6 Ways to Create Rocket-Fuel Content for Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is one of the fastest growing technology segments in business, and analysts predict it will grow to a $4.6 billion industry by 2016. But marketing automation can’t run without content. 
More than three-quarters of those invested in marketing automation say that developing processes and content is instrumental to success with the technology. Without content, there’s nothing to send to potential and current buyers, nothing relevant to plug into specific nurture tracks, and nothing valuable to exchange for their contact information.
So how can marketers create optimal content for marketing automation — the kind of content that spurs action, moves potential buyers toward purchases, and gives your marketing and sales teams insight into your buyers?
Here are six ways to align content marketing and marketing automation:

1. Target Specific Segments and Personas

Personalization is one of the best ways to drive engagement with your brand and interest in your products. It’s even been shown to increase content consumption by 113%. Marketing automation software allows you to collect demographic and firmographic information about who your buyers are as they enter your database. The trick, then, is to use this information to identify people by persona, and create segments and nurture tracks that allow you to deliver highly relevant content to those people based on the information you’ve gathered.
With that in mind, every piece of content you create should target at least one persona or theme. Once you have the relevant content, you can deliver that content to the right people using marketing automation.

2. Align Content to Sales Stages

Using scoring and deep-dive analytics, marketers are able to track and monitor behavior as their customers move down the sales funnel. Similar to aligning content to the interests and needs of your personas, creating content for specific sales stages allows you to automate the delivery of timely information to buyers. And it works. The best content marketing companies are 25% more likely to have a process in place for aligning marketing content with marketing and sales funnel stages.
Combine sales-stage specific content with scoring, and you have a powerful way to move your buyers efficiently toward purchase.

3. Create Different Kinds of Content

Part of personalization is understanding buyer preferences – and understanding how these preferences change based on buying stage.
This means knowing which types of content work best for each buyer, and when they work best. Different types of content have different strengths. For example, webinars are great for explaining new product features or for covering in-depth topics. Infographics capture attention, and can be used to deliver data-heavy information in a compelling way.
And don’t be afraid to take risks when it comes to this stuff — there’s no hard-and-fast rule here. For example, infographics are normally considered great early-stage assets, but KISSmetrics used this format to deliver case study data. Testing different content types allows you to understand your buyers and how they like to consume information—invaluable knowledge for optimizing your marketing efforts.

4. Write Better Emails

On any given day, the average customer will be exposed to 2,904 media messages, will pay attention to 52, and will positively remember only four. If you’re not delivering well-written, compelling messaging to your buyers, they won’t engage with you or remember your product.
High-quality emails that compel buyers to take action are crucial to your success with this platform. Every email, after all, is content, and should be approached with the same standards as your blog posts, ebooks, and other assets. To create better emails, make sure you test subject lines, keep copy concise and punchy, and include focused calls-to-action.

5. Get Teams on the Same Page

If your demand generation team and your content-creation team aren’t on the same page, you’re going to have trouble implementing the tactics mentioned above. Make sure everyone understands exactly how personas and sales stages are defined — otherwise, the content won’t be relevant or useful.
Along these same lines, define your processes for incorporating new content assets into nurture campaigns and outreach efforts. Without them, your marketing team will be missing opportunities to engage users with fresh content.

6. Track What Matters

Analytics are the cornerstone of intelligent modern marketing; they are the quantifiable metrics that CMOs and CEOs want to see. Marketing automation and deep-dive analytics make it possible to understand how exactly your marketing initiatives drive new names and profits for your organization. This is no small thing — in fact, these tracking capabilities are the basis for modern marketing.
Make sure you’re tracking which content assets — emails, whitepapers, blog posts, landing pages, etc. – drive the results that matter to your organization. Unless you’re measuring your major successes and/ or your biggest failures, you won’t be able to optimize marketing automation technology or content strategy.

6 Reasons Why You Need A Marketing Dashboard For Your Business

Clive works at Cyfe. They offer a marketing dashboard that takes all of the guess work out of creating their own visual displays. Click here to learn more about us and to get a free trial.

