Dear Matt,

Thank you for launching the new Link Disavow Tool. Hopefully it will allow a number of high quality sites and businesses that were hit by penalties like Penguin to recover. My concern however is that it will create more confusion than already exists, as impossible as that may be. I doubt you’ll be keen to remove this tool just after launching it, but either way I’d like to propose a much simpler alternative.

First, The Problem:

Many high quality sites and businesses have been hit by massive penalties since Panda. I’ll refrain from talking about Panda from here on out since it’s not primarily related to links, but it was around that time that you guys (Google) seemed to shift from smaller, more targeted penalties and algo adjustments to massive penalties and devaluations with a great deal of ‘collateral damage’. I realize there have always been changes, but I’ve been working online full time since 2005 and have never seen anything like what’s been going on since February 2011.

I’m sure you know the SEO game a lot better than I do. Since I started out on the web, you needed links in order to rank in competitive niches. In my primary business niche, if you didn’t get links, you didn’t rank. All of us bought links, because we needed to in order to rank. I know this. You know this. Aside from buying links to rank among our real competitors, we also needed them to rank above spammers with low quality affiliate and made-for-Adsense sites. We did have a choice, but as a real business there was only one good one at the time. Buy links and rank, or don’t buy links and be outranked by competitors and spammers. Surely you already know that.

I understand you want to get rid of low quality sites in your search results. I’m all for that. I want to see quality results as much as the next guy. I’m a searcher too. But when you guys started applying negative factors to spammers and low quality sites that bought links, you also wiped out scores of high quality sites that were forced to buy links in order to outrank the spammers for the last several years. It’s not only spammers that buy links. I’m sure you know that, too.

So why are you decimating these high quality sites and businesses? For a while, I thought you were just evil people acting in your own self interest with no concern for others. But I had a conversation with a programer the other day who had another theory: It’s not that you guys are evil, careless people. You’re just so focused on fighting spam that you don’t even see the ‘collateral damage’. You see the low quality, spam sites that get taken out, and you see the big brands that continue to rank no matter what they do, and all looks ok. You don’t see the diversity that your updates are wiping out, the specialty sites that offer a better user experience than the big brands…the sites that previously needed to buy links in order to rank. In fact, regardless how good your intentions are, these small sites likely still have to buy links in order to beat the slew of big brands who are now able to rank blank pages with keywords in their title tags due to their massive authority and head start in the race.

The Link Disavow Tool

Enter the new Link Disavow Tool. Now, quality sites have a way to remove those links they used to need in order to rank…those links that you guys attached a negative ranking factor to, or used to trigger a site wide devaluation like Penguin. So if a business owner is lucky enough to have heard about Google Webmaster Tools and read about this new tool, they might have a chance at ranking their penalized site again.

But Which Links Are Problematic?

I’ve got a blog that I unfortunately haven’t posted on in over a year. It’s a real blog with no ads or affiliate links. A couple of years ago someone contacted me about doing a guest post, a completely legitimate guest post that was on topic and written by a topical expert. A few months ago I received an email from an SEO company requesting I remove the link to help their client recover from a Google penalty. How many people will use your new tool in such a way, to remove legitimate links that are helping them rank? How many sites will look to you like ‘bad’ sites, because people mistakenly request that links on them be disavowed?

I know you offer some guidance on that subject. But you and I both know that many people won’t even know your tool exists, others won’t read your guidance, and plenty people who do read it still won’t know which links to disavow.

A Much Simpler, More Ethical Solution

The current penalties are applied according to a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach. That might be ok if we were discussing hobby sites. But I talked to a guy two days ago with an awesome, incredibly useful site that fulfills an important need, especially in today’s economy. He’s about to sell his house, move his family, and begin looking for a new job due to his business being decimated by these penalties. He’s been labeled as guilty for doing what it took to compete. There are thousands of similar cases. I can only hope you guys aren’t thinking about them because you’re so focused on the spammers.

So rather than applying a negative value to links you don’t want to count, how about simply not counting them? At least you wouldn’t be penalizing high quality sites and businesses. If they were ranking solely on the basis of those paid or otherwise low quality links, then they’re going to have some work to do. But that’s unlikely. If they are a high quality site, they’ll have some high quality links too. The spammers will have less. So by simply discounting the spammy or low quality links, you’ll be ensuring that the quality sites rank above the spam sites.

