The Schipul/Tendenci team at NTC 2013!

Analytics tools for nonprofits (really any organization can benefit from these tools!):

1. Cross Domain Tracking

Many sites we work with (including our own!) is made up of multiple domains. The multiple domains can be tricky with reporting because reports falsely list bounces and referrals as people go from one internal site to another. This can be explained… but it is not always clear from just looking at a single report.

The solution: Cross Domain Tracking from Google Analytics

2. The Measurement Protocol

You can track anything in Google Analytics now. The Google Analytics Measurement Protocol allows developers to make HTTP requests to send raw user interaction data directly to Google Analytics servers. This allows developers to measure how users interact with their business from almost any environment. Developers can then use the Measurement Protocol to: Measure user activity in new environments, tie online to offline behavior, and send data from both the web and server.

It even has structure for financial data, for instance: &tr=50.00 // Transaction revenue. &ts=32.00 // Transaction shipping. &tt=12.00 // Transaction tax.

Learn More on Google’s Developer Documentation

3. Link Tagging

Google URL tagging it is really powerful to mix the protocol data with campaign data. You can then filter your analytics data by campaign passed through a link tag. Powerful stuff!

Learn more about Google Analytics URL Builder for an example of how the variables would be added

More Nonprofit Technology Conference Recaps!

Check out our other recaps and resources from the Nonprofit Technology Conference!

• Panel Recap: Level Up Your Online Fundraising!
• Video Webinar On Demand: NTC Highlights
• NTC Recaps and Resources Landing Page
  

Matt Cutts addressing the SEO world about alogirthm updates on Google’s YouTube Channel GoogleWebmastersHelp

The crowd at the “How to Ranke Better in Search” #bingle panel at SXSW was reflective of the presenters’ reputations. The other panelist was Duane Forrester of Bing – whose specific role is product manager of Bing Webmaster Tools, and the panel was moderated by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. I was seated in the crowd of overflow seating so I technically didn’t see the presenters, but I could hear the conversation and watch what they were displaying on their computer screens (see pic below).

Matt Cutts SXSW Panel Packed House! Shot: Overflow Seating

The session format was a Q&A panel where audience members could ask the questions and drive the topics.  Below were my biggest takeaways:

1. Social Signals are Growing in Importance

Social Signals (aka how links and shares from Social Media profiles affect your site’s authority) have had an effect on search results when a user is logged in to Google for some time now. If you or your friends have shared or liked content (particularly on Google+) – that content is more likely to rise to the top of the page. One of my favorite quotes of the panel was from Matt on these personalized results:

“There are a lot of people whose bosses think they rank number one because the boss is always logged in seeing personalized results” - Matt Cutts, Google

Matt confirmed that over time we are going to see social signals play more of a role when logged out as well.

This is already most noticeable with the rel=”author” tag which attaches your Google+ profile to content you’ve created and adds your profile photo next to the content in search results. In the panel, Matt confirmed that content with this author photo next to it does consistently see a higher CTR.

How to: Link your content to a Google+ profile using rel=”author”

2. Start Using Schema.org

Schema.org is a system of tags that webmasters can use to markup their pages in a universal way recognized by the major search engines. Google and Bing both praised the value of incorporating these Schema.org tags to help the search engines better crawl and understand the content on your website – and indicated that this will become even more important in the future.

From Duane - Schema data does not affect rankings directly; it is used to help the search engines understand the site and its content.

Google and Bing are still testing how users respond to showing schema markup in SERPs – so you may see it show in search results only sometimes for now.

How to: Getting Started with Schema.org

More Resources: Getting the Most out of Schema.org Microformats (from SEOMoz)

3. Quality Content Wins

This is something Google has been hammering home with their recent algorithm updates. It’s not exactly new, but I wanted to mention it because of how much both Google and Bing emphasized this point during the panel. At the end of the day – Quality Content wins online. Quality Content means better placement in search, better engagement, and better conversions.

“Our job is to consistently wow people with search results” - Duane Forrester, Bing

More: Google Guidance on What Defines “Quality Content” 

4. Don’t Rely on Press Releases for SEO

Press Releases are key for communicating to traditional media, but Matt confirmed that Google has downgraded the value of press releases for SEO recently, so you should not rely on that content to boost your SEO on its own.

“We haven’t really trusted press releases since 2006″ – Matt Cutts, Google

5. Google Isn’t Too Worried About Facebook Graph Search as a Competitor

There has been a lot of buzz about Facebook’s Graph Search tool. One audience member asked straight up if Google is worried about Facebook Graph Search as a competitor. Mat’s reply – not right now, but he can definitely see a potential over time.

6. For Ecommerce Sites, Reputation Matters to SEO

Google also confirmed that they are working on an update for 2013 that will try to incorporate a merchant’s reputation into their ranking for e-commerce sites specifically. The catalyst to this has been poor sites ranking well because of an increase in links from bad press. Google is trying to get smarter about determining which of those links are “good press” vs “bad press.”

7. Google (Still) Hates Spam

Matt is head of Google’s Spam team so naturally he spent time discussing some of the team’s latest spam updates. Within the How Search Works site, Google has launched a site that shows real time screenshots of websites being discovered and dinged by Google:

Real Time Spam Screenshots from Google

More Resources: Google’s “How Search Works” Resource Library

What other SEO takeaways did you see at SXSW? Share them here!

1. Double Check Your Goal Tracking in Google Analytics

Throughout the year you have probably launched new campaigns and landing pages, and there may be new contact forms on your site. Make sure all of the forms on your website are added as Goals, and all of the confirmation URLs are correct and tracking properly.

To get to your Goal Settings, on the top right corner of the screen click “Admin” and then click into the profile you’d like to review. This will then take you to the list of all of your Goals

From here you can review each Goal individually, and verify that the Conversion URL and Funnel steps are correct.

2. Update Your Keyword Research to Identify New Trends

At some point in the past you have identified a keyword focus for your website based on Keyword Research from a tool like the Google Keyword Tool or a paid tool like Wordtracker. For our clients, we focus on words with a balance between a healthy number of searches each month and competition levels where we are most likely to perform well.

Search behavior changes over time, so it is good to take time every 6-12 months to revisit this research and see what new opportunities and changes have come up over time. Review your keyword list to see what changes have happened in search volume and competition in the past year.

The Google Keyword Tool lets you also drill down into keyword data for desktop search vs. mobile search – so you can focus mobile content on different keywords if the search patterns are drastically different.

Also – review your keywords in the free tool Google Trends to compare searches over time and find Rising Searches to identify up-and-coming opportunities!

3. Review Your Homepage Optimization for 2013

Run a Keyword Density Analyzer Report

There are many similar tools out there, but I am partial to Schipul’s free Keyword Density Analyzer Report. Enter your homepage URL and check the results to see which phrases you use the most within your homepage content.

Focus on the two and three word phrases (as one word terms are often too generic to focus on). Within the list, you should see:

1. Your brand name
2. Your geography
3. Your top product/service

If any of those items are missing, update your page to incorporate those terms in more places. Think about the Title Tag, Meta Description, within the Tagline, in alt tags, headers, and the content of the page.

Double Check Your Title Tag

Is your title tag representative of your Marketing focus for 2013? If not – update it to incorporate words around your primary goals this year!

More Homepage Audit Tips! For more tips on auditing your home page, check out our Homepage Web Marketing Audit over on the Schipul Blog!

4. Identify & Remove Duplicate Content

With algorithm changes like the Panda and Penguin Updates, Google continues to reward high quality content and ding low quality and duplicate content. The new year is a good time to review to make sure your site isn’t guilty of duplicate content that may negatively affect your rankings.

We use free tools like Copyscape (plug in a URL and it checks for the same content across the web) and Screaming Frog (desktop software that scans your whole site) to identify duplicate text across a site and the web.

Take down duplicate content or use your Robots.txt file to block crawling of duplicate pages. You can set up 301 redirects from the old URL to the new to make sure visitors who may have that page bookmarked or linked don’t receive 404s.

You can also remove the URL in Google Webmaster Tools (more info on how to do that here).

