At Web Gnomes, we constantly monitor the world of Internet marketing so that you don’t have to. We enjoy learning the latest and greatest techniques, and we love sharing that knowledge with our readers and clients. Here are a few of our favorite Internet marketing posts from this past week:
Disavow links you don’t trust & SEO Analyzer updates
Ever since Google released the Penguin Update, numerous people in the SEO community have been requesting a feature that gives webmasters the ability to disavow links that are pointing to their sites.
Well, ask and ye shall receive. As of this week, you can use a Disavow Links feature in… wait for it… Bing Webmaster Tools. That’s not a misprint. The debate about this feature might have been centered around Google, but Bing is the first search engine to actually implement it.
This is another clear indicator that Bing is desperately trying to appeal to the SEO community (and hopefully steal important market share away from Google), and kudos to them for beating Google to the punch. However, numerous questions are still unanswered.
Now that webmasters are allowed to disavow links, does that mean the quality of their link profiles will receive even more scrutiny? As many in the community have argued, search engines should simply devalue “bad links” (as opposed to penalizing for them). But now that webmasters can explicitly disavow those links, does that mean search engines will expect webmasters to diligently police their link profiles?
Also, many people have openly wondered how easily this new functionality can be gamed. If search engines use disavowed links as a spam signal, what protections are in place to prevent spammers from disavowing legitimate links? One would hope that search engines are intelligent enough to verify the existence of links before they are allowed to be disavowed, but at this point, we obviously don’t know for sure.
How to Protect Your Site from Negative SEO
Another extremely hot topic in the world of SEO (especially post-Penguin) is negative SEO. In this post, Jason Acidre provides an interesting case study on how he combated a negative SEO attack against his site.
First, he defines negative SEO and explains how it can be used to potentially harm a site’s rankings. Then, he quickly begins explaining how you can use backlink investigation services such as Ahrefs and Majestic SEO to identify an attack.
Here is a screenshot from Ahrefs that clearly shows the anchor text being used in the negative SEO attack:
Finally, Jason gives actionable advice to help protect your site against negative SEO attacks:
- Start with the On-site Factors
- Beef up the homepage’s link profile to sustain link equity
- Build more positive signals around your site
- Authority Building
- Link Removal with Removeem.com (Optional)
- Publicize that your site is being attacked (Optional)
- Submit the spam page for Removal from Google’s index through Google Webmaster Tools (Optional)
- Move the old content to a new URL (optional)
Be sure to read the article for more information about how to protect yourself!
Learn SEO Like Rand Fishkin Would
If you’re looking to learn SEO, you might as well learn it like the master: Rand Fishkin (the CEO of SEOmoz).
In this post (written by yours truly), you will find many of the most valuable resources for learning SEO. This includes free online guides (such as SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO), published books, popular blogs, useful articles (categorized based on specific SEO tasks), interesting videos, and much, much more.
It also has a nice image of the SEO Mount Rushmore:
Basically, if you’re looking to learn the fundamentals of SEO, this post is a great place to start :-).
The SEOgadget Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization
This week, Richard Baxter and the team at SEOgadget released one of the best infographics you will ever see. It clearly illustrates the right (and the wrong) way to perform conversion rate optimization:
