Penalty Avoidance

How to Prepare Your Website for a Google Algorithm Update [Case Study]

Matt Diggity — Mon, 13 May 2019 09:39:30 +0000

I hope that you’ve never had to go through the pain of being hit by an algorithmic update. You wake up one morning, your traffic is decimated, and your rank tracker is littered with red arrows. Algorithmic penalties are not a subject I like to trivialize, that’s why the case study I am about to share with you is different than most you’ve read before. This case study is a testament of faith and hard work by my agency, The Search Initiative, in light of a huge shift in the SEO landscape. Unfortunately, with core algorithmic updates you can’t simply change a few things and expect to get an immediate ranking recovery. The best you can do is prepare for the next update round. If you’ve done all the right things, you experience gains like you’ve never seen before. Even if you’ve never been hit with an algorithmic penalty, you should care about these updates. Doing the right things and staying one step ahead can get your site in position for huge gains during an algorithm roll out. So what are “the right things”? What do you need to do to your website to set it up for these types of ranking increases when the algorithms shift? This case study from my agency The Search Initiative will show you. The Challenge: “Medic Algorithm” Devaluation I want to start this case study by taking you back to its origins. There was a big algorithm update on the 1st of August 2018. A lot of SEOs called it a “Medic Update” because it targeted a huge chunk of sites related to health and medicine. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-medic-update-26177.html What Does an Algorithm Update Look Like? Let’s start with a few facts. Fact #1: Google is constantly running search experiments. To quote Google from their official mission page: “In 2018, we ran over 654,680 experiments, with trained external Search Raters and live tests, resulting in more than 3234 improvements to Search.” Here are the official numbers relating to the search experiments they ran last year: 595,429 Search quality tests – this is the number of tests they have designed to run in the search engines. Some of them were only conceptual and were algorithmically proven to be ineffective, therefore these never made it to the next testing stages. 44,155 Side-by-side experiments – this is how many tests they have run through their Search Quality Raters. The SQR team looks at the search results of old and new algorithms side-by-side. Their main job is to assess the quality of the results received, which, in turn, evaluates the algorithm change. Some changes are reverted at this stage. Others make it through to the Live traffic experiments. 15,096 Live traffic experiments – at this stage, Google is releasing the algorithm change to the public search results and assesses how the broader audience perceives them, most likely through A/B testing. Again, there will be some rollbacks and the rest will stay in the algorithm. 3,234 Launches – all the changes that they rolled out. Fact #2: Google releases algorithm improvements every day and core updates several times a year! Bearing in mind everything said above, Google releases algo improvements basically every day. Do the math… They’ve also confirmed that they roll-out core quality updates several times per year: When you suspect something is going on, you can confirm it by simply jumping over to your favorite SERP sensor to check the commotion: https://www.semrush.com/sensor/ During this period, rankings typically fluctuate and eventually settle. Like in the below screenshot: A lot of SEOs (myself included) believe that during the Heavy-Fluctuation Stage, Google is making adjustments to the changes they’ve just rolled out. It’s like while you’re cooking a soup. First, you add all the ingredients, toss in some spices, and let it cook it for some time. Then you taste it and add more salt, pepper or whatever else that is needed to make it good. Finally, you settle with the taste you like. (I’ve never actually cooked soup other than ramen, so hopefully, this analogy makes sense.) Fact #3: There will initially be more noise than signal. Once there is an algo update, especially an officially confirmed one, many budding SEOs will kick into overdrive writing blog posts with theories of what particular changes have been made. Honestly, it’s best to let things settle before theorizing: One strength we have as