5. Scrutinize Your Contact Form to Improve Conversions

We all know that it doesn’t matter how many people you drive to your website with great SEO if they don’t convert!  Now is a good time to scrutinize your main contact form and look for ways to improve your conversion rate going into 2013.

Things to consider changing to improve conversion rate of your online forms:

1. Test a different Headline to make the page more compelling – have you communicated why your organization is uniquely valuable?
2. Can you add a product video or use other visuals to showcase the benefits without so much text?
3. Are there fields you don’t really need anymore that you can remove or make optional?
4. Are there additional questions that could save your team & the prospect time in qualifying? (For example – adding a question about budget or timeframe)
5. Should you implement a free Chat Now tool to catch users with questions?
6. Can you add validation to the page with a short testimonial or logos of brands you’ve worked with?
7. Does your form look good and work correctly on a mobile and tablet device?

Sometimes even the smallest tweaks in headline wording or question order can make a big difference in conversion rate. Come up with ideas to try and test, test, test!

6. Think Mobile

Mobile and tablet traffic is growing, and recent research shows that up to 50% of all local searches are performed on a mobile device.

Review your site on a mobile device and make sure everything works correctly. Almost half  (46%) of consumers report that they are unlikely to come back to a mobile site if it did not work properly the first time they visited. Remember that your site mobile search rankings can also be affected if your site doesn’t function properly on a mobile device.

Look at your Google Analytics data if you are considering investing in a mobile site design. Our average client sees mobile traffic as about 8-10% of their total traffic. If you are above that threshold, consider investing in a mobile site to cater to those visitors.

See this number and your break down of which devices visit your site most by navigating to Audience > Overview > Mobile > Devices in Google Analytics.

If you are using a Mobile Site or Responsive Design, keep the design simple and easy to navigate. Minimize page load times as much as possible, as mobile visitors expect shorter load times than desktop visitors.

Happy 2013!

Annette had a ton of interesting points related to UX, but her website user experience discussion really had me listening. The way visitors interact with a website can make or break a PPC or SEO campaign. You can have amazing PPC ads with a great CTR, but nobody will convert if they get to the website and they’re lost. The same goes for people clicking through from organic search. Ultimately, you have to tell the visitor what to do and why. If you want them to “buy now” then say why. Then clearly tell them how.

Annette brought up a good point…visitors, especially from organic search, don’t always land on your homepage. She compared this to arriving at the front door of a beautifully landscaped home. We all know that people don’t always land on our homepage. Nope, sometimes visitors will show up in a weird and confusing back alley and then will ultimately bounce away! As search engine marketers, we need to make sure every page that a visitor could potentially land on is optimized with the end user in mind.

Where we expect/hope all of our visitors will land when visiting our website

Where some visitors ultimately land...whomp whomp

Other interesting points from Annette:

• People rely on user ratings and reviews from third party sources, but do realize that not all of the reviews they read are true
  (This point is something I stress all the time to my clients. It’s important to encourage reviews on social sites. Learn more about attaining user reviews and claiming local listings from a blog entry I wrote a while back: Handle Negative Online Business Reviews Like a Pro)
• People are skeptical of marketing content from manufacturers and they expect that the manufacturer will only tell them the good things about the product. Therefore it is not an accurate reflection of reality
• Users need a reason WHY they should buy and it needs to be written in a way that a human being would speak to them (conversational tone).
• Better, easier product comparisons are needed. Avoid overwhelming your visitor with a ton of choices and use extra care with your layout.
• Visuals are critical, users are driven by imagery
  (In fact, Annette brought up a funny, but true statement — humans are hard-wired to recognize cuteness. It keeps us from killing our young! So, bring on the kittens, puppies and babies.)

In case you want more awesome stats and info from Annette, check out her Speaker Deck here.

WP Mobile Detector

Google seems to give more clout to websites that offer mobile versions of their site and I can see this becoming even more important as responsive web design takes over. Mobile users prefer a mobile version of a site so why not give that to them? You can easily make your website mobile ready with the WP Mobile Detector. This plugin will automatically detect the type of device being used to browse the site. It even gives you a variety of compatible mobile themes to choose from.

