Posted by Casey_Meraz
The recent Google Pigeon update that affected local search was just another example of why marketer’s should never put all of their eggs in one basket.
Online marketing has been rapidly evolving over the years and a major … Continue reading →
Posted by petebray
What factors go into determining how many Twitter followers you gain (and lose) each day?
I was driven in part by Rand Fishkin’s recent “mad scientist” experimentation that he touched on at MozCon. There, he noted that his tweets with images resulted in significant follower losses.
Do they? And what other behaviors result in more (or fewer) followers?
I’ve found some interesting gems.
Of course, it’s worth noting that aggregate, general trends don’t necessarily speak to your specific situation. In fact, as you’ll see, they’re often exactly the opposite! To that end, I want you to play along at home…
If you’re a Moz subscriber who has had their Twitter account connected to Followerwonk for three or more months, then chances are you’ll find a new complimentary report there. (I also only computed these reports for those who have more than 50 Twitter followers, and who tweeted in at least 10% of the days analyzed.)
Once you’ve downloaded the report, please clean up the data. Look for any days with zero gains/losses that look wonky (i.e. something should be there but isn’t). These are either Twitter or Followerwonk outages. Delete them AND the day immediately following outage. This is important, as the day following outages usually has outsized gains to make up for the missing date. It can heavily skew any statistical analyses.
If you’re not a customer, no worries; this blog post highlights some pretty interesting general Twitter growth metrics.
(I am going to repeat this offer again in a few months—in fact, we may build it into Followerwonk. So subscribe now to ensure that you have plenty of social graph history for analysis. Please tweet me to let me know if you find this data useful. We may build it permanently into the product if so!)
We track social graph changes for thousands of users, and we compute new and lost followers on a daily basis. We’re one of the only companies that to do this (maybe the only one).
Sure, lots of sites compute net changes; but we track gains and losses, and we track who your new followers (or unfollowers) are. This is a huge set of data to explore to look for significant trends, to get hints as to what causes follower growth, and more.
This post is an introduction to that exploration. We’ll cover a lot more in future posts (including analyzing the types of users that you gain after specific Twitter or offline activity).
Let’s take a look.
I created a day-by-day summary of new and lost followers. My data set included roughly 800,000 “days” for over 4,000 users, and requiring analysis of millions of tweets.
The result was a large spreadsheet with a lot of content metrics.
For example, I determined the # of tweets with images, those with URLs, those that are “broadcasting” vs those that are @mentioning someone, and so on.
I did this because my hypothesis is that follower growth (and loss) is significantly impacted by the content that one tweets.
For all of my analyses, I use that old Microsoft stand-by: Excel.
I’d typically recommend R: It has a lot richer analytic capability. But it has a much steeper learning curve, and I wanted this blog post to be a bit of a tutorial, so Excel fits the bill.
If you’re following along at home, you’ll want to first enable Excel’s “Analysis ToolPak.” Dunno why, but Microsoft chooses to turn it “off” by default. This add-on allows you to easily perform correlations, linear regression, and more.
As a first step, I like to get a lay of the land via basic descriptive statistics.
To do this in Excel, find the Data Analysis tool, and select Descriptive Statistics. Check the box labeled “Summary statistics,” then select all of the columns with numeric data, and you will get a summary table.
(Of course, sometimes scientific notation is hard to read at a glance. To remedy, I highlight all of the numeric cells, right click, and select “Format Cells.” Then I change it to “Number” with 4 decimal places.)
Remember, this is analyzing 800,000 days across several thousand Twitter users. We see that the average daily account growth in new followers is about 0.2%, while the average daily account loss is 0.1%.
By the way, it’s worth pointing out that this isn’t necessarily a representative sample. It’s an aggregate of mostly Moz/Followerwonk customers. And it spans the range from very big Twitter accounts, to very small ones (where getting a few new followers will result in outsize daily % gains).
I select Data Analysis and choose “correlation.” I select all of the numeric columns as the input range.
I get a nice table of results!
There’s some interesting stuff here:
Of course, the relationships between tweets with URLs and tweets with hashtags is fairly simple.
It’s a lot harder to understand, for example, what variables predict follower growth (or follower loss). After all, there are a ton of different factors at play. And, as we see from the correlation chart, only a few things stand out.
First, pay attention to the percentage daily growth of followers compared to follower loss.
Just eyeballing, you can see that people are gaining followers at roughly twice the rate that they’re losing them. (The strange diagonal lines are a side effect of small accounts gaining and losing 1 follower in a day.)