website owners is that there are lots of us – and the data that is collected by webmasters on forums and on Twitter is sometimes enough to give an indication of what changes you could possibly make to your sites. However, this is not usually the case, and when it is, it is usually difficult to tell if what the webmasters are signaling is actually correct. Keep an eye on those you trust to give good advice. That said… At my agency, we always gather a lot of data and evidence first, before jumping any conclusions… and you should do the same. Very shortly, we’ll be getting to that data. The Question: Algorithmic Penalty or Devaluation? When things go wrong for you during an algorithmic update, a lot of SEOs would call it an “algorithmic penalty”. At The Search Initiative, we DO NOT AGREE with this definition! In fact, what it really is, is a shift in what the search engine is doing at the core level. Put it in very simple terms: Algorithmic Penalty – invoked when you’ve been doing something against Google’s terms for quite some time, but it wasn’t enough to trigger it until now. It’s applied as a punishment. Algorithmic Devaluation – usually accompanying a quality update or a broad algorithm change. Works at the core level and can occasionally influence your rankings over a longer period of time.Applied as a result of the broader shift in the quality assessment. Anyway, call it as you want – the core algo update hitting you means that Google has devalued your site in terms of quality factors. An algorithmic shift affecting your site should not be called a penalty. It should be viewed as a devaluation. You were not targeted, but a bunch of factors have changed and every single site not in compliance with these new factors will be devalued in the same way. The good thing about all this… once you identify those factors and take action on them, you’ll be a great position to actually benefit from the next update. How to Know You’ve Been Hit by an Algo Update? In some cases, a sudden drop in traffic will make things obvious, such as this particular site that I would like to look at more specifically. But we’ll get to that in a second. Generally speaking, if your traffic plummets from one day to the next, you should look at the algorithm monitoring tools (like the ones below), and check Facebook groups and Twitter. Google Algorithm Change Monitors: https://www.semrush.com/sensor/ https://moz.com/mozcast/ https://algoroo.com/ https://www.rankranger.com/google-algorithm-updates https://cognitiveseo.com/signals/ Useful Facebook Groups: The Lab Ahrefs Insider Inside Search Useful Twitter Accounts to Follow Cyrus Shepard Glenn Gabe Marie Haynes The Patient: Our Client’s Site The client came on board as a reaction to how they were affected by the August update. They joined TSI towards the end of October. This was the ‘August 2018 Update’ we were talking about – and still no one is 100% certain of the specifics of it. However, we have some strong observations. 😉 Type of the Site and Niche Now, let’s meet our patient. The website is an authority-sized affiliate site with around 700 pages indexed. Its niche is based around health, diet and weight loss supplements. The Symptoms As the industry was still bickering, there were no obvious ‘quick fixes’ to this problem. In truth, there likely will never again ever be any ‘quick fixes’ for broad algo updates. All we had to work with was this: You can see that in this particular case, the number of users visiting the site dropped by 45% in July-August. If we look at October, when we’re running all our analyses and creating the action plan, the organic traffic looks even more pessimistic: With the niche, site and timeline evidence, we could easily conclude what follows: 100% Match with The “Medic” Update How We Recovered it – What are the “right things”? To contextualize our decision making on this project, this is a rundown of what we know and what we knew then: What we knew then It seemed as many of the affected sites were in the health and medical niches (hence, the “Medic” update). Sites across the web have experienced a severe downturn in rankings. Rankings were affected from page one down. (This was surprising – most of the previous updates had less of an impact on page 1.) A lot of big sites with enormous authority and very high-quality have also been devalued. We had speculated that this would suggest a mistake on Google’s part… What we know now ‘The August Update’ affected Read More Read More

