6 basic bills you should always negotiate

Does the thought of haggling over your monthly bills make you break out in a cold sweat? You're not alone because most people don't like trying to talk their way into a lower price.

Source Business http://ift.tt/1K3VbxI

UNLV officials to present options on buying stadium land

UNLV's next step for a new stadium is Thursday when university officials will brief a Nevada Board of Regents committee on various financial options to buy 42 acres at Tropicana Avenue and Koval Lane for $50 million.

Source Business http://ift.tt/1OsYAFT

New confession embarrasses Tony Abbott

TONY Abbott spent all of last week denying them, but last night, a bureaucrat blew the lid on explosive allegations against the government.

Source NEWS.com.au | Business http://ift.tt/1isQByw

5 Ways to Build Links Without Getting Penalized

How do you get more search traffic if you’re not supposed to build links?

It’s a catch-22…

You know you should create content that attracts links, but you need to have links to have an audience that can link to you.

Therefore, you must be proactive in order to get backlinks to your site.

And according to Matt Cutts, the importance of backlinks isn’t going away anytime soon:

…backlinks still have many, many years left in them … over time backlinks will become a little less important … we will continue to use links in order to assess the basic reputation of pages and websites.

According to just about every study out there, backlinks are still one of the most important factors in ranking highly in search engines—as the image above illustrates.

Bottom line: You need to build backlinks.

But…you need to do it in a safe way, so you don’t have to worry about having your site sent into oblivion by the next Penguin update.

Avoiding penalties while building links isn’t about luck. It’s about earning links. The types of links that Google penalizes sites for are low-quality or bought links. If you can buy it on Fiverr, it’s not a good link. Period.

High quality links will never be penalized. These links have natural anchor text and are placed on highly authoritative and trusted sites. These links cannot be bought in the vast majority of situations.

In this article, I’m going to show you five of the best ways to get high quality links that will improve your search rankings without putting you at risk of being penalized.

In addition, most of these links will send you traffic right away—high quality links tend to do that. 

1. Get freelance writers do it for you

Remember the goal: get natural links on highly authoritative sites.

Most of these sites are run by professional teams, and almost all of them produce content on a regular basis.

For a variety of reasons, many of these sites also rely heavily on freelance writers to produce the majority of that content.

Here’s a crazy thought: What if you could get a freelance writer who contributes to a major relevant site to love your writing or product? It would probably lead to multiple links over time.

What’s even better is that these top-tier freelance writers don’t just write at one authority site—they write at multiple highly-trusted sites.

Think about that for a second. Getting just one freelance writer to love your stuff could result in several extremely high-quality links.

Now imagine if you could find a few more freelancers like that.

Pretty cool, right? Let me show you how to do it…

Step 1: Find freelance writers in your general niche. It all starts with a list. You need to identify big sites in your niche that use freelance writers.

If you’ve been operating in your niche for a while, you might already know a few.

If not, you’ll have to dig around a bit. Search for “biggest [niche] sites,” and look through the results. If you see a bunch of different posts on a site’s homepage or blog, it’s likely a good target. Alternatively, ask your friends or people on forums to name their favorite sites.

To expand your options, you can look at sites in any related niche. For example, if I was looking for marketing writers, I would look for the biggest sites that focus on:

• SEO
• Conversion rate optimization
• Inbound marketing
• Online business
• Copywriting
• Link building
• Public relations
• etc.

Quite a few options.

Write down as many sites with multiple regular contributors as possible on a spreadsheet.

Step 2: Evaluate writers. Now that you have a list of sites, you can begin your search for good writers with whom you’d want to connect.

Some sites make this really easy, like the Crazy Egg blog:

When you click on the Writing Team link, you get a list of writers that regularly contribute to the site.

Not all sites will have that. Take Moz, for example:

Either way, the process from here is largely the same.

Click on an author’s name, which will almost always have a link to a page of their previous posts:

Next, decide if that writer covers the topics you write about.

For example, I see that Sharon mainly writes about SEO and CRO. If your site/business was in either the SEO or CRO niche, she’d be a great person to get to know.

Here’s where the hard work begins. You need to repeat this for every writer from every site. In the case of a site such as Moz (shown above), you’ll have to click through the last few pages of blog posts to see if the writers are regular contributors (2+ posts per month) or just doing a one-off guest post (don’t target these).

This is a ton of work, but choosing the right writers is crucial to getting a good success rate in the next steps.

Step 3: Give them a chance to like you. The average freelancer isn’t extremely well-known, which makes interacting with them a lot easier than with influencers in your niche.

That being said, a lot of the same rules apply.

You don’t want to start by saying, “Come, look at my writing—it’s amazing!” That’s just going to turn your prospects off. Instead, start by giving them a little value without asking for anything in return.

Yes, this will take a bit of time, but a solid relationship with a handful of freelancers can provide amazing long-term benefits to your business.

I recommend finding them and connecting with them on social media to stay up-to-date with their work. Most author bios will have a link or two to the writer’s favorite social media platform:

Now, you can do basic things like re-sharing their posts to get on their radar.

Freelance writers are judged by editors based on the performance of their posts. Typically, that’s measured by these two metrics:

• comments
• social shares

Next, read any of your chosen writers’ newly published posts, and leave a thoughtful comment. Share a personal story or add something valuable to the article that might encourage discussion.

Any good freelance writer will reply to your comment, which you could then reply to further (if appropriate). If they reply once again, their comment count for that article will go from zero to four, which looks a lot better. In addition, this may encourage others to start commenting as well.

Commenting on one article isn’t going to be enough. Do it for at least two or three articles over the next month. If you have a following on social media, share these posts, and tag the writer to make them aware of it.

Step 4: Show them who you are. At this point, you’re on their radar. They know who you are, and it’s possible that they did a basic search for you (not too likely, though).