When it comes to online marketing, your target market is active in many places – from the social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to search engines such as Google.  Many business owners are realising that they have to engage in all of the popular spaces online – neglecting one, can mean that your competition may dominate in that sphere, and that you’re simply missing out on sales.

And so you dutifully engage in all of the popular marketing channels online…
However, after a while, things can get confusing.

If you have a lot going on it can be really difficult to manage your marketing effectively, and if you don’t know how successful each marketing channel is being, you can’t possibly know where best to spend your time.

What Is A Marketing Dashboard?

A marketing dashboard is simply a graphical interface that allows you to see an overview of your entire marketing strategy – in a single view. By providing a simple interface through which you are able to view your key performance indicators at a glance you can cut out all of the data that you don’t need.

It is often said that the problem with Analytics is that there is too much information and inexperienced marketers can either get buried or just completely fail to take advantage of the data that is actually useful.

If you set up a dashboard thoughtfully, with your own goals in mind you can avoid these pitfalls – sounds good right? Let’s look at some specifics though; here are six reasons why you need a marketing dashboard for your business.

1. You See the Bigger Picture

When you’re dividing your attention between various marketing campaigns, it’s often hard to see the wood for the trees.  The philosophy is to keep shovelling and not worry about it.

Your hard work will mean more visitors and more sales, and you will be invariably right in that respect. However, why all the unnecessary hard work? A marketing dashboard forces you to zoom out and see your overall marketing strategy holistically. A marketing dashboard forces you to see everything from a distance.

Marketers are typically obsessive over details, and that’s not a bad thing, but sometimes we miss the big picture – while being able to see it makes us better at getting results.

2. It Makes Your Marketing More Efficient

When you look at the big picture you will notice trends and patterns that were out of view prior to your dashboard usage. These insights will allow you to allocate more of your energy and budget to the more effective campaigns, which makes your marketing more efficient.

Marketing isn’t just about seeing what works; it’s about realising what doesn’t work and where trends lie. If you notice that a traffic source is declining, then either the strategy needs to be tweaked, or perhaps efforts in that channel need to be withdrawn, so that your resources can be spent in more successful areas.

Trends are far easier to spot on a line graph than looking at a list of numbers. When you compare different sets of data in a comparative line graph, you can focus on the important trends and spot patterns and relationships that you might otherwise miss.

Needless to say, the true power of spotting trends is that they enable you to make predictions. For example, you may be seeing an upward trend in sales generated from Facebook.  From that analysis, you may decide to double your advertising budget for the Facebook platform.

If changes happen slowly you might not notice a gradual decline in traffic from Twitter (for instance), but your dashboard will make it obvious and give you time to plan ahead by finding new alternatives or adjusting your Twitter strategy.

3. Monitor and Compare Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

If you manage a website, your KPIs are likely to be numbers of visitors and sales generated.  A KPI line graph can show you a comparison of the two.  You can see if there are any trends with these two.

Which KPIs matters the most will depend on your business and there are plenty of things you might choose to track. The charts above show a helpful visualisation of how your conversion rate and your conversion volume might interact and how different traffic sources might convert differently.

If your sales suddenly spike but your overall conversion rate slightly drops you can derive that whatever caused your traffic space sent a slightly lower than usual quality of traffic, or maybe that your website is not well targeted for that particular traffic segment..?

4. Which Marketing Channels are the Most Effective?

When your website is taking in traffic from several sources, you need to be able to track :
•    how many visitors each channel brings in
•    how many sales are generated from each channel
•    the resulting conversion rate using the above two metrics

You can plug this data into your dashboard, and then compare each channel to one another. It’s simple really, but if you can directly compare traffic volume, cost of traffic and sales/revenue generated you can easily see which marketing channels are really worth your attention.

5. Conversion Rate Marketing Funnels

A marketing funnel graphic shows you a breakdown of your visitors / leads versus customers, and repeat business.  A graphical representation of this data (literally as a funnel) can be quite a striking view, and a focal point that you can shape your improvements in conversion rates around.

