That is a cool tool. It won't be very useful in the future though. Cutts has said Panda/Penguin updates will be rolled out more subtly going forward.. meaning you won't see massive drop on one specific day..

I have a hard time selling the "pay me to make friends in your industry" bit, so I hardly do it for clients anymore either. Making content for clients is a tangible asset that is

A. Easier to sell

B. A great long-term strategy on its own

Doubt it. Google has most syndicated press release services on a list of "don't allow these links to pass PageRank." I imagine for this very reason.

Being a big public company you don't really need to worry about penalties. Just ask yourself, "would I feel comfortable telling a search engine engineer what I'm doing to market my website." If you answered yes, don't worry about it. You're one reconsideration request away from getting out of the penalty if one were to ever arise.

You should definitely use them. Just don't be stupid with it and stuff 100s of keywords in there.

Here is a case study showing they still work:

http://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-analysis-seo-isnt-dead-but-you-need-to-act-smarter-and-5-easy-ways-to-do-so/

And one of my favorite quotes of all time:

If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising.
David Ogilvy

Yah or just post here and I'd be happy to help. For some reason I don't get e-mails when someone PMs me.

Could be an issue with Panda. Could not be. Hard to tell. If the article was published on the authority BEFORE the others you should be ok. Just think of news aggregation websites like Yahoo News and look at how they do it work. Publishing the same article in multiple locations isn't really best practice - whatever that means.

Hey SEOSponge,

I've used this list before:

http://www.chicagostyleseo.com/2012/02/open-source-negative-keyword-list/

When I don't have time to build my own negative keyword list. I prefer to make my own though. Have you gone through the "keyword details" report? Navigate to the "keywords" tab of each campaign and look for "keyword details." That's the report you want to look at - especially when you're using broad match.

Google recommends 30 keywords per ad group. I've used more or less. Not really that important.

For your broad match campaigns consider using modified broad match. Still broad, but MUCH more targeted and you won't get those really crazy results if you set it up right. Here's a resource,

http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/bmm.html
http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497702

Let me know if you have any other questions. I've been deep in AdWords the last few weeks.

Thanks,

Dave

For one of my clients, a keyword with 28 exact local searches has brought in 2x as many conversions as any other keyword being targeted on the site. It's all about context really.

Thanks for the link Phil. I actually have read that before. And I read it over at CMI too. Are you aware that the author of this post:

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/10/create-video-content-that-actuallreally-works/

Basically said the same thing you did in the "Example: Google Analytics Qualification Test" section without giving you credit? Not sure if you're working together or not but just wanted to let you know.

And this:

"For such a keyword, You don't want YouTube to rank - you want your site to rank with a great landing page you can sell from and drive users there so you can retarget them if they don't convert. If you've decided that your landing page will be best served with a video explaining why your cat urine odor removal spray is the best - this video shouldn't be on YouTube - for the risk that users go to youtube.com rather than your site and likey therefore don't convert to sale. Additionally, the video snippet may help to improve your CTR."

We're on the same page here. Totally agree.

I think two videos is a great compromise. I don't think you've really made that point before, but I think it is a good one. There really isn't an issue with two short :30-1min videos. In fact, I'd say it's better to have two short videos highly relevant to their title than one long video that is semi-relevant to its title.

A commercial keyword is any keyword that brings you leads / sales IMHO. We've gotten 3 calls in 4 months... sounds pretty commercial to me. Just because it has "how to" in it does not make it informational. For example, in my "how to remove your name from Google" video I explain why you need to make your own website to combat negative reviews, but I strategically left out information on HOW to build that website.... which is what people have called us about and asked us to do for them.

I understand what you're saying about commercial and informational keywords though. I actually wrote a post on it a few months ago. I'm not going to create content for something like "best SEO agency" though, what would I say? I might put something like that in a homepage title tag, but its ranking is going to be determined by backlinks.

There really isn't a hard distinction line between commercial / informational / comparison type keywords. "how to remove cat urine odor" is information but could lead someone to buy a Cat Urine Odor Removal Spray. You just don't know. And, if I were to make a video on "how to remove cat urine odor" I'd put it on YouTube because it'd get more views and I'd get more sales. Hence the "cast your net."