Also, take a look at RT rate and favorite rates compared to follower growth. The correlations are pretty low at less than 0.1%, but you can definitely make out a bit of a trend.
This relationship makes sense to me. RTs and favorites reflects a tweet’s value and virulence. The better the content (presumably) the more likely it will be RTed. And the more RTs it gets, the more likely that user will reach non-followers, who may then decide to follow.
The problem with correlations, though, is it’s hard to see through the noise. So many factors contribute to growth.
What we want to do is look at a variable and “strip out” all other variables’ influences.
Regression lets us use multiple independent variables at once: day of the week, time of day, type of tweet, whether it has a URL, and so on. It then isolates each one, stripping out any “interference” from the others, to test their predictive value to the dependent variable. This lets us test each variable in its pure form.
In our case, the dependent variable is the daily % followers up (or down). This variable depends on the others. (Well, that’s our hypothesis, in any case.)
It’s quite easy to perform linear regression in Excel.
Select the Data ribbon. Click on Data Analysis. Select “Regression”. Then, for the Y Range, enter the dependent variable: namely, the % followers up column. For the X range, enter all the other columns (up to 16). Select “labels” to tell Excel that the first row contains labels to name each variable. Then hit Ok.
I first played around with the daily % gain.
Adjusted R Square is the statistic to pay attention to. Here, it tells us that our model explains over 4% of the variation in new followers.
Doesn’t sound like much, right? But, actually, it is!
Consider if you were able to explain 4% of stock market movement. Or interest rates.
Remember, too, that this is across thousands of users and 800,000 combined days.
So what’s moving the needle here?
Pay attention to the ones I’ve highlighted. Look at the coefficients: these tell us the impact that a one-unit move in the independent variable has on the dependent variable.
By way of explanation, consider that the average daily follower growth for a user is 0.00196 (or 0.196%). On weekends, we can expect a drop of 0.000453. That doesn’t sound like much, but that amounts to a 23% drop in follower growth!
Of course, while you don’t want to mistake correlation for causation, you might take some general lessons from this analysis in terms of follower growth:
Each additional tweet with an image or hashtag corresponds to a 2% increase in new followers.
This makes intuitive sense. The use of hashtags (found in 45% of broadcast tweets) exposes content to others it might not normally reach. Similarly, images make content more attractive for casual viewers of one’s account.
Each additional retweet a user makes is associated with 4% more new followers.
It’s hard to know why there’s such a strong relationship with this one. And, by the way, I am talking about retweets a user makes of others (not ones his content earns from others). I suspect it’s because RT’d content is typically better-than-average content. It probably makes one’s timeline more attractive to previewing users, and may result in RTs of the RT (thereby exposing you to a new audience). Moreover, the attachment of one’s name and avatar (both on the RT itself, as well as associated with the originating user) likely accrues additional views.
Engaging with others is associated with 6% more new followers.
This confirms that Twitter shouldn’t just be a broadcast medium: that it’s important to engage and respond. It likely increases your overall RTs, exposes your content to others (via those watching the engagement from others’ timelines), and more. However, in our analysis, the out-sized gains may be “artificially” inflated by the accounts in our analysis that have zero engagement. These somewhat spammy accounts simply broadcast out links and other flotsam, and are therefore associated with far fewer new followers.
Each additional tweet with a URL is associated with fewer new followers.
Do links really add a ton of value to your followers? Particularly if that content is already ricocheted all over one’s existing network? Probably not. And so it may turn off new followers. As well, see my theory above. Tweets with URLs are the mainstay of spammy accounts. To the extent that our analysis included these users, the association between fewer followers and URL tweets is strengthened.
Weekends are terrible: you can expect 23% fewer new followers.
Save those tweets for the weekday!
Creating great content (and therefore getting RTs and favorites) is good.
Kinda obvious. But it’s nice to see this confirmed. There are strong associations with more new followers and retweets and favorites of your content. These actions, and retweets particularly, hint at the importance of virulence: the more RTs you get, the more exposure your content has to potential followers outside your network.
These are just general rules after analyzing many 1000s of days and users.
Things change dramatically when you analyze specific users. Through regression, and a bit of trial and error, you can uncover some pretty magical growth factors. (Well, I consider them magic anyway.)
I used linear regression on just Rand’s data: his daily follower growth and tweeting metrics. Here are the results:
We can explain 15% of Rand’s daily follower growth variation in our model! This makes sense, because it’s custom tailored to Rand and so will fit better than the one-size-fits-all model from the aggregate analysis.