This way of viewing your data allows you to quickly see which areas of your website are underperforming, where you are losing the most conversions and therefore where you could perform the easiest improvements.

6. Find Out More About Your Target Market

The more you know about your target market, the better you can serve them.  The better you can serve them, the more sales you’re going to make through repeat sales, word of mouth and recommendations.

A marketing dashboard can give you insights into your target market:

•    where do they spend the most time online?
•    do they respond well to email marketing campaigns
•    or are they more active on Facebook?
•    are Twitter users more likely to buy on your site than Google Adwords referees?

This kind of information can help your tailor your future marketing strategies and help better serve your target market.

You may have an unusually low click-through rate on your email marketing campaign, but strong engagement on Twitter.

While the low click-through rate for your mailings may indicate that the content of the email could be improved, it might simply indicate that your demographic is far less likely to respond to email newsletters in the first place.

The very same market may be far more active on social networks.

This kind of comparison is made a lot easier with a marketing dashboard and without one you may miss the indirect comparison and hence the trend. In this scenario you would likely want to tone down the email marketing and focus on other ways to make contact.

Summary
In simple terms, a dashboard is a tool to help you see what you need to see quickly and efficiently. Certainly you could check all of this stuff via analytics and your various other data sources, but having it in one place saves time.

To really make the most of the opportunity it is important that you only view actionable data. Filter out any stats that don’t have the potential to give you actionable insights.

In other words; when you view a stat, ask yourself “so what?”

You should aim to come up with a simple set of decision questions around each data point. Or in other words: “if this then that”

For example:
If my Twitter traffic does not consistently increase over time then I will reconsider my posting schedule and try alternative platforms.

5 Steps to Build an Authority Website

Dan Kaufenberg is a successful search engine marketer. He spends his time building niche websites and researching the newest aspects of search engine optimization, search engine marketing and website development. Dan is the main contributor to the Build a Website Free Blog and can be found on Google +.

Building a website that can be considered “authority” takes some time. However there are some factors that if implemented correctly can influence the time it takes your website to become an authority. These 5 main contributing factors are the same basic factors for building any website, but the approach is different. Let’s take a look at five steps and the method to build an authority website.

Step 1.Website Creation and Branding

If you haven’t already decided how you are going to build your website you need to pick a builder. WordPress is one of the leading ways to create a website and for this process I recommend it. However if you are familiar with another web builder, you can use any option you like. When building your website consider these factors.

• Create a brand ensure that people know what your website is about when they arrive.
• Create a logo that is memorable and professional.
• Choose an effective color scheme that will tie together with your brand and logo.

 
Branding your website/business is important. Before you get started building your website you should have an idea for a logo, color schemes and your overall brand image. This will ensure when your website becomes an authority website for your niche, people will recognize your brand.

Step 2.Keyword Research

We all know we have to evaluate our competition and research effective keywords. Building an authority website is no different.  Keyword research and content creation go hand in hand, but there is a specific process you will want to follow when establishing authority in your niche.

• Start off with low competition keywords and build a medium to large bank of content, around 30 articles.
• Starting with low competition keywords will give you a grace period that allows you to still rank for your content.
• Now that you have started to build desired keyword densities for your website you can move onto medium competition keywords.
• Now focus on writing 30 articles for medium competition keywords. These articles will not only do okay in search, but they will build more on the overall keyword densities for your websites niche.

 
There is a time factor that needs to be considered, especially for your medium competition keywords to rank in search. The purpose of this process is to establish your website and build your image of what your website is about to search engines.

Step 3.Content Creation

As I said before “keywords and content go hand in hand”, but there is a new method to content creation that you should focus on. Google and other search engines are moving into a semantic world. What this means for you is that if you properly theme your keywords and content in your articles, you will rank better. There are a few tricks to ensure that your content is properly themed and will do well in search.

• First you need to be at least a pseudo expert when writing about a topic. What I mean by pseudo is that if you are not an expert, do your research. Experts use certain theme words when they write about a topic and search engines look for that.
• A good rule of thumb is to have 5 different theme words that you can focus on and use them at least five times in your content.
• Don’t forget about your main keyword either, do not stuff, but use it any place in the content that is relevant.
• The main idea is to create quality content, but as we all know beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. So quality is determined by content that helps someone solve a problem, learn something new and has high re share value.