You’ve built up some good will, and the writer appreciates your support. Now, you want to take the relationship to email.

Go back to their author bio to see if you can find a link to their personal website. Not all writers will have an email list (like bloggers), but they’ll all have a contact form at the minimum:

If a chance to join an email list comes up, take it. That’s the easiest way to get the writer’s personal email address.

However, unlike some bloggers/influencers, freelancers diligently check emails received through the contact form, so you can use that as well.

In your first message, don’t pitch or link to anything.

At this point, the writer should know you by name, and they are probably thinking:

[Your Name] seems to be popping up everywhere recently. He either really likes my work, wants me to write for him/her, or wants something from me (to review his/her product or something similar).

If you link to something right away, all that time getting to know the writer and his/her work is flushed down the toilet.

Instead, send something like this to them (either to their email or using the contact form):

Subject: Your [niche] writing

Hi [Writer’s Name],

I just wanted to send you a quick message to let you know that I loved your recent articles on [site #1] and [site #2].

In particular, your article about [recent topic] was extremely helpful. I took your advice [something from the articles] and ended up [some sort of achievement].

Keep up the great work :),

[Your Name]

Step 5: Introduce your work. Now that you’ve done an awesome job beginning the relationship, you can start thinking about how your content or product works best with your target writer’s work.

Although you could send an email a week or two later asking them to take a look at one of your best posts, your best move is to give even more value to your writer.

How? Freelance writers have to continually come up with great ideas to pitch, which is hard.

So, give them three or four great article ideas highly related to your product or content.

Then, send them another email, something like this:

Subject: A few content ideas?

Hi [name],

I have a few article ideas that I think would be perfect for you if you’re interested.

I didn’t mention it before, but I’m actually a [niche] blogger (just on my personal site). I previously wrote a really in-depth article on [topic] {put the link in here!}. I was looking for a few great resources to link to in that article, but I couldn’t really find any, so I just noted down the topics.

I was planning on writing about them myself because I think they’ll turn out great, but it’s not exactly the kind of topic I usually write about on my site.

It just occured to me that you might be the perfect writer to use these ideas, so they’re yours if you’d like to pitch them to any of your editors:

• [idea #1]

• [idea #2]

• [idea #3]

Let me know if you end up writing any—I’d love to read them.

Cheers,

[Your Name]

Notice the mention of your content and the link (make this clear). The writer will almost always look at it and, assuming it’s as good as you say, link to it when they get a chance since it fits perfectly with the content ideas you gave them.

This approach hinges on you providing great content ideas. They can’t be just your everyday list post ideas that no editor will care about. Luckily, I can help you out here:

• Where to Steal Ideas for Your Next Blog Post
• Generate Clickable Ideas
• How To Create Better Content For Your Customers

2. Give your best knowledge away (yes, guest posting is still useful)

I’ve written about guest posting many times before, but I need to correct some poor practices here. Some people write guest posts but don’t get the right backlinks from them, so I want to show you how to maximize your posts here.

If you need a guest posting crash course, refer to these:

• Guest-Posting on Steroids: A 4-Step Blueprint That the Top Guest Posters Use
• How to Find the Best Places to Guest Blog
• Advanced Guest Posting
• 7 Lessons Learned from Publishing 300 Guest Posts

Some guest posting links are better than others: The typical guest post bio link at the bottom of the post, although okay, is not very effective.

It’s typically a single link at the very end of the post (not very many readers will see it), and sometimes it’s in a special “bio box,” which Google could devalue.

Don’t get me wrong: it will still drive some traffic and give you some SEO value—but not as much as you should be getting.

A good guest post is done on a really authoritative site, which automatically makes it a pretty trusted page.

It’s always seemed weird to me that any pages you link to in your guest post get more powerful contextual links (that drive more traffic) than a piddly link at the bottom.

Although a few blog owners are paranoid about you linking back to your site in any way, most are okay with it as long as it adds value. Your goal should always be to write the best guest post possible, and if that includes backing up a point by linking to your site, you should do it.

When I write a blog post, I link to supporting sources all the time. Most of these links aren’t to my own posts:

But when it truly makes sense to link to one of my own posts, I do it:

In this case, the post I linked to is relevant to the point I just made, and many readers would find it helpful.

One thing that more bloggers should do is link to their previous guest posts:

Either way, just make sure all links in the article are valuable. Typically, the best content to link to is:

• lists of resources
• ultimate guides
• infographics/gifographics
• data or studies

Why not add to your guest post’s authority? One of the reasons why you would guest post on a particular site is because it’s authoritative. Some of that authority will pass back onto your site.

What many guest posters don’t realize is that this means that the stronger your guest post is (in terms of authority), the more you benefit.

So, instead of just posting your guest post and calling it a day—like most bloggers do—you will promote it.

First, email anyone that you linked to or mentioned in the article:

Subject: Mentioned you

Hi [name],

I mentioned you in a guest post that I did on [site name]. If you’d like to check it out, here’s the link: [URL].

Best regards,

[Your Name]

Many will understand that you’d like them to share your post with their audiences, but you could also add a line asking them to do so in your email.

Next, share it on social media platforms you use regularly as part of your social media strategy.

But don’t just share it once. Share it multiple times over the next few weeks with different titles.

Finally, share it on aggregator sites such as Reddit or niche-specific ones such as Inbound.org and Hackernews. If it’s a really well-written post, you can get at least a few hundred targeted visitors to it. If you’re new to Reddit, do yourself a favor, and read this guide first.

3. Inform the world of your infographics

I still love infographics even if they don’t work as well as they used to.

An average infographic today still gets me 371 backlinks from 34 unique domains.

There is no other common content type that spreads as easily as infographics do as revealed by a study of over 1 million articles:

Since it’s other people who link to infographics, these links are almost always safe.

