The Hangout saw some great questions come through in the Google+ comments with many centred around use of the Disavow Tool and strategies we should be using going forward in a post-Penguin world. 

In-line with the questions and comments we saw coming through about Penguin, Tim provides his thoughts on this below.

The main thing people need to take away from the recent update is that it’s not a penalty; it’s an algorithm that is negatively affecting them. Penguin is targeting websites that are ‘over optimised’, with the main focus being on links, therefore it is important to audit your link profile and remove the negative signals Google are using to run the algorithm. If you have been hit by Penguin you have to accept that your investment in low quality link building has been identified and killed by Google, therefore as well as removing the bad links, you need to start thinking about what makes you link-worthy and developing a natural strategy moving forward.

Penguin is like a reset algorithm, if you have invested in link manipulation, it is now worthless and you need to start from scratch by cleaning up your profile and building on a more solid foundation.

You can view the Hangout in full below or over on our YouTube channel.

As always, our next Hangout will be announced right here on the blog and also on our Google+ page so be sure to head over and add us to your circles to be the first to find out about it.

If you have any burning questions or topics that you’d like to see featured in an upcoming Hangout, do let us know by emailing brunch@branded3.com or in the comments below. The same goes if you have any follow up questions with regards this month’s Hangout – we’d love to hear from you!

On the first day his post drove ~60,000 visitors to the Branded3 site. That’s around 20-30x our usual daily traffic, just to one page.

Our Google Analytics graph for April/May looks like this:

In isolation it looks as if we usually have quite low traffic.

The annotation under the graph says:

Stephen Kenwright breaks Branded3 server: The antisocial network: Path texts my entire phonebook at 6am

(ProTip: You can add annotations by double-clicking any date – this is useful for notable changes to your website such as a large change in traffic or a website redesign)

While our awesome development team were scrambling to fix the servers that had broken with the Path post, it got me thinking.

Be prepared for your server to die

If any website has a sudden surge in traffic, it can kill your server. Imagine a pipe with a slow trickle of water and suddenly a flood comes through. The pipe will probably burst. This is known as the “Slashdot Effect” and usually happens with popular posts on small websites.

Douglas Radburn helped keep the Branded3 website alive when Stephen’s post suddenly got a lot of attention – this is his advice about what to do in this case:

Ensuring your platform is optimised is an important step. Always make sure you’re using the most up to date version of your blogging platform and plugins. Caching options are readily available and easy to configure through plugins, even without specialist knowledge. Set one up now when your traffic is low, and you’ll ride the storm. Cloud hosting allows near-instant scalability in high-traffic situations so that you can quickly react, and depending on your platform, this is done seamlessly.

Having one really popular blog post messes with your metrics

Having a huge surge of visitors that behave very differently to the norm will definitely affect your metrics.

Here are some metrics that changed dramatically from March (pre Path post), April (Path post live) and May (Path post still getting high attention)

N.B.: Bounce rates for websites with blogs are nearly always higher than bounce rates for websites without blogs. Many people who want to read a blog post come to the website to read a blog post and leave. This is a bounce.

Imagine giving this report to a client – it’s as if their website is performing badly. Users are becoming less engaged and less inclined to buy something.

If you’re looking at Analytics for a site that’s not yours, you might not know immediately what’s happened to make the report look terrible.

Why are my metrics dead?

Before doing anything – if you ever see this little icon in the top right, click it and drag the slider to “Higher Precision” to make your data is as accurate as possible.

Look for spikes or dips in traffic and find out what’s causing them. For the Branded3 website it was obvious there was a spike from 30/4/13-1/5/13.

If it’s a dip and you know you had a problem with your website (such as it went down that day), you should exclude those dates from your analysis. Export the data from Analytics and manipulate it in Excel. If you didn’t have an issue with your website, and there was a drop in traffic for another reason (such as losing rank in Google) you should still include these dates in your analysis.

If there’s a traffic spike, narrow the date range to the days that were most affected by the traffic spike. You can do so by changing the dates in the top right:

Look around to see what may be causing the spike. The places I’d hit would be:

• Landing Page Report
• Referrals Report
• Keyword Report

Look at the top term – is it new or increased? If so, it’s probably that. If not, have a look at how many rows are in the table.