Spammers will keep trying to game your algorithm. They’re going to do that anyway. They’re going to keep sending me loads of junk mail, bombard my blog with stupid comments, and even hack my sites with links cloaked for only Googlebot to see. None of that is going to change. Adding a negative factor to paid and spammy links might cut down on attempted manipulation. But it’s also decimating high quality sites and businesses.

So I understand you’re waging a war on spammers. I’m glad you are, as I don’t want to find spam when I search, and I don’t want to see spam sites outranking high quality, informative, useful sites. But the way you’re doing this now…penalizing sites that only did what they needed to do in order to compete under the system you built, using a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach, and then requiring them to use your link removal tool…is both unlikely to work well and unethical.

With all due respect, for the the sake of all humanity, please simply don’t count links you don’t like!

A while back I posted about my e-commerce site recovering from Panda. In that post I mentioned that the site suffered a 60% drop in traffic. What I didn’t mention is that despite the massive drop in traffic our sales nearly doubled that year (2011). We didn’t expect it, and it wasn’t directly due to the change in traffic. The sales increase was caused by our efforts to increase our conversion rate to offset the traffic loss.

Here’s How We Did It

We read a book called The E-Myth Revisited. If you’re running a website or business, I very highly recommend reading it. Some aspects of the book come across as rather elementary, and there were sections that could have been left out. However, the substance of the book was excellent, and it caused us to change the way we looked at and ran our business, including our e-commerce site. I’ll only describe here what applies to our increase in conversions and sales, but there are other great and beneficial reasons to read the book.

Although customers loved our site and it had a very professional design, we had never put an overall vision for it into words. It was really just a site selling products, along with useful information for our customers + excellent customer service. One of the steps in “The E-Myth Revisited” is to write down a vision for your business…what you want your business or site to convey…what you want people to feel when they land on your site for the first time or walk in your door.

A Unified Vision

Actually coming up with a single sentence for our vision wasn’t easy, but once we did it we felt we had a real purpose. We had a single goal or vision that every page on the site should attempt to achieve…a single unified feeling for every aspect of the site. So we got to work on making that happen. We made relatively simple changes to the design…a color here…a message there. But the impact was amazing. The day we made the first changes, our bounce rate was cut in half and average time on site nearly doubled. Conversions more than doubled, and sales went up by almost 100% for the year.

So despite losing 60% of our traffic from Feb. to the end of the year due to Panda, our sales were about doubled compared to the previous year. And it wasn’t due to a change in search traffic or the terms people searched for to arrive on our site. The data was consistent across all traffic sources…not only Google, but also Yahoo and Bing where we had not been penalized.

One Change, Not Many

In every previous year we attempted to maximize our sales and conversion rate. We made numerous changes to every element of our site, but each one either had very little impact or none at all. It wasn’t until we changed one thing that we saw a huge and instant impact…the vision. And that vision was based on feeling instead of product specs or direct benefits.

Why Feeling Beats Logic

When a customer arrives on your site, they’re going to instantly feel a certain way about it. If they’re looking to purchase something, they may very well decide to make that purchase or not within a couple of seconds, without even having read anything about your products. Most of them will use thinking and logic after, to support the decision they’ve already made based on how they feel about your business.

What’s more important than anything else, is that your website conveys a feeling that puts your customer in the mood to do whatever it is you want them to do.

Product specifications, direct and indirect benefits, price, etc…it all matters.  But it’s all secondary to the way someone feels when they land on your web page. If they don’t get a good feeling, if you don’t put them in the mood to buy, it doesn’t matter how good your product or sales copy is…most customers aren’t going to buy from you.

This year we focused on reducing the amount of product specification and benefit language in our marketing, and focused instead on the feeling people will have when they use our products. And our conversions are up nearly 30% over last year.

For us, getting hit by Panda and losing 60% of our traffic caused us to try to improve the aspects of our business we could improve. And it worked, extremely well. Whether your site has been penalized or not, make sure you’ve got a written vision based on what you want your customers to feel, and make every page of your site convey that feeling. You’ll be glad you did.