 
Following the golden rules of content creation will show your customers and the search engines that you are an authority in your niche. You will rank higher, get more return visitors, more click through potential and higher and higher rankings.

Step 4.Social Networking

Social networking is a big deal and we all know its potential. However there are some best practices to follow when using social networks.

• Build a presence on the main networks. I would focus on Google +, Facebook and Twitter, these networks will have the biggest potential for building your brand and your websites authority.
• Focus on Google + and build a page for your website. After the recent updates from Google your page on plus could outrank your main website if you have a large following. Plus is a huge factor that Google uses to determine what content is relevant.
• Use Google authorship markup for all of your websites authors and build their profiles around your brand. Using authorship markup will give your website a boost, if your authors build a following.
• Use Facebook as a place to be human. Facebook is a place for your business to relate and not to sell. You can share your content and do some selling, but followers on Facebook like pictures and the more interesting aspects of your business.
• Use Twitter to update your followers on new content and anything that revolves around your brand.

 
Yes, you can use other networks. The main three I use are Pinterest, Digg and Stumble Upon, these networks are all great sources of traffic and are targeted for images, news and new websites. Getting highly targeted links and traffic from social networking is essential to start building your brand and establishing your businesses human side.

Step 5.Building Back Links

Building a large diverse back link profile is still as important as it was five years ago. There are just a few factors that have changed and will help build authority in your niche.  Relevance to your niche is the most important factor for building back links and if you stray off topic you could be penalized. Make sure when building back links you follow some of these best practices.

• Maintain relevance when writing content for guest posts and while choosing which domains you offer guest posts to.
• Stray away from using too much relative anchor text, because it is now seen as spammy. Instead keep your content relevant to your keywords.
• When commenting on other posts and forums leave a good comment. Your comment should be helpful, add to the article and help people recognize your experience and brand. Use your keywords in the comment and it will help search engines understand the back link you get from commenting.
• No more link farms and link exchanges, unless they are relevant and have useful content that adds to your niche. Even though these methods can be helpful, they can also be very harmful, so I suggest avoiding them.
• Getting high page rank back links will help speed up indexing of your website and will give your site a larger boost in rankings, just remember to maintain relevance.

 
Back links are still very important, but they need to be done right, straying away from these best practices can put you further behind then when you started.

Putting it all Together

While you may think that all of these elements are the same elements that you read in every SEO article, there is a subtle difference. When implementing these five main factors, if done right, will allow your website to build its authority faster and maintain your presence as an authority for years to come.

Building authority takes some time, but it can be sped up through the same simple methods that you would use when building any website. A good looking responsive website, good keyword research, content that is helpful, a presence on social networks and maintaining relevance when building back links, are all the elements needed to build your authority.

Top 5 SEO Actions in 2014

SEO has changed drastically during the last few years. Especially last year, since Google’s latest updates. 2014 is the year where even more effort is needed in the field of SEO for a company to remain competitive on the internet.

A company has to pay attention to the following 5 elements in order to succeed nowadays in SEO.

1.On-page optimization

One of SEO’s most important elements has been, and still is, the website’s optimization, making the website friendly to search engines and all of its pages visible in SERP’s. A website has to be designed carefully all the way from the beginning, so that it is more easily indexed by search engine crawlers, because there are so many factors that may affect an SEO-friendly website.

On-page optimization is not a procedure that should be performed solely during the website’s original design, but is an ongoing process that must be made and checked at regular intervals. The most important issues related to on-page optimization are meta tags,  URLs, usability, navigation, index options and nofollow, heading tags, sitemaps, redirects, multi-language issues, pagination, canonical URLs, duplicate content, robots.txt, schema snippets, sub-domains, folders and others.