There are two standouts:
This confirms Rand’s own experiment: when he purposely spent a few days tweeting travel-related images. Perhaps these tweets were too off-topic? Or maybe his sudden change in tweeting behavior is to blame?
As he points out, it’s interesting that RTs and favorites of his tweets aren’t associated with new followers for him.
After all, in our general analysis, we do see that they play a significant role for most folks. Perhaps Rand’s retweeters are typically the same people over and over? Or in the same universe of folks who already follow Rand? (Thus he gets exposure to few new folks.) Interesting considerations for future research.
Rand hinted at something else in his email: that he feels that conferences are the real growth driver for him.
And he’s right!
I coded the days Rand spoke at conferences. Adding this variable (and removing a few others) bumps Adjusted R Square up to 20%. Conferences account for a notable part of the variation in Rand’s follower growth.
Yep: every time Rand speaks at a conference, we see an associated 31% greater daily growth in new followers. (Incidentally, I also analyzed days Rand did White Board Fridays, and these weren’t significant.)
What’s cool about using regression is you can test hunches such as this. If you look at the arrows in the chart above, it’s not immediately clear that those days are “more” than others. Remember, after all, that a ton of other factors contribute to each day’s gains (or losses). Through regression, we’re able to strip out influences from other variables, and focus just on one influence.
In the analysis of your data, maybe you want to code different events you attend? Or days when you make a blog post? To do so, just create a new column in the spreadsheet. Mark each day as a 0 when you didn’t write a blog post (or whatever); and a 1 when you did. Then include this in your regression as one of the independent variables.
So far I’ve highlighted what drives follower growth.
But we can also run regressions on follower loss. Remember, in Followerwonk, we track new followers and lost followers separately. Follower losses are those users who unfollowed you on a given day. Simply use as your dependent variable the follower loss column. And, as we did before, all of the others as your independent variables.
Here’s a really interesting one for a major sports team.
We can explain 22% of their follower loss in our model.
Notably:
I also encoded when they won or lost games. Winning games had little effect.
But for each losing game, their follower loss increased by 56%! That might seem kinda obvious: but not necessarily. Since games are typically on weekends, you might assume that follower loss is simply a “weekend effect.” Via regression, though, we know it’s not. That losing days are significantly associated with losing followers.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
Continue reading →
Posted by MarieHaynes
There has been a lot of talk lately about negative SEO. Does it really happen? If so, should you be worried? How do you know whether someone is attempting to attack you with negative SEO? And what should you do to protect yourself? The purpose of this article is to shed some light on the subject, and hopefully to reduce some of the fear exists in this area.
Negative SEO occurs when someone makes attempt to lower a site’s rankings in the search engines. There are multiple ways that this can be attempted. The most common type of negative SEO that gets discussed is link based negative SEO, but there are many other techniques that unscrupulous people can use to try to reduce your rankings. We’ll talk about how to recognize some of these tactics later on in this article .
We know that a site can be penalized or can be suppressed by Google algorithms if they have engaged in manipulative link building. The result can be a manual unnatural links penalty or an unnanouced demotion at the hands of the Penguin algorithm. So, if links that I made can hurt me, then intuitively it makes sense that links that someone else made could have the same negative effect. Or can they?
Google is quite adamant that true, effective negative SEO is very rare. In an effort to understand more about Google’s stance on negative SEO I decided to research every instance I could find where a Google representative discussed negative SEO. You can read transcriptions of a good number of John Mueller’s and Matt Cutt’s statements on negative SEO in this article. I’ll be quoting from these transcriptions several times in this Moz post as well.
Prior to January of 2003, Google had a page on their site that said the following, “There is nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. ”
And then in 2003, they changed the wording to say, “There is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking….”
And really, the change made sense. I don’t believe Google was admitting at this point that you could drop a site by pointing links at it. Rather, they were likely conceding that there could be cases where someone could harm your website by, for example, hacking into your server and deleting your site or changing your robots.txt file to tell search engines not to crawl the site any more or other such nefarious things.
But what about links? Can a competitor point bad links at you and reduce your rankings? In 2007, Matt Cutts was quoted in a Forbes article on negative SEO: “Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. “We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against it,” he says. “I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice.”
