http://www.haspenguinhityet.com/

Earlier this week, I launched haspenguinhityet.com.

Made over a cup of tea on a dreaded Monday morning, it was my way of sarcastically summing up all the panic, debate and absolutely nonsense over what was then, the upcoming Penguin 2.0 update (I’ll let Matt explain).

http://haspenguinhityet.com/ Visitors since Launch

I’ve been overwhelmed by the amazing response it’s had, with nearly 1,500 visits so far and 200+ social shares – not bad for something whipped up in 10 minutes and frankly, pretty pants looking. Thanks all!

How SEO Experts Manage Their Workflow: Mini Interviews

Last week, my first ever SEO-related interview was published on Hex Digital’s blog, a UK based digital agency.
It’s part of a collaborative post on ‘How SEO Experts Manage Their Workflow‘

I answered the following questions (third response):

• How do you allocate your time during a typical work day?
• What tools do you use to manage your projects and workflow?
• What SEO tools do you use or recommend?
• What is your main focus when you are working on SEO?
• How do you track your time spent?
• How do you allocate your time for personal branding and company branding?

Enjoy! Big thanks to @LucyKirkness for asking me to take part!

Brighton SEO

Yesterday, a massive 2,500+ SEO/Digital folks popped down to Brighton for what is probably the UK’s largest SEO Conference – BrightonSEO.

It’s a staggering amount of attendees, which makes me realise just how big the UK search industry is now – and it’s really just the tip of the iceberg, I imagine most SEO teams only could bring down 10-20% of their staff.

I enjoy Brighton SEO for one a simple reason – I always walk away with a ton of geeky new SEO tips, tricks and tools that simply help me do my job better. Plus, you get a free beer at the end.

If you couldn’t make it, then I’ve rounded up all the BEST SEO & Content Marketing tools I stumbled upon at the event, that I’m sure will make you even more awesome at SEO.

SocialMention
http://www.socialmention.com 

Social Mention scrapes data from 30+ social media platforms, letting you quickly discover mentions of content, URLs or a brand-name. Export the data in .CSV or setup a email alert. I previously advocated Topsy for doing this task, but the feature-set and data seems better here.

LinkRisk
http://www.linkrisk.com/

Unnatural Link Warnings are hard work, LinkRisk is a brand-new tool in BETA will ease the typically painful, murder-inducing process.
Setup your domain, answer a few questions and it’ll help automatically identify the toxic links in your backlink profile.

It works by taking backlink data from multiple sources (Majestic SEO, Webmaster Tools etc.) and filters it by a number of metrics i.e. dodgy domain extension, no Google PR, link no longer indexed. Last year, me and a team of 3 people manually audited in excess of 400k backlinks to resolve a manual penalty. It took us 3 months, 4 reconsideration requests and a well-timed tweet to remove it. I think that alone says why this tool is valuable.

Trendsmap
http://www.trendsmap.com/ 

One successful tactic for grabbing attention with your content is to talk about seasonal or trending events. TrendsMap visualises the most talked about trends on Twitter in specific locations. You could use this data to help you generate content ideas whether it be on a local news story or national events. No prizes for guessing about the most talked about thing in Brighton yesterday.

ImageRaider
http://www.imageraider.com/

How many times has your infographic on ‘the history of painting and decorating’ been copy & pasted? Probably none, but anyway..
ImageRaider is a super-charged version of Google Image’s reverse search feature, add a list of URL(s) and you’ll get a nice little report on everywhere it’s been published (or politely stolen).

PowerMapper
http://www.powermapper.com/ 

There are lots of good tools out there to generate sitemaps (XML-Sitemaps.com being one), but this tool creates 2D & 3D visual sitemaps for you – which is really powerful when trying to understand how crawlers navigate your site, or explain to a client the architectural issues a site maybe facing.

GrepTheWeb
http://blekko.com/webgrep 

So, how many people use rel=author on their site? Or, is Lady Gaga more popular online than Beyonce? Blekko let’s you find out the statistical answer using GrepTheWeb. Enter in a text string and Blekko will grep the entire web and find out how many domains & backlinks mention the query.

With an infinite source of data, you’ll never struggle to find statistics for your content on air conditioning ever again (please don’t write about that, oh dear..).

Robotto
http://www.robotto.org/

If you manage multiple large websites like me, a recurring #SEOFacepalm is when a client makes a change on the site without telling you. Let Robotto do the job for you, it monitors website changes and will notify you on anything that has changed. Whether it be a line added a Robot.txt file or a header response issue.

Content Idea Generator
http://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker/

Stuck for a whitty content idea about boring subject? My challenging client’s have included Boilers, SSL Certificates and Business Insurance so trust me, I know all about it. Portent’s awesome Content Idea Generator tool comes up with all types of whacky ideas to inspire content generation. Here’s a few that I came up:

“How [Boilers] will stop North Korea”
“6 Facts About [Baked Beans] That’ll Keep You Up at Night”
“Why [Business Insurance] is Cuter Than a Kitten”

That’s your lot!