Many Content Management Systems (CMS) present serious weaknesses on the context of Search Engine Optimization, that’s why special attention is needed on behalf of Webmasters. In order to solve similar issues related to your website, you can use the WSA Spider tool from WebSeoAnalytics.

2.Social Media Signals

Social Media Signals are gaining more importance as they bring more traffic to a website and also increase Domain and Page Authority. One should not neglect the fact that the primary goal of search engines is to provide the best possible results to the end user. Therefore, it is reasonable for a web page that goes viral on Social Media to be important for search engines. Despite the fact that most Social Media sites have nofollow links, search engines use them to locate popular web pages. The most important social media signals for SEO are Shares and Likes on Facebook, links to Tweets and Retweets on Twitter, Shares and +1 on Google+.

3.Content

A website’s content is becoming more and more valuable for the site’s web traffic, as well as for SEO. The fact that ‘Content is King’ as believed by the SEO practitioners is confirmed every day. Nowadays, if a website has no blog section and it is not updated daily by professional columnists, then it cannot keep up with the rising competition. Good articles tend to attract visitors from a variety of sources like social media and organic traffic. That happens because great content tends to get shared more often (social media) and at the same time it is more likely to attract a high amount of backlinks (organic traffic).

4.AuthorRank

Google+ is becoming increasingly important in Google’s Search Engine Result Pages. Someone can become a Google+ user easily, as he only has to create a Google account and configure his own profile. Every author then can link his own articles with Google+ by using authorship markup and tag rel=author.

Active participation in Google+ (interaction with other users, comments, shares, +1 etc.) seems to have a positive influence to a website’s rankings. Articles by authors with higher AuthorRank have shown high rankings in Google’s result pages (But we must be extra careful here because correlation doesn’t equal causation). Nevertheless, Google+ can be used to improve an authors’ AuthorRank. This could be achieved by growing contact circles, by contributing constructively with aptly comments, valuable links and interesting content similar to that of other users.

5.Mobile

According to a 2014 research, 25% of all web traffic is coming from mobile devices (tablets and smartphones). It is evident that this traffic cannot be ignored and that websites should be mobile-friendly.

There are two common approaches to follow in order to make a site mobile-friendly:

• Create a distinct website for mobile users which is accordingly designed, easier to search and which is loading faster, thus decreasing bounce rate. This should usually have a distinct URL e.g. m.mydomain.com.  A drawback to this approach is the fact that a visitor could search for information not available in mobile versions of the website (some mobile versions of specific websites omit several pages which are available in desktop versions).

• The best approach for the majority of websites is the “responsive design”. Following that approach, a website is able to recognize the end user’s device (e.g. if the user has access through a laptop/PC or a smartphone) and adapt its appearance depending on the end user.

Conclusion

2014 is a year with many challenges for the SEO community. On-page optimization has always been one of the most important elements for SEO. Social Media Signals have also gained more significance especially in the last few years, and Content that helps users to meet their needs, as well as improving SERP’s position for various keywords is necessary in a competitive environment. Moreover, AuthorRank is the new ‘hot trend’ in SEO and every website should emphasize in this part of optimization. Finally, having a mobile-friendly website is vitally important, in a world where about 25% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices.

Concluding, as search engines are getting smarter, old SEO techniques are considered to be deprecated and harmful. The aforementioned 5 elements are the proper recipe for successful SEO in 2014.

How to Avoid Google Penguin Penalty

7 top tips to avoid a Google Penguin penalty in 2014 –

Digital marketing strategist, Kunle Campbell, talks you through his 7 must know facts about the Google Penguin recovery for 2014. Find out what your SEO strategy should be addressing, so that you can have a great new year free from Penguin attacks.

With 2 major version rollouts and a total of 5 updates since 2012, it would be prudent to say that Google Penguin has shaken the SEO world over. Going forward though, one of the key questions your 2014 SEO strategy should address is how to Penguin proof your link building strategy or on the other end of the scale for less unfortunate webmasters; how to recover from a Penguin penalty that has been wrecking havoc on your rankings.

I have paid keen interest to each Penguin update over this period because I have had to carry out backlink audits for websites with suspected cases of the Penguin penalty and for the analysis of sudden dips in traffic due to manual unnatural link penalties.