So, at that point Google is admitting that negative SEO via linkbuiding is a possibility, albeit quite a remote one. Let’s jump forward to 2012. In April of 2012 Google released the first version of the Penguin algorithm which was created to reduce and even penalize for the use of unnatural links. This is when the topic of whether or not you could negatively affect a competitor’s site by pointing bad links at them became a very common discussion. Take a look at the Google Trends data for searches for “negative SEO”:
Shortly after Google refreshed the Penguin algorithm in October of 2012, Matt Cutts announced the creation of a new tool, the disavow tool, which would allow site owners to ask Google not to count links that they felt could damage their site. Matt stated that the vast majority of sites would not need to use the tool and that Google’s algorithms were really quite good at making sure that these bad links would not hurt your site. But, he did admit that it could potentially be a concern for people in high money, competitive niches, saying, “For the people who are in maybe super competitive poker, casino, whatever kind of niches and they’re worried about, ‘OK, what if someone is trying to do some ill will towards my site?’ we’ve just released a new tool called disavow links.”
If you read through the transcriptions of things that Matt Cutts and John Mueller have said about negative SEO, here are the points that Google seems to be emphasizing:
I can’t tell you how many times I have had a client claim that a competitor is attacking them with bad links when in most cases, this probably isn’t true. If you start looking at your backlink profile and seeing some odd looking links it’s a normal reaction to think, “I didn’t make these spammy links! So, if I didn’t make them, who did? It must be my competitor!”
Here are some examples of situations where negative SEO was suspected, but in reality there is another explanation for what is going on:
There are some websites that link out to almost every site on the web. For example, most sites will have links from sites like:
…and so on.
I’ve seen site owners get really upset when they look at their “Links to your site” section of Webmaster Tools and see something like this:
The fear is that Google is going to think that you built tens of thousands of links to your site. Now, in the example that I have given, where the site is a well known one like yellowpages.com, it may be a little more clear that this is not an unnatural link. But, what if a site owner in your niche really liked your content and linked to you in their sidebar? And what if they linked to you with a keyword? Underneath “Links to your site” in Webmaster Tools is a section called, “How your data is linked” that contains your most commonly used anchor text. So, if I got a sitewide link from a site with thousands of pages and they linked with a keyword, I’m going to see that Google thinks that the majority of my links are keyword anchored. Oh no! I’ve had people think that they’ve been hit by negative SEO because they have seen a single keyword anchored sitewide link. In my opinion, Google is pretty good at figuring out that a sitewide link is really just one vote from a site. A single sitewide link is not a sign of negative SEO even if it causes thousands of links to appear in Webmaster Tools.
Have you ever in the past purchased a link building package? For example, years ago when I was learning SEO I purchased a citation building package to one of my sites. It was one of those deals where you pay $100 and you get a whole bunch of directory listings. (Yeah…I’m not proud of it, but hey…we all had to start learning somewhere.) I’ve since cleaned up those links. But, the amazing thing is that they keep replicating. I will often see new links appear that are using the same text that I used when I purchased that package. It would be easy for me to say, “Hey! I haven’t built any links in years…and now I’m seeing spammy directory listings appear. This must be a competitor pointing bad links at me!” But really, my own actions were the cause for these unnatural links.
You might laugh at this example, but I’ve seen it happen. I had a client who contacted me for help with a manual unnatural links penalty. He swore he had never purchased or built a link in his life, but his backlink profile was full of a lot of pretty manipulative stuff. He assumed it had to be a competitor doing this. As we were doing the cleanup for his site we noticed new bad links that were appearing. Agh! We’re under attack! Well, it turns out that the site owner’s nephew had been doing some reading about SEO. I am not kidding. He thought he was helping his uncle out by SEOing his site for him. Oy vey.
Some people are shocked when they find out that their SEO company has been building them unnatural links. I have seen many cases where an SEO company promised they were going to give a site “White hat links” or links that were within the Google guidelines, but in reality it looks like they outsourced the job to a cheap linkbuilding company that created spammy bookmarks, blog comments and forum signatures. If you’ve got unnatural links and you’ve ever hired an SEO company, there is a good chance that those bad links were actually made on purpose and that YOU paid for them! Remember, prior to April of 2012, these links used to work well to rank pages and very few websites would get penalized for using them.
While someone could negative SEO your site by hacking into it, not all cases of hacking are negative SEO. A while back, a friend of mine emailed me and said, “Hey! Did you know that one of your sites is ranking highly for Michael Kors handbags?” His suggestion was that I take advantage of that and throw an affiliate page up on the site. 🙂 I had a look at the backlinks and here’s what I saw:
Crap.