The post How to Prepare Your Website for a Google Algorithm Update [Case Study] first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

7 “White Hat” Link Types that Can Get you Penalized in 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 09:38:32 +0000

Foreword by Matt Diggity: Very shortly, I’m going to be turning things over to Rick Lomas. Rick is an expert in manual penalty removal. I’ve been working with him for quite some time, helping folks recover from manual actions, whether they be “unnatural links”, “thin content”, etc. Starting last year with a Christmas Day spree of manual actions going after scholarship link building, we’ve seen an uncanny amount of manual penalties being triggered by supposedly whitehat seo techniques. This is kicked up significantly in 2018 as we’ve had 3 waves of manual penalty sprees already, compared to typically one-per-year. Rick has kept track of all the “white hat” link types that Google themselves has pointed out problems with. You’re about to learn all of them. What do I know about links? I confess that before 2012 I was a black hat spammer and link builder. In those days I did not care where a link came from, as long as I had more than everybody else. I was in the motorhome/RV rental niche generating leads for a UK based company. The money was amazing, my client was happy and all was well. I had VAs in India building web 2.0s and I had three PCs running SENukeXcr 24/7 using spun content. What could possibly go wrong? On my birthday, April 7, 2012, I received a message in Google Search Console (or rather Google Webmaster Tools as it was called then). It was the dreaded message that all SEOs never want to see: Unnatural inbound links to http://domain.com violate Google Webmaster Guidelines I swear my heart stopped for a few seconds. I checked my traffic and it was still OK, should I be worried? I carried on as if nothing had happened. In the back of my mind, I knew there was a ticking bomb about to explode. On April 23, 2012, the ticking bomb finally exploded and caused mass devastation. I was left with my main money site limping along on Bing and Yahoo traffic. My income had been decimated overnight. The reality struck completely when the boss of the motorhome company called and said, “What’s happened? You’ve been wiped off the face of Google. I’ve got three staff here staring at empty screens, shall I fire them?”. The aim of this post is to educate you to avoid the mistakes that I made. I’m not doing this by spouting some random ideas, but showing you some sample problematic links that have been provided by Google reviewers. I only have this evidence because I have worked on hundreds of Manual Actions since 2013. When does Google provide examples of problematic links? Sadly, not as often as we would like and certainly not when you ask them! At the time of writing the most common time to see them is when you have been through this process: You have received a Partial Match Manual Action for Unnatural Inbound links You have submitted a Reconsideration Request Google has replied saying that your Reconsideration Request has been rejected At this point, more often than not, Google will supply 1, 2 or sometimes even 3 sample links that they do not like. Here are some examples that may surprise you… 7 “White Hat” Link Types that Will Nail You 1) Non-relevant Niche Edits The idea of putting a link into an article that is already established in Google is very sound. But in this case, it seriously backfired. Here the link was on worldofwonder.net which has rather good metrics and good traffic. The link was in a sentence talking about a ‘walker’ as an aid to help people walk. The article was about Alice Walker, an American writer, and activist. Clearly, the link was completely irrelevant. So it seems that Google doesn’t like irrelevant links. Most niche edits I see are pretty tenuous links, so be careful and definitely keep them on topic. 2) Sponsored Posts This one comes as no surprise. Google does not want you to guest post, pay for posts, pay for links, do link exchanges or anything that violates their Google Webmaster Guidelines. That said, this message was meaningless as this site did not have any live links that even vaguely resembled these samples. It’s a fail for Google, but at the same time, we get the message that sponsored posts are bad. 3) Zero Traffic Sites – Site Rebuilds? I don’t always agree that a site with no traffic doesn’t pass link juice. If this was true 99% of PBNs would not work. But we know that they do work. However, in this case, the Google reviewer did not like this link at all. Looking at the site itself http://teampr.info/ it seems to be a site rebuild using content probably from Archive.org. The content is now junk and irrelevant with tons of broken images. Google has the final word, “Your site still violates Google Webmaster Guidelines”. 4) Obvious Guest Posts At first glance, KevinMD.com looks like an authority site similar to WebMD.com. The ‘Contribute’ page says: KevinMD.com is the web’s leading social media health platform, with 3 million monthly page views, and over 250,000 subscribers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and RSS. Could this be true? It’s probably somewhat exaggerated, but SEMRush does show some reasonable traffic: The link in question was not even a money keyword anchor text link. It simply stated something like, “A. Doctor is an anesthesiologist who blogs at AFitnessBlog.org.” at the end of the article. The article itself was well written and informative. The site states that it was founded in 2004 by Kevin Pho. Kevin Pho appears to be a real physician and even has his own Wikipedia page. So how could this be problematic? I think the answer can be found if we go back in time with Archive.org and see how the site looked in 2011: It seems like Kevin has been selling guest posts for many years and Google does not like it. Avoid reaching out to sites that clearly state that they’re selling links in their posts, avoid guest post author box links, etc. Or go with a vendor like Authority Builders that has already done this vetting for you. 5) Best Top Rated Links The one thing that stands out more than anything else in Google’s Manual Actions of 2018 is keywords like: best, top rated, top 10, review of the best etc. The link here is on http://uscombatsports.com and has the word ‘best’ 21 times on this particular page. Throughout this site, the word ‘best’ is completely overused. Take a look at the homepage: Although this site has some reasonable traffic, I get the impression that Google doesn’t like being told what is best! 6) Fake Social Profile Links There are two links given here. The first one Sociable.co might appear to be some sort of social network, but in fact, it is just another blog selling guest posts: The traffic on sociable.co is reasonable, but the fact that they openly advertise the sale of sponsored posts seems to be a definite No-No in Google’s eyes. The second example is on bizcommunity.co.ke. Although this Kenya-based website openly states ‘Advertise with us’ on its menu, the problem link is much more subtle than a blatant ad or guest post link: At first, it appears to be a perfectly innocent profile page with a NoFollow link to the members’ website. On closer inspection, it is evident that there is a second DoFollow link with an obvious money keyword in the anchor text. Google didn’t like them being greedy. It’s also odd how the profile name is Cathy, but then in the description, she appears to be called Rosie. I suspect this may be some software script that set up hundreds of profiles automatically, spinning the text each time. 7) Irrelevant Redirects This was the first time in five years of fixing penalties that I saw a redirect given as an example problematic link. The really worrying thing here is that there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with the domain other than it was slightly off topic. The original domain was about a specific food festival at a town in The Republic of Ireland. This domain was redirecting to a domain about kitchenware which is aimed at a US audience. There is a second link mentioned which Google refer to as a ‘spam link’. The site is now dead, but looking back to January 2018 on archive.org you can see that it was complete rubbish. The opening sentence of this post says it all: Microwave are now very popular among residence manufacturers, when time conserving tools have actually come to be necessary in the transformed lifestyles of the people. This could not have been written by a human and no human ever needs to read this sort of nonsense. So how do you avoid getting manual actions? The examples that I have mentioned above may have shattered all your illusions about link building. Links that you may have thought were white hat are being given as examples Read More Read More