In addition, you control most of the anchor text. When you publish an infographic, you should always include an HTML embed code that people can copy and paste on their websites:

Within the embed code, there is a link to the image and also a link back to the original page with the anchor text you specify:

If you picked anchor text like “best diet pills,” then yes, you might get penalized. But for branded anchor text (e.g., “Quick Sprout”), no chance.

Remember that only a fraction of people will use the embed code, so you will still get overall diversified anchor text. For instance, that above example was only used by 32% of linkers:

Get bloggers to link to your infographic: If you don’t have any readership, it’s extra important to promote your infographic aggressively. This is still safe because although you’re asking for a link, you’re not paying for it or trying to trick someone into giving it to you.

Compile a list of bloggers in your niche, and send them an email like this:

Subject: [insert the name of your infographic] infographic

Hey [insert their first name],

I hope your [insert the day] is going well. I noticed your blog and thought you might want to check out this infographic we just rolled out about [insert the topic of your infographic].

Check it out when you have a minute, and let me know what you think.

[insert URL]

The embed code is located under the infographic for an easy copy and paste (just in case you want to share it with your readers).

Thanks for taking a look! Hope it was of interest to you,

[Your Name]

Again, this doesn’t work as well as it used to, but you should be able to get about 5% (sometimes more) of the bloggers to embed your infographic at some point, assuming it is actually good.

4. Social media links add up…and have one added bonus

Much confusion exists when SEO and social media come up together, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

I’ll make this as simple as possible.

Matt Cutts released a video last year clearly saying that social signals are not a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm:

However, Bing does take into account social authority. In an interview, Bing representatives confirmed that the search engine looks at how many followers you have, who follows you, etc. It might not be a huge ranking factor, but it’s there.

That’s really all there is from a simple SEO perspective.

Now, let’s shift gears a bit. Be honest, when you read the title of this post, what did you immediately think of?

Google.

Yes, Google is a behemoth, but Google does not represent all search engines. Even just from a text standpoint, Bing/Yahoo are continually growing their market share.

Last year, I wrote that social is the new SEO, and not a ton has changed since then.

The fact remains that Google is just one site you can rank on. YouTube, for example, gets 1,140 searches per second. That’s far more valuable than Google for video-based content.

What about Twitter? Twitter’s search engine gets over 2.1 billion searches per day. Then there’s Facebook, Instagram, Google+…

There are a ton of search engines out there.

Being active on them and getting a lot of social shares will help you show up in their searches more often, which will lead to more traffic to your website.

In addition, many of those shares still result in a link back to your site. They may not get any special “social” consideration, but they’re still links on an authoritative domain.

In case you didn’t watch that video above, Cutts said this:

Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results.

Not surprisingly, social media profiles, and even posts, sometimes rank really well.

Even though thousands of sites mention Quick Sprout, social media profiles are seen as highly relevant to a brand query. Links from these pages must provide at least some SEO value.

Finally, who knows how Google’s algorithm is going to change in the future. It may include social signals one day. Until then, social media links can help you rank on multiple search engines and can send direct traffic to your site.

Aggregator sites are social too: I’ve mentioned before that large aggregator sites, such as Reddit and Inbound.org, can be great for link-building.

Those sites are highly authoritative, usually allow dofollow links, and have massive audiences.

If your content gets popular on any of these platforms, you can get massive exposure, which can lead to many more links in the future.

For example, a startup called Product Hunt was essentially launched on the startup and entrepreneur subreddit communities. The people in those communities liked it so much that it became popular and spread insanely quickly.

Now, people link to it all the time on those subreddits, which leads to more exposure, users, and links:

In addition, when enough people see something, a percentage of them will link to it. Product Hunt was able to get over 1 million links in just over a year, all starting from a few posts:

5. Be altruistic – do something beneficial for your community

As a marketer, you might find it really easy to become selfish and always ask, “What’s in it for me?”

But sometimes, you can find ways in which both you and your community can win.

Below are a couple of such ways I’d like to share with you.

Tactic #1: Set up a scholarship. You used to be able to donate to charities to get great links, but that’s not extremely effective anymore since SEOs got wind of it. But a scholarship is similar to a donation—just bigger.

It will cost more, but you’ll get more, and often higher quality, links out of it.

Creating a scholarship isn’t very difficult in the States although it may vary in other parts of the world. Here’s a simple guide.

If you’re creating one in the US, you need to meet certain legal and IRS requirements. I recommend consulting a lawyer if possible. On the plus side, creating a scholarship also comes with some tax breaks.

To start with, you’ll need to decide how much you want to give away and to whom. Scholarships can be as little as $500-1,000, so you don’t need to break the bank to set up one.

I would recommend making the scholarship as relevant to your niche as possible. For example, if you were in marketing, you could create a scholarship for aspiring marketers or entrepreneurs. This will help your links to be more relevant and powerful for your search rankings.

Once you create your scholarship (put the details on your website), you can start contacting schools to link to it. These are very high quality links.

You can use these search strings to find potential scholarship pages (do the same with .gov):

• site:.edu “scholarships”
• site:.edu “college scholarships”
• site:.edu “scholarships links”
• site:.edu “scholarship list”
• site:.edu “list of scholarships”
• site:.edu “Outside Agency Scholarships”
• site:.edu “private Scholarships”
• site:.edu “keyword + scholarships”

Be warned, you might have to dig around a little bit to find the page you need. Look for a link to a page with external scholarships, like this:

Some pages will have contact information on them, but sometimes you’ll have to scroll down to the footer to find a link to the school’s directory. Find contact information for the scholarship department:

I always prefer calling over email when possible. If you send an email, it can be weeks or months before you hear back.

Also remember that since most of these pages will belong to schools, they won’t be usually very active during summers, when it may take longer to get a reply.

Contact as many as you can, and you should be able to get at least a few dozen solid links.

