“Why would I want to help someone else’s SEO by linking to them?”

“Why would I link to a potential competitor when I could link to my own internal page?”

“Won’t external links cause me to lose PageRank?”

“Won’t external linking cause me to drop in the SERPS?”

It occurred to me that many people might be struggling with this issue in their own SEO campaigns, so I thought a blog post was in order to help clear up a few of those pesky SEO myths and hopefully help you get your external linking protocols up to where they should be.

Leading by example

As a creative SEO agency, one of our ongoing tasks is to look at which sites consistently rank well for both long-tail and highly competitive short-tail keywords; attempting to find common, recurring elements in each site. Completing exercises such as this not only gives you a good idea of the techniques and approaches used by the most popular sites, but it also helps you put together a list of potentially beneficial ranking elements.
I consider the best sites to be leading by example – even if they’re not trying to, and it’s our job to take notice of (and learn from) these examples.

Looking at some of the biggest and most popular sites online, you can start to get an idea of what it will take to get your own sites ranking strongly, and using positive correlation, you can even start to eliminate some of the more pervasive SEO ‘myths’. One such myth is the belief that external links have a negative effect on rankings, and that using them ‘leaks’ PageRank to external sites.

Just by looking at the external linking policies of some of the biggest and highest rankings sites (take Mashable, SEOMoz, BBC or SearchEngineLand for example) we can see that this simply can’t be the case – all of the above sites tend to link out in the body of articles or other content, and all rank well, which would seem to suggest that external linkings simply don’t negatively affect your rankings. Admittedly, this isn’t the most compelling of arguments to state definitively that external linking doesn’t hurt your rankings, after all it could certainly be possible that external linking was indeed a negative factor, but that the weight of all the other positive factors (high quality content, high quality inbound links, natural link profiles, high levels of engagement and sharing via social media, strong SEO-based markup, etc) are causing the sites to rank regardless of their outbound links. However, a look at SEOMoz’s SEO Ranking Factors 2011, we can see from the correlation data gained from their research that there is a 0.04 correlation between the number of outbound links on a page and strong search engine rankings. This might seem insignificant, but when considered with all the other ranking factors it gives a pertinent indication – that external linking doesn’t negatively affect search engine rankings.

Quality and quantity

Of course the previous statement assumes that you’re linking to relevant, high-quality content from your website, if you’re placing dofollow links to low-quality sites hosting malware and selling counterfeit viagra then you can safely assume it probably will have an negative impact on your rankings, just as it will have an impact on the way people view your brand (and how many people subsequently visit your site).

When we’re looking at the external links from the most popular and best ranking websites, we can immediately see a common theme – they’re all linking to high-quality, relevant and useful content. Generally speaking, this is usually referencing content that expands on an area of discussion, recommending additional content or service providers, or used to provide credit or acknowledgement (usually for data, quotes or images). As a result, the links that come from the biggest pages are useful, and not there simply to push you to a sales page or as an obvious attempt to bolster another pages’ ranking for a specific term (both internally and externally, like the anchor text links you find on sites populated with posts from article marketing and distribution networks).

The other thing you notice is that the quantity of external links is any given piece of content on a high-quality site is never overwhelming – the text isn’t stuffed with outbound links. Rather the links are placed only when they’re useful or necessary from a journalistic standpoint (i.e. crediting your sources). They’re also only placed when they’re relevant, which is another crucial element to successful outbound linking.

What we can draw from this is that external linking should be an element of your on-site content production, but only when it’s relevant and adds value to the user (even a source reference link adds value, as your readers may be interested to check out the source of quotes or data). External linking shouldn’t be adopted because it will help your rankings, it should be adopted because we can be fairly sure it doesn’t hurt your rankings, and because it adds additional value and weight to your content.

Community-led value

A potential benefit of external linking that people often overlook is the community aspect of external linking, and the potential benefits that can bring (such as additional traffic, brand awareness, inbound links and social media links). If you’ve got a website with a decent amount of traffic and high level of readership and engagement, then any outbound links you place in your content will likely send additional traffic to that external source. As a result, you will show up in their analytics as a referring site, and this awareness can be extremely valuable.