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How to 91x Website Traffic – A Case Study Blueprint for 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 08:38:05 +0000

Every once in a while you run an SEO campaign that changes the way you do everything. The lessons you learn, the challenges you face, and the results you achieve inspire you to rewrite your whole SEO gameplan. This is the story of one of those SEO campaigns. As you might already know, I’m a director of a very talented SEO agency called The Search Initiative (TSI). Since coming on, we’ve encountered many wins and this case study is one of them. In a few months, we lifted their algorithmic penalty and increased traffic by 9,109%. You’re about to learn the exact steps we took to achieve this. You’ll learn: A detailed onsite, offsite, and technical SEO audit process How to repair algorithmic penalty problems A safe link building strategy for Conversion rate optimization strategies for fast growth Fair warning: the strategies detailed ahead are intense but worth it. Here’s the success one reader found after following this case study: Case Study: From 1,036 to 95,411 Organic Visitors Per Month This is the story of a campaign for a social media marketing website. Our client monetizes their website by selling monthly subscriptions to achieve better social proof on Facebook, Instagram, and other social networks. If you’ve ever been in this niche before, you’d know it’s not an easy one. It’s one of the hardest niches there is. The Challenge The client joined The Search Initiative with a heavy algorithmic penalty. Traffic at the time had decreased significantly to almost 1/10th of the previous volume. If you’ve ever had an algorithmic penalty before, you can directly connect with the frustration and annoyance of such a disaster. The main challenge was to determine what type of a penalty hit the site and to take action on getting it lifted. General Approach We started by thoroughly analyzing the data based on the tools available to us and the details provided by the client. The initial analysis included looking into: Google Analytics Google Search Console Keyword tracker (Agency Analytics) SEMrush Ahrefs Cloudflare Server settings Previous link building reports and audits Once we determined the most probable cause of the penalty, we put together a plan of action. We created a comprehensive onsite, offsite and technical audit before building the overall domain authority through our own link building strategies and traditional outreach to relevant blogs and sites. How We Did It The Dynamic Start: Backlink Review The link profile of the domain included a lot of spammy, low-value domains. Since a previous automated backlink audit (most probably done using Link Research Tools) had been performed before the client joined our agency, we started by reviewing its results. At TSI we know that if it comes to potential link penalties, especially the algorithmic ones, we have to be very thorough with the link reviews. To start the analysis, we downloaded all the link data from the following sources: Google Search Console – it’s a real no-brainer to include all the links that Google definitely has in their database. However, according to this Google Webmaster Help page, you have to remember that GSC presents only a sample of links, not all of them. Ahrefs – it is our go-to and best 3rd party tool when it comes to links. Their database is an absolute beast and the freshness of the data is also outstanding. To gather all link data, go to Ahrefs, type in your domain and select Backlinks. Now you’re good to Export it to an Excel file: By the way, make sure you select the Full Export option, otherwise, you’ll be exporting only the first 1000 rows with the Quick Export: Majestic – even though their crawler might not be as complete as Ahrefs, you still want to have as many link sources as possible for your audit. With Majestic, you’ll have to type in your domain → Select “Root Domain”→ Export Data. Now, because of the link memory (AKA ghost links – links that are deleted, but Google still “remembers”), we export the data from both, Fresh and Historic indexes. Also, ensure to set the tool to “Show deleted backlinks”. Moz and SEMrush – Similarly to Majestic, with these two we just want to have as many links as possible and complement the database, in case Ahrefs missed some. How to get links data