Marcus Tober, founder of Search Metrics covered the full list of Panda losers (that link will be followed when they clean up the followed comment spam on the page :P) from the update over on their blog on the 14th of April. If you haven’t heard of Search Metrics, it’s a fantastic tool for gauging organic visibility of a site and landscape.

Example of a well known site hit by Panda with the now standard way of viewing it via Search Metrics -

As we are not far from two years down the line after the original release, we wanted to run an updated analysis of the losers to see how many have actually recovered and to what extent on average in reality. You can find our analysis below in the embedded Google docs spread sheet –

A few things to note, before we dig into the data –

• The original Search Metrics analysis used their old OPI score to measure visibility. After speaking directly with them, we had to update the original metrics from their post (both pre and post Panda) to their current SEO visibility metric, so we are obviously comparing like for like.
• The column headings in bold are those that we have added as part of our analysis.
• I am not convinced play.com or passport.net were hit by Google Panda.
• Moneypage.com is the only website we couldn’t get current SEO visibility data for (as it’s dead).

So What Does The Analysis Above Tell Us?

• Just 7 sites out of the 98 have experienced 100% recovery (or more) which represents just 7.14%. If you remove passport.net and play.com completely, this would be 6 out of 96 (6.25%).
• 12 sites out of 98 analysed have recovered 70% of their original visibility (or more) which represents just 12.24%. If you remove passport.net and play.com completely, this would be 10 out of 96 (10.42%).
• 82 sites out of 98 analysed have under half of their original visibility (or less) which represents a massive 83.67%. If you remove passport.net and play.com completely, this would be 82 out of 96 (85.42%).
• On average sites are currently down by 69% of their original pre-panda visibility. This means on average sites have experienced a 31% recovery of their original pre-Panda visibility.
• Sites have on average increased visibility by 10% from when they were hit by Panda to today.

Please take the data above with a pinch of salt, but the analysis does highlight just how difficult it has been and still is for websites to experience recovery from Google Panda. In many cases, Google questioned the fundamental business model of a website or at the very least, made most think again about what USP and value they provide to users (that Google hasn’t decided to offer themselves of course…).

The updated version of the SEO spider has plenty of new features, which include –

• Save Configuration – You can now save the spider configuration to be default on start-up. This feature is fairly basic currently, but will be developed further to allow a number of configurations to be saved and accessed quickly.
• Response Time – The SEO spider now collects response times for URLs under the ‘Response Codes’ tab. This should help identify slow loading pages!
• Filter Totals – There is now a filter total in the GUI, to save exporting to Excel and calculating.
• Bulk Export Out Links – You can now bulk export out link data via the ‘advanced export’ menu.
• Accept Cookies – The SEO spider can now accept cookies, which can be useful for some websites which require it to be able to crawl. This feature is still turned off as default as of course, search bots do not accept cookies.
• Auto Pause On Reaching Memory – One of our most frequent queries is, how many URLs can the SEO spider crawl? Well, this is dependent on memory allocation. Now when you start to reach the memory allocation, the SEO spider will automatically pause and recommend saving the crawl and increasing memory allocation, before uploading the crawl again and resuming.
• 5XX Response Retries – There is now an ‘advanced’ tab in the spider configuration which allows the user to adjust the number of automatic retries for 5XX responses.
• Request Authentication – Users now have the ability to switch off messages from websites which require authentication.
• Response Timeout – The amount of time the SEO spider waits for a response from a URL is now configurable, which is useful for very slow loading websites.
• New Filters – We have introduced a couple of new filters, such as page titles with under 30 characters or meta descriptions with under 70 characters.

You can download the new version on our SEO spider page.

Update 2.11 (25th February 2013)

We have released a small update to version 2.11. This release essentially irons out a few bugs in version 2.10 which include –

• Fixed a ‘Null Pointer Exception’ error when exporting the ‘response codes’ tab for any results where the response time field has no value (such as a DNS look-up failure).
• Fixed a bug with custom filters loading from older projects.
• Fixed a domain matching bug with .com and .com.au’s.
• Changed the date format in the SEO spider so there is no confusion between UK and US date formats :-).