If you’ve linked to someone in a positive way (i.e. through an advocation of their talent, review of their service or product, etc), then they may well link back to you, or link to your content via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Not only will this send additional relevant traffic back to your site, but these social media links will help your SEO, not to mention improve your overall brand awareness.

Dofollow or nofollow?

I often come across people adding the nofollow attribute to external links in their content, in what I’m sure is an attempt to maintain fabled ‘link-juice’ on their own pages. For me, if you’re placing an external link to additional content on your site, it should be a dofollow link*. Nofollow links are designed for links to content you don’t trust (or at least haven’t verified), and therefore don’t want to be crawled from your site (making them good for links placed in comments and other user-generated elements), but this simply shouldn’t apply to external links in your content. Why would you be linking to content you haven’t verified or a site you don’t trust? If I’m going to add a link to my content, that link will be relevant, high-quality and will be adding value to our readers, so I’ve got no problem with those links being dofollow.

*The only exception here is with banner advertisements and paid text links, which should always be marked with the nofollow attribute.

Hopefully that will give you more confidence when it comes to linking to external sources; just make sure they’re relevant and that they add something to your content, and you should find they have a far more beneficial impact than a negative one when it comes to traffic, brand awareness and SEO.

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Post by John Pring – Follow him on Twitter (@john_pring)

The reason most decent SEO engineers don’t pay too much attention to TBPR is that it’s considered fairly out of date – i.e. it doesn’t reveal the true PR of any given page. The true Google PageRank of any page is really known only to Google, and is thought to be constantly updated. As a result, relying on TBPR as the most pertinent indicator of a website’s quality (and therefore as a link prospecting tool) can be a risky business, leaving most SEO engineers paying more attention to metrics such as SEOMoz’s Domain and Page Authority.

Having said that, TBPR updates are indicative of how any given page (or domain) is being viewed by Google, giving you a reasonable idea of whether a page is improving or declining in relative Google authority.

As you can imagine then, a huge number of websites have seen substantial drops in rankings, or have been dispersed from the index altogether. Inevitably, this has led to some sites being ‘promoted’ in the SERPS, giving us a collection of winners and losers from the Panda update.

The full effects of the update on UK based sites has been outlined by web analytics company SearchMetrics, who put together a comprehensive list of the biggest winners and losers from the UK roll-out (included at the bottom of this post).

It’s certainly been an interesting update, and examining some of the most affected sites brings up some pertinent questions about exactly how the algorithm is viewing and rankings sites, and how we can improve our own SEO campaigns.

One of the most immediately interesting ‘losers’ is Microsoft-owned review site Ciao, which saw a monumental 94% drop in search engine visibility (in terms of Google). Obviously Microsoft is a major competitor to Google, and the more cynical amongst you may look at this drop with a raised eyebrow, but Google will insist the drop is algorithmic (as opposed to a manual penalty) and I’d be inclined to believe them, particularly given the recent complaints from Microsoft to the European Commission, accusing Google of unfaily leveraging their monopoly in the search world.

Other major losers include Amazon-backed DooYoo, as well as technology websites Pocket Link, TechEye, Tech Radar and the popular Computer Weekly, all of whom have seen substantial drops in rankings and visibility. Many SEO’s will be pleased to see that infamous content farms Mahalo and eHow also saw major drops, with the latter causing a fair amount of controversy after escaping the US Panda update relatively unscathed.

Many of the tech-based websites to have seen a decline in visibility have confused SEO’s, as a good number of them boast genuinely great content, which is 100% original. After having a look at a few of them however, I think their drops are likely to be down to the redirection of affiliate links (surprisingly common amonst some of the hardest hit sites) and/or overly aggressive advertising – the altering of which will probably see them regain a lot of their positions over time.

Some of the sites to have seen an increase in rankings include Google-owned YouTube (interesting) and competitor Vimeo, as well as high profile platforms such as eBay, BlogSpot and news sites Metro, The Independent, The Mirror (not sure about that one), Mashable and TechCrunch.

Here’s the full list of winners and losers, courtesy of SearchMetrics (numbers on the right are the change in percentage in terms of Google results page visibility):

LOSERS

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Winners

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Post by John Pring – Follow him on Twitter (@john_pring)

So, realising that I’m unlikely to explain how URL shorteners work in terms of anchor text and the spread of link juice better than Mr Cutts, I thought I’d just embed the video.