in Moz Open Site Explorer: Your site → Inbound Links → Link State: All links → Export CSV How to get links data in SEMrush: Your Site → Backlink Analytics → Backlinks → Export. Please make sure to select “All links” option. We had all the data now, so it was time to clean it up a bit. There’s no real secret in how to use Excel or Google Sheets, so I’ll just list what you’ll have to do with all the link data prior to analyzing it: Dump all Ahrefs data into a spreadsheet. If you’re wondering why we start with Ahrefs, it’s explained in step 4. Add unique links from GSC into the same spreadsheet. Add unique links from all other sources to the same spreadsheet. Get Ahrefs UR/DR and Traffic metrics for all the links (Ahrefs data will already have these metrics, so you’re saving time and Ahrefs’ credits). Spreadsheet ready! With the spreadsheet, we started a very laborious process of reviewing all the links. We classify them into 3 categories: Safe – these are good quality links. Neutral – these are links that are somehow suspicious and Google might not like them that much – although they’re quite unlikely to be flagged as harmful. We always highlight these in case we were to re-run the link audit operation (for example if the penalty did not get lifted). Toxic – all the spammy and harmful stuff you’d rather stay away from. Some of the main criteria we’re always checking: Does it look spammy/dodgy AF? Does it link out to many sites? Does the content make sense? What is the link type (e.g. comment spam or some sitewide sidebar links would be marked as toxic)? Is the link relevant to your site? Is the link visible? Does it have any traffic/ranks for any keywords? Ahrefs’ data helps here. Is the page/site authoritative? Ahrefs’ DR helps here. What’s the anchor text? If you have an unnatural ratio, then it might be required to disavow some links with targeted anchor texts. Is the link follow/nofollow? No point disavowing nofollow links, right? Is it a legit link or one of these scraping/statistical tools? Is it a link from a porn site? These are only desirable in specific cases, for example, you’re a porn site. Otherwise, its disavow time. If it is likely that the whole domain is spammy, we’d disavow the entire domain using “domain:” directive, instead of just a single URL. Here’s a sneak peek of how the audit document looked like once we finished reviewing all the links: Then, we compared the results of our audit and current disavow file and uploaded a shiny new one to Google Search Console. We disavowed 123 domains and 69 URLs. Additionally, we also used our in-house, proprietary tool to speed up the indexing of all the disavowed links. Something quite similar to Link Detox Boost, but done through our own tool. Here’s a little screenshot from our tool: Crucial Stage 2: The Onsite Audit The next step taken was a full, comprehensive onsite audit. We reviewed the site and created an in-depth 30-page document addressing many onsite issues. Below is a list of elements covered in the audit: Technical SEO Website Penalties First, we confirmed what the client has told us and established what kind of penalty we’re dealing with. It has to be emphasized that there were no manual actions reported in GSC, so we were dealing with a potential algorithmic penalty. We searched Google for the brand name and did a “site:” operator search. If you were able to find your brand name ranking number 1 in Google (or at least among your other profiles, e.g. social media accounts, on the first page) and it’s no longer there, you know you’re in trouble. Basically, if Google devaluates or de-ranks you for your own brand, this is a very strong indicator that you’ve been hit with a penalty. With the site: operator search it’s a bit more tricky. However, as a rule of thumb, you could expect to have your homepage show as a first result returned for a simple query: “site:domain.com” in Google. Another way of confirming the content devaluation is to copy and search for a fragment of the text on your core pages. In the example below I do a Google search of 2 sentences from one of my articles (right-click to bring up a search of the text you highlight): As you can see below, Google finds it on my page and shows as a first result: If it was not the case and Google did not show me first or at all, then it would be a very strong indication that the article page or Read More Read More