Enjoyed the post? I’d love to hear about any more SEO or content marketing tools you recently discovered.

Credits

For more great SEO nerdyness (the folks who inspired this posted) – follow @Rich_falconer, @LexiMills, @PaulDavidMadden & @Hannah_Bo_Banna on Twitter.

On a completely different note, I recently lost to @DigiMatt in a ‘SEO Pool Competition’ despite my pro-skills and as a result, I owe him a follow link, so here you go sir ‘Matt Evans – SEO & Viagra Pills Specialist‘

‘SSL Certificates Explained’

Just helped finished development of this new interactive starter guide to SSL Certificates for Symantec WSS.

It’s pretty tough to make ‘sexy’ content that is B2B focused, so the idea was born by simply thinking about who Symantec’s typical target audience is – small to medium businesses, and what they’d find useful.

Why is it useful? Pretty much any website with an eCommerce store needs an SSL certificate in order to safely process transactions without the risk a ‘hacker’ (or whatever mum’s call them these days) getting hold of their personal information. The problem is, a lot of businesses aren’t aware of the product name, so it’s not suprising that ‘What is SSL’ is searched 1,300 times a month in the UK alone.

Anyway, it was developed using HTML5, CSS & MooTools, I came up with the original concept & rough design (well, partly inspired by this little number) and now the team are beginning the outreach work, so please share!

P.S. It’s also available in French & German, if you like your content with a european flavour.

The real magic happens in that, most advertorials allow you to include external links to other sites – whoa there boy, I smell an SEO opportunity!

In the past 5 years, advertorials have exploded as an SEO tactic, for a simple reason -

• Newspapers & Publications tend to have a decent high page-rank / domain authority
• They have a TON of editorial content that naturally attracts links and social shares
• Content could  be seen as a form of advertising, rather than paid links (kinda)
• Therefore, Google will have a tough time algorithmically recognising my one bit of paid editorial content

Now – I won’t lie, I’ve been a past advocate of advertorials (for good reason, which we’ll get onto) – but we may have a wee little problem.

Over the past day, Google decided to slap the PageRank of 600+ regional newspaper websites in the United Kingdom.

Snapshot of Google PageRank Changes for UK Regional Newspapers

Time to panic? remove links? stop advertorials? Hmm..

Going off-topic a second, despite the drop in Google Toolbar PR, each of these sites still is being regularly indexed by Google (maybe the drop to PR is simply to scare off link-buyers? heck, only SEOs look at Google PR anyway and Google has their own non-public page-rank score for all sites).

This discovery came to a head after a great bit of analysis by Anthony Shapley, to understand why florist-brand Interflora’s rankings were wiped off the face of the earth. Cutting the story short, and adding my own ‘gossip’ – they have been buying a massive bulk of 150+ advertorials at every key sales period (valentines, xmas etc.). Naughty!

So what does this mean moving forward? In short, despite this change, Advertorials continue to provide SEO value at the moment according to the data, remaining an effective SEO tactic for now (morals aside).

Let’s go on a magical journey as the answer is in the SERPs. Let’s take a look at a highly competitive search term, Car Insurance (450k searches per month) for example, with Confused.com ranking 1st and MoneySupermarket.com 2nd as of writing.

Google UK search results for ‘Car Insurance’ (22/02/2013)

Digging through each sites backlink profiles at a glance, each has invested in Advertorials at some point, links which continue to be indexed, containing phrase-match anchor text, and contributing to their rankings (I’m not trying to name and shame here in any shape or form, I’m just as so-called ‘guilty’).

MoneySupermarket.com Advertorial on ThisIsNottingham (a site which has dropped from PR6 to 2)

Now, don’t get me wrong – is this engaging content? nah, does it attract any traffic, social buzz or natural links?  nope, should it be indexed? probably not.

Of course, there is also a huge amount of  other factors contributing to their performance – on-page, technical considerations and awesome content marketing (which I’m a huge champion of).

BUT it’s tough to ignore the fact that sites who tend to rank in competitive SERPs, clearly see SEO value from paid-for link building in some form RIGHT NOW.

I know what your thinking – will Advertorials work forever? are they  future-proof? Of course not, it’s clear given the evidence above this tactic is diminishing, but absolutely nothing is future proof (I hate the phrase).

In conclusion, I would advise that an SEO strategy has to be agile and diverse – considering the current market situation (where content-based paid links such as advertorials arguably still play a role), while also investing in smarter tactics, whether it be content marketing (pitching great content to editorial sites), brand building or something else yet to be determined.

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All comments and debate appreciated, please don’t think I’m saying let’s all just buy links and relax in the pub.

Any human can spot a paid-link, Googlebot will eventually also. For example, all advertorials have to state ‘ADVERTORIAL’ on the content by law, and also end up dumped in a archive after 12-months – here’s an example from TalkTalk, it’s a goldmine for the Search Quality Team.