Serpswatch

Serpswatch
arpanphull

Serpswatch
Google Penguin, Panda, and Link Building
arpanphull

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Contents
Rap Genius: Lessons on link building 1
No Page rank update in 2013 3
Google Penguin 2.1 targets link sellers.. 5

Rap Genius: Lessons on link building
December 29, 2013
What can we learn from Rap genius? Don't try to game google? Is
that it? Almost everyone who is familiar with SEO knows that
backlinks play an important role in SERPS ranking. Rapgenius
founder's hubris ultimately got the company in trouble. The founder
was caught asking a blogger backlinks in return for promotional
tweets for his article. The blogger was smart, he published the mails
exchanged with the rap genius founder on his blog. This got Google
interested in RapGenius' link building strategy. We all know what
happened to rapgenius finally: the sites' traffic tanked and it simply
disappeared from google results. What rap genius was doing was
obviously a black hat technique. What got me interested: is there
something in it for people who want to produce great
content/product and people to write about them. Of course you
wouldn't want to engage in practices which google doesn't like. In
simple terms if you are influencing a website or blog to link to you
through some sought of direct or indirect incentive then you are
violating webmaster guide lines. Let's see an interesting twist now.
Let's see what the whistle blower got out of this. Rapgenius expose
was covered by all major sites on the web. Interestingly the whistle
blowers' blog (http://jmarbach.com/rapgenius-growth-hack-exposed)
was also mentioned equal number of times. Here's is what I found
using ahrefs tool .
1

Look at the massive link velocity. The site (http://jmarbach.com) got
close to 100 links from top notch websites within short span of 15
days. Now that's the power of awesome ( viral ) content . Can you
achieve this kind of growth by buying links? If you can then you
must be filthy rich or influential to generate this kind of impact.
2

No Page rank update in 2013
October 07, 2013
Google is hyper active these days. There is a major update every
other day. Now, Matt Cutts, the head of google spam team, has
tweeted that there will be no page rank update this year (2013).
Page rank is indicator of Google's trust in a site. Google came up
with this metric for the benefits of its users. However, Page rank
became a badge of achievement for webmaster, which they would
proudly display on their websites. Since trust (page rank) flows
from one site to another site, a back link from high page rank site
matters a lot. And PR plays an important role in SERPS - yes it still
matters a lot- the high pr sites are tempted to sell links. A link from
high PR sites (PR-8) nowadays costs anywhere in between $200
and $300 a month. Google hates this because it allows low quality
sites to show higher in the search results. May be because of this
reason google decided not to update the page rank. Now the
question is: what are it's implications? 1 ) Link Buyers will now be
confused. How to decide which sites Google trusts? Even if you
know that google trusts a particular site. How would you figure out
how much trust Google has in that site? There is a huge amount of
difference between PR 5 and PR6 domain. 2) Link sellers won't be
able differentiate themselves from low quality link sellers for similar
reasons. Does this mean that metrics DA (domain authority) and PA
( Page authority) introduced by Moz will now become even more
relevant? There is a high correlation between high DA and high PR.
In fact Moz.com has introduced its own page rank know as
MozRank. [table] Name, Moz DA, Google Page Rank
techcrunch.com, 96, 8 twitter.com, 100, 10 hipmunk.com, 69, 6
3

triptease.com, 45, 4 [/table] As you can see from the table above
high DA implies high PR. However, I could find some odd cases as
well. [table] Name, Moz DA, Google Page Rank structuresite.info ,
51, 1 [/table] If not moz then who else can quantify Google's trust?
In the absence of credible third party source Google might achieve
it's objective of confusing link buyers and seller. Why not simply kill
the PR tool? the decision to not to update PR is related to on going
battle against link sellers?
4

Google Penguin 2.1 targets link sellers..
October 06, 2013
Google Penguin 2.1 is primarily targeted at link sellers. Google
takes link buying very seriously. Site which engage in link buying
and selling practices were hit hard during this penguin update. We
found that many high PR sites were the target of this update. Here
is what we found after the Penguin Update. [table] Domain
Name,Old Pr,New PR,PR Drop famfamfam.com,8,4,-4
aibworld.net,6,3,-3
extremeprogramming.org,7,3,-4
sociosite.net,7,3,-4 getk2.com,8,4,-4 linuxnews.co,7,3,-4 [/table] By
looking at their website one could easily make out that these sites
were engaged link selling business. Now as webmaster should
you be worried if you had links coming from one of these
sites? What I have seen in the past is that links from penguin sites
are no longer valued by Google. However, if majority of your link
profile is comprised of penguin 2.1 hit sites then you are going to
experience a traffic drop. The drop in traffic is going to be
proportional to value your site derived from these backlinks. In
simple terms if 90% of your site’s traffic was because of these links
then you are going to see 90% traffic drop. If you had bought link
from one of these sites are you going to experience a penalty?
Again I feel the answer is no. However, the traffic drop may seem
like penalty. But actually there is no real penalty. Google has said
several times that external links can’t harm your site. Were you a
target of this udpate? Did you experience any traffic drop today?
Food for thought: How does Google figure out if site is engaged in
link selling? There is still some chance that these could be editorial
links.
5