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The Story of 10Beasts.com – An Uncensored Interview with Luqman Khan

Matt Diggity — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 08:00:29 +0000

About a year ago, I was introduced to a site called 10beasts.com. At the time, it was an 8-page affiliate website in the technology niche that quickly busted out of the sandbox in six-figure profitability within 8 months. December 2016, it broke $80k. This site became incredibly popular when it was featured on Glen Alsop’s Gaps.com. I mean, how often does someone go public with an affiliate website of this level? Fast forward one year… 10Beasts grew in size and earnings and flipped for over half a million dollars. And then the unspeakable happened. It got penalized with an unnatural links manual action in Google Search Console. And guess what? The penalty had recovered in 5 days. Meet Luqman Khan. Luqman is the creator, builder, and recoverer of 10beasts. In this no-holds-barred interview, Luqman discusses the entire story of 10beasts, how he got it ranked, how he sold it, and how he recovered it. In this interview we get into: The story of Luqman Keyword research Content planning Onsite optimization Backlink strategy Social signals The huge flip for $500k+ …and the miraculous 5-day recovery Resources: Tools Keyword Finder – Keyword Research CrazyEgg – Heatmap Monitor Backlinks Services AddMeFast – Social Signals Upwork Fiverr: Character Images AllTop.com Empire Flippers Guides An SEO’s Guide to Flipping Blogs NichePie Backlinko Cloud Living Gaps.com NeilPatel.com Transcript Matt: Hey, Luqman. How’s it going, man? Thanks so much for coming on. Luqman: Hey, nice to meet you, Matt. You’re absolutely welcome and thanks for inviting me for this interview. Matt: Absolutely. For the people that are watching that don’t know who you are, can you give us a brief introduction like what’s your name, how old are you, where you came from? Luqman: Well, my full name is Mohammed Luqman Khan and I’m from Lahore, Pakistan. Lahore is actually the second biggest city of Pakistan. I’m like actually, I’m born here and I’m living since I’m born here, and I have been to England, Turkey, Egypt, and a few other countries. And for now, I am still living in England as a computer science student in University of Manchester. Matt: Oh, great, awesome, so you’re well-traveled. Tell me a little bit more about the home city you grew up in. Lahore, right? Luqman: Yeah. Matt: Is that a city where people are doing like what you’re doing, working online? What’s it like where you’re from? Luqman: Well, Pakistan is actually the second biggest country who are doing the freelance work like freelance jobs are more open here in Pakistan. And what I’m doing here a lot of people are doing here. Actually, I’m inspired from a Pakistani guy called … his name is Salman Baig. He’s from another city called Peshawar. It is the north side of Pakistan. So, yeah, that’s all. Matt: Yeah, cool. And what do your parents think about what you’re doing? Luqman: Well, my parents really don’t like what I’m doing. They want me to really work. They ask me there what you do and I really tried to explain them what. They don’t know what you can do on internet. They want me to get a physical job, they want me to show doing something because the people think that I’m just a lazy guy who’s sitting in home all the time and do nothing but yeah, that’s actually what’s going on here. Matt: It’s not one of their familiar lawyer, doctor, so it’s garbage. I get that too. So tell me a bit about your background. You said you were getting a degree in computer science, right? Luqman: Yeah. Matt: Okay. And are you working on your bachelors or masters? Luqman: I’m doing bachelors yet. Matt: Okay. How are you doing there? Luqman: It’s not that great. It has nothing to do with my career, so I’m actually just doing it to get a degree to satisfy my parents, that’s all. Matt: I hope your parents don’t watch this, and if they do, I apologize for instigating this guy. Okay, cool. Have you ever had a jobby job? Have you ever worked for someone else? Luqman: I had a job in call center. It was in the sales department in some kind of product, I think security installment product in Canada but the call center was here in Pakistan. Matt: That