Image Credit: InkThemes

What are some of your favorite WordPress plugins?

As a senior production manager at PPC Associates, I spend a great deal of my day working in Microsoft Excel, whether that be manipulating data for reporting or prepping an upload sheet to load into AdWords Editor (Google AdWords’ offline editing program). When you’re dealing with thousands of rows of data that needs to be formatted for a client or uploaded into an account, accuracy and efficiency become vital.

In Excel, there are literally thousands of tools, formulas and shortcuts that can be used to your advantage when managing your PPC campaigns; some have already have been explained by my colleague, Laura Rodnitzky. However, within Excel, ASAP Utilities (which can be downloaded for free, here), is an add-in that works as a supplement to your preexisting tools and formulas and can enhance your Excel capabilities. Here are some of the ASAP Utilities’ most helpful tools for managing your AdWords data:

1.       Advanced character remove or replace

This utility allows you to remove or replace advanced characters, some of which Excel does not allow you to change. In Excel, when using the Find/Replace function, the question mark is used to signify all data within a cell, which prohibits you from being able to isolate a question mark and deleting it. However, with ASAP Utilities, you can remove or replace a question mark.

a.  In Excel, highlight the cells that contain the question marks.

b.  In the “Text” section of ASAP Utilities, click “10. Advanced character remove or replace.”

c.  Select the appropriate symbol – in this example, the question mark – then fill in the “Replace each selected character with:” box with a symbol that is not represented in the URL string. Replacing the question mark will allow us to then use the Find/Replace function in the next step. For this example, we chose the dollar sign. Then click “OK” and “Close.”

d. The question mark within the urls should now be a dollar sign. Use the Find/Replace function to find “$*” and replace with nothing. In Excel, * represents all data that is left in the cell (similar to the ?). This will allow you to delete all tracking, along with the dollar sign.

2.       Performing Calculations on Selected Data

This utility allows you to perform a specific calculation on a selected range or data. It is most commonly used for calculating new bids. Instead of setting up a new formula juxtaposed with the original bid (Max CPC/CPM) to perform the calculation, this utility lets you update the original data. Note that this can also be done quickly in AdWords Editor, but if the keywords/ad groups can’t be isolated easily in AWE, this is the fastest way to update your bids.

a. In Excel, select the data to apply the calculation to.

b. In the “Formulas” section of ASAP Utilities, click “2. Apply formula/calculation to selected cells…”.

c. Create the formula, and then select “OK.”

3.       Delete leading, trailing or excessive spaces

This utility allows you to delete any extra spaces before or after text, as well as extra spaces between tokens (excluding single spaces). The Excel Trim Function, which is located under Excel Tools and Functions, can also be used to eliminate unwanted spaces. However, depending on the format of the data, the Trim Function does not always delete these spaces, whereas the ASAP Utility will work on all types of data. This utility is most commonly used for deleting unwanted extra spaces in keywords, ad groups or ads before uploading into AdWords Editor.

a. In Excel, highlight the cells that contain extra spaces.

b. In the “Text” section, click “9. Delete leading, trailing and excessive spaces”.

4.       Insert before and/or after each cell in your selection

This utility allows you to prepend or append data to a cell or range of data, which can be helpful when creating keywords with a broad match modified match type where a “+” must be prepended to each token in the keyword. The simple Find/Replace Excel function allows you to insert a “+” for all tokens by simply finding a space and replacing with a space and “+”. However, we can’t add a “+” at the beginning of a cell, in front of the first token, because Excel will then view the data as a formula, and will show an error. Similar to Excel’s Concatenate Function, we can prepend a “+” to the first token without receiving a formula error.  However with ASAP Utilities you can prepend data to the cell itself, instead of creating a new cell to add in the “+”.

a. Select the cells that you want to prepend or append data to.

b. In the “Text” section, click “1. Insert before and/or after each cell in your selection” and fill in the “add before” and/or “add after”. In this example the “+” is added to “add before”. Make sure to check the “Example” section to verify the data looks accurate, and then push “OK”.