A Final Note

Despite our substantial increase in visitor engagement signals, our e-commerce site was hit again by Panda 20 (what most SEOs are calling the latest one) after having recovered this past March from Panda 1.0. This is yet another indication to me that Panda is not primarily concerned with what’s good for visitors. Our bounce rate is just under 20%, with ~6 pages viewed per visitor, and just over a 4 minute time-on-site average. This highlights the need for multiple traffic sources and promotional methods even for high quality businesses, in addition to keeping fixed expenses as low as possible.

On Sept. 28th Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted to announce a “minor weather report” designed to reduce rank for low quality exact match domains (EMDs), later claiming it would only effect .6% of English US queries.  As has been typical recently, there’s a lot more to this story.

In April of this year, Google launched a Panda update on the 19th, a Penguin update on the 24th, and another Panda update on the 27th (timeline here).  In addition, other dials were turned during this period to increase rank for authority sites and tighten filters for anchor text over-optimization.  Previously, Google had been updating Panda on a monthly basis.  But more recently, updates and algorithm changes have been packed together, often with misleading announcements.  This so-called EMD Update was no exception.

Update Codename: Misdirection

On most popular SEO blogs and forums, people tend to attach themselves to whatever Matt Cutts announces, making it easy for Google to point right, throw a cookie in that direction, but then run left…while everyone is still looking the wrong way and missing the real story.  Look a bit deeper into the comments or follow up posts, and you’ll find a few people yelling…but that’s not what happened to my site.  These comments are usually followed by others who have taken Google’s bait, continuing the misdirection.

While there may have been an update that targeted “low quality” EMDs, there definitely was a massive across-the-board penalty that hit non-EMDs.  Here’s proof:

Both of the above sites were long time small businesses in an e-commerce niche I follow, neither with EMDs.  (The screenshot is from Advanced Web Ranking.  The numbers on the left side of the columns are current rank.  The numbers on the right side are the positions lost or gained.  The change shown is between Sept. 27 and Oct. 1.)  Here’s another screenshot from an entirely different, non-commercial niche:

Again, neither of the above sites was an EMD and both have been around for nearly a decade.  I could post screenshot after screenshot, but they’d all look the same.

Speculation

This update, or something released around the same time, looks more like a Panda or Penguin style devaluation, and it clearly affected far more than .6% of queries.  Every query I track, and I track a lot of them, had sites that range from slightly devalued to decimated across-the-board.  It’s impossible to come to any definitive conclusions at this point in time, but to me this looks slightly more content related than link related.

Do you have a non-EMD site that was hit by the EMD update?  If so, let me know in the comments, along with any thoughts on the cause of the hit.  I’ll update this post or post again as soon as I have more information.

My lasts few posts have focused on the pros and cons of various social networking strategies, from participation on popular social networks to blogging and email list building. But I’d like to take it back to the best method of online promotion there is: SEO.

Why SEO Beats Social Networking

First, a caveat. Social networking can and often should be a part of your SEO strategy. By networking in the right places and with the right people, you’ll get links, which is a big part of SEO. For the ultimate source of traffic and conversions however, SEO will beat social networking for most online businesses.

More Effort, Less Traffic

Social networking is primarily about connecting with people in your niche, and these days it’s most often done on networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Building a following on these networks takes time. And it takes continuous effort. It’s not something you can do and then forget, and it’s not something that’s generally smart to outsource.

For many sites and in many niches, a couple thousand visitors per day isn’t all that much. I’ve built mini sites in a couple of days that have pulled in 10K visitors/day without much effort. A 50K Twitter following would take far more effort. And it wouldn’t be a one time deal. It would require continuous work. Furthermore, those 50K followers aren’t following your site. They’re following your Twitter feed. If you post a link to your site, how many of them will actually go to your site? 5% maybe? If you’re lucky. And you can’t post links to your site every day without looking like you’re only there for self-promotion.

John Aguiar said in the comments on this post that at the time he made it, his 80,000 Twitter followers were sending him 500 to 1,000 visitors per day:

I dont know the 80,000 followers I have yet Twitter sends me 500 to 1000 visits a day to my blog.

Twitter is the best free tool you have to get traffic and build your brand.

Although he’s got 115K+ followers now, he’s following 67K people and looks to spend an incredible amount of time on Twitter.

