Are sites that "smell of SEO" being demoted?

[MarieHaynes]

I'm working with a site owner who recently hired an SEO to work on just one particular type of keyword.  It seems like the more work the SEO did, the lower the keyword gradually dropped.  Granted, the "work" is pretty low quality - anchor texted bookmarks, comments and low quality articles.  We're doing an experiment where we are going to disavow those links and see if the previous rankings return.

Another site that I am consulting with has a lot of good natural links and then some anchor texted links, but from decent sources - some guest posts (on good sites - not a spammy site that exists only for guest posts) and some places where decent websites have agreed to link to the site.  The anchor texted links do not make up very much of the overall anchor text.  There is good diversity and lots of brand and url anchored links.  It seems like the more the SEO does for this site, the more the rankings drop.  And it's not all about anchor text.  The SEO placed a link in a relevant directory, using the url as anchor...rankings dropped a little.  They obtained an expired domain with relevant and very natural links and 301'd it to the new domain...rankings dropped several places.  And so on.  Occasionally the rankings will pop up a little, but overall it's a downward spiral.

Check out this post by Gary Taylor.  He did an experiment where he took an established site that was ranking well and threw some spammy links at it.  To quote the article, 'every day goes by my ranking for the term “domains” is getting harder to maintain.'  He recently tweeted that he has been removing and disavowing links and the rankings are returning.

I was looking at searches for real estate related terms in different cities.  In some cities, the top sites are ones that have ZERO obvious SEO done to them.  There are sites ranking on page 3 that have been SEO'd, and not all of them have poor SEO.  Many are what I would consider really well done.  Some of the sites ranking on page 1 have under 10 links.  There was one with 2 followed links and they were not from super authoritative sites!

To complicate matters though, if you look at searches like "Toronto Real Estate Agents" some of the top sites have lots of keyword anchor texted links.

Perhaps this should be a blog post rather than a Q&A, but I would love to hear some of your thoughts.  My personal thought is that Google's main goal with Penguin and the unnatural links warnings is to make it so that not only is it not profitable to try to manipulate the SERPS, but that every time you try to do so, you potentially do your rankings harm.

I used to say that Penguin could only affect a site on the date of a Penguin refresh, but I am thinking now that Google has managed to roll Penguin into the algorithm to some extent  so that it can demote the majority of any work that smells of SEO.

Thoughts?

[EGOL]

If you take a product, as an example let's say... "Joe's Widgets".

The site that received #1 rankings in the past might have been an article about Joe's Widgets on Wikipedia.  That was simply promotion of the most powerful site with a relevant article.

Now, if Joe's Widgets appear on product pages on hundreds of sites, the brand site, JoesWidgets.com gets an enormous boost in the SERPs.  Perhaps beating Wikipedia because of these "brand mentions".  This is a relatively new development from Google within the past few months.

Still not recognized strongly enough, perhaps, might be HowToUseWidgets.com that has 40 pages of articles about how to use, Joe's Widgets, how to select them, how to main tain them, photos of the different models, comparisons of Joe's widgets to six other brands of widgets.   In my opinion, this is the authority site but it gets lower rankings because it is not powerful and isn't the brand name website.  However, this site might get more relevant traffic than JoesWidgets.com and wikipedia simply because it has saturated the SERPs for lots of the important secondary and long-tail keywords.  This is the attack that I am building.

[DonB]

I'm glad to see this discussion, because I think we're experiencing a sea-change that began last year about this time with Google's big changes. I'm seeing that active linkbuilding without social-signal input is hurting some sites, whereas hands-off traditional linkbuilding (i.e., letting inbound links occur naturally rather than consciously creating them) with social-signal links/discussion is helping some sites.

For me, the big issue is whether SEOs can change the internal culture of clients, to get them to understand the growing-growing-growing importance of social media links (and brand discussion that doesn't necessarily include links). Clients who still don't "get" social media usually also don't "get" the need for a content-publishing plan, in which the best way to announce new content is through social media.

A related issue is the increasing importance of the authorship tag to Google rankings. Many organizations - large and small - still refuse to allow employees to identify as spokesperson-evangelists for the brand, yet it's clear Google rankings rewards those who publish as Google+ individuals. How will Google reconcile their ranking love for brands, with their new ranking love for Google+ authors?

UPDATE: just after submitting the above, I saw a new article on SERPs gains for content by Google+ authors:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269354/Google-in-the-SERPs-Increasing-Authorship-Adoption-High-Data

[usef4u]

Hi

Marie, I believe there have been many Penguin refreshes, but there was no official announcement. I even read in a post or a tweet when Dr. Pete also mentioned that there have been refreshes of Penguin. And Marie even, i am noticing these changes since last month.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Future Services to Game Google:

• Get 10,000 visitors who spend 20 minutes on site, and 5000 return visitors!