Tactic #2: Run a contest. Do you know what else people in your community love? Free stuff.

You can give away subscriptions or products to people that give you their email addresses and share the contest on social media. The bigger the prizes you give away, the more viral it will go, and the better results you will get.

I’ll be upfront: this tactic is primarily good for building your email list, but it will provide you with a few links as well.

Gael Breton ran a contest to grow Authority Hacker and was able to get over 1,600 new subscribers and thousands of social followers and shares. The contest also attracted 10 natural links of decent quality on forums and blogs.

To get those results, they had to give away prizes that had a total value of over $5,000.

But Gael was clever. Instead of just putting up that money himself, he got the companies to donate the prizes.

If you can convince a few well-known companies that you know what you’re doing and have them donate prizes, you might be able to lower your contest costs by a significant amount.

Conclusion

I hope you get a few big takeaways from this post.

First, if you’re going to “build” safe links in 2015, you need either great content or a great product. Most of your investment should be going into either content or product development.

Once you have that, you can use these five effective ways to build safe links that can be used over and over again to grow your website’s traffic and search rankings at the same time.

You don’t necessarily need to use all five, but having a diverse link profile only makes you more immune to Google penalties.

This is far from a complete list of link building strategies, but it’s what I think most site owners should start with.

If I missed any of your favorites, share them in a comment below so that everyone else can benefit too.

Source Quick Sprout http://ift.tt/1K3p7Ke

The $100,000 Challenge: August Update

We just wrapped up the fifth month of the $100,000-a-month challenge, and traffic-wise, it was a great month. In August, we had 40,870 visitors with 13,431 coming from search.

I know this is an August update, but from the beginning of September, we’ve already been averaging over 800 visitors a day from Google, which means September should be a big month for NutritionSecrets.com from a traffic perspective.

August showed an over 54% traffic increase compared to the previous month. Here’s what happened…

SEO takes time

I’m not a patient person, but SEO takes time, and there isn’t much you can do about it. It doesn’t matter how much content you write or how many links you build, search engines don’t just open the floodgates to your site.

They make sure that you are continually improving and that all the signals look good. If they do, you’ll see more search traffic. It’s been like this for years. Typically, every time I start a new blog, it usually takes 6 to 7 months for search traffic to really kick in. Within this period of time, you should see NutritionSecrets.com reach over 100,000 monthly visitors.

How can you increase your search traffic?

There is a formula I use with all my blogs to grow my search traffic. Here is the Excel Sheet I use for NutritionSecrets.com. There are a few things to keep in mind when going over the spreadsheet:

1. It was originally created by Louder Online years ago. I took it with their permission and have been using it for my own projects ever since. That’s why you see their branding everywhere.
2. Within the document, you will have to replace “nutrition” or other random keywords with those relevant to your blog. The sheet will pre-populate results based on that.
3. The spreadsheet is a Google Doc and can only be viewed, not edited. To be able to modify it, you’ll have to create a duplicate by clicking on the navigation option “file” and then “make a copy.” Now, you can modify the spreadsheet.
4. If you need more customized help, you can always hire Louder Online.
5. Keep in mind that my version isn’t the neatest as I already know a lot about content marketing. That means you are looking at a very minimalistic version that isn’t as filled out as it should be.

Now that you have the sheet, there are a few things you need to know…

The content strategy document we use on Nutrition Secrets, along with a toolset, outlines a number of key elements that Mike follows to ensure consistency in his blogging. It also provides some amazing ways of being able to rapidly generate ideas for posts that have a high likelihood of being successful.

The strategy document includes the following sections:

• Style guide
• Strategic plan
• Visitor personas and journey template
• Idea generation tools
• Headline generation tools
• Idea scratch pad & validation
• Editorial planner
• Editorial calendar

Here is further explanation of the sections I listed above.

Style guide

This document records everything that should be followed from a style perspective to ensure a consistent feel to all of your created content. It covers elements such as:

• Tone
• Style
• Voice
• Language used
• Formatting
• Common categories
• Meta data rules

Strategic plan

This spread sheet is put together directly from this chapter of the Advanced Guide to Content Marketing. It contains the following sections:

• Channel plan
• Core and secondary messaging
• Business objectives
• Competitive analysis
• Differentiator

Visitor personas and journey template

This template provides the opportunity to outline a few of the key personas within your targeted traffic. It allows you to answer many questions that help define those personas so that when you create the content, each piece is written with the goal of targeting a specific persona or a specific stage in the visitor’s journey.

A number of sections in this template are pulled directly from this post on HubSpot by Aaron Agius.

Idea generation tools

This is where a lot of the magic happens for the blog. This is a suite of tools put together to pull in questions related to your topic from around the web.

The idea here is that if you are answering people’s questions and solving problems in your industry through great content, you will put yourself in a position of authority within the industry.

The tools developed here pull questions from the following websites:

• Quora
• StackExchange
• Reddit

In addition to developing a strategy around answering common questions and addressing problems people in your niche have, you can also benefit from staying on top of current trends, known as “newsjacking.” The content strategy sheet allows for a search to be performed on an entered keyword, which pulls relevant information from the following sources:

• Google News
• Hacker News
• Reddit
• Digg
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Google Trends

The combination of these two powerful sets of tools allows for endless high quality content ideas to be pulled into one central document. You can use the document to help you choose the topics you are most comfortable writing about and then build out those ideas.

Headline generation tools

Jon Morrow put together a fantastic document called Headline Hacks. It is a cheat sheet on how to write headlines that help posts go viral.

By combining this cheat sheet with Portent’s Idea Generator tool and HubSpot’s Topic Generator, you can produce a large number of possible headlines for each content idea you create with help of the above Idea Generation Tools.