If there are a lot compared to the previous days, it means you suddenly have a lot more landing pages/sites linking to you/keywords you rank for than before.

Should I filter my reports?

Before you make this decision, you have to decide what you’re reporting in. In this case I’m interested in my conversion rate.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that go on to undertake a specific action on your website (buying a product or signing up to a newsletter).

Ask yourself: is this what I want to see? Maybe a certain demographic of visitors will never convert and you should focus your efforts on the behaviours of the visitors that might. For example, if you know that only UK visitors can order products, then focus on their behaviours and increasing the conversion rate for those visitors.

Your decision to filter the data for conversion rate should be based on the questions “are these visitors likely to become my customers?”. In the Branded3 case – anyone who searched for the term “Path” or landed on the Path blog post was not very likely to become a customer – we don’t offer any Path services; we just wrote a popular article about Path.

You can use an Advanced Segment to get rid of irrelevant data, and export the relevant data to get a better idea of what your conversion rate really is. Here’s a video on how to use advanced segments:

It’s up to you whether a specific demographic of people would be potential customers or not. In our case, it was incredibly unlikely – they were just interested in reading a story about Path.

Advanced Segments or Filters?

Advanced Segments

• Can be applied at any time
• Don’t permanently affect the data
• Can be applied historically
• Best to use for excluding an anomaly in data

Using an advanced segment to exclude traffic for the Path post we get these stats:

This looks a little more normal! We might want to have a look into the drop in conversion rate, but at least it’s not as alarming as before.

Filters

• Are permanent
• Permanently affect all data going forward
• Can not be applied to historic data
• Best to be used in a completly seperate profile, to analyse a specific demographic (for example, only UK visitors)

In the past, we had one page that drove 2000-3000 visits a day because it ranked really well in Google for a high traffic term that it just wasn’t relevant for. We eventually re-directed the page. If we hadn’t, I would have recommended a filter be applied to our Analytics account to exclude that page – those visitors were not going to convert, so why should I analyse their actions?

Key Takeaways

• If your website dies, do something about this ASAP
• Figure out what you want from your reports
• Decide who your customers are and how to best analyse their behaviour

So yes, content can kill your site, but it’s not something that can’t be fixed.

Around 2% of English-US search queries have been affected by the update and in this Hangout, Tim will be sharing his advice on how online marketers can best get their strategies in-line with Google’s guidelines.

With almost 10 years’ experience in the online marketing industry, Tim oversees the development of search strategies for some of the biggest brands in the UK.

An influential SEO blogger; Tim’s unique insights and creative strategies have helped to establish him as an industry thought-leader who’s always at the forefront of Google’s algorithm changes.

If you’re an online marketer, don’t miss this Hangout for the latest tips and advice on staying ahead of Google’s updates.

To take part in the Hangout, simply click here to join the event – the first nine to get involved on the day will be able to join in with the discussion – but don’t worry if you miss out on being the first users there, as we’ll be recording the Hangout on air for you to watch on our G+ page or our YouTube page.

If you’ve got any questions whilst you’re watching, you can leave a comment on our Google+ page or tweet us using the hashtag #B3Brunch and Tim will do his best to answer them all.

See you Thursday at 11:30am!

Graph from searchmetrics illustrating eHow.co.uk’s Panda problem. eHow was reported to be among the biggest losers from Panda 2.0.

Panda is very effective at catching sites with thin, spun content that provides no value to users, but surely nobody who still has a reliance on SEO is still trying tactics like these? We’re still finding plenty of sites in need of historic content clean-up operations, but with Google supposedly working on “softening” the Panda update, now is the time to take stock and learn the lessons. Don’t think for a second that low value content will get a thumbs-up from Mountain View in future, and that things that are just about passable now will provide value five years down the line.

Don’t rely on Panda to keep your standards high

If you’re creating content just to recover from Panda then you’re still writing content for Google’s benefit, which is exactly what Matt Cutts and co. are trying to eliminate. This is why it’s not a case of adding another hundred words to the paragraph on your product page in order to escape, and nor should it be.