sounds fun. Luqman: Yeah. I had it back in 2011 maybe. I don’t remember. I don’t really … yeah. Matt: Okay, all right. Luqman: So, I only worked for like one month. My back was already completely trashed of sitting on a chair for eight hours continuously. Matt: Yeah, I can agree. Luqman: It’s like … Matt: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And so, when did you get into SEO and how did that happen? Luqman: When I was a freelancer, I started, you know, I figured out online earning from an ad. It was a PTC website, I don’t know. I was I think smartphone were newly introduced back then and I was looking for a smartphone on GSMArena.com, and there was an add earn by clicking in it was a PTC website. I hope you know about PTC websites. Matt: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Luqman: There you click on an add and you get a few cents and things like that. And that was a scam website but I ended up with an idea that earning, online earning is quite a possible thing. So I started research, I learned HTML, CSS, and WordPress. By the passage of time, I started to work on upwork.com, fiverr.com. And I had a project on Fiverr, they were the client who had a website. I think Amazon associate website. That’s how I figured out about Amazon associate and by the passage of time, I figured out about search engine marketing that how you can get visitor to your website and that’s how I ended up on backlinko.com, cloudliving.com. And I saw that guy, Suman Bake, whom I told you about earlier from Peshawar. I saw him. I know he was posting somethings on his Facebook walls so it was good. Matt: Okay, so you were doing some online freelance work. You started working for a website. And you’re like, “Okay, if he’s paying me this much, how much is he making?” Luqman: Yeah. Matt: Then you went down the rabbit hole, I’m guessing. Luqman: Exactly. Matt: And where have you learned from in the meantime? Do you read blogs? Luqman: Yeah, the main learning source is backlinko.com for branding. And a few other Facebook pages, Facebook groups, sorry, and Neil Patel. You know neilpatel.com and Quick Sprout also. These famous blogs, they are really helpful. Matt: Awesome. And this was how long ago when you first started getting into SEO? Luqman: I think in 2013 or ’14. Maybe … I’m not really remember. Matt: So like maximum like four, four-and-a-half years ago. Luqman: Yes. Matt: And I would definitely say you classify as what I would call a very successful SEO. I’d say you’re probably in the 1% considering what you’ve done with 10Beasts. How does that sound to you? Luqman: Oh, thank you. Matt: Like how does that make you feel? Luqman: That sounds great. That sounds really great, man. Matt: I’m not just saying that because its coming from me… but just like you were not an SEO four years ago and now you’re … I would say you’re in the 1%. That … you’re awesome. Luqman: I really do feel awesome actually. Matt: That’s good, that’s good. You deserve it. You did a lot of hard work and I’m excited to talk about that site but not quite yet. On the way to where you are now, did you ever face any setbacks or any big issues that kind of … roadblocks that got in your way. Luqman: The biggest issue I faced was drop out of college in November 2015. I had a fight issue with my ex’s boyfriend and the fight really turned rough fight, fight. Matt: Okay. Luqman: So you know, actually, that guy, he brought a few guys to beat me up from outside the college, those who weren’t students. So the students of the college, they find out that people came outside the college to beat me, the student of the college. So the fight really turned into a big scenario like there were more than 50 to 60 students fighting in the hockey ground. Matt: Oh, my goodness. Luqman: And it really turned bad. They suspended like more than 16 students and including me and that other guy. I was suspended for five years. I cannot [inaudible 00:07:47]. Matt: Wow. So, I mean, that probably not just affected you in your school life. It probably affected every aspect of your life including the relationship with your parents. Luqman: Yeah, exactly. The relationship with my parents, my family, my teachers, so it was really bad. Matt: How did you bounce back from that? Luqman: I flew to England. Read More Read More

