The SEOshank Reconsideration

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“Do you feel you’ve been rehabilitated?”

A few months ago, I went through my first penalty removal experience for a client. They had a manual action notification in their Google Webmaster Tools account for having unnatural links pointing at their site, due to poor quality work from their previous SEO agency.

Before delving into filing a reconsideration request, we removed as many links as we could and disavowed the rest using Google’s shiny disavow tool. During the process, I researched reconsideration request best practice and discovered that it can be very hard to succeed on your first try – sometimes it takes multiple attempts. Even so, I wanted to follow the rules properly to maximise our chances of early success.

It took us 4 attempts in the end until we were successful and the manual action was subsequently lifted. With each attempt, given Google’s pettiness (as I will go on to explain), it was difficult not to just have a massive grump at them. In fact, it reminded me of certain scenes from a certain film…

Disclaimer: If you haven’t seen The Shawshank Redemption, then be warned that there’s gonna be spoilers…

Reconsideration request #1 = Red’s 20-year parole hearing

When drafting my reconsideration request, I followed Marie Haynes’ excellent guide, which also includes an example draft. I followed the example pretty closely (unfortunately I didn’t save any examples, so I can’t share them in this post), which – as you can see if you click the link – is pretty courteous and friendly but also quite apologetic. It accept responsibility. It asks for forgiveness. It tells Google that we’re rehabilited.

Our “We have worked hard to resolve the quality issues on our site and are completely committed to following the Quality Guidelines from this point on” is Red’s “I can honestly say that I’m a changed man.”

I felt a bit like this:

Red's 1st parole image
…But this happened:

Red's 1st rejection image

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Stick Your Fork Elsewhere… Thoughts On Matt Cutts’ “Guest Blogging Is Done” Statement

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Fork imageYesterday, Google’s Head of Webspam Matt Cutts posted a new blog post containing a very strong statement:

“Stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy.”

As expected, the SEO industy went nuts on Twitter (I have to admit that a lot of the responses were actually pretty funny). In the 12-ish hours or so that have passed since the announcement, there have already been some great response posts by SEO greats including Joost de Valk and Ann Smarty (to name just a few). Given that I’m a strong advocate of guest blogging, I wanted to chip in, too.

My immediate thought was this: the statement is intended to scare the spammers. People who spam guest blogging will (hopefully) be put off. But people who do guest blogging properly aren’t (or shouldn’t) suddenly be thinking of stopping everything. That would be crazy.

Here are some other thoughts…

Matt specifically mentions paid guest blogging

In Matt’s post, he complains about some guest blogging outreach that he received, especially the fact that they offered him money if they published it:

“If you ignore the bad spacing and read the parts that I bolded, someone sent me a spam email offering money to get links that pass PageRank. That’s a clear violation of Google’s quality guidelines.”

I’m curious to know if Matt would’ve made such a fuss if they didn’t offer him money. Granted, it was still a lousy outreach attempt (and of all the people to target…!), but it’s true: money shouldn’t be involved in a conversation about guest blogging (more on this below).

Not all guest posting is spammy

My concern is that people will suddenly think: “oh no, guest blogging… eee!” and run for the hills. But Stephen Kenwright makes a cracking point:

YouMoz, man! I challenge anyone to read YouMoz and find one post where someone’s blatantly only done it for the SEO-ness. I’ve had the pleasure of writing for YouMoz 6 times (2 of which were promoted onto the main blog), and not once did I think: “this is gonna boost my SEOz” – if anything, it’s an added bonus.

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SEOno News & GB Posts: Part 7

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News

A few things to report since the last news post back in August…

  • I’ve been invited to speak at Online Seller Wales‘ next event on 20th February in Cardiff. My talk title is: “Google-Friendly Link Building Tactics For Online Sellers” (i.e. eCommerce sites). Here’s the Eventbrite page. Best of all? It’s free! And there are two other speakers! Check out the #OSWCardiff hashtag for more news and info.
  • Cardiff Blogs launched its Blog Club. Separate to our main events, they’re monthly and they’re intended to give local bloggers 2-3 hours to work on their blog, whether it’s to write some new posts or get some tips and advice from other bloggers. I wrote a post about November’s meet-up, which you can see here.
  • Another YouMoz post I wrote (see below for its link) was upgraded to the main blog, which I’m mega chuffed about!
  • I was asked to contribute to an article on The Next Web, which is awesome (link below).
  • SEOno has been included in SEO Group’s Top 40 SEO Blogs to Read in 2014. Given that I looked through the list and saw 39 other blogs that I think are ten times better than this one, I’m extremely humbled.