Panda is at the top of the funnel – passing that test doesn’t entitle you to revenue. Search engines aren’t your customers, and Google doesn’t convert for you. Search engines deliver you leads, and since you can’t sit a salesman on every single landing page, you need copy in place that will do that job for you and capitalise on those leads. You’re selling your products to your customers, not to Google, and at no stage in the buying cycle has a customer ever been persuaded to make a purchase by “150 words of unique content”.

Are Panda’s days numbered?

No Panda will be around forever.

Google can see through your “150 words of unique content”, and there’s a good reason why increasing the word count won’t help you. With Chrome’s increasing market share and Analytics code implemented on more than 70% of sites across the web (this time last year), Google has so much data detailing which sites are providing value to users. They can’t use it all right now, but they don’t be surprised if it features in the big picture.

Regardless of the numbers stored safely away in Google’s database, some engagement metrics are plain to see. No social shares; Likes; comments – these are Panda signals of the future. Google looks set to take traffic into account when calculating search rankings too; and content that’s valuable on desktops but unreadable on mobiles will become a hot topic. And it should!

How to kung-fu Panda

Among other things, Panda is designed to crack down on duplicate content. Content Marketing is the antithesis of this – it’s all about providing value that nobody else is, and creating content that fulfils a need. Analytics gives us access to some of Google’s own data, and with the help of many other tools we can discover what that need consists of.

Content Marketing can help you to grow, but there’ll always be a need for SEO on your site if you’re trying to recover from an algorithm. If you’re still worried about Google Panda in five years’ time you’ve not learned the lessons, and the companies who have invested in expanding their content library properly will have left you behind, even if you get your rankings back.

Some of the internet’s most revered marketers say SEO companies should do it like the ad men do. But advertising agencies – commanding fees in the millions of pounds – don’t have the understanding of how search engines treat content that SEO agencies do, which gives us a massive advantage online. A traditional marketing campaign can live or die by its next ad, but for us it’s not all about the next piece of content. You can’t recall a TV commercial that generates no revenue; you just have to cut your losses…but you can always edit a landing page.

Have you ever considered becoming Google Analytics qualified?

What is the GAIQ Exam and why should I bother?

GAIQ (Google Analytics Individual Qualification) is an exam offered by Google to prove that an individual is proficient in the use and understanding of Google Analytics.

Key Stats

• Costs $50 – you both purchase it and take it online here
• Only available in English
• 70 Google Analytics Related questions (all multiple choice) – chosen at random
• 90 minutes long (test can be paused, expires 5 days after starting)
• 80% is the passing score (you can get up to 14 questions wrong)
• Receive a certificate, and your name is listed in Google’s list of Qualified Individuals. Not to brag, but here I am.
• Once passed, certificate expires after 18 months (so if you’re reading this in 2015 or later, the link above probably won’t work)

Reasons to do the GAIQ test

• Official Qualification from Google
• Can be added to a CV/Resumé/LinkedIN
• To have idea of where you can improve upon (pass or fail, Google give you feedback on the questions you most commonly answered incorrectly)
• If the company you work (or hope to work for) for is interested in becoming a Google Analytics Certified Partner Google say “It is highly preferred to have at least 1 employee who is certified in the GAIQ test.”

Gathering Google Analytics Knowledge

In order to pass the GAIQ test, the following is required:

• Knowledge of how to use Google Analytics
• Knowledge of how Google Analytics works (i.e. what cookies it uses etc.)
• Knowledge of RegEx (Regular Expressions)
• Ability to think logically about a problem

List of Google Analytics IQ Resources

• Google Analytics IQ Lessons AKA Conversion University – Google’s official presentations about how to use Google Analytics
• Google Analytics – Nothing is really better than using the software itself. Explore everything!
• Regular Expressions Reference Centre – If you find RegEx tricky, I found this reference table really useful
• This guide by Himanshu Sharma - written 2013, quite relevant for the current format
• The “Big Daddy” of resources by Jens Sorensen – written in 2010, still relevant, but some things have changed since then

Doing the GAIQ Exam

In all likelihood, you’ve probably done some kind of exam at some stage in your life before. The advice you teachers gave you is still sound today.

