROI compared to other marketing channels.

Long Live Online Marketing

While discussed many times, webmasters still struggle with shifting their link building activities toreal SEO strategy. They fail to see that SEO in 2013 is now integral to online marketing and no longer a standalone activity.

Whereas SEO used to be about tuning a website for optimal consumption by spiders, today’s SEO is about earning recognition, social spread, and backlinks through excellent content marketing. This means SEO is now ongoing, integrated, and strategic – whereas it used to be one-time, isolated, and technical.

Real SEO

Real SEO is the prescription for those who fear Penguin 2013. Here are practical activities that need to be done every month to achieve real SEO:

• Continually Identify Audience Demand: Your SEO won't be successful if it isn't useful. To serve a need, webmasters must understand what the audience is seeking. Keyword research, as always, is critical. While doing keyword research don’t over-emphasize head terms or money keywords. Focusing on long-tail keywords renders more immediate results, increases the breadth of a website (remember Panda), and builds authority that will ultimately help the head term.
• Content marketing: In my opinion, content marketing is the new link building. Earn recognition, social spread, and backlinks by giving away valuable information for free. Excellent content has high audience value and points readers to other resources viacocitation. Video is an excellent form of content marketing that is still under-utilized by small businesses. And newsjacking is an emerging form of content marketing that specifically targets hot news topics for viral spread.
• Work on brand: There is increasing evidence that branded mentions are an important legitimacy signal to Google. Promoting the brand has traditional marketing benefits and also now helps SEO. But be careful not to turn SEO content marketing into an endorsement, as this crosses the line. Find traditional marketing tactics, such as press releases, to drive branding while announcing news-worthy events.
• Syndicate: The "build it and they will come" philosophy doesn't work on an Internet with more than 500 million active domain names. This is why even excellent content needs to be promoted. Email marketing, social media, community engagement in forums, and guest blog posting are efficient mechanisms for spreading the word about engaging content. Interviews, PPC ads, and local event sponsorship will also get your name and content noticed. Any activity that broadcasts your message, your brand, and builds real community discussion will ultimately support SEO, and should be considered part of the SEO process.

Conclusions

The arrival of Penguin 2013 has many small business owners scared and confused. But SEO remains one of the best online marketing channels.

Real SEO is the path forward for those who wish to make a long-term investment in online marketing. Forward-looking webmasters can prepare their sites for Penguin 2014, 2015, and beyond with well-researched, end-user focused content marketing that provides strong audience value.

Using modern syndication tactics, they can broadcast their message, gain audience mind-share and earn recognition. By spreading valuable content, small business can build their brands and earn bulletproof backlinks.

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Google Penguin 2.0 Spam Report Form Now Available

It's been less than 24 hours since Google Penguin 2.0 went live, but there are already several reports of big changes. There are also many reports that, despite Penguin, Google is still ranking spam sites. You can now report this directly to Google.

Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cuttstweeted about the new Penguin Spam Report today. It is located here.

When you go to the form, Google asks you for information about the spam site that is still ranking:

• The URL of the spam site.
• The URL of the search result that demonstrates the problem.
• Any additional information about the spam results.

Unlike last year's Penguin feedback form, Google isn't giving you the option to report sites that shouldn't have been affected by this update.

One of the complaints Cutts responded to on Twitter concerned the post-Penguin results for pay day loans in the UK. Cutts noted that "we have a couple more things coming in that space."

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Boost Your Blog's SEO Mojo with These 6 Simple, Actionable Steps

Your blog is a powerful tool. Publishing blog content on a regular basis can provide an organization with a number of distinct benefits, which include:

• Brand building and awareness.
• Positioning yourself as a thought leader.
• Demonstrating your (or your organization's) expertise.
• Developing relationships within your niche.
• Fostering an engaged and active community.
• Generating leads.

Blogging is also powerful from an SEO standpoint as well. Strategic and active blogging can help you:

• Incite more crawling – the more you publish, the more your site gets crawled.
• Penetrate more keyword verticals.
• Attract links – provided you're promoting your content; passive link acquisition is difficult if not impossible for most sites.
• Generate social signals.
• Drive more organic traffic.

Despite the inherent "SEO value" of blogging, many blogs just aren't properly optimized for search, or aren't optimized to their fullest potential. As such, these blogs aren't working as hard as they could be for an organization from an SEO standpoint.

Many of the fixes and improvements you can make are really quite simple. Let's take a look at six steps every organization can take today to improve their blog's SEO.

1. Practice Good Pagination

Pagination on a blog is a system for enumerating pages so you can organize and archive content. Pagination is particularly helpful for usability because housing all your blog posts on a single page that scrolls endlessly isn't a practical or user-friendly approach. A single page with hundreds of blog entries would undoubtedly hurt load times too.