There are hundreds of other utilities within ASAP, all of which can be used to make your work in Excel a more efficient and user-friendly experience. I highly encourage anyone who uses Excel to manage their PPC campaigns to take advantage of this free utility and to start exploring all of its possibilities.

Guest Blogger:

Melissa Bregar is a Senior Production Manager for PPC Associates, a digital marketing firm with offices in the Bay Area and downtown Chicago.

 Infographic by pulpmedia: Awesomely Accessible Lesson in the Basics of Adwords

1) What you pay (CostPerClick) depends on:

* [how much you bid]

* [Quality Score of your ad] – this itself is way complicated – see below

* [Adrank of advertiser in lower rank position]

2) Two Tactics to optimize your Adwords:

2.1) Test Your Ad Copy:

2.1.1) Always have at least 2 ad variations; eg, “Blue Shoes for Sale” and “For Sale: Blue Shoes”. Google will test out your ads’ performance and help you use the higher performing ad copy, so you want at least 2 at a time for testing purposes.

2.1.2) Analyze the data. Pulpmedia suggests experimenting with different metrics: One ad might have slightly higher CTR (click through rate) but significantly lower CVR (conversion rate).

2.2) 3 Easy Bidding Strategies:

2.2.1) Pause Keywords for 30 days when Impressions > 200 and CTR < 1%

2.2.2) Pause Text Ads for 30 dyas when Impressions > 200 and CTR < 1%

2.2.3) Raise max CPC to first page bid estimate for 30 days when Average Position > 1.8 and Quality Factor < 4.

Infographic by Pulpmedia Online Marketing

 Quality Scores: Not Simple

There simply isn’t a way to dumb-down Quality Scores: they comprise a set of relationships between many variables, each of which is more or less complex in its own right. That said, PPC Hero makes a valiant, effective effort in his/her(?) Ultimate Guide to Adwords Quality Score.

This guide provides counsel on no less than seven types of Quality Scores. Below is my distillation of this opus.

1. Account-Level QS* is based on how well your entire account – all keywords and ads – have performed in the past.

Contributing Metrics:

* High CTR

* High QS for your keywords

* Older accounts have more data, so will have higher QS than newer ones

Actionable:

* Some people argue that you should Delete low QS keywords, others say to Pause them

* PPC Hero advises you to consider the search volume you get with these words before deleting – if you add them back in after deletion, Google counts them as “duplicates”

2. Ad Group QS is the average ad score within a single ad group.

Contributing Metric: Each individual Ad’s QSs

Actionable: Find Ads with the lowest CTR in the group and rewrite them

3. Keyword-Level QS is based on how well your ads do in search queries that are an exact match to your keyword. It is a number from 1-10, 10 being the best.

Contributing Metrics: 

* At first Keyword QS is based on the keyword’s performance history on Google.com

* After your keyword has appeared enough times in searches (ie, after it achieves “a significant number of impressions in your account”) it will be based on CTR for queries that were an exact match.

Actionables:

* If your impression share is low (impression share = [Number of times your ad appeared/ Number of times your ad was eligible to appear]), increase your bid or daily budget amount

* Broaden your match types or add broad match keywords. Eg, in Advanced Options select “broad match” instead of “exact match”, or change your keyword from “Patio Furniture” to “Outdoor Furniture”

 4. Ad-Level QS is the score for individual ads within an ad group and is determined primarily by CTR.

Contributing Metrics: CTR

Actionable: If you have low CTR for a lot of ads, DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) shows the exact query of the user within your ad, typically increasing CTR.

 5. Landing Page QS* influences your keyword QS, even though there is no official QS for Landing Pages.

Contributing Metric: Good, relevant content

6. Display Network QS is a bit mysterious but seems to reflect numerous metrics that generally indicate ad quality

Contributing Metrics:

* Ad historical performance

* Ad relevance to the site and ad group keywords

* Landing page quality

Actionables:

* Test different ad types (images versus text)

* If you have low CTR relative to competing ads, try using site and category exclusions and negative keywords for search matches

7. Mobile QS* again, not explicit metric, and google claims to calculate QS without considering device platform. But since distance between user and business location influences QS, separating your campaigns by mobile may reveal fruitful and divergent trends.