So, if I understand you correctly, the "competing against yourself" theory is only applicable when you are "designing to improve conversions on a specific page?" If so, then yes I totally agree (and thank you for your blog posts communicating this.)

I think I understand what you're saying about tying the content type to the hosting platform, but not positive. You've never really defined "content type" I don't think? By "Content Type" you would separate content by categories like this?:

Educational Content

Instructional Content

Opinionated Content

By Content Goals you would separate content by categories like this?:

Content created to convert users

Content created to increase brand awareness

Content created to increase authoritative persona of employee or brand

We'll just agree to disagree on the budget portion.

One of my objections is with your argument of "competing against yourself." My above example shows that is simply not the case. Of course, that is only one example and I'm sure you have others that back up your case (some great ones in your recent blog post - thanks)

That video was actually part of a strategy to get leads. Just like my videos and blog posts on recovering from Google penalties. I posted the "how to remove your name from google" video 4 months ago and we've gotten 3 phone calls from it. Users may not click over to your website (as the case study from your recent blog post points out), but that doesn't mean they're not calling you and it certainly doesn't mean that YouTube videos don't lead to conversions. That's what the handy free AdWords YouTube overlay ad is for.

My second objection is to your refusal to accept budget into your theory. If a brand dosn't have any money to promote a video and is only making a few why not let YouTube do the free advertising for them? It's cheaper, and as my above example shows, still very effective.

We'll never agree on this topic. An elaborate content strategy is simply not necessary if you're only making a few videos.

On a side note, search "how to remove your name from google" in google right now. My YouTube video with snippet is number 3 and my blog post with the YouTube video embeded on it is number 8. The blog post has the YouTube embed and the transcript on it - that's it.

Now, if I would have self-hosted that video with Wistia and uploaded a sitemap rather than post it on YouTube then yes there is a chance we would have got a self-hosted snippet and our conversions would probably go up (because we're sending people to our site rather than YouTube). However, by hosting on YouTube and then on our site as well we get two listings on the first page of SERPs.

Not really sure. With 9 years experience I'd hope at the very least $50,000. Rand has a good post on this from 2011:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-salaries-how-much-should-you-make

You'd probably get more in-house than at an agency. Most agencies want you to focus on one thing and do it over and over. Your wide variety of skills could really get put to work an in-house position. You can save the company money on hiring out to agencies.

Just my .02

This pretty much defines link farming and spam. Drop the 50 EMDs and put all of your efforts on the main site.

Normally I would look at both sides of the coin, but this is just blatant spam.

Hi Ramon,

This is a very difficult question to answer. Before I even try to answer it I'd like to point out the following:

The first Panda filter came out on Feb 25, 2011. On Feb 24, 2012 Search Engine Round Table published a survey asking how many webmasters recovered from the filter one year later. The survey can be found here. As you can see, not many were able to recover from the filter even one year later. This is by no means a conclusive study, but it's really the best we have.

To answer your questions:

1. In my opinion, it's beyond fixing if you lose rankings and you did NOT receive a warning from Google. If you received a warning consider yourself lucky. Follow Google's instructions and use a service like linkdelete.com to get the bad backlinks removed (or just do it yourself).

2. Open Site Explorer works great for identifying bad backlinks. Go through the list of exact match keyword anchor texts and you'll be off to a good start.

Finally, I'd like to plug my post on this subject:

How-To Recover From Google Penalties & Filters

It's a long one, but I include several pictures and examples to make this process easier for folks in your situation.

Good luck!

From my experience, text based Adsense ads pay out 10x times more per click than image based ads. I don't even allow image based Adsense ads on my sites for this very reason.

The largest ad block Adsense has will get clicked the most. Fact.

Keep the bottom ad but turn it into text based ads.

Basically, model your page after an ehow article.

Hope that helps!

The 301 redirect is a great solution. You could also use a rel=canonical if for some odd reason a 301 is not possible. See Google's guide here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

If you're inserting the links to improve user experience why does it matter? Just insert the links where it makes sense.

If I understand your question correctly you're asking what is the best way to manipulate Google rankings with your network of blogs? Add links to old articles or write new articles?

My answer would be - on the new articles.

And bring down your network of blogs. It will come back to bite you one day.