5 Responses to SEO Roundtable Webinar, July 25

1. Reg-NBS-SEO July 11, 2012 at 1:33 pm

   I wonder if the panel could be asked about linking?

   Google has declared that PageRank is not an actionable metric.
   While many of the professionals ignore this, I take it to mean that links, (which are the core of PR), do not have a measurable effect on SERPs.

   Google has just gone through a major purge of thin/scraped/recycled/ad-heavy/farmed links and content.
   This has resulted in a major loss of IBLs.
   Even Google.com lost over 8 BILLION of their links.
   That was Panda.

   Then came Penguin which was a recalculation of PageRank with non-relevant (off topic) links removed.
   They also say that it was targeted at kw stuffing, but this has been a target for years. Perhaps it was a strengthening of the rule.

   Once the PR recalculations to remove the influence generated by off topic links was done, the post panda / penguin algos came into effect.

   With the original PageRank determining the value of a link based on a percentage (.85) of the PR of the page divided by the number of links on the linking page a failure, relevance was added to the PR calculations.
   You can get more PR “Link Juice” from a relevant PR0 page than you can from a non-relevant PR8 link.

   This is a significant departure from the old, non-relevance based, PR.

   Google no longer trusts the site owner to constrain their linking to marketing/promotion without regard to influencing SEO / SERPs.
   To this end, they have removed the user configurable factors from influencing SERPs.

   These factors all involve links.
   Google wants links to improve the information silos.
   They do not want to be following links to garbage.
   Matt Cutts just said that nofollow was a one digit percentage of all links “And a small one at that”. Even this has failed.

   PageRank was a strong factor at first, but over the years it’s influence has been downgraded as improvements in latent semantics provided more relevant results.
   This culminated in the switch from a strictly mathematical PR calculation to one based on relevance. This was done in the Mayday update.

   Even the predictive component of a link, the anchor text, has been removed as an influence.

   Google scans linking patterns to determine if they are organic.

   New sources of penalties are linking patterns and non-relevant links.

   There has been a lot of imagined correlation between drops in the SERPs based on the anchor text used.
   I do not feel that this is what caused the drops, as anchor text is one factor that, in an organic link, is NOT under the control of the site owner.

   I would say that regardless of percentage of use, Google is targeting anchor text used on NON-RELEVANT pages.

   Reg

   Reply
2. Wilks Poole July 17, 2012 at 1:20 pm

   I think I really need to be present when this all goes down. I badly needed to know what to do in the future especially that I have just been penalized. I was not really happy about that.

   Reply
   • M. McNamara July 25, 2012 at 12:14 pm

     If you weren’t able to attend, please check out our recorded version that will be up in the next week or two!

     Reply
3. Reg-NBS-SEO July 17, 2012 at 3:55 pm

   I would love to be present.
   Unfortunately, health reasons prevent it.

   How were you penalized Wilks?
   I would love to chat on skype about that.
   My id is vre-crash (an old sim racing team name.)
   I’m in the Pacific time zone GMT-8

   Reply
   • M. McNamara July 25, 2012 at 12:10 pm

     Hi there,

     We’ll have a recorded version of the webinar live on our site next week!

     best,
     Michaela

     Reply