There were a number of other smaller amends and updates along the way as well. As always, if you spot any problems, please contact us via the support page with the details.

Thanks again to everyone for all their support of the tool, we are already working on the next batch of features. There are still plenty on the list!

So with December beginning tomorrow and the run up to Christmas now well and truly underway, to celebrate we will be opening a door each day on a SEO Spider advent calendar on our Facebook page. Behind each door we’ll be giving you some ideas on how you could use the Spider as well as tips & tricks that we’ve learnt over the years.

To keep up to date with these tips & tricks all you need to do is to Like us on Facebook and as we open a (metaphorical) door each day you’ll get them direct on your timeline!

As we’re really getting into the Christmas spirit this year, as well as giving all you lovely people great ideas about how to use the SEO Spider we’re also giving you the chance to WIN A FREE LICENCE!! (Aren’t we great!?!)

To be in with a chance of winning all you need to do is let us know in the comments below the most creative way you use the spider and how it’s helped you over past year. We’ll then put all of the commenters in our Santa hat (he’s lent us one especially) and one lucky so-and-so will win their license for next year!

Good luck everyone and Merry Christmas!

Terms & Conditions:
One entry per person
The prize is 1 (one) annual licence for the premium version of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, valid from January 1st 2013
If the winner is already a licensee Screaming Frog will extend their respective licence by 1 year
The winner will be randomly selected at 12noon (GMT) Monday 24th December 2012
The winner will be announced on the Screaming Frog Facebook page (so keep your eyes peeled)
The licence will not be transferable to another person
No part of the prize is exchangeable for cash
By entering the competition the winner agrees to participate in such promotional activity and material as Screaming Frog may require
Entries after the closing date will not be counted so don’t do it
Please ask the bill-payers permission before calling (in fact, don’t call as we’re not taking entries via the telephone)
If you see gum on the street, leave it there. It isn’t free candy
Last but not least, Don’t eat yellow snow

Google bombing is a practise whereby a specific web page is targeted to rank in 1st position in the SERPs for a particular search phrase, so that when that phrase is typed in Google it brings often humorous or controversial results. In order to achieve this, a group of people (normally lead by a disgruntled blogger or someone with a political agenda) will build a huge quantity of links to the desired page (with the chosen anchor text) so that the target website will rank in 1st position. Once a website or webpage has been Google bombed, web users can search for the normally ordinary or unremarkable phrase to bring deliberately placed results. Occasionally the results of a Google bomb are hilarious, others are thought provoking, and some are just plain unfortunate (see ‘completely wrong’ below).

Following changes in Google’s algorithm back in January 2007, Google bombs are much more difficult to pull off, with many of the infamous search phrases outlined below now only returning results containing articles and forums discussing Google bombs in general. So with your linking and social sharing help let’s see if we can get this very blog post ranking for ‘dangerous cult’! ;)

Mitt Romney

Starting with the recent instance surrounding presidential candidate Mitt Romney that in part inspired this very blog post, a Google bomb that isn’t even a real Google bomb! Type in ‘completely wrong’ as a Google Image search and your results will be populated by images of Republican Mitt Romney, who is obviously ‘completely wrong’ about a lot of things – and that’s Google’s opinion, not mine ;). As amusing as this is, a genuine Google bomb it is not. Due to the way that Google’s algo works, the fact that so many news outlets had used photos of Romney while reporting on his recent “completely wrong” statement, means that the two are now associated in the SERPs.

Chuck Norris

Why one might decide to Google the phrase ‘find chuck norris’ is beyond me, but if you’re that way inclined (Chuck Norris inclined, not THAT way inclined) then hit the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button which takes you to Arran Schlosberg’s site NoChuckNorris.com. Designed to look like a Google results page, you receive the wonderful ‘error’ message “Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.” A simple and effective Google bomb.

George