I have witnessed both Penguin recoveries as well as non-recovery cases (as a result of impatience, panic or the outright refusal to change link-building tactics). I am aware of the recovery process and in this article; I aim to flesh out how to detect a Penguin penalty (Vs. a manual penalty), how to prevent getting hit by penguin, how to recover (with detailed link clean up instructions) and to debunk certain myths about Penguin.

Background: pre-Penguin

Right from Google’s inception as a search engine, web link spam has been rife and reached its peak in 2011. What I find quite paradoxical is that link spam spawns from a flaw in Google’s ground-breaking PageRank algorithm, which has actually positioned Google ahead of all other search engines because of its ability to deliver the more relevant results to searchers.

Google’s PageRank algorithm counts the number and quality of backlinks to a page to roughly determine the page’s importance and rankings, based on anchor link text. The key issue Google faced ‘Pre-Penguin’ was determining the quality of backlinks. Dealing with backlink spam has been and to a degree still is a cat and mouse game between Google and spammers. Do you recall how Google bombs worked?

Pre-Penguin, frustrations about the growing number of spammy websites on Google’s search results started to build up in both the white hat SEO communityand general public despite updates such as Florida (2003), Big Daddy (2005), Caffeine and even Panda (from 2011). Black Hat spammers almost effortlessly had their way up the rankings for top-tail ‘money key-phrases’ that raked in a lot of rewards.

Penguin rolled out to fight webspam

Google introduced the Penguin update in April 2012, as a machine-learning algorithm to uncover spammy backlink profiles that not only devalues the impact of spammy backlinks’ on rankings (as a previous Panda update did) but also penalizes websites employing low quality backlinks by de-ranking them.

Penguin is actually a software program run at specific times (more on this later) that detects spammy patterns of backlink optimisation across large data sets that are not obviously detected by the human eye or crude algorithms.Web pages with “Full match” patterns of backlink spam are automatically penalized each time it is run and websites that have cleaned up their acts regain rankings over each update.

Now that we have covered the background and basics; here are 7 must know facts about Google Penguin to help anyone with recovery and to prevent getting hit by the penalty in the first place:

1. Penguin updates are scheduled

Penguin is rolled out at specific times of the year – the trends from the last 18 months show rollouts specifically: in May and October. Here are the last 5 updates:

Penguin 1 »»» Page Level Update

• (Update 1) April 24th, 2012 (impacting around 3.1% of queries)
• (Update 2) May 25th, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
• (Update 3) October 5th, 2012 (impacting around 0.3% of queries)

Penguin 2 »»» Domain

• (Update 1) May 22nd, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
• (Update 2) October 4th, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)

The next Penguin Update is excepted sometime in May 2014. What I am uncertain about at this point is whether it would be a 3rd update of Penguin 2 or whether is would be the first Penguin 3 update.

Whatever the case, it means that websites hit by previous Penguin rollouts, should be currently cleaning up their acts and rebuilding credible backlinks in preparation for the next update in May 2014.This should not be confused with receiving a manual action notification in Webmaster tools about a partial match manual penalty that can occur at anytime.

2. How to detect a Penguin penalty

To set the records straight, if your site has been hit by Penguin, Google will never notify you – you would need to check your website’s traffic as well as carry out a series of other checks which I have outlined below.

Step 1: Check your traffic and significant keyword drops:

The first step for a Penguin penalty diagnosis is to check if the sudden drop in your website’s traffic coincides with any of the dates above. If the traffic drop coincides with the Penguin update dates, you should check what keywords you have stopped ranking on Google for. The best way to check would be to use Google Webmaster Tools and any rank tracking software you use.