For anyone who can’t be bothered to watch the video (time is money and all that), link shorteners do pass both anchor text and link juice, and are a genuinely useful tool for social media marketing and SEO.

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Post by John Pring – Follow him on Twitter (@john_pring)

In addition to the news of the global roll-out, Google Fellow Amit Singhal announced that the update will now incorporate information gained from their experiment whereby they allowed users to block certain websites from their results, although Singhal suggests this data will only be incorporated in ‘high-confidence’ situations (whatever that means).

Singhal also made an interesting statement suggesting that the update has been further refined, affecting an additional percentage of search results:

…this change also goes deeper into the ‘long tail’ of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before.

Whilst this initially sounds rather dramatic, Singhal went on to state that the ‘refinement’ to the update would affect around another 2% of search results (compared to the 12% affected by the initial update).

As I’m sure a considerable number of SEO’s in the UK will be doing, we shall be keeping a close eye on the SERPS in the next couple of weeks, although we’re reasonably confident (stops writing and touches wood) that our white-hat client strategies will hold up to the update (as they have done thus far).

If you’re struggling to adapt your SEO in the face of the Panda update, have a look at my post on how the update has affected SEO. For those that have seen a dramatic drop in their rankings (or have a feeling they’re about to), have a read of our post on what to do if you’ve been hit by the Panda update, or wander over to Google Webmaster Help and let them know what’s happened (although don’t expect anyone at Google to restore lost rankings, unless you happen to have some very high-profile friends in the media).

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Post by John Pring – Follow him on Twitter (@john_pring)

Google have been particularly quiet when it comes to providing website owners and marketers with actionable techniques to recover their rankings, presumably because Google believes the drops to be a fair reflection of the quality those websites were providing. However, Google have set up a Webmaster Forums Help thread, where webmasters can appeal to Google if they believe their site was hit unfairly.

Amongst the generic advice and tips reposted from the Google quality guidelines, Google employee Wysz posted some genuinely useful advice to those looking to repair the damage done to their rankings by the algorithm update. In a reply to a question, Wysz posted the following pertinent advice:

If you think you have been impacted by this change [referring to the farmer/panda update] you should evaluate all the content on your website and do your best to improve the quality of the pages on your domain … removing low quality or duplicate pages or moving them to a different domain could improve your rankings for the high quality content.

I think this is sound advice and frankly, something a lot of people should have been doing before this update. If you know you’ve got low quality content on your site, or content that you’ve directly taken from another source, your first step would be to remove this content altogether (or move it to another domain if you like, although I don’t see the point of that particularly).

On top of removing obviously low-quality content, you need to be aware of any original content that may appear as shallow content to search engine spiders. Finding such content can be a little tricky, but it is possible (particularly when you’ve got Open Site Explorer at your disposal). Rather than writing my own version of how to locate this content, I’ll direct you to the single best post on that exact subject on the SEOMoz blog: Weed Out Your Lowest Performing Pages.

You need to ensure the level of quality content on your website remains as high as possible – if you’ve got the time, it might be worth going through previous blog posts and organic search landing pages and adding additional content to these posts and pages. Your content is far more likely to be considered high quality if it’s in-depth and above a certain length. Adding complementary media never hurts either; placing suitable pictures, video and audio to your content can not only improve its’ quality, but bring you additional traffic through organic image and multimedia searches.

You might also want to think about improving your overall social media activities, which we’ve already established can have a direct impact on your SEO. Check out my post on how social media affects SEO, or my infographic on using social media links to improve your SEO for further information. While I’m on the subject, you might also want to follow us on Twitter.

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Post by John Pring – Follow him on Twitter (@john_pring)

Successful site architecture is about ease of navigation for your users; ensuring that your highest quality content is easy for your visitors to find and that none of your important pages are ever more than a couple of clicks away. An added benefit to having a reasonably flat site architecture is your search engine indexation rate, which is likely to improve with effective SEO site architecture (meaning you have more of your sites’ pages in Google’s index, improving the number of website entry points as well as the number of pages generating traffic).