Idea scratch pad & validation

This is a template that allows you to write down the ideas you have come up with using the idea and headline generation tools. The most important function of this section is to validate the ideas that have been generated to ensure they meet at least some the following criteria:

• Topic has a high search volume
• Similar topics have seen success on competitor sites
• Topic is trending positively over time
• Topic is an ego-bait piece for influencers within the industry

Editorial planner

This is a work sheet that allows you to create a more detailed outline of each post before you set out to write it. This editorial planner allows for specific language, tone, style, and content length variations to be indicated if they are needed for any particular piece.

Here are some of the items:

• Status
• Due date
• Author (for a multi-author blog)
• Content idea
• Further description
• Draft URL (for Google Docs)
• Specific style notes
• Content length
• Must include items
• Must exclude items
• Reference links
• Specific comments
• Estimated hours for completion

Editorial calendar

An editorial calendar helps ensure the proper scheduling of content at the correct times. This includes incorporating changes to the schedule based on seasonal requirements, holidays, or anything else that requires content to be written or published on specific dates.

Now that you know our content strategy, let’s dive into Amazon.

How we will generate revenue

We will be monetizing the site through e-books and a course we are going to sell. We haven’t started creating any of those yet, but we eventually will.

The strategy will be somewhat similar to the one I use on NeilPatel.com. Maybe we’ll start with the homepage, which will have an opt-in for a webinar. Next, we will give you hours of useful information free, and eventually, we’ll pitch you a paid product.

I do this on the NeilPatel.com site, and on a bad day, at least 1% of all webinar registrants sign up for a $6,000 course. Which isn’t too bad… Eventually, I should be able to get it to 2% or 3%. And when you have 100,000 monthly visitors, you can typically collect 5,000 to 6,000 emails assuming you are leveraging pop-ups and content upgrades.

When it comes to Amazon, we’ve done a lot of research, but we haven’t found a company that will let us white-label a “fish oil” product (it’s going to be our first product) on our terms. We’d like to be able to get paid on every sale without having to pay upfront.

It’s kind of like an affiliate model, but the physical product will have a Nutrition Secrets label on it and will be drop-shipped from the manufacturer’s office.

The profit margins won’t be high, but at least I won’t have to put up any cash. I’ll then use the Nutrition Secrets audience to generate reviews for the product on Amazon.

It will take some time, but in general, the fish oil market is big enough to allow me to sell at least $50,000 worth of fish oil capsules each month if I hit 4.5 stars or higher with 500 plus reviews.

The key with Amazon is a high rating, large number of reviews, prime shipping, and offering more than the competition at a competitive price. It may sound like it might be hard to offer all this, but it really isn’t. You just can’t be greedy and have to be okay with lower margins.

We haven’t done much with Amazon yet as I have been traveling overseas a bit too much, but hopefully we get something up and running in the next 30 days.

Conclusion

Overall, it’s been a good month. Traffic shall continue to rise assuming we push out more high quality content and continue to build links. It’s just going to take time and patience.

In an ideal world, Mike would be producing two pieces of content each day, but with manual link-building outreach, he just doesn’t have the time. Hopefully, that will change in the next month or two.

What do you think of the progress so far?

P.S. I wanted to give special thanks to Louder Online for letting me publish their content marketing spreadsheet. If you like what you see, you should hit up Aaron as their online marketing services are really good.

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The Complete Guide to Google Penalties (Both Manual and Algorithmic)

It’s your worst nightmare…

You wake up one morning and check your analytics. But something’s wrong…where’s all your traffic?

Whether you like it or not, websites in most niches rely on Google for a large percentage of their traffic.

If you get hit by a penalty, 10%, 20%, or even more of your business can be wiped out overnight. That’s a pretty scary thought.

There are two types of penalties that can hit you: manual penalties and algorithmic penalties.

Algorithms get most of the attention because those types of penalties affect tens of thousands of sites all at once.

However, there are over 400,000 manual penalties that are applied every month, according to Matt Cutts—that’s a lot. 

To be fair, many of the sites that get penalized are legitimately awful sites that consist of nothing but content spam. However, hundreds of site owners are penalized every day who are trying to make the best site they can. It could even be you one day.

If you’ve been fortunate enough to avoid a penalty in the past, you might think reports of penalties are exaggerated. In most cases, they’re not.

While not all penalties will have the same effect on your traffic, some can wipe out 90% or more of it in an instant.

And penalties don’t discriminate either—they affect both small and large sites.

After the Panda 4.0 update (more on that later), eBay’s traffic was hit hard:

But that’s far from the only example of a big site being penalized.

Recently, another large company named Thumbtack was penalized.

Thumbtack, in case you didn’t know, is a company that Google invested $100 million into, and they still got penalized.

That being said, there is a difference between penalties for small and large sites. If you’re a very large site, where a penalty will garner a lot of press, you may be able to get prioritized support in fixing the penalty.

Thumbtack was able to get their penalty lifted in less than a week. If you have a lesser-known site, it’ll typically take a few weeks or months (at least) to correct the penalty.

I didn’t tell you all this to make you terrified of getting hit by a penalty. I did it so you recognize that avoiding penalties is ideal for your business.

If you understand all the different common penalties that Google hands out on a regular basis, you can take simple steps to reduce your chances of being hit by one by 99%.

In this article, I’m going to go over all the main types of penalties you can be hit by:

• Panda
• Penguin
• Mobile-Friendly
• Top Heavy
• Payday
• Pirate
• Unnatural Links
• Spam
• Thin Content

For each of the penalties, I’ll let you know if you have the type of website that is at risk of being hit and what steps you can take to minimize your chances of being penalized in the future.

If you’ve already been hit by one of these penalties, check out my step-by-step guide to fixing any Google penalty.

Panda – This penalty chews up weak content

The Panda algorithm might be the most well-known algorithm.