Some exam advice that your teachers always gave you

• Make Notes – either in a physical notebook or digitally as you work
• Read everything. Read the question, read the possible answers
• Don’t Rush
• Re-read your answers

Some GAIQ specific advice

• Be confident before taking it. There’s no set date, and it’s a waste of time/money to do it before you’re ready.
• This is an Open Book exam – have Google Analytics open for reference. I imagine some people know exactly where/how to find something in Google Analytics but maybe forget the terminology.
• You can pause the test to come back to later. If you struggle with concentrating for more than half an hour, you can take a break! Just so long you come back to it within five days of starting.
• Eliminate answers you know are wrong. You can actually score-out incorrect answers for later reference
• If you’re not sure what a question is asking, mark it and come back later. The IQ exam has the ability to skip over questions and review them later.

Advice from some Google Analytics Qualified Individuals

Some of the old resources are not relevant and somewhat outdated. The Conversion University itself seems to have dropped some modules such as the cookie ones which may be worth mentioning. There is also a lot more focus on result based reporting – i.e. questions on conversion rates/assisted conversions etc. which will probably throw people off this new test as these are new metrics compared to the original test. Questions are also a lot more logical reasoning based as opposed to direct yes/no direct answers.

- Alan Ng, Data Insights Analyst (Twitter)

I used some notes in a notepad I had saved from last time I took the test. In addition, I used Branded3′s Google Analytics account to look around when I was unsure of some of the terminology

- AJ, Data Insights Account Manager & Analyst

If you have any questions about Google Analytics or the GAIQ test, feel free to send us an e-mail or chat to me on Twitter @ejbarnes89

If you have been living on a desert island for the past two years and know nothing about Penguin, you can read up on it here and here. The main takeaways:

1 – The new version of Penguin is more aggressive

2 – It targets lower level pages of a site and not just the top level.

You might want to watch this again as well:

What I really wanted to do was go over some of the trends we are seeing, and what you can do if you are being badly affected by the updates.

Link devaluation & website devaluation

If you have seen your rankings diminish over time, that does not necessarily mean that the Penguin algorithm is affecting you. Matt Cutts announced 3– 4 weeks ago that they had taken action against a large network of link sellers and devalued the outgoing links accordingly.

On-going link devaluation is very evident in the SERP’s as Patrick pointed out in his post on aggressive link devaluation.

If your rankings seem to be slipping on a weekly basis, it is likely your link profile is being devalued, there is nothing you can do about this other than to remove/disavow the low quality links and focus on building stronger links based on a natural strategy. The last 3 – 5 years of your SEO is likely wiped out, getting your rankings back will not be an easy task, you will have to start from scratch.

Authority sites win

No brainer really, this latest round of Penguin definitely favours what everyone in the real world would consider the authority sources on the web. Government websites, news sites and advice driven resources have all fared well from the recent update, as you would expect.

So, you may not have been penalised, or hit by the algorithm update, however you may have lost visibility to websites with more authority.

Penguin isn’t a penalty

Many sites were expecting to see link removal efforts when Penguin reran, however it is becoming clear that Penguin is not a penalty. There will be no magic recovery because you have removed links, this is an algorithm update, it isn’t Google saying ‘you’ve been naughty, we’re going to punish you’, this is Google saying ‘all that stuff you did to rank, we’ve just killed it, start again’.

So unless you have managed to replace all the authority your low quality links were giving you, don’t expect to see your rankings come back. Unfortunately, any investment in low quality links is lost, and the only way back is to invest at a higher level in developing a solid SEO strategy.

It could get worse

Matt Cutts has already stated that the impact can be adjusted, and I am pretty confident that he doesn’t mean ‘we can make this easier on link spam’.

This update is going nowhere, Google is not going to let you off, aggressive link devaluation and manual action against link sellers and networks will intensify. Building a ton of anchor text links is not going to help you, there is no secret formula for anchor text variation, and removing links will give you a clean sheet but won’t bring you back.

As I have said on my blog and plenty of times on Twitter, if your links are acquired for SEO value only, you are likely to be in trouble now and in the future if you persist. No more easy street.

If you have, you’ll know about the panic that ensues. Maybe you know you’ve done some link-building in the past that’s outside of Google’s guidelines, or perhaps you hired an SEO firm which wasn’t honest with their link-building tactics.

Either way, these links have to come down.

In the last six months we’ve helped over 40 clients recover from manual spam actions. In that time, I’ve read a lot of literature about the process. The amount of posts about this process might be overwhelming for someone doing it for the first time. Especially since there is a lot of false information out there.

Here is a list of the five most common myths of recovering from a manual penalty:

1) Remove all of the links that are obviously paid for

Some people in the past may have paid webmasters to host links to their own website; be it in a blog post, or in a sidebar.

Some of these links will have to be removed because they do not add value to anyone.

However, if you have a good link on a good blog that’s going to drive traffic, why remove it? Even if it says “paid” or “sponsored” yes, you can keep them.

This is why the rel=”nofollow” tag exist. Google’s guidelines for webmasters states that if you’re going to sell links, you should place a nofollow tag on them to prevent them from passing PageRank.

I run a blog myself, and know that fellow bloggers feel a degree of annoyance at being asked to remove a link. It’s like telling them “your site’s not good enough, this link is pointless”. It can sour a good relationship that had the potential to be valuable if it wasn’t already. Asking someone to no-follow a link can be much more favourable. No-following a link means they retain their link equity and is less likely to have an adverse effect of PageRank.

Myth Busted: No-following links can be more effective than removing links

2) Remove all low authority links

Nearly every article I’ve read on removing links says something along the lines of “prioritise your links by domain authority/PageRank/number of pages indexed/other random metric” and goes on to say “automatically remove anything with metric below a certain number”.

It makes my head spin.

Just because a link is on a low authority website, does not automatically mean it’s not a link worth having.

Every good website must start somewhere. A brand-new website is never going to have much authority in terms of metrics – however it might soon have a surge of readership or inbound links. How can you justify removing a link without ever even seeing the link? It’s beyond me.

Yes, a lot of harmful links could be from low authority websites; but the corollary of this statement is just as bad. Links from high authority websites are not automatically good. Many spammy websites whose links could harm you still have authority in terms of metrics, they could be a dropped domain and the webmaster is clever enough to know how to maintain that authority (I’ve seen it on many occasions).

Links don’t even have to be on spammy websites to be harmful. Links from high authority websites can be harmful too if they are seen to be manipulative. This once again iterates that links should be looked at manually before being thrown in a “remove” or “do not remove” pile.

Myth Busted: Metrics mean nothing in the world of removing links. New sites might yield good links, trusted sites might have manipulative links.

3) All brand anchor text links are fine

Another arbitrary metric to sort by is anchor text. The advice for these ones is “any link that exactly matches your brand name is fine”.

Once again, how can you assume that a link you’ve never seen is fine?

If a link is on a spam site, it has to be taken down, no matter the anchor text – it’s harmful.

However, if you know that the manual spam action is being taken out on a specific keyword, I could forgive you for prioritising those exact match keywords before anything else. However, it’s still important to look at your full link profile.

Myth Busted: The anchor text tells you nothing about the website a link is on.

4) Just run an automated tool to do it

Automated tools are good enough, up to a point. We’ve trialled a few in the past, and the best we’ve seen any of them do is identify some of the worst links from the worst websites. The lower tier of these kind of tools classifies anything from a trust-worthy website as “good”; that really doesn’t tell the full story as we’ve discussed above.

However, I have yet to see a tool that can classify your whole link profile for you. You still have to do a lot of work yourself.

Here’s a tweet that Alan Ng (a fellow Data Insights team member) sent out many moons ago that pretty much sums this up.

if you ran automated tools to get rankings and got penalised…would you then trust automated link cleanup tools to get you them back again?

— Alan Ng (@TypeAccord) November 20, 2012

Myth Busted: Link clean-up tools might be able help you start processing, but most links need manually looking at.

5) Don’t use the Disavow tool

Of all the advice, I find this one the most unbelievable.

Google created a tool which effectively lets you tell Google “I know these links are bad, but I can’t get them down” so Google can discount the links. Why wouldn’t you use this?

Many stubborn SEOs insist that using the disavow tool is “doing Google’s work for them”. The fact remains that the tool does work. Why make work harder for yourself? Branded3′s Head of Search Strategy, Matthew Jackson did an in depth review of why the disavow tool works and how you can use it.