Let’s start with discussing what an effective SEO website architecture should look like:

None of the pages are more than 3 clicks deep, resulting in high(er) authority pages, a higher indexation rate and an improvement in long-tail, organic traffic. On top of this, the highest quality pages are cross-linked throughout the site, ensuring none of the top content is stuck in a silo (we’ll cover this topic a little later on in the post).

Looking At Your Own Site Architecture

So how can you go about improving your own site architecture? First, you need to ascertain the effectiveness of your current website architecture, and that involves a little bit of research (and some drawing). Start with your homepage, and start listing your website pages in terms of links and depth … you should end up with something looking a little bit like this:

Obviously yours will look a little different, but I’ve come up with the above image as it allows me to demonstrate the issues you’ll likely need to address when looking at your own site architecture.

As we can see, some of the content is 6, 7 or even 8 clicks away from the homepage, making it extremely difficult for visitors (and search engines) to find it. A site architecture like the one above will result in the bottom sets of pages (3+ clicks from the homepage) seeing a poor indexation rate, low level of long-tail searches and low power and authority. Have a look at this SEOMoz post on the Dmoz directory for an example of how indexation stops once it reaches a certain level, even on hugely authoritative domains.

One of the primary reasons for this is a lack of internal links to the bottom pages, with many being stuck in what SEO’s refer to as a ‘silo’ …

What Is A Silo?

A silo refers (in this instance) to a collection of pages which are only accessible from the preceeding page. Let’s take a look at the following example:

The pages above are in a silo; the lower pages are only accessible via the page above it. This means that in order to reach the bottom page (which could well be a piece of high quality content), users are expected to embark on a six-click descent – making it very unlikely that many people will reach the page.

This kind of internal linking also results in very low authority pages at the bottom of the silo, as the page authority drops considerably the further you move down. This is likely to result in those bottom pages not ranking well (even for very long-tail terms), and in a lot of cases not even being indexed by search engines.

So how do we avoid these content silos? The answer lies in improving your internal linking campaign, and ‘flattening’ your site architecture …

Flattening Your Site Architecture

The aim here is to ensure that all of your high quality content and relevant pages (or preferably every page on the site) is never more than three clicks away from the homepage (or from any other page for that matter). We can achieve this simply by improving our overall internal linking structure:

As you can see from the image above (apologies if it’s a bit squashed, but it should be clear enough for you to get the general idea), we have flattened the site architecture by effectively ‘promoting’ our lower down pages via internal links. Essentially, we’ve increased the number of internal links and decreased the number of user clicks needed to navigate; this not only improves your overall indexation rate and user navigation, but ensures a greater spread of domain authority throughout the site.

This can have a considerable impact in terms of SEO, and ‘promoting’ pages in this way (moving them higher up the site architecture) can result in substantial ranking improvements.

There are numerous methods you can employ to flatten your sites’ architecture; javascript dropdowns, footer links (like we’ve employed, ensuring our services pages are never more than one click away), image links, ‘read more’ tabs, sidebars, etc. Have a look at some of the most prominent sites in the SERPS for competitive phrases and see which methods they’ve utilised to improve their overall site architecture.

If you enjoyed this post or found it helpful then please consider linking to it, or just spreading it out using our social media tabs below.

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Post by John Pring – Follow him on Twitter (@john_pring)

The update appeared intially to be focused on ensuring that sites publishing non-original content didn’t outrank high quality sites with more in-depth, original content. Since the update was launched however (at first in the USA, with reports suggesting the update will hit the UK within weeks), it has become clear that the update was focused on any and all low-quality sites, particularly those who featured above-average levels of advertisements (even if they were Google Ads).

With the increasing amount of criticism over the quality of the results returned by Google, the search giant needed to do something to improve the quality of the sites in their index. The farmer update (I prefer this name so I’ll stick with it) is clearly a response to this level of criticism, and it means that sites deemed to have duplicate or low quality content are going to see big drops, if they haven’t already. Considering some of the current link-buidling tactics employed by SEO engineers, this could have a distinct knock-on effect to rankings and subsequently, SEO practises in general.