Posts on other sites

Recent guest posts:

Contributions on other sites

In the last few months, a few people have also approached me asking me to contribute to a post, which I thought I’d mention, too:

Trolled By An IT Company… My First (& Last) Link Request Attempt By Phone

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Telephone imageSo I have an… interesting link building story from a few weeks ago…

A client of mine is a Cardiff-based IT support company. While seeking out relevant links, I came across the website for a London-based IT support company who have a resource section on their site that basically says that they only cover London and the south of England, so here are some links to other companies that provide IT support services in the rest of the UK. Aww… isn’t that nice of them?

My client wasn’t included in the South Wales section, so I rubbed my hands together, hopped onto their Contact Us page to find… that there was no email address listed or a contact form. Oh.

All they had was a phone number and a postal address.

This was my moment, I thought… my first ever link request by phone! I first came across the tactic of asking for links via phone (rather than bog-standard email) on Jon Cooper/Point Blank SEO’s site. It’s in his link building strategies list – I also thought he had a standalone post/case study about it, but can’t seem to find it (if anyone else does, please let me know). (EDIT: Jon has commented at the bottom of this post and shared a link to it.) I’ve always been a bit of a phoneaphobe (even now), so I tend to rely on email more than I do on phone, but Mr Cooper is wise beyond his young years and so I thought I’d give it a try…

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3 Interesting Observations From 3 Recent Small Business Domain Migrations

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We're Moving imageSince going freelance over 6 months ago, I have helped a few small businesses with domain migrations, making sure that they’re all done in an SEO-friendly fashion.

What is a domain migration? Some people might call it something else (e.g. site migration, domain change, etc.) but it’s basically the case of moving your site from one domain to another. For example, I might consider moving SEOno.co.uk to SEOno.com, with all of its URLs following suit – e.g. SEOno.co.uk/category/seo/ would become SEOno.com/category/seo/, with the former (ideally) redirecting to the latter in each and every instance.

A simple domain migration is when none of the URLs are changing (except for the domain itself). Obviously a domain migration involving a complete URL restructure can complicate things slightly.

A tale of 3 domain migrations

Three Trucks image

There’s a number of reasons why someone might want to migrate domains…

In one of the cases, the client mainly wanted to move from a .co.uk to a .com (to improve his chances of rankings more globally and attracting international enquiries) but also wanted to use it as an excuse to ‘rename’ the business slightly.

For the other two clients however, it was my recommendation. They were using EMDs (Exact Match Domains) – i.e. keyword-heavy domains (e.g. seo-in-cardiff.com rather than actualbusinessname.com) – which I have never been a big fan of, so I recommended that they migrate to more brand-focused domains, which I thought would improve their click-through rate from the SERPs and look more trustworthy to searchers. In both cases we had only just started working together, so it made sense to make the change ASAP, before tasks such as link building and citation building were carried out in full force.

While all 3 sites are only small (we’re talking no more than 100 indexed pages for the biggest; only 20 for the smallest), they all had different circumstances, with none of them being quite the same. Only 2 of them were migrating from EMDs to branded domains. Only 2 of them were retaining all the URLs on the new site (i.e. not changing any URLs around in the process). Only 2 of them mapped out the redirects (with one of them, all the old domain’s URLs simply redirect to the new domain’s homepage instead). And only 2 of them utilised the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools.

Here’s a table, because none of that probably made any sense…! Please forgive the plainness of its appearance (there’s a good reason why I’m an SEO and not a graphic designer):

Domain Migration Table image

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