Contributing Metric: User distance from vendor

Actionable: Create separate campaigns by platform device, to see if some ads are more effective on different types of platforms

If you’re still reading, it’s time to pack up, head off and start tweaking your Adwords Campaigns!

Google recently sent out emails alerting everyone that the old version of Analytics reporting will end in June 2012. We see the good in the new Analytics and there is a lot more data to play with. However, this is a headache because all of the automatic reports you set up in the old Analytics will need to be made again in the new Analytics. This is good news and bad news. It’s good because it gives you the opportunity to revisit your dashboard and customize it. Unfortunately for agencies this is bad news because all of the hundreds of reports we have automated will be gone! We encourage our clients to log into their Analytics and get familiar with the data. This is the perfect time for them to customize their dashboards to display the data they’re most interested in seeing.
If you need a little help getting started we’ve simplified it for you — 3 Quick Steps to Set Up Email Reports in the New Google Analytics

Writing PPC ads can be fun – using your brain to shoehorn great messaging into a limited number of characters is like doing puzzles. The parts of the copy-creation process that get really tedious are the repetitive acts – checking character count obsessively, combing the text to make sure your capitalization preferences are followed, appending the same word over and over.

There’s good news, though – Excel has some handy features you can use to streamline those mind-numbing steps. Here are my four favorite ad copy time-savers (they work for keywords, too):

1.       Length Formula

If you’re writing or customizing a significant number of text ads, create an extra column to the right of any ad text component to automatically measure length (i.e. the number of characters, including spaces, in the cell). Type in =LEN(cell), where cell is simply the cell whose characters you want to count. This feature makes it easy to see if you’re hitting the character count limits for Headline, Description Line 1, Description Line 2, or Display URL in AdWords. You can easily copy the formula down multiple rows and use conditional formatting (see #2) to quickly flag any cells over the limit.

2.       Conditional Formatting

It would be impossible to go into all the conditional formatting options in such a short blog post, so I’ll stick to the two main uses for ad text and keyword builds. First off, we can use the “Greater Than…” option to flag any ad text lines that exceed the specified limits. Go to “Conditional Formatting” > “Highlight Cells Rules” >  “Greater Than….” and enter your max limit in the dialog box that appears.

The screenshot below shows that the last two headlines exceed the 25-character max. As I modify the text of the headlines, both the length count and the conditional formatting will automatically update.

You can also use the “Less Than…” option if you want to identify ad text components that are significantly below the character limit. For example, you may want to flag any Description Line with fewer than 20 characters – perhaps there is additional, relevant text that can be added to use up more of the real estate and enhance the message you are trying to deliver.

Another useful conditional formatting tool is “Duplicate Values…” which is also found in the “Highlight Cells Rules” section. You can use the “Duplicate Values…” option to flag repeated keywords in keyword builds, duplicate ad text, etc. In the screenshot below, the two headlines flagged in green are duplicates.

3.       Capitalization Functions

Another useful feature for ad text is the “proper” function, which capitalizes the first letter of each word in a cell. Type in =proper(cell) to use this function.

There are a couple things to consider when using “proper.” First of all, the output appears in the cell where you place the formula, and the output itself is a formula. In order to manipulate it, you’ll need to copy and paste as special (values). You may want to paste it back into the cell with the original text, so you maintain the headers (“Description Line 1” in the example above). The other thing to keep in mind is that acronyms (such as PPC) will be modified so that only the first letter is capitalized. You’ll need to go back and fix any acronyms – fortunately a simple find/replace can do the trick.

There are additional capitalization functions that may be useful, depending on your preferences for keywords, ad group names, and ad text. The “lower” function makes every word lowercase, and the “upper” function makes all letters capitalized.