So how has the farmer update affected the SERPS in the UK and the US? How has the process of SEO been affected? How does Google qualify what constitutes a ‘low quality’ website? What signals are they taking into account? All of these are pertinent questions, particularly if you’ve witnessed substantial drops for your own (or client) websites.

Low Quality Signals

The interview with Wired gave us numerous valuable insights, which have confirmed a few of our suspicions regarding the signals the algorithm is paying the most attention to. Let’s have a look at a few of these signals in more detail:

We’ve suspected for a while that particularly aggressive advertisement placement would have an adverse effect on rankings in the long-run, whether these ads were Google Ads blocks, banner ads, text-link ads or affiliate link placements. This suspicion appears to have been correct, looking at the answers given by Cutts and Singhal in the Wired interview.

Cutts: There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?” Questions along those lines.

Looking at some of the sites most affected by the update, we can see that the presence of excessive ads (defining what is classified as ‘excessive’ is difficult, so you’ll need to use your best judgement on this) does indeed appear to be used by Google’s algorithmic solution as a major indicator of a ‘low quality’ website. For a deeper analysis of the sites that were most affected, have a read of this great post on Search Engine Land.

Obviously excessive advertisements aren’t the only low quality signal, from what we can gather, ‘shallow’ content appears to be another important factor:

Singhal: So we did Caffeine in late 2009.  Our index grew so quickly, and we were just crawling at a much faster speed. When that happened, we basically got a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good. The problem had shifted from random gibberish, which the spam team had nicely taken care of, into somewhat more like written prose. But the content was shallow.

‘Shallow’ content is hard to judge algorithmically, which allows us to make a few educated guesses about how this is judged. Cutts and Singhal disclosed that they came up with a list of questions designed to help them judge a sites’ quality, including ‘would you trust this site with your credit card‘, ‘would you give medicine prescribed from this site to your kids‘, etc.

It’s a fair assumption then, that trust is an important element in the farmer update; judging such a factor algorithmically is exceptionally hard, but with a little bit of thought we can make some potentially pertinent judgements about the factors being looked at by the new algorithm update.

How Can Trust Be Judged By An Algorithm?

When we look at a website, we take a huge amount of information about the site we’re looking at to make reasonably quick judgements on how trustworthy we deem the site to be; is the site design up to date? Is the information being presented in-depth or do they simply skim over important subjects? Is the brand recognisable? Do they have a social media presence? Do they have reviews or testimonials from previous clients? Via what methods do they accept payment? Are they based in the country you’re browsing in? Do they have a phone number and physical address listed? What kind of sites do they link out to? Do they have any discernable customer services presence? What kind of products are they selling?

Whilst a lot of this will come down to personal judgement (making algorithmic judgement particularly tough), a lot of this could be broken down into reasonably simple indicators, which, when used in combination, could be used to judge a sites’ quality via an algorithmic approach. Let’s indulge in a little bit of conjecture, and discuss which elements could be looked at algorithmically to judge trustworthiness:

• Brand indicators
  This is a whole blog post on its own (in fact I’ll write one next week on improving your websites’ brand signals), but it’s probably fair to say that on the whole, Google prefers to rank brands above unkown websites (due to the level of trustworthiness usually associated to recognisable brands). Things like having a strong social media presence (particularly on Twitter and Facebook) can act as a strong brand indicator, as typically, sites set up to make a quick buck rarely have a solid social media presence.
• Social media links
  I’ve already written a post on how social media affects SEO, as well as producing an infographic on using social media to improve your overall SEO, but it’s worth mentioning here that a diverse profile of backlinks from social media accounts is likely to act as a strong indicator of popularity, and therefore a high level of trustworthiness.
• Domain age and freshness of content
  Typically, a lot of spam sites and sites set up to sell affiliate products will be set up and left alone, with the owner usually spending their time and efforts on link-building (usually in a blackhat manner) in order to rank for relevant phrases. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that an older domain which regularly features fresh, relevant content would be considered more trustworthy that a newer domain with very little in the way of fresh content.
• Physical address and phone number
  If the algorithm can easily locate a physical address and phone number, then that’s another tick in the trustworthy column. This is particularly true if the contact information can be linked to the same information on other trustworthy sources, such as Google Places, highly considered web directories, etc.
• Website size and depth of content
  On the whole, sites set up with the sole purpose of ranking for keyterms related to their affiliate links are usually fairly light on content, and will rarely feature more than a couple of pages. Therefore, a site with a lot of depth is more likely to be considered trustworthy. Of course this isn’t always the case, as content farms tend to be large sites with a considerable amount of content, however, this content is usually pretty shallow in nature (especially in comparison with specialist sites on the same subjects) and they often contain a high amount of duplicate content and aggressive ad placement.
• External links
  Generally speaking, most low quality content sites are built either to support advertisements or provide a platform to make affiliate sales (amongst other reasons). As a consequence of this, these low quality sites rarely link out, and when they do, it’s to a product or affiliate. Higher quality sites, such as in-depth blogs (like this one!) and the like tend to link out much more frequently, and tend to link to sites of an equal or higher quality.
• Inbound links
  Inbound links have always been used to judge a websites authority, and a similar tactic will no doubt be used to help judge trust; the more trustworthy websites linking to you, the more trustworthy your site is likely to become.
• Level of advertisement placement
  As we’ve already discussed, the level of advertisements placed on a website is likely to be being used as a key indicator of both trust and quality (due in the main to the number of low quality sites set up specifically to support advertisements).

I would suggest that the algorithm is likely looking at a combination of these elements to judge the level of trust and quality of a website, and using the relative position on a trust/quality scale to rank the site accordingly. Take the following quotes from Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts:

Cutts: … we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side. And you can really see mathematical reasons …

Singhal: You can imagine in a hyperspace a bunch of points, some points are red, some points are green, and in others there’s some mixture. Your job is to find a plane which says that most things on this side of the place are red, and most of the things on that side of the plane are the opposite of red.

Admittedly this extract is rather cryptic, but it suggests that there’s a potential scale of trustworthiness, on which the new algorithm update places a website. Regardless of how trustworthy you are as a business, if the algorithm places you at the red end of the scale, you’ll see considerable drops in ranking positions, and if you’re placed at the green end, you’ll likely see dramatic improvements in your positioning.

So what happens to the sites that are in the middle of the scale? A pertinent question considering that is where the majority of legitimate website owners will find themselves. Looking again at answers given during the Wired interview, there’s a particularly notable quote from Singhal:

Singhal: I won’t call out any site by name. However, our classifier that we built this time does a very good job of finding low-quality sites. It was more cautious with mixed-quality sites, because caution is important.

So essentially, if you’re at the bottom of the scale you’ll go down, if you’re at the top you’ll go up and if you’re in the middle of the scale (i.e. a ‘mixed quality’ site) then you’ll more than likely stay roughly where you are.

How Can We Use This To Improve Our SEO?

Ah yes, this is probably the bit you’re most interested in. For those who’re looking for ways to game the system for a quick pound, you’re not going to like this bit; if you want to improve your overall SEO, then stop looking for short cuts. Google wants to place quality, relevant sites in its index – and so it should, the happier the user with their SERPS, the more likely people are to continue to use Google above the increasing number of competitors in the search field. We for one welcome this update, as it means SEO’s are forced to provide quality to their clients, instead of gaming the system in order to rank poor quality client sites.

So with this in mind, let’s take a look at how you can improve your SEO with the farmer update in mind (and I’ll stop moralising about white hat and black hat practices … maybe).

• It should go without saying that you should be aiming for high quality, in-depth and relevant content on your website – this should have been standard practise for SEO’s for a long time, but it’s worth noting that it’s more true now than it has ever been. Don’t expect to rank well if you’re trying to optimise poorly written, duplicate or thin content.

• Get rid of aggressive banner ads from your website and ensure that any ads you decide to keep never take precedence over your content. If you’re using a thin content page to support ad blocks (regardless of their source, don’t be fooled into thinking just because they’re Google Ads you’ll be spared) and you expect that site to continue ranking for terms related to the content, you’re in for a bit of shock.