This was not a competitor trying to hurt my rankings. In fact, the tens of thousands of spammy links that were pointing at my site were actually helping my rankings at that point. What had happened here is that someone had taken advantage of a vulnerability in a Wordpress plugin that had not been updated. They were able to hack into the site and create a whole bunch of new pages. They then pointed huge numbers of spammy links at these pages and redirected them to their Michael Kors affiliate sites.
If you are looking at your backlink profile and you see odd keyword anchors for things like viagra, cialis, casinos, payday loans, ugg boots, etc, then there is a good chance that you have been hacked. In most cases these links can be removed by finding and removing the pages that the hacker created on your site. However, if you have been hacked, it’s a good idea to have someone familiar with cleaning up hacks look at your site to figure out how the hacker got in and how you can close that door.
In this situation, we removed the offending pages, found and fixed the access point, AND I also disavowed all of those links. According to Google, if you get hacked and have bad links pointing to you, you can probably ignore them because their algorithms are good at picking up and just discounting this sort of thing. However, it concerned me that these bad links actually were helping this site. If Google was just discounting them then they should have had no effect. I am 99% sure that I would have been ok to leave them, especially since the pages they pointed to had been removed (which also removes the link pointing to that page), but just to be absolutely sure that something odd didn’t affect me with the next Penguin update, I disavowed them all at the domain level.
I now have alerts on Google Alerts and Moz Freshweb Explorer set up to help me determine when someone is hacking my site. To do so for your sites, in each of these tools you can set up alerts for things like:
…and so on.
I said at the start of this article that the vast majority of cases of suspected negative SEO that I see really aren’t negative SEO after all. But, there are situations where it does indeed happen. Here is the type of link that you can commonly see when someone is trying to attack you with negative links:
There are many other tricky techniques that can be used to attack sites with negative SEO, but most sites will not need to worry about these tactics. (I’ll explain more about whether or not you need to worry below, so keep reading!) I’m not about to describe all of the different ways you can do negative SEO, as I don’t want to give any evil people any ideas. But, the one tactic that I will mention and that you can keep an eye on is someone redirecting penalized sites to yours. Take a look right now at your site on ahrefs.com. You don’t need a membership to see whether you’ve got redirects pointing to you. Scroll down until you see “backlink types” and then “redirect”.
Now, not all redirects are bad. If you have affiliates, they may have pages that redirect to your product pages, These are usually okay, and there are many other valid reasons for a site to redirect to yours. But if today you see that you have three sites redirecting to you and next week you’ve got 30 or even 300 sites redirecting to you, then this could be a sign of a problem.
Can these redirects hurt you, though? Can an influx of bad links hurt you? Do you need to worry? Google has given conflicting advice in this regard. In one place, they have said that bad link signals will definitely pass through a 301 redirect, but in another place they have said that attempting to 301 redirect a penalized site to a clean site will not cause a penalty on the clean site. In my opinion, what Google is saying here is that if you are redirecting one of your own sites to another of your own sites, then they’ll pass the bad link signals. It’s just like you building your own unnatural links. But if you try to 301 to someone else’s site then they won’t let those links count. How does Google know the difference? That’s part of the secret sauce. I do think that they use all sorts of signals to determine whether links are self made or made by a competitor.
OK, so let’s say you see evidence that someone is attacking your site with unnatural links. Does this mean you are going to lose your rankings?
Google really does work hard to algorithmically protect sites from this type of link causing a problem. And, I would say that for the vast majority of you who are reading this post, you DO NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT NEGATIVE SEO.
Yes, just shouted there. I really want to emphasize that most sites do not need to worry.
This is the point in the article where the black hatters start getting upset. I wonder who the first person will be to post a comment saying, “You don’t know what you’re talking about! Negative SEO works because I’ve done it on hundreds of sites.” Or, “I know negative SEO works because my site got taken down.”
Here is my opinion on the types of sites that could possibly be adversely affected by a link based negative SEO attack:
In these cases, if it does appear that negative SEO is being targeted at your website, the best tool you have is to do monthly monitoring of your backlinks.
If you are in a competitive niche, or if you have a history of being penalized and having to do link cleanup, then you really should be monitoring your backlinks regularly. What we do for our regular link audit clients is a monthly backlink audit. This really should be frequent enough to find and clean up unnatural links. However, if you are under a strong attack where new unnatural links are coming in daily, it may be a good idea to do this cleanup every one-to-two weeks.