That is not to say that the disavow tool holds all the answers. Simply throwing links into a disavow file and submitting a reconsideration request to Google probably isn’t going to yield results by itself. You have to show you’ve made an effort to actually remove bad links or change paid links to being no-followed, to keep within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Michael Auty, who also works in Branded3′s Data Insights team had this to say about Google’s disavow tool:

The Google disavow tool was never meant to be a first resort, it was meant to be a last.

— Michael Auty (@MichaelAuty) March 18, 2013

By all means, don’t be afraid to use it – just don’t expect it to do all your work for you. But by using it it can certainly make it easier to tell Google that you know you have bad links.

Myth Busted: Google’s Disavow tool works, why make a difficult job harder?

If you’re concerned about the Manual Spam message, please don’t hesitate to talk to us about it. I’m also on Twitter @ejbarnes89 if you want to chat about it.

One of the biggest devaluations Google has done was last week, shortly after Matt Cutts tweeted about taking action on a major link seller network.

In fact, we took action on several thousand linksellers in a paid-link-that-passes-PageRank network earlier today.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 15, 2013

Searchmetrics has not updated this week yet but when it does you will see lots of sites taking a big decline, we tend to monitor dozens of sites every week that we have noticed to have a spammy link profile but that were not hit by any penalties in the past year or so. Loads of these were wiped out at the end of last week by link devaluation.

Some people seem to think that link devaluation is somehow better than a manual link penalty – let me be very clear about this, it’s certainly not. We can recover anybody from a manual link penalty within 2-3 months and have done so for over 40 brands in the past six months. Rankings usually improve dramatically after the penalty is lifted and everybody is happy. If you are losing rankings week after week due to link devaluation the only solution is to place good quality natural links to counteract the losses. The problem is that it’s impossible to place enough natural links every month to rival the speed that Google is working to devalue the rest of your links.

Link devaluation is perhaps better than being hit by Penguin but it’s pretty likely that the people suffering most from link devaluation are at risk from Penguin too. We have a policy of doing a full manual link audit for all clients every few months (some are done once a week) to minimise the risk of any bad links causing problems and this should apply to every site in the world that wants to succeed in SEO. There are various tools that do an automated audit which is great for a health check but nothing beats a full manual audit to make sure you find every single bad link.

Standing still or growing?

A lot of sites have a goal of aggressively increasing SEO visits year on year but in reality if their link profile is poor then they really would do very well to just stand still this year. Look at the searchmetrics.com charts of people who were trying to grow aggressively a couple of years ago and think about whether they would have been happy to stand still.

Voucher sites are a prime example (although there is no suggestion their troubles are due to bad links or any other bad practices, or that their traffic has dropped in line with the visibility on searchmetrics) of how standing still would have been a great result. Two of the market leaders have lost a lot of visibility (according to searchmetrics) recently with myvouchercodes down from 266,000 to 13,700 since 2011 and vouchercodes.co.uk down 50% since mid-March this year.

These drops are probably due to lots of factors including how Google ranks voucher sites for brand queries (or not as the case may be) but I bet they would love to have the rankings they had two years ago.

Cue people from all ends of the colour spectrum (that’s black to white) throwing their hat into the ring and proclaiming that Google has no right to do this; they’re still getting results from that; they expect everything to be less valuable in future and you should be on Google+ just to be safe, like that little red +1 on your website’s door will make Penguin walk on by like some sort of SEO Passover.

The question that gets asked far too rarely is: “should this tactic still work?” and, in the case of press releases, I’m not sure that answer is in the affirmative.

Do press releases still work?

To answer all those questions above, many people are still getting reasonable returns from press releases, there are currently some relatively safe ways to do it and some of the big press release distribution sites such as PRWeb and PR Newswire haven’t been penalised yet.

Earlier this year, Branded3 received a response to a reconsideration request that highlighted a brand anchor text link in a press release as an unnatural link. We questioned Google about it and they decided the site was acceptable, but it seems that it’s sitting right on the borderline.

Google now regards brand anchor text as unnatural in press releases it seems. Yes, I did say brand anchor text.

— Patrick Altoft (@patrickaltoft) January 23, 2013

That should tell you pretty much everything you need to know about how Google considers press releases nowadays (either that, or everyone with an exact match domain should probably consider purchasing a new domain as you’ll never be able to build links again) – if not, this should.

Should press releases have ever been an SEO tactic?