4.       Concatenate

The last feature I’ll hit on today is “concatenate,” which allows you to join the contents of two or more cells and/or cells plus text. For ads, “concatenate” is a great tool for appending tracking parameters to destination URLs, or for adding text to existing ads, among other things. For example, if you want to run an ad test with the word “Free” added to the beginning of every headline, the concatenate function would let you do this easily in Excel.

Note that, like the “proper” and “lower” functions, the output is placed in another cell and needs to be copied and pasted as values in order to manipulate the text.

Another great use for “concatenate” is to append the plus sign before broad match modifier keywords – however, it will only append the sign to the first token in a keyword. For the remaining tokens, simply use find/replace to find spaces and replace with space and plus sign.

There are several more functions and tools in Excel that will make your life as a search engine marketer much easier, but these are some of my favorites for ad text creation (and they can be handy for keyword builds, too).

Do you have any to add? Leave a comment!

Facts dispel fear (or at worst justify it and indicate a path towards greener pastures), so I wanted to distill what we know to date with hard quantitative data. Surprisingly the answer is not-a-whole-lot, and what we do have comes from just a couple sources.

A chart produced by SEOmoz shows that “the impact of Penguin was immediate and substantial”, with over 3% of Top Ten Rankings in their analysis changing (versus the ~2.7% change caused by the Panda update on April 19th).

Untold quantities of keyboards have rendered the phrases key-word-stuffing and over-optimized-anchor-text in hypotheses about what Penguin is doing. However, MicrositeMasters had unique access to a fabulously large data set and produced the only set of charts I could find showing detailed effects of Penguin.

 

Findings & Action Items from MicrositeMasters

1. Keyword-Stuffing in Anchor Text: Only sites with over 60% of anchor texts containing “money” keywords matching incoming links were negatively affected by Penguin.

A money keyword generates a lot of search traffic. Guzman defines it as a high-volume search term or phrase with a Google rank of roughly 5-15. In other words, the Penguin is looking for you if over half of your traffic is driven by searches using high-volume keywords that exactly match your anchor texts.

Action Item: Unless your incoming link anchor texts were totally dominated by high-volume search keywords, this component of the Penguin Algorithm is not hurting your site.

2. URLs in Anchor Text: Penguin is going to hit you for stuffing URLs in your anchor texts, but not near as much as money-keyword stuffing (far right in chart below).

Action Item: Reduce your URL-stuffing, but take care of the keyword-stuffing First!

3. Relevant (Niche) Inbound Links: Having links from websites outside of your niche is okay, as long as you have some from relevant websites, too.

I made this chart by eye-balling the numbers in a pair of charts from the MicrositeMasters study. The chart shows two things:

i) It doesn’t matter if you have a high or low percent of inbound links from websites with content that is relevant to yours, as long as you have SOME quality, niche inbound links: websites with low percentage (10%) of same-niche inbound links were penalized at the same rate as sites with high percentage (60-100%) of relevant inbound links.

ii) It matters a LOT if you have NO relevant inbound links – the red bars show that about half of websites with 0% of relevant inbound links were penalized. Once you have even 10% of your links coming from quality, relevant sites though, Penguin isn’t penalizing you for having non-niche links too.

Action Item: Make sure you have some inbound links from quality, relevant websites.

That’s not easy – and it’s part of the point of Penguin: good content creation and targeted community development around your site is harder than typing a keyword into 20 anchor texts. Countless blog posts offer advice on building a quality community (inbound links from websites with good content related to your site). Here are a few tidbits from Brownrigg’s insights on generating a community for your website.

i) Post quality articles relevant to your niche (that people will want to repost on their site).

ii) Compile some of your articles into an ebook.

iii) Publish your articles on sites like digg and submit them to article directories.

Post-Penguin Reality

Penguin seems to have a fairly narrow target – keyword-over-optimized text anchors and disproportionate inbound links from irrelevant websites: in other words, it has effectively removed shortcuts for generating website traffic. In general, however, and despite the apocalyptic rhetoric out there, the new Sheriff should leave the world with a lot of well-deserved winners – people creating genuinely good content and generating traffic with honest “white-hat” methods that ultimately benefit the 2,267,233,742 people searching for content on the World Wide Web.

Image from cognitiveseo.com/blog