The Anatomy Of An (Accidental) Monster Post – One Year On

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Monster/laptop image
Just over one year ago, on 6th March 2013, I published How To Remove Slanderous Google Reviews – A Case Study. It’s the story of how I managed to remove a fake 1-star review from my parents’ business’ Google Places account.

At the time, that’s all it was: a story. Events unfolded and I decided to write about them, as I thought that my experience might be helpful to others. Beyond that, I thought nothing of it. Even as an SEO, I didn’t expect the post to be big – but over the year, it took off. Majorly.

One year on, I wanted to look back at the stats in Google Analytics and suggest what I think may be behind its success.

The data

From 6th March 2013 to 5th March 2014, my blog had over 15k unique visits and over 22k unique pageviews. The post had over 7,000 unique pageviews – a third of all pageviews to the entire 150+ page blog…

GA Top 5 Pages screenshot
(Click to enlarge)

It’s also been viewed twice as many times as my homepage. The blog’s second most popular post during that time received a seventh of the views of the main post (just shy of 1,000 unique pageviews)… In other words, it makes the rest of my content look crap in comparison, haha!

Interestingly, when looking at the Top Pages section in Open Site Explorer, things are different. From a Page Authority point of view, it’s the blog’s fifth most popular page:

OSE Top 5 Pages screenshot
(Click to enlarge)

Less links and less shares compared to a couple of other posts and pages.

So what’s attributed to its success, if social shares and links aren’t behind it? Organic search.

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Google-Friendly Link Building Tactics For Online Sellers: My Online Seller Wales Talk

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On Thursday 20th February, I gave a talk at Online Seller Wales, for their Cardiff event (#OSWCardiff) in Porter’s Bar’s cinema room. I’ve spoken in the venue’s cinema room before for my Cardiff Internet talk (and I’ve also spoken on their main room’s stage for my Ignite Cardiff talk) – it’s a great venue.

The talk title? Google-Friendly Link Building Tactics For Online Sellers. In other words, white-hat link building and link earning tips primarily aimed at eCommerce businesses. I also talk about Google’s stance on link building (what with things like Google Penguin, Manual Actions and the disavow tool) and also give advice on anchor text etiquette in 2014 and beyond.

Here are the slides:

I’d like to say a big thank you to Gaz Copeland of Stoked SEO (@StokedSEO) for giving me advice and feedback on my slides when I was working on them.

And here is the audio, which I recorded myself using my iPhone. It includes some Q&A at the end with some of the audience. I’ve used Audibase to host it (who are based in the same building as me – Welsh ICE in Caerphilly, just outside Cardiff):

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How To Change Your Profile Pic On A Google+ Local Page

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Plus sign imageChanging the profile pic on a Google+ (personal) profile is easy. Changing it on a Google+ Brand page is easy. But changing it on a Google+ Local page? I spent a good while trying to figure out how to do it, and seeing as a Google search on the topic yielded no helpful results (other than an article on Google+ Help, which wasn’t even the 1st result), I thought I’d blog about it.

It’s easy once you know (really easy), but what makes things confusing is the fact that your page may already have a profile pic – via Google Places. But if you actively start using the Google+ element of your Google Places/Google+ Local page (i.e. writing posts in the ‘Posts’ section), that section might have a default blue icon that Google shows when you don’t have an avatar…

So in other words, if you have a profile pic on the Google Places side of things (in the top section) of your listing, but not on the Google+ side of it (bottom half of the ‘Posts’ section, each time you submit a new post), then here’s the fix…

And nope, you can’t click the avatar in the top-right of the screen – that won’t work this time…

Google+ profile vs. Google+ Local screenshot
…Trust me, I tried.

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2-3 WordPress Plugins For Reducing Comment Spam (From 100s To <10 Per Day)

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Want to know how I reduced WordPress blog comment spam significantly, using just 2-3 plugins, with no need for a CAPTCHA? Then keep reading, friend…

STOP imagePeople who know me well (especially on Twitter) will know that blog comment spam has been a major bugbear of mine for a while. I’ve tried multiple solutions, including CAPTCHAs (such as Animal Captcha, Sweet Captcha, Math Captcha, other more normal CAPTCHAs…) but experienced no joy. I also followed the steps in this guide, downloaded the plugins that were recommended and followed its instructions, but found that it just didn’t have the desired effect…

Unfortunately it’s not simply a case of purging the Spam section in one go without checking it. I get a lot of false positives (genuine comments that get filtered into the Spam section by accident), so I have to trawl through it all. One. By. One. Bearing in mind that I used to get about 100-200 spam comments everyday. Ouch. I also help to manage Cardiff Blogs (also built on WordPress) and while they don’t get as many spam comments as SEOno does, if left unchecked for a few weeks, I’ll have to filter through a few hundred…

Desperate for a solution, I stumbled upon 2 plugins and thought that I’d give them a go. The number of spam comments I receive now has reduced dramatically: from 100-200 per day to about 10. Much more manageable.

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Should You Remove Bad Links? A Twitter & Google+ Debate

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So this morning I woke up, opened Tweetbot on my mobile and found out that I’d received 29 @mentions from 3 people…

Earlier in the day yesterday, I left this reply to a tweet by @barriemoran about lifting penalties:

I’ve done a bit of manual action work myself (as Morgan Freeman can tell you!) and I always try to remove as many links as possible as part of the process. However I admire Leeds-based SEO agency Branded3 and @Tim_Grice‘s bold claim that “Branded3 [have] had over 60 manual penalty recoveries without removing a single link” (source). I threw @Branded_3 into the tweet as I was curious if they’d chip in with a response on the topic, which they did (in the form of Tim). Dozens of @mentions later…? Well…

Boxer image
* DING DING! * Ladies and gentlemen, in the red corner, we have Barrie and @ChrisLDyson, arguing that you should definitely try and remove links as part of the process. And in the blue corner (very apt, given their branding!), we have Tim on behalf of Branded3, suggesting that simply disavowing is enough and link removal isn’t necessary (and that they have 60+ success stories to prove it)…

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