Is the time it takes to build a massive Twitter following worth 1,000 visitors per day? Surely not if you compare it to SEO. I’ve built multiple sites in a couple of days, spent less than $1,000 on link building, done nothing else to promote them, and had them each bring in thousands of visitors per day. Compare spending less than a week in total on a site and getting many thousands of new/unique visits per day to spending a year building 80K Twitter followers that gets you 500 – 1,000 visitors per day. There’s really no comparison.

Visitor Intent

Your Twitter followers are always the same people, most of whom are using the social network to communicate with friends. With search based traffic on the other hand, every single visitor is actively searching for something you’re providing. Which do you think is more likely to convert and make you money?

You can’t beat search for bringing you visitors who are more likely to convert. They’ve gone to their computers, navigated to a search engine, and typed in a query looking for something in particular. When they click on your site, they’re going there to fulfill a need at that moment in time. If you’re selling a solution to that need or providing advertising that satisfies that need, your chances of making money from that visitor are relatively high.

Most people using social networks on the other hand are not looking to make a purchase. They’re looking to communicate with friends or see what people are up to. When you send them a link to your site, they’re far less likely to purchase something or click an ad, as they weren’t looking for what you’re giving them in the first place.

Less Effort, More Unique Visitors, & Higher Conversions

SEO beats social networking because it takes far less effort to build a larger stream of unique visitors who are searching for exactly what you are providing. For most businesses, SEO traffic is more likely to convert than social traffic too.

Again, I’m not implying you shouldn’t be doing any form of social networking. If you’ve got a great site, you probably should. But in most cases, if you know what you’re doing, SEO is going to lead to more traffic and more conversions…more money.

Why SEO Beats PPC

This is a tough one, and it’s not true as often as SEO vs. social networking. PPC is also searched-based, so visitor intent is high. And because the top PPC ads are displayed on top of the organic results, especially for commercial queries, you can get more traffic from PPC than SEO.

But there’s a cost, and it’s often prohibitively high.

Barriers to Entry & Prohibitive Bid Prices

SEO takes knowledge and experience. Most self proclaimed SEOs don’t know what they’re doing, so if you do you’ve got a serious advantage over the majority of your competition. The knowledge it takes to be a good SEO is a barrier to entry compared to PPC.

Anyone can start a PPC ad campaign. It only takes a few minutes. And many new entrants are inclined to try to get into the first 3 spots above the organic results, bidding the cost per click up above profitable levels. Most long time PPC marketers know that competitive phrases are generally priced so high that profit margins end up being very low or even negative.

While SEO is also extremely competitive, if you’ve got the knowledge, the cost of getting and staying at the top is usually lower. It’s true that ranking naturally takes more time than setting up a PPC campaign, and that with certain strategies your ranking is going to be less stable than what you can achieve with PPC. But there’s no guarantee that profits from PPC will remain stable in the face of competition that can bid up the cost per click.

SEO can bring you a large, constant stream of new visitors that’s nearly free once you’ve got a great site ranking at the top. PPC will always cost you, for every single visit.

Why Content Isn’t King

This one is easy. It’s not Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will not come. It doesn’t matter how awesome your site is. Without promoting it no one is every going to see it. Do a search for anything. You’ll find plenty sites in the top 10 that have poor content.

You can get a site with poor or mediocre content to rank in the top 10 through SEO, but you can’t get a site with great content to rank with no SEO. Great content will help you rank better because it will be easier to get links to a great site. People will be more likely to spread it. But great content alone is nothing.

Social networking and PPC both have their place, and content is indeed very important. But there can only be one king…and for traffic and conversions with maximized profits, it’s SEO.

How would you like to increase your traffic and conversions?

Are you really taking advantage of social networking?

Many people think they’re covering their bases by setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter account.

But there’s much more (and maybe less!) you can and should be doing to maximize your traffic through social networking.

New In-Depth Articles

Today I’ve added three new pages to our site with in-depth information and tutorials. The first page, Promoting Your Site Through Social Networking, covers the best ways to get more visitors through smart social networking. The second page is a detailed tutorial on Enabling and Increasing Blog Subscriptions, with code examples you can copy and paste for use on your blog today. And the third page is another detailed tutorial, How to Build an Email List, again including code you can copy and paste to use on your site now.

New social media is the rage today, and it does have its place. But giving up on old school social networking is a mistake, as it not only creates long term value for your business and your visitors, but is also a great way to increase traffic with more engaged users. Check out the articles above to make sure you’re not missing out.