It was one of the first updates that specifically penalized websites. The first Panda algorithm was run in 2011 and decimated the traffic of a lot of low-quality websites.

In the three years following its release, Panda was run about once per month. Now that the algorithm is more established, it only seems to be run a few times per year.

While this might seem like a good thing at first, it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, with fewer updates, there are fewer opportunities to get penalized.

However, Panda is an algorithmic penalty. This means that if you get hit, once you fix the underlying issue(s) that caused the penalty, you have to wait for the algorithm to be run again to get your rankings back.

That means you could be waiting several months to get the penalty lifted.

And if you’re unsuccessful fixing the issues, you’ll have to try again and wait for another iteration of the algorithm.

The basics – What is Panda? The amazing thing about Panda is that even though it’s been run several times over the past four years or so, we still don’t have an exact definition of what types of sites it affects (although we have a good idea).

Google’s search team keep their algorithms as secret as possible. They don’t give much help to sites hit by algorithmic penalties, whereas they provide a lot of support for manual penalties.

As of now, we know that:

The purpose of the Panda algorithm update was and is to keep low-quality (“shallow”) content from showing up in search results.

Therefore, if you don’t have low-quality content on your site, you should be safe from the traffic-eating pandas.

Here is the problem, however. Low-quality can mean many different things.

Google provided a list of over 20 questions to help alleviate the worries of webmasters, but most of these are open to interpretation:

Two different people could be asked these questions regarding the same site and come to different conclusions. I don’t think they are very helpful.

Over time, the SEO community has come together to analyze websites that were hit by Panda and arrived to the following conclusions about pages that get penalized:

• The content is poorly written (perhaps “spun” using software)
• The content is very short (“shallow” content that is too brief to be valuable)
• The content is mostly duplicate content (copied from another page)
• The content adds no real value

It’s no surprise that content farms, like most web 2.0 sites, were hit the most. They were heavily used by SEOs to create backlinks to content, but those links were placed in terribly written, short articles for the most part.

How do Panda penalties work? Google often patents its algorithms, and it did so for Panda. It was granted its Panda patent in 2014. While you’re free to read it, it’s pretty boring, so let me sum it up for you:

Google creates a site-wide modification factor based on the quality of all the pieces of content on the site. If it falls below a certain threshold, the factor is applied to the site (lowering rankings of all the pages on the site).

In plain English, this means that if a site has a certain amount of low quality content on it, the entire site will be penalized.

That’s why, when it comes to reports of Panda penalties, you usually see graphs like this one:

Panda penalties are rarely small—they decimate organic search traffic.

How do you know if you were hit by Panda? You don’t get any messages about algorithmic penalties. The only way to spot them is by observation.

If you get hit by a penalty that wipes out most of your traffic, chances are you’re not alone. Monitor SEO news sites such as Search Engine Land to get more information. If it’s a Panda update, it’ll likely get spotted quickly.

If you ever suspect you’ve been hit by a penalty, but it happened in the past, there are online tools that can help you.

One useful free tool is the Panguin Tool. Once you connect it to your Google Analytics account, it will overlay a graph of your traffic over timelines of past algorithms:

If you see that your traffic rapidly declined a few days before or after a major Panda update, you were likely penalized by it.

Remember that these algorithms are often run over long periods of time (weeks), so your traffic decline may not start on the exact day that the algorithm was reported.

Penguin – The bird that can’t fly but can detect your bad backlinks

Only in SEO would a panda and a penguin be so closely related.

Both have had a huge impact on the way SEOs approach their work.

While Panda focused mainly on on-page factors, Penguin was a huge step forward for identifying unnatural link profiles.

The first Penguin was released in 2012 and affected over 3% of all queries. Like Panda, it decimated the traffic of any site it penalized:

What Penguin looks for: Penguin was groundbreaking when it was first run and has become more sophisticated over time.

It looks for a variety of obvious unnatural backlink patterns.

Google will never release the full details of the algorithm (or not any time soon), but we do know that there are three main backlink factors that can be used to identify unnatural link patterns:

1. Link quality - A site that has obtained all of its links naturally will have links of both low and high quality. Sites made by blackhat SEOs often have a ton of just low quality links or only high authority links (like from a private blog network).
2. Link velocity - Look at the backlink growth of any large site, and you will see that it gains links at an increased rate over time. Unnatural sites often get a lot of links in a short period, followed by a sudden decrease.
3. Link diversity - Legitimate sites get links from all sources (contextual, blog comments, forums, etc.). However, bad SEOs often create a large portion of a site’s links from one source (like blog comments). In addition, links should have varied anchor text. Too many links with the same anchor text could trigger a Penguin penalty.

Complicated, right?

Penguin is one of the main reasons why most SEOs are “whitehat,” or at least “greyhat,” SEOs these days. If you want to manipulate Google, you’ll have to plan your link-building strategy very carefully to make sure that most of your links appear natural.

How Penguin penalizes sites: Penguin is not a site-wide penalty—it affects specific pages.

However, since it affects those pages that typically have the most backlinks pointing to them, you can still lose 80%+ of your traffic if those pages are responsible for most of your traffic.

If your site is flagged by Penguin, you’ll typically be penalized. In some rare cases, Penguin will discount the value of the unnatural links instead of penalizing you.

A tool such as Panguin (shown in the previous section) can confirm that your traffic drop was caused by a Penguin algorithm update.

If your traffic drop was relatively small, you were probably one of the lucky few who didn’t get penalized. The drop was most likely caused by those now-discounted links.

When you’re checking to see if you were hit by Penguin, you should know that it is an even bigger algorithm than Panda. It can take more than a few weeks to fully run.

Recovering from a Penguin penalty is possible but difficult. Not only will you have to try to fix the issue (which could be a number of different things), but you’ll also need to wait for the next algorithm refresh to see if it worked or not.