It’s not a bad idea for other sites that are at low risk of succumbing to a negative SEO attack to do a monthly link audit as well. What we have found is that when you monitor your new links monthly, you can easily see the new, good links that your site is attracting. This can give you a lot of ideas on how to get even more links. If you see, for example, that a few people had recommended a particular product of yours via a link from forum posts, then you may want to create more content surrounding that product and engage on an email outreach campaign to get more people to link to that content.
But wait….why would I recommend doing a regular link audit if Google says that they can catch negative SEO and discount it? The reason is that you’re relying on an algorithm and the algorithm is not going to be 100% accurate. Here are some quotes from John Mueller of Google regarding their accuracy on catching and discounting negative SEO:
“It’s a tricky situation and not something where I’d say that we can guarantee that we always get it 100% right. But, from the cases I’ve looked at I think we’ve done a pretty good job.”
“We do work very hard to make sure that third party effects like that don’t play a role within the search results. It’s something we can’t absolutely guarantee that we’ll always get it right. So, if you’re seeing something like this you’re welcome to let us know about that. “
“If you’re looking at the links in Webmaster Tools for example I might go ahead and submit a disavow file for those links. In general though, we do recognize these kind of situations and handle them appropriately. “
There are many different ways to do a backlink audit. Some people will use automated link auditing tools, but if you do choose to do this it is vitally important that you do a manual audit alongside of the automated suggestions. I can’t tell you how many failed reconsideration requests I have seen because people have relied solely on these reports. I have also seen these tools recommend disavowing some fantastic natural links as well. In my opinion, you must look at your links manually!
If you are working on a site that does not have a history of unnatural linking, you can probably get away with just using the links that you get from Webmaster Tools. Google has said in the past that Webmaster Tools links are “all you need”. However, John Mueller and Matt Cutts have clarified that statement saying that they are all you need in order to pick up your patterns of unnatural linking. This is fine if you are lucky enough to have a complete list of all of the links that have been ever made on your behalf, but if you don’t have that then you’re likely going to have to go looking to other sources to find all of these links. We have come across many unnatural links that are indexed in Google and not reported in Webmaster Tools. And, we’ve even been given some of these as examples on failed reconsideration requests. The links you see in Webmaster Tools are just a sample of your links. As such, we use links from the following sources:
We then sort the links into a more manageable list so that we only analyze one link from each domain. If you are doing monthly audits, you will want to keep track of which domains you have already audited so that you don’t waste time assessing that domain again. You can use a VLOOKUP formula in Excel to highlight which domains you have already audited in previous months. You can use a similar VLOOKUP to highlight domains that are already in your disavow file.
It took me a while to understand how VLOOKUP works. There are many tutorials out there, but here is my simple explanation:
I have prepared hundreds of link audit spreadsheets. This summer I dedicated a huge amount of time to creating and programming a system that allows me to keep track of my monthly audit clients and create awesome spreadsheets for manual link audits. The sheet that is produced chooses the best link from each domain to audit, eliminates domains that I have already audited for each client, marks the nofollows, marks which links are keyword anchors, and marks which domains have already been disavowed (and also takes into account subdomains when you have disavowed the full domain.) It also tells me whether or not each domain is my list of tens of thousands of domains that I call my “disavow blacklist” and also my whitelist that contains domains that I know contains links not made for SEO purposes such as sites like alexa.com, aboutus.org, known dmoz scrapers and so on.
This system saves me a huge amount of time, especially for those clients for whom we do regular backlink audits. I want to thank Moz for allowing me to mention this system. I am now making it available for others to use (for a fee). You can get more details here.
The next step, once you have audited your links and determined which ones are ones that were made to manipulate Google, and are therefore unnatural, is to add these sites to your disavow file. You almost always want to disavow these domains on the domain level. This means including “domain:example.com” rather than “http://www.example.com/page1.html”.
Once this is done, add these domains to your existing disavow file and upload it to the disavow tool. Don’t worry…there is no harm in submitting regular disavows.
I have covered a lot of info in this post and hopefully I haven’t confused too many people. The topic of negative SEO really is a tough one to understand. On one hand Google says, “Don’t worry about it.” But, on the other hand they tell us that although it shouldn’t be a problem, it’s not a bad idea to disavow any spam links you find pointing to your site even if you didn’t make them.
Here are the takehome points of this article:
Negative SEO always brings up interesting discussion. Have you been a victim? Do you do monthly audits? Do you feel that Google is good at preventing negative SEO?