• Get 5000 Facebook shares, and 10,000 Retweets

• Get A Comment With From an Author Rank of over 9000!

In all seriousness, though, I think this may already be happening.  Going through the analytic histories of some of my clients I've seen them get several hundred visits in one day from a keyword that has less than 10 searches a month in the Google Keyword Tool, and they ranked on page 50 of the SERPS.

[EGOL]

There definitely seems to be a sea change whereby much of the focus now is to concentrate on providing good content and great user experience. By getting your audience to remain on your site for longer, sharing your content, and potentially returning to your site again is what should pay dividends....

heh...  this is replacing linkjuice.    The new rocket fuel for SEO is contentjuice.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

I work in the automotive niche, and almost all of the website providers have issues with duplicate content, and site structure.  However, we are working to improve that.

Anyway, my off-site is mostly going after guest blog posts from local bloggers, as well as anyone writing in my clients niche.  I'm not good with macro's in Excel, so all of my outreach is done by hand.  Beyond that I focus on citations since my clients are always looking for local customers.

When you checked out the different real estate searches did you see a lot of local results?  Whenever I do those searches I see the 6-pack of local results.  That actually makes me really excited, because the average real estate person only has a handful of citations.  So, you could really take over those searches, in theory, with a citation binge.

[simon_realbuzz]

There definitely seems to be a sea change whereby much of the focus now is to concentrate on providing good content and great user experience. By getting your audience to remain on your site for longer, sharing your content, and potentially returning to your site again is what should pay dividends . That not to say that certain basic SEO principles should be ignored but user experience is surely the key.

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Cody,

Thanks for this comment.  It's very helpful.  Care to share a little bit about how you are accomplishing your off-site SEO?  Or would that be spilling the secret sauce?  

I bet that your sites have really good on page structure and great content as well and this is probably the key.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Hi Marie!  I loved your recent post about the difference between Panda, Penguin and Unnatural Link Penalties recently.

First off, I'd like to say that I'm still getting awesome results with my SEO.  I work on around 100 websites, and both my on-site and off-site techniques are improving the results.

That being said, I can see that the site level metrics are having a larger influence.  I work in a niche that has lots of different providers for websites, and most of them create tons of duplicate content.  The sites that are creating 1000's of pages of duplicate content have been hit hard in the past 6+ months, and it's getting harder to keep them ranking well, but the one's with great architecture are actually getting easier.

For a great example of a company taking the initiative on this I'd look at Autotrader.  They recently, within the last year I believe, decided to no-index all of their inventory.  They did this because all of it was the exact duplicate of what the dealers had posted in dozens of other places online.  Right after they made that change I saw a dramatic improvement in rankings across the board.

[LeahHutcheon]

My company was recently approached by someone who's done SEO for some quite big sites, promising a top three position within 4 weeks for a competitive area by "spinning".

Thankfully, my boss swiftly told him we didn't need his services as there's no such thing as a fly-by-knight in reality.

I guess it's just about keeping as up to date as possible so whatever we do has a positive lasting impression. Phew!: does take some work though.

[MarieHaynes]

"It's only terrifying if you aren't ahead of the curve with SEO" - Great point!

[irvingw]

It's only terrifying if you aren't ahead of the curve with SEO. It's scary for people hiring SEOs too because they are hiring someone who is supposed to know but quite often they don't and wind up hurting the site.

Google is coming down very hard on links which is why they had to provide a disallow tool to help you combat poor SEO past practices or negative SEO attacks which before you could not really handle other than getting all the links down that are harming you.

Also, onpage optimization can hurt you just as easily, because Google knows you are in control of those factors, so under optimization is the new optimization.

[MarieHaynes]

I do believe that this is a terrifying prospect for anyone who makes a living at SEO.  I don't believe that SEO is dead, but I do believe that the role of an SEO is definitely shifting from "link building".  I think that the vast majority of SEOs out there today have a model that won't work in this new age of Google.

I think that the only SEOs who are going to succeed are going to be ones who can do a fantastic job of on-page optimization and then find ways to make the site not only attract links but also attract and keep users.  Ultimately, Google wants sites to rank well because users find it helpful.

[LeahHutcheon]

If true, that's pretty terrifying! I've not the experience to really be able to talk on the subject I'm afraid, but I've been putting in a lot of effort trying to learn. The idea that such work might be potentially hazardous is certainly a cause for mild alarm.

Do you suppose just playing things as straight as possible will be enough? Our focus is on creating really compelling articles for our blog and a site that's a cinch to use - fingers crossed!