Mobilegeddon – Can Google force website owners into the future?

Google’s primary goal is to help users find the best content that satisfies their queries.

For the first decade of Internet search, most of the work done by Google was dedicated to finding and classifying content better.

But Google is pretty good at that now.

The biggest factor affecting the user experience (when someone is searching for something) is the content itself. In other words, website owners aren’t improving their websites and content fast enough to keep up.

In early 2015, Google announced that it would start trying to help mobile users find useful results on mobile-friendly websites.

This announcement caused a lot of stir in the SEO community. A mobile-friendly update was soon to come, and it sounded like it was something big.

Site owners scrambled to make their websites mobile-friendly—something that Google would be happy to see (better experience for mobile searchers).

The update finally came a few months later on April 20th.

Although it was called “Mobilegeddon” and “Mobilepocalypse,” it turned out to be much less significant than originally predicted.

There was definitely some movement in the search rankings, but only the worst mobile-offenders suffered traffic losses.

What does Google consider mobile-friendly? Mobile-friendly can mean many different things. This is probably why Google started by just demoting the worst offenders.

Right now, there’s no sliding scale. Your web pages are either friendly or not friendly.

You can see what Google thinks of your content by using the Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Enter a URL, click Analyze, and it will give you a green passing message or a red fail message.

It’s a good idea to check a few different pages such as your home page, a blog post, and any other pages with custom layouts or designs.

Another place to check if you have any major mobile issues is in Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console).

Navigate to “Search traffic > Mobile usability”, and you’ll see any errors that you should fix as soon as possible:

Finally, Google has also released a useful mobile SEO guide. In it, it explains the most common mobile errors such as blocking javascript or messing up your mobile redirects.

On top of those mistakes, here are a few more general mobile-friendly principles to keep in mind:

• Don’t use software that most mobile devices can’t render, e.g, Flash.
• Resize text to match the screen (i.e., responsive design)
• Use text that is easily readable on a small screen (typically 16px or more)
• Don’t put links right beside each other (hard to tap the right one)

Mobilegeddon in the future: Just because the first mobile-friendly update wasn’t huge doesn’t mean you shouldn’t concern yourself with making your website as mobile-friendly as possible.

Google will likely make changes to the algorithm in the future as it further develops its requirements for what is and isn’t mobile-friendly.

Keep in mind that even if you get hit by a mobile “penalty,” your traffic likely won’t be decimated. This update primarily boosts the rankings of the most mobile-friendly sites, so they’ll just push down your unfriendly pages in the results.

Top Heavy – Balance is the key to any impression

When a searcher clicks on a result in Google, they are looking for an answer to their query.

If they can’t find it, they get frustrated.

So, it makes sense that Google would like to minimize these frustrations by not sending users to sites that make it difficult for users to find what they’re looking for.

The “Top Heavy” algorithm was first run in January 2012.

As the name implies, it specifically targets top heavy sites.

The best explanation comes from Google itself:

“We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.

So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience.

Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”

How the Top Heavy penalty works: This is a site-based penalty. That means that either all of your content is penalized or none of it is.

Google clarified this after an article on Search Engine Land pointed out that Google’s results themselves could be seen as “top heavy.”

Google responded by saying that only sites where most pages are “top heavy” will be penalized.

If it’s only a few pages, don’t worry about this algorithm.

The final thing you need to know about this algorithmic penalty is that it is run very infrequently.

It was first run in January of 2012, then October of 2012, and most recently in February of 2014. If you get hit with this penalty, you’ll have to be patient to get it removed.

Avoiding a Top Heavy penalty: Although it may seem unfair that the algorithm is only run about once a year, it’s fairly difficult to get hit by this penalty.

Here’s an example of a top heavy layout:

Unless you have multiple ads, all above the fold, you’re probably safe.

And really, these types of sites should be penalized. They’re extremely frustrating to the average searcher.

If your content is pushed below the fold, chances are your site visitors won’t bother trying to find it.

To avoid this penalty, just create a good user experience.

Payday – If you prey on hopeful readers, your Payday may be over

Anyone who has been in the Internet marketing industry for some time knows that shady industries can be very lucrative.

Most of the best blackhat SEOs compete against each other to rank for keywords in the gambling, loan, and supplement niches.

This algorithm—“Payday”—was appropriately named for some of the most lucrative, and therefore competitive, search engine results for Payday loans.

Combatting spammy results with the Payday algorithm: We’ve seen in the past few years how good Google is at catching blackhat SEOs.

It has repeatedly crushed large portions of their sites, mainly belonging to beginner and intermediate SEOs.

However, the best blackhat SEOs won’t go down easy.

There is a small group of SEOs who have the ability and will to manipulate Google. They are good enough to rank well in these high paying niches and make enough money to justify it before getting penalized.

The Payday algorithm was first run on June 11, 2013, and rolled out over a few months.

It specifically targeted queries containing keywords such as:

• Payday loans
• Casinos
• Viagra
• Garcinia cambogia
• and more.

The second version of the algorithm was released on May 17th and 18th of 2014, and the 3.0 version was released soon after in June.

If you operate a site in any “spammy” niche, you need to be extra clean if you want to avoid being penalized. Otherwise, if you’re getting results with blackhat SEO, expect to be penalized eventually. If that happens, you’ll just have to move on to a new site.

If you have a legitimate site that was hit by this penalty (line up traffic drops with any of the algorithm dates), you can try to fix it. However, you’ll have to wait for the algorithm to be updated again for any positive changes to take effect.

Pirate – Outlaws be warned! The Google police are coming for you

Google almost always tries to show searchers the results they want.

However, Google has taken a strong stance on piracy.

Piracy, which is essentially stealing copyrighted content, is considered unethical by many and is illegal in some countries (although hard to enforce).

The “Pirate” algorithm was Google’s answer to the growing number of torrent sites (mainly used for pirating media and software) showing up in search results.