Step 2: Anchor text diversity

The next step would be to check your anchor text diversity - this is the ratio of ‘brand name and non-money’ anchor text to ‘money’ keyword anchor text links to your domain. ‘Money’ keywords refer to key phrases you’re trying to get rankings for, as opposed to more natural-looking blend anchor text such as: YourWebsite.com, www.yourwebsite.com, your business or brand name, your website name, ‘click here’, ‘here’, etc). Remove’em is an excellent free starter tool to use for quick analysis of your anchor text backlink ratio. Although Remove’em isn’t the most accurate of tools, it will help you sniff out anchor text over-optimisation at a top level prior to carrying out a more in-depth analysis using comprehensive backlink analysis tools like Majestic SEO, SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs. Here is an example from a recent penguin victim, bannerbuzz.com. Remove’em shows 74% of all backlinks and 13% of all domain backlinks have the anchor text ‘vinyl banners’ – this immediately flags out ‘vinyl banners’:

Further investigation using Majestic SEO’s fresh Index shows that bannerbuzz.com has a total of 10,296 external backlinks from 826 referring domains.

Delving deeper in Majestic SEO’s ‘Anchor Text’ tab, you would find that search phrases ‘vinyl banners’ and ‘vinyl banner’ together account for 1,877 backlinks from 213 domains; which accounts for about 25% of all domain links and about 18% of all backlinks. If you take an even closer look at the 553 referring IPs, their situation look more dire – 213 domain links from 553 servers, which come to approximately 40%.

This along with elementary data from Remove’em confirms anchor text over-optimisation.Another tool I highly recommend is Link Research Tools – Quick Domain Compare, which helps compare your anchor text diversity with that of your competitors currently ranking for search phrases you have lost rankings for. This should give you a more comparative anchor link ratio analysis more specific to your niche or industry to help you understand the severity of your anchor text link over-optimisation.Websites’ that I have seen hit by the Penguin penalty typically have a 2:1 (or more) of all ‘money’ anchor text to ‘brand’ total anchor text link ratio. To stay on the safe side keep each ‘money’ anchor text links around the 5% of total links mark and check on your competitors’ anchor text link ratios.

Step 3: Site wide link ratio

In order to further investigate anchor text ratios, it is quite important to check and distinguish between domain links from total backlinks. A quick check in Google Webmaster Tools ‘Link to Your Site’ report tab would reveal linking domains and the number of links from each domain. A more detailed report can be generated using backlink analysis tools such as Link Research Tools, Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs.

Looking again at the bannerbuzz.com backlink profile, 1,877 backlinks as compared to 213 domain links indicates a significant number of site wide links. Which together with money anchor text links indicates a negative backlink profile.

Step 4: Check domain authority and trust flow

Another optional check might be your Moz Domain Authority and Majestic Trust Flow. Moz’s domain authority measures the predictive ranking strength of a domain and Majestic’s Trust is a weighted average of the number of clicks from a seed set of trusted sites to a given domain. I would take both figures with a pitch of salt, as further analysis is required to validate their figures.

Step 5: Link health breakdown summary

If you do have the budget, I would suggest that you use Link Detox for a detailed analysis of your backlink profile to identify high and moderate risk backlinks.

3. How to identify unnatural links

Using tools to identify a potential unnatural link pattern is half the battle; manually analysing each link is the second half. Here are steps to identifying Unnatural links:

Download your backlink report from various sources. My top recommended sources are:

1. Google Webmaster Tools,
2. Bing Webmaster Tools
3. Majestic SEO and
4. Link Detox Tool

In Majestic SEO, scrutinize backlinks from domains with low citation and trust flow. Whilst in Link Detox, high, moderate and low risk back links are automatically flagged. The types of links that are likely culprits to a Penguin penalty are:

1. Spammy blog-roll links
2. Link networks – private and public network
3. Comment spam
4. Classified spam
5. Forum signature spam with exact march
6. Article marketing links with signature spam at the bottom of articles
7. Free for all directories
8. Exact match anchor text ‘widget app’ links
9. Sitewide backlinks

List all the links and domains that fit the above profile and endeavour to get their contact details.