• Try and improve your brand indicators – as I’ve already said I’ll provide a blog post on this in the next week to avoid this one being unreadably long, but briefly, you need to ensure your brand signals are strong. Keep your social media accounts populated and ensure they’re linked to and from your website, with the same brand information that’s featured on your website. Make sure all your directory submissions contain the same information, include an address and area-coded phone number and keep your information consistent across all platforms. If you have staff, then make sure they have social media accounts that mention that they work for you, and preferably link to you (particularly good for platforms like LinkedIn). Proper registration signals are also important, if you’re a limited company, include your company number, if you’re VAT registered, include your VA T registration number – both the footer and the contact page are good places for these. While I’m on the subject of contact pages, ensure you don’t just have a contact form, include your address, phone number and any other relevant contact information. Brand mentions will also be important, so when you’re link-building, include brand-name anchor text links as well as your keyphrase targets (also gives your backlink profile a more ‘natural’ feel). This might also result in organic searches for your brand name, which is another important brand indicator.

• Look to improve your levels of trust – there’s some overlap here with improving your brand signals, which is good as it reduces the number of things you need to be concerned about. As we’ve already discussed, there are several elements that could be analysed algorithmically in order to gauge your sites’ trustworthiness, so start with focusing on those. Ensure you have a physical address and phone number, a robust ‘about’ page, regularly update your content and ensure that it’s in-depth and of a high quality, build high quality links, link out to high quality pages and cut down on your advertising.

• Increase your social media efforts, substantially. Google (and Bing while we’re at it) have confirmed that social media links can improve your rankings and website authority, and it’s not hard to understand why. A large number of links from social media accounts (with particular reference to Twitter and Facebook), especially if they’re from a diverse range of high authority social media accounts, is a strong indicator to search engines that your content is high quality, popular and that your site is trustworthy.

• Forget short-cuts and black-hat practices. If you’re only interested in the short game, then you’re going to seriously struggle, particularly as the Google team continue to tweak their algorithm (which they will). The problem with employing short cuts designed to game the Google algorithm is that one change can undo all your work in a matter of minutes. Instead, don’t supply content for Google, provide it for your visitors – when you’re putting together your content, don’t even consider Google – sure, they’re the market leader now, but that may not always be the case. Build your site and your business around quality of content, product and/or service. Play the long game and you’re far more likely to see benefits in organic search, particularly when these efforts are combined with legitimate and high-quality SEO practices.

*I’ve intentionally avoided discussing article distribution platforms and article spinning in this article, as I plan to write a seperate post on this very issue. If you’ve got any specific questions on this, let me know in the next few days and I’ll try to include them. If you want a quick answer on whether or not they’re still worth using for SEO, the answer is a very complicated yes (just stay away from Ezine Articles and Articlebase).

Conclusion

It’s been an interesting update from Google, and one of the biggest in the last couple of years (Matt Cutts suggested it affected around 12% of queries, which is a huge amount of searches). Generally, I think it’s a good move from Google and one that will hopefully improve both the quality of organic search results and the practices of SEO engineers. A good friend of mine recently said to me ‘I guess it’s time to go back to the old school methods, like creative link building and high quality link-bait’. He’s spot on, and to me that’s a good thing, as relevancy and quality should never have left the forefront of the SEO engineers’ mind.

Don’t expect this to be the end of this update either, Google are constantly tweaking their algorithm and this update will be no different. I’d expect to see some more changes in the SERPS in the coming months, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more unhappy webmasters and black-hat SEO’s in the near future.

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Post by John Pring – Follow him on Twitter (@john_pring)

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So why does Wikipedia rank so well? Can you outrank Wikipedia for a competitive phrase, or should you just be happy with the number 2 or 3 slot? We get asked these questions a surprising amount, by clients, interns and readers of our blog, so I thought it was probably worth covering the subject in a blog post.

Let’s start at looking why Wikipedia ranks so well for such a variety of terms.

Domain Authority

Wikipedia has a phenomenally high domain authority (98 out of 100 according to the SEOMoz toolbar) – this is the result of the size, quality, age, structure and inbound links of the site and is one of the primary reasons for the site ranking so well for such a variety of keyterms. The site has a homepage Page Rank of 9, and whilst this isn’t as important a ranking factor as many people believe, it is indicative of the authority of the site and the subsequent trust it enjoys from Google.