When it comes to SEO, pagination implemented correctly maximizes "crawl depth" and makes your content easier for engines to access by reducing the number of clicks needed to reach deeper, archived pages. In addition, proper pagination is a scalable way to flow more (or a larger percentage) of PageRank to your archived content.

Here are some solid examples of SEO-friendly pagination (multiple, numbered hyperlinks means fewer clicks to reach older content).

It isn't just blogs. Search engines practice good pagination practices as well, so take a page (or a post, if you will) out of Google's playbook.

If that's good pagination, then what's bad pagination?

Examples of poor pagination (or complete lack of) are pretty rampant across the Web. Some of the biggest offenders are free, off-the-shelf WordPress templates where you get a either a single hyperlink to access archived content "older entries," or two links "older entries" and "newer entries."

So why is the above example bad?

Having a single link means it can take exponentially more clicks to reach older content, which can make it harder for bots to find. Also, a single link means each subsequent archived index page (and the posts linked from it) is getting a smaller percent of a percent of PageRank. By the time you've gone five clicks deep into your archive, those pages and posts are starved for link equity.

Some of my favorite pagination plugins are:

• WP-Paginate
• Simple Pagination

2. Add Related Posts

As mentioned in the above section on pagination, it's critical that you make your blog content easy to find (both for bots and users). If your content is buried a dozen clicks deep or if it's orphaned entirely, that content can drop out of the index or won't have enough link equity to outrank competitor documents, rendering those pages useless from a SEO perspective.

So another way to improve the findability of your content is to add a list of related articles at the end of each of all your blog posts. Not only does this elicit more page views with readers, but this practice also helps flow link equity to deeper content and improves the circulation of PageRank across your blog. Finally, given there are keywords in the anchor text, related posts are an internal linking mechanism that reinforce the semantic relevance of a document they're linking to.

If you're running on WordPress, adding related posts is relatively easy, and there are a range of some very good related post plugins:

• 12 Related Post Plugins For The WordPress Beginners
• 3 "Must-Have" WordPress Related Posts Plugins

3. Add Previous and Next Posts

Similar to implementing a related posts feature on your blog, you can increase findability with "previous" and "next" post links, which can appear at the top or at the bottom of an article on your blog.

Much like adding related posts, "previous" and "next" article links effectively surfaces your content and improves link equity distribution. In addition, these types of navigational links can help increase time on site, and boost overall user-engagement and satisfaction signals via the "long click," a behavior metric Google is potentially measuring.

4. Proper Use of Categories

Categories are another component on your blog you can leverage to boost your organic search efforts. Besides making archived content easier to find (a common thread here), categories help classify and silo your content into topically themed pages, which creates additional opportunities to rank in search results.

Some category best practices are:

• Limit the number of categories you have. Categories are often misused or abused with contributors creating a new category every time they write a new post, which can lead to really thin pages of content (pages with a single post snippet). For small- to medium-sized blogs, 10 to 15 categories are really all you need.
• Select only one category per post. Contributors often abuse the category select feature and click on multiple categories before posting, which can risk duplicate content issues.
• Add original content to your categories to help make them unique. This plugin works well for adding introductory content to category pages

5. Vary Title Tags vs. Article Titles

Keywords are the foundation for your SEO efforts. Most bloggers understand this and often include keywords and keyword variations in their copy. But where many authors drop the ball is by not varying the title of the blog post and the title tag element.

Often this is due to inexperience, time constraints, or the option doesn't exist in their dashboard (which is easily remedied with the proper plugin). As such, the CMS or publishing platform duplicates the post title and the title tag with copy and paste.

Will this negatively impact SEO? No. But given the title tag is still the most important piece of content on your site (from an SEO perspective), not varying title and title tag is really more of a missed opportunity.

By varying your title and title tag and working in alternative keywords, stems, modifiers or synonyms, you make your content work even hard for you in the SERPs. And the more keyword variations in your content, the more opportunities your content has to rank in more searches.

There are a number of SEO plugins that allow you to vary post title and title tag, but my favorites are:

• WordPress SEO Plugin
• Headspace2

6. Add Sharing Buttons

Adding social buttons prompts sharing, which improves the distribution or your content across social platforms. Sharing can also help expose your content to new audiences.

From an SEO perspective, getting your content shared increases the likelihood of mentions and links. Also sharing helps your content get discovered faster; and the quicker it's found, the sooner it shows up in the index.

What's more, Google is gathering social data and this data impacts rankings. To what extent those social signals influence rankings is debatable, but Google clearly places some degree of value on social, and so should you.

To help increase distribution of your content across social channels, you need to implement frictionless sharing. Make your share buttons obvious, but not disruptive or distracting.

Sharebar is my favorite social sharing plugin for WordPress. It doesn't support Google+, but this quick snippet of code solves that.

Sharebar is good for two reasons. It shadows the reader as they move down the page, and it contains "share counts," which can help convey further trust, authority and popularity of an article for an audience.

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