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Continue reading → Posted by EllieWilkinson
Hey Moz fans! I’m Ellie, and I’m part of the newly formed Customer Success team at Moz. As part of the “S” team, I work to teach customers how to be successful marketers and awesome Moz users.
Whether you’re an old pro or a n… Continue reading →
Posted by PhilNottingham
This post can be considered a sequel to this post from 2012.
Back in July, Google rolled out a bunch of changes in the way they treat rich snippets in the search results (check out this fantastic post from AJ Kohn for the details).
One of these shifts was to dramatically scale back the prevalence of video snippets in universal search results, restricting them exclusively to domains where video is the core offering of the site.
A list of domains receiving rich snippets as of August 2014, courtesy of Casey Henry.
For me, this sparked three questions. Why has Google done this? Will it stay like this? Does this affect my video marketing strategy?
We don’t know, but we should behave as if this is the new paradigm for video SEO. My expectation is that video snippets should come back in for more and more domains over time, as Google get better at working out when video is the explicit focus of a page and domain; but even as this expands, the majority of sites doing video will not be able to secure video snippets for their own domain (this mirrors trends in other types of snippets too).
Yes it does.
Rich snippets have always been a huge part of video SEO. Whitelisting all YouTube videos while removing snippets from most other sites has a profound impact. Practically speaking, it means that hosting through YouTube is now the only way the majority of businesses will get a video snippet ranking in universal search, albeit always pointing to the youtube.com instance of a video, rather than their own site.
This means that YouTube’s importance and value as a marketing channel, particularly where SEO is concerned, has expanded considerably. Google’s favouritism towards their own platform, alongside the continued focus on domain diversity within SERPs means YouTube can now be considered a scalable and easy way to get content ranking for some competitive terms, securing an eye-catching snippet in the process. In terms of owning Google SERP real estate, YouTube has just become one of the most powerful tools in any SEOs arsenal.
For any popular search topic where you’re trying to cement your brand as a key player, you should be using YouTube as part of your marketing mix. Additionally, for competitive queries, you should be considering YouTube as a way to optimise secondary pages which can take up additional spots alongside pages from your own website, thereby expanding your own presence in the search results and lessening the exposure your competitors get.
A word of warning though: This tactic should be carefully tested on a site-by-site basis before rolling out at scale, as sometimes having a YouTube video ranking as well as a page on your own site can cannibalise your organic traffic. YouTube usually won’t refer a huge amount of traffic to your site (rarely more than 1% of views), so the approach can prove counter-productive on occasion.
As of now, If you have an SEO strategy that doesn’t include YouTube, you’re doing it wrong.
– Phil Nottingham, July 2014
(Tweet this quote)
However, while YouTube’s importance and value has increased, the nature of the platform hasn’t fundamentally changed. In order to get a video ranking highly in Google and YouTube search, you need to generate engagement. Shares, subscriptions and engaged views are still the metrics which will ultimately result in better rankings and to do this organically, you need to create content which appeals to audiences who find your content via YouTube search, YouTube recommended links and Google search; rather than just the audience who watch videos via embeds on your site.
This means you have to create content with the “YouTube context” in mind (i.e. ensuring the videos you make are relevant and valuable for audiences when viewed in isolation), and not assuming that because a video gets good engagement when embedded on a page on your site, this will necessarily translate to engagement on YouTube. It’s not true that all of your videos should live on YouTube by default. For content where retaining engagement on-site is more important than just getting more eyeballs (i.e. when you’re trying to build a community, build links, generate email sign-ups etc.) securely hosting your videos and driving traffic exclusively to the canonical version on your site is usually still the best option.
So, what sort of content should you be creating for YouTube? I have put together a “non-whiteboard Monday” to explain…
[Editor’s note: “Non-whiteboard Monday” isn’t actually a new series… at least not yet. Phil is just remarkably (and often hilariously) creative. =) ]
These changes to Google’s algorithm shouldn’t fundamentally change your decisions about hosting, and the core reasons for using YouTube vs securely hosting remain. If you want as many people to see your video as possible, you should be using YouTube. If you want to retain control of the traffic on your own site, you should be self hosting, or using a third-party platform like Wistia (I explicitly mention Wistia throughout this section as it’s the best platform on the market right now, but there are other good options).
For most businesses, you should be doing some mixture of the two, with content created specifically to take advantage of the benefits of each platform.
Core advantages of different hosting options:
| YouTube | Secure Third-Party Solution (e.g. Wistia) |
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Ostensibly, you need to start with what type of content you’re creating and what you’re trying to achieve with it.