Quality

Despite what some people seem to think about the quality of the Wikipedia pages, they’re actually extremely high and the content is now often compared (in terms of authority on a subject) to the Encyclopedia Britannica. The myth that the reliability of the content on the site is poor most likely comes from Wikipedia’s user-entry content model, which (at one time) allowed anyone to update and change the information on any Wikipedia page. This is still possible, but the level of moderation on Wikipedia now makes adding comical or incorrect information (that lasts) to the site extremely difficult.

Structure and mark-up

The content and the way the site is structured (in terms of mark-up and well optimised copy, images, etc) is essentially perfect in terms of SEO. The website is unconcerned with promotional content (apart from the now common ‘plea’ from the Wikipedia founder), conversion optimisation or flashy, modern content – their encyclopedia status (and associated aims) allow them to produce pages which are simple, clean, text-based and perfect for search engine indexation. On top of this, the site speed is excellent, substantially aiding the impressive rankings .
The site utilises semantic mark-beautifully, has perfectly optimised images, highly relevant (and usually high authority) external links and extremely strong content (in terms of both quality and quantity). The site is 100% substance over style and is an ideal example of how to lay out web pages and content for ranking well in search engines.

Internal Links

Wikipedia has one of the strongest internal linking structures imagineable; ensuring nearly every page of their mammoth website enjoys at least a handful of extremely strong, internal anchor text links from extremely high authority pages.

Inbound External Links

As you might expect, Wikipedia boasts a monumental backlink profile, with some phenomenally high authority pages/domains linking to them. The encyclopedic nature of the site encourages anchor text links and pretty much every page on the Wikipedia site enjoys at least a few high authority page links (on top of the particularly strong internal links).

The combination of the above elements has caused Wikipedia to rank so highly for such a wide range of phrases, and makes the site extremely difficult to outrank.

How To Outrank Wikipedia

With that said however, it is of course possible to outrank Wikipedia, even for the most competitive phrases. However, to do so, you’ll need to ensure that your site exceeds Wikipedia in at least a few of the metrics mentioned above.

Domain authority – it would be extremely difficult to exceed Wikipedia’s domain authority, and in a lot of cases practically impossible. Therefore, you need to look at other ranking factors in order to outrank Wikipedia pages.

Quality – this will need to be a major consideration for you and you’ll need to ensure that you have a substantial amount of extremely high quality, relevant content on the page you’re looking to rank. Your content needs to be more valuable and more in-depth than that on the corresponding Wikipedia page and should encourage an extremely high click through rate.

Structure and Markup – you will struggle to beat Wikipedia when it comes to structure, mark-up or site speed, but it’s certainly possible to match the site. If you can ensure your on-site elements are properly optimised, keep your site speed at an optimal level and ensure you’re content is of a particularly high standard, you’ve got a good starting base to take on the Wikipedia page.

Internal links – you’re unlikely to get the same level of internal linking (from the same number and authority of pages), but you should make an effort to find the highest quality, most linked-to pages on your site and ensure they’ve got internal anchor text links to the page you’re trying to rank. Check out the post on using Open Site Explorer to find link prospects for more information on finding the strongest pages on your domain.

External links – this is one area where you stand a good chance of exceeding Wikipedia’s metrics (for all but the most high profile, linked-to Wikipedia pages). Whilst the majority of high ranking Wikipedia pages can boast some good inbound external links (usually with good anchor text), they’re usually beatable if you’re engaging in a quality link-building campaign for your target page.

Weak Areas

As you’ve probably guessed, exceeding the metrics above isn’t a particularly easy task – so are there any SEO areas that Wikipedia is weak on? Actually, there is one notable weakness in Wikipedia’s overall SEO profile; social media signals.

Social media is becoming an ever-more important SEO factor, and (at least at the moment), Wikipedia doesn’t get too much in terms of social media signals. You should easily be able to exceed the regular number of mentions from large social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc that Wikipedia receives, helping you to outrank their pages.

Obviously some pages are going to be harder to outrank than others, so the likelihood of taking a number one spot from Wikipedia varies wildly depending on authority of the page and the competitiveness of the keyword. If you’ve got any specific examples you’d like to ask us about or any general questions whatsoever, let us know in the comments section below.

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