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How to Block Google Fonts and More: A Paranoid Schizophrenic’s Guide to Tin Hat SEO

Matt Diggity — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 13:00:18 +0000

Most folks are familiar with the various types of SEO. We have black hat SEO, where people are using techniques like content automation, backlinking software, hacked sites, and sneaky redirects in order to climb the ranks. On the other side of the equation, we have our white hatters, who like to stay within the guidelines of Google’s terms of service. Somewhere in the middle, we have the grey hats, who dabble in a bit of both. But, you may not have heard about the ever elusive band of SEO’s called the “tin hats.” In a nutshell, tin hat SEO has a lot less to do with actual “ranking” then it does with “generally being freaked the hell out about everything crashing down in a single instant and ruining everything you’ve setup for the past year.” Read about the origin of the term “tin hat” here. Tin hats are often the butt of jokes in the SEO community. They’re made fun of because of their lack of actual progress in ranking and earning due to the immense amount of time spent geeking-out about Google reading their emails, tracking their IPs, and discovering their foot prints. Laugh as you might, but we all have a little tin hat inside of us. I know I do. My personal stance on the whole subject of tracking, spying and what not: I think it’s extremely unlikely that it occurs. I think that Google has too much on their plate already. Nonetheless, as long as it doesn’t take too much of my time, I figure it doesn’t hurt to take some precautions, just in case. I mean, (as I type this from my homemade bunker with 18 months of water and rations) one can never be too safe. If you’re the same and you just want to know the essentials of how to protect yourself, you’re in the right place. I’ll be going over some of the common fears from the tin hats related to spying, IPs, document scans and more and the solutions for each. What I won’t be discussing is the topic of PBN footprints which is a whole subject in itself. For that I will refer you to Daryl Rosser’s PBN guide. That said, now onto the show: 1) How to Block Google Fonts Paranoia level: 7/10 The Problem If you use WordPress for your PBNs, like most of us do, then this applies to you. Certain WordPress themes will call upon Google and ask for a downloadable set of fonts. Not only that, but the WordPress dashboard itself tries to download the font pack whenever you login. If you look at the HTML source code when such a theme is loaded or when you’re logged into WordPress, it will look something like this… The worry is that if you’re logging into many of your PBNs from the same IP address, Google will be able to see all of the different sites that you have WordPress access to, put your whole scheme together, and then blow your shit up. To safeguard against this, people have tried many things: You could avoid using WordPress themes that have this API call, but WordPress itself calls for the fonts, so that does no good. You could try to remove the API call from the WordPress installation files, but the file that calls on the fonts is compiled and encrypted, so good luck with that. Lastly there’re plugins that claim to help, but I haven’t found a single one that can deal with the WordPress dashboard call. The Solution: Hack your “hosts” file Instead of attacking the problem at the level of your sites, simply prevent your computer from ever being able to ask for these files, period. This is performed by editing the “hosts” file of your computer. Open up this file and make sure to “Run as Administrator” (read more). Add the following line to your “hosts” file: 127.0.0.1 fonts.googleapis.com Save the file and you’re done. You’ll know it’s working because some sites that you visit are going to be uglier than normal. This is because they’re actually utilizing some of these fonts and are now unable to download them. This is the price we pay for paranoia. 2) Browser, Account, and Search History Tracking Paranoia level: 8/10 The Problem Have you ever had any of the following questions when you’re doing your work as an SEO? If I’m logged into my Google account when I’m searching, will Google be able to track all the sites I go to? If I use Chrome, will Google be able to see all the PBNs I log into? If I leave my search history turned on, will Google be able to destroy my life? The tin hat philosophy behind this is similar to the Google fonts idea. If you’re being tracked, then essentially a complete list of sites that you visit and log into, is visible to Google. There’re a couple of different solutions that I don’t quite recommend. You could always: Switch to a new browser like Safari Make sure you never login to a Google account Always clear your search history Never save cookies Use a VPN to switch up your IP whenever you log into a PBN However, this kind of defeats the purpose of using a modern browser that will save your passwords, perform autocomplete for you when you’re trying to work quickly, bookmark your sites, etc. Not only that, but you’re still not fully untrackable. Even when you’re using a VPN, a simple webtrc command can pierce the veil. Alternatively, you could use a browser like Epic Browser. This company can indeed successfully pull off what’s necessary to block you from being tracked. However, this company and others like it make money from selling data. Specifically, the behavioral data collected from your browsing experience which is especially valuable for advertisement companies. Essentially your tracked data isn’t directly readable by Google, but perhaps it might be in the future when the price is right. This is Inception level tin hit at its finest. Luckily there’s an alternative. Solution: Opera Browser with the Ghostery Plugin The Opera Browser (to date) is not affiliated or partnered with Google at all, and is actually performs extremely well compared to its other non-affiliated peers. Between Opera and Firefox, I personally felt like Opera smashed it. Browser Speed Comparison Table Courtesy of DigitalTrends.com Once you have Opera installed, download the Ghostery plugin. Ghostery is a solid plugin and privacy tool that can effectively block your browser from sending any outgoing information. Just be sure you don’t opt-in when you’re installing it or it will sell your data to advertisement agencies, just like Epic Browser. Here’s how to effectively set it up. 1) Install the plugin and go to the settings 2) Make sure the opt-in Ghostrank is turned off and the auto-update is turned on 3) Select all types of trackers and enable all of them. 3) Save 4) Go over to advanced settings and make it look like this: Now when you go to a website that instigating tracking, you can actually see what all is getting blocked by Ghostery. 3) Gmail is Scanning Your Email Content Paranoia level: 6/10 The Problem It’s a well-known fact that Google scans the content of our Gmail accounts in order to serve us up advertisements that can potentially create revenue. They clearly state this in their terms of service. Not to worry though, this process is performed algorithmically and based on filters. The only instance where a filter will trigger human interaction is in the case of child abuse/porn which, in my opinion, they have all rights to take action. Nonetheless, if you want a full-proof solution to privacy… Solution: Setup a Domain and Create Your Own Email Address Simply register a domain and setup an email address for it. This is a no-brainer anyways if you own an SEO agency, but even if you’re just starting out in SEO or stick mostly to doing affiliate SEO on your own, it never hurts to have a branded domain and your own email address. Setup basic email on this account and then install either Outlook or Thunderbird on your laptop or home computer. Personally, I prefer the features of desktop mail software over Gmail anyways. Got to love that “Do not deliver before” feature. 4) Google has access to your Google Drive Sheet and Documents Paranoia level: 6/10 The Problem The Google terms of service is written in such a way to cover all of its products when it comes to being able to mine data from you. So just like Gmail, the Google Drive spreadsheets and documents applications are open for inspection. To function properly in SEO, one needs to manage and track data such as backlinks, PBNs, etc. If you travel or manage a team, then your spreadsheets and SOPs need to be stored in the cloud. This will enable you, or anyone else, to always be able to access the Read More Read More

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