I think there are broadly three different marketing goal buckets which you might create video to support: Brand awareness, consideration and advocacy and conversion.
Under this framework, your video hosting plan should be as follows:
Here, I am talking about video to support a context towards the latter part of the purchasing funnel. While, in some sense, all content is designed to improve conversion, I explicitly mean “a video designed to improve the conversion rates on a specific page”. Examples might be videos for product pages, a home-page explainer video or a video encouraging subscriptions to a mailing list.
Inherently, video created to support a specific page will only really make full sense when watched while on that page—meaning the content should be secured to retain control of the user experience. Additionally, for this kind of content, gaining a clear picture of how users are behaving after watching the video becomes incredibly valuable—which is why a secure, paid platform such as Wistia is the right way to go.
Much like with conversion video, this one is relatively clear cut. If you’re goal is exposure and getting your name out there, you want to host with the platform that will maximise visibility across search and social, which is YouTube.
Video to improve brand awareness typically takes the form of creative stories—videos designed to be sharable and to promote a core message that reinforces positive association.
Here I refer to videos created to move your target audience from initial awareness of your business to point of considering becoming a customer or brand advocate. Videos for consideration might take the form of tutorials, how-to’s or bits of thought leadership—often informational content designed to acquire links, shares and stimulate conversation. Some more promotional pieces also fit into this model, such as trailers.
For this kind of video, the choice is much more complex. Often the style of video will work well for an audience on YouTube, but it can be much more valuable for you if users engage with the content on your site rather than on YouTube.com. Fundamentally here, you need to make a choice regarding what’s more important to your business — If it’s more critical to retarget users and bring them into an owned ecosystem (your website), using Wistia (or similar) will be a better option for you. Similarly, if your domain isn’t as strong as it could be, securing content and ensuring all views on your site will mean you can retain the equity from links and shares. However, if you have a strong site but lack core awareness of your brand—then you may decide hosting exclusively with YouTube and embedding the YouTube versions of your video is a better bet—so that you’re fully optimising for your presence on YouTube. In many senses, it’s the same kind of choice as guest authoring an article on a popular blog vs publishing the article on your own site. Each option has its benefits, and the nuances of the content and your target audience will determine the most sensible approach.
You can also choose to embed content using Wistia (or similar), but then put the content on YouTube as well. While such an approach may have some strategic value (e.g. allow integration with Google plus, while allowing you to ensure the version on your site gets most of the shares), it does have some drawbacks… Fundamentally, it’ll mean that you’re poorly optimised for YouTube. In order to maximise the benefit YouTube will give you as a platform for seeding content, you want to ensure you get as many views, shares and embed as possible of the YouTube version of your video; which won’t happen if you choose to embed securely and then add the video to YouTube after the fact. Additionally, if you have a reasonably weak or young domain, you can find instances where YouTube.com will end up out-ranking your site and the YouTube version of your video becoming the de facto canonical—acquiring the majority of links, shares and traffic from search.
As previously mentioned, to make strategic decision about video hosting, you ultimately have to start with the goal. If you’ve created video without really knowing what you want to achieve with it, then your best bet is to experiment liberally to work out whether your audience find the content valuable and determine in what context it’s of most use to them.
Nevertheless, if you have an existing library of content and can’t work out where to host it, the following flow diagram may be of use to you. Note: this is designed to be relevant for businesses doing video marketing to promote a product or service. If you are a publisher or content creator looking to monetize your content, you should likely use Brightcove to host all on-site video, while syndicating some relevant content to YouTube.)
You can, but then you’re missing out on the better analytics and marketing tools you can get from a secure third-party platform.
No. Vimeo is a great platform and community for creatives, but holds little value for businesses. Vimeo Plus and Pro can be considered cheap secure hosting solutions, but the toolset and analytics features are subpar. Wistia’s free plan is both better… and free.
No. If you’re a business trying to sell a product or service (and not just monetize your content), doing this just means that your customers will be distracted by ads from other organisations – and it also means your competitors can advertise on your videos if they wish. Side note: if your competitors are allowing advertising on their own YouTube channels, don’t waste that opportunity….
Make a better one. If you’re dealing with a search query that only returns one YouTube video, the likelihood is, you can either get a second one ranking or switch out the existing result for a video which is more authoritative and better targeted. Source some user feedback on your competitor’s video to determine how it could be improved, build a better version and then get as many quality views, shares and embeds as you can.
I hope you found this post useful! Please hit me up in the comments with any questions and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability.
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