Based on the following graph of the traffic for some of the top torrent sites, I’d say it worked pretty well.

It didn’t knock them out of the search results altogether, but it reduced a large chunk of their traffic:

The reason why they still attract organic traffic is because not all their content is illegal material. In addition, this algorithm had no effect on branded searches.

Other sites that were purely made for pirating did lose most of their traffic. For example, free-tv-video-online.me lost 96% of its search visibility:

How the Pirate algorithm works: The main purpose of this algorithm wasn’t to eradicate torrent sites from the search results altogether, just for certain queries.

For example, if someone searched “Game of Thrones season 5 episode 6,” the searcher should not get torrent results. Before this update, torrent links to the episode would show up. But now, only reviews and legitimate ways to watch the show (HBO) are in the results:

The algorithm works based on copyright reports.

If a site has a lot of copyright violations, this algorithm will penalize it by lowering its rankings.

While new torrent sites can be made, they will be removed each time the algorithm is run if they have accumulated enough violations.

To get an idea of the scale on which copyright violations occur, consider this: Google receives requests to remove over 10 million URLs from search each week:

Not all of those are legitimate claims (Google always verifies first), but it’s still quite a bit.

If you want to avoid the Pirate penalty, it’s simple: don’t steal content (or I suppose don’t steal too much of it).

Unnatural links (manual) – Diversity is healthy

Manual penalties are a whole different beast when it comes to Google penalties.

They can be just as damaging to your traffic levels as algorithmic penalties are, but at least you’ll be able to see if you were hit by one.

As the name implies, manual penalties are given by Google employees and contractors who review your site against their quality guidelines and deem that you are violating one or more of them (most common ones are below):

One of the most influential ranking factors has been and still is backlinks. The more backlinks a page has, the better it ranks (in general).

Of course, SEOs started manipulating this as soon as they found out.

Manually reviewing backlink profiles of “unnatural links” is one of the ways Google combats this.

If the reviewer sees that a large portion of your links are paid links or part of a link scheme, you will be hit with this penalty.

Different forms of unnatural link penalties: Many different penalties include the phrase “unnatural links.” Some have more of an effect on your site than others.

If you log in to Webmaster Tools (Search Console), you can see whether you have any manual actions applied to your site:

The three most common actions are:

1. “Unnatural links to your site—impacts links.” If you have unnatural links, but it doesn’t look like you had any part in creating them, you’ll get this manual action, which isn’t actually a penalty. The links will no longer factor into your rankings (so traffic might drop a bit), but there’s nothing you need to do to “recover.”
2. “Unnatural links to your site.” If you just see this message, then you’ve been penalized. It means that the reviewer has concluded that you’re responsible for the shady links. Depending on the specific message, either specific pages will be penalized or your entire site could be.
3. “Unnatural links from your site.” If you’re always linking to specific sites with exact anchor text (for a high volume keyword) or you have way too many links pointing out from your site, you could get hit with this. This penalty can affect either a portion or all of your site.

Fixing a manual penalty: While no penalty is good, manual penalties are better than algorithmic. Once you fix the issue, you can apply for reconsideration. If you truly fixed the problem, the manual action will be lifted.

Once again, you may need to refer to my step-by-step guide to fixing any Google penalty.

Spam (manual) – If you’re going to play around, at least do it carefully

While most SEOs believe that spam refers solely to blasting thousands of links to a site, it’s much more than that.

The term spam, at least when it comes to manual penalties, also includes things such as:

• excessive or malicious cloaking
• scraping content
• automatically generated content
• and more.

Just like in the case of unnatural links manual actions, there are many different spam-related messages that can show up as a result of a manual action. These are the most common:

1. “Pure spam.” The majority of the site is clearly spam, or the backlinks to the site are all spammed. It’s next to impossible to recover from this manual action.
2. “User-generated spam.” If you have a site that allows users to submit content, you could be penalized for it if they abuse it to create spam content or links. Most commonly, this penalty refers to spam in comments or forum posts/profiles. It can be fixed.
3. “Spammy freehosts.” If you’re unlucky enough to have your site hosted by the same web host that provides service to a ton of spammers, your site might be lumped together with them. This is a good reason to stay away from very cheap or free hosting services.

Since these are manual penalties, they can be fixed. Recovery usually involves either cleaning up on-site spam or disavowing spammy links.

Thin content with no added value (manual) – No one likes hearing the same story over and over again

If Google doesn’t get you with Panda, it may get you with a manual review for having thin content.

Thin or duplicate content typically consists of information that can be found elsewhere, either on or off your site.

If a manual reviewer spots that most of your content is derived from other content, you can get hit with this penalty, and your traffic will take a tumble.

Here are the most common scenarios that represent “little or no added value”:

• Automatically generated content
• Thin affiliate pages
• Content from other sources, e.g., scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts
• Doorway pages

When you go to the Manual Actions section in Webmasters Tools (Search Console), you can see whether you’ve been hit by this penalty:

Pay close attention to whether it says that it’s a site-wide match or a partial match.

If it’s a site-wide match, that means the penalty applies to all your content until you fix it. If you just have a few pages of thin content, it’s possible that the penalty will only affect those. While you should still fix it, it won’t have a huge effect on your traffic.

Conclusion

Penalties are part of every SEO’s education.

Most are deserved, but some happen accidently. Understanding the root causes of penalties is the first step to preventing them from occurring and fixing them if you do get hit.

Once you have a good grasp on all the penalties, monitor Moz’s Google algorithm change log for any new ones so you can stay on top of them.

If you’ve discovered that you’ve been doing something that might get your website (or your client’s) penalized, stop it and correct it. Hopefully, you’ll catch it in time to avoid a penalty.

If you have any questions about these penalties, just let me know in a comment below.

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