4. How to clean up your act

A thorough link clean up begins with process documentation; having listed all the medium/high risk backlinks, their domains and contacts, endeavour to ask for the outright removal of the links when you contact the domain owners. It is best to remove backlinks from an entire domain rather than from only specific pages. If you used an SEO company and consultant for link building in the past, try and get in touch with them to assist you in the link removal process. Review all old SEO reports to verify sources of links you are looking to remove.It might come to a surprise to you that some SEO agencies ran link farms and link networks, so the removal of the links might be more straight-forward than you would think.

If all fails and you would be left with a list of domains you have been unable to remove your backlinks from – this is when to use Google’s Disavow tool. I would strongly advice disavowing an entire domain rather than a specific webpage as you should really disassociate the entire domain from your site’s backlink profile.Remember to focus on link removals first before using the Google Disavow tool in Webmaster Tools and to note which sites have been contacted and how they were contacted. Do not bother with a resubmission request unless you received a manual penalty notice in Google Webmaster Tools.

To reiterate the link clean up process:

1. Remove your bad link first
2. Disavow
3. Use reconsideration request in Webmaster Tools only if you received a manual penalty notice.
4. If you were hit by Penguin – wait for the next Penguin update
5. If you were hit by a manual penalty then you could regain rankings in days, weeks or months

5. Penguin is algorithmic and not a manual penalty….but

Google Penguin just like Google Panda is a computer program that is separate to Google’s core algorithm. It is constantly learning (through artificial intelligence) and programmed by a bunch of PhDs and really smart engineers that roll it out into Google’s core algorithm at specific scheduled dates. It more like a flush of the system based on specific machine learning rules that aim to sniff out web link spam.

A manual unnatural link penalty on the other hand is flagged by Google’s core algorithm, which is constantly running. The moment it picks up unnatural looking spammy backlinks, it penalizes your site and sends a manual penalty notification to Google Webmaster Tools. If you clean up your act, you are allowed to submit a reconsideration request that is forwarded to a member of Google’s web spam team. They then re-evaluate your domain and decide if the penalty should be lifted.

There’re exceptions though…according to Moz’s Dr.Pete, bigger companies could use the reconsideration request to jolt their brand websites back into Google’s SERPs from Penguin penalties without having to wait for the next Penguin update:

“It depends on how big you are. I've seen companies use reconsideration as a back-channel in some cases where the penalty seemed algorithmic, and they were big enough for Google to communicate with them. I suspect it's not the "approved" method and it won't work for most of us.

6: Penguin is a site-wide and not a page-by-page penalty

The following statement made by Matt Cutts in this video interview with Leo Laporte prior to the launch of Penguin 2 in May 2013, below seemed to have caused confusion in the SEO community:“The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the homepage of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper.”

As Barry Schwartz rightly pointed out in this article, Penguin has always impacted an entire website and not just its home page; Matt Cutts’ reference to ‘Google looking at just the homepage of a site…and going much deeper’ refers to Penguins link analysis of a domain.

Penguin 1 seemed to have only analysed home page backlinks to determine whether a penalty would be applied but Penguin 2 runs a ‘deeper’ backlink profile analysis on a page-by-page basis and if a site does not make the cut, a penalty is applied.

‘Creative’ 301-redirects to avoid a page penalty simply do not work and would do more harm that good – treating the root cause of the penalty rather than the symptoms by cleaning up your spammy backlink profile and building quality links would drive in a sustained recovery.  

7: Dilute your anchor text ratio by building quality links to regain rankings

If you have been hit or yet to be hit and have any ‘money’ keyword anchor text links constituting over 10% of your backlinks, my advice would be that you start building brand and natural backlinks to dilute the share of ‘money’ keyword anchor text links. The quality as well as the diversification of your anchor backlinks is key to recovering and surviving Penguin.

Run competitor link analysis on the top 5 sites ranking for your desired search phrase to understand what the acceptable anchor text link ratio is in your niche. Use your findings as a benchmark for your link building efforts.

Finally, remember to stay ethical and creative with your link building - let quality content and superior user-experience drive your creative link building strategy. I hope these tips help keep you high and dry from Penguin or fix a penalty.

Have you been penalized or have you recovered from an unnatural links OR Penguin update? Is yes, could you share your story. Also feel free to ask questions.