Linkbuilding has changed fundamentally over the past year and the way outreach has performed has changed along with it. Regardless of whether online PR is replacing linkbuilding (it probably is), PR has completely replaced press releases and quite rightly, too.

If your client/company is doing something newsworthy, that’s a linkworthy asset…and the easiest way to waste that asset is to write 300-400 words that are blatantly self-promotional (don’t pretend you’ve NEVER put out a press release that reads “the leading X company in X…”) and squeeze in links to that service.

This doesn’t work for a couple of reasons:

1. News is coming from the company itself, so it becomes less trustworthy and fewer people care

2. Your news is now out there, published. What’s the incentive for a big site to break your story?

Fewer and fewer people are browsing press release sites, whereas plenty of people are reading The Verge/Guardian/*insert site you actually read here*. Where would you want your news to be published?

The sad fact is that a press release is all about your company and if you’re promoting your services in that news item, it flows so much better if the links are exact match anchor text to the correct pages on your site. Trying to batter brand terms into your sentences screams “I know about SEO and that’s why I’m doing this” and Google will hate you for it.

Matt Cutts breaking some news. Not in a press release.

Where SHOULD I be publishing my news?

When deciding where to publish your news story, think about who it’s most relevant to. If you’re a tech company, why not head over to The Verge and see if you can get featured there? If you do debt, or deal with money, try the FT. Put your news into a press release, put it into the public domain and you’re just hoping that someone finds it relevant to them.

Placing your products and/or services in front of the people that will convert is a no brainer, and you need to understand what medium your target audience operates in. The readership of press releases, for the most part, is the press itself – by putting out a press release you’re just giving the raw facts so that journalists can make it work for their readers. Not many people can get hundreds of links from raw facts, so why would you put your news out like this in a press release?

Build a relationship with someone who has a great, relevant blog, and you’ll land an awesome link with an article in front of an audience that will actually buy into what you’re selling. Try the scattergun approach with a press release and you’ll get thousands of terrible links you can’t remove AND a penalty you’ll have to explain to your client.

Publish on your own site if you have to

You can do so much more with a news story. Even if you only put it on your company’s blog, you’re at least sure that you’re not going to get penalised, you might get some long tail traffic and you can use that link in your outreach if you want to talk to bloggers about what your company is up to. Bloggers are part of the press now and it’s a fairly safe bet that whatever your niche, the bloggers who will help you to sell your products won’t be browsing PR Newswire.

This is the tactic that Matt Cutts seems to advocate – check out an interview on this topic published on Linkbuildr last month. Combine this with some awesome outreach and it could work. If you have something genuinely newsworthy, though, you might want to think about publishing it on a news site that your audience will read instead of wasting it on a press release site.

(Throughout this post, I’ve been referring to press releases as “news stories”. If these things aren’t synonymous for you, please don’t ever write a press release.)

Focusing on video games, my blog attracts some pretty random keywords, take a look at this one I found the other day:

So, I decided to check it out for myself. By using the Google image tracking filter AJ Kohn wrote about, I was able to tell this came from image search. So before long, I was searching for photos of ‘pretty emo boys’ to see what image was ranking.

The picture is of Squall, the main character from Final Fantasy VIII. It seems unsurprising, because I wrote a review of Final Fantasy VIII some time ago.

However, this picture doesn’t appear anywhere in the review. But in this paragraph I do in fact link out to that picture.

The link is to this image of said ‘emo’ pretty boy, which is not hosted on my blog.

So, why am I ranking in image search for an image I don’t even host?

Of course, Patrick Altoft comes up with the answer in about a second after seeing the question.

You don’t need to have the image on your page, a link to the image is enough for Google to think the image is there.

In fact, he wrote a post about this… back in 2007!.

So now you have it, nearly six years on, and Google still has no idea how to credit images to the right people.

I know this is a lame problem to have in the grand scheme of online marketing, but it’s not exactly clever on Google’s part. My blog receiving the traffic means that the original owners of the image are not getting the traffic. Not only that, but if a user clicks through to my site, they’ll see that the image isn’t there, and think “what am I do on this page?” and bounce right back.

If anyone else has seen this, I’d like to hear about it. I’m on Twitter @ejbarnes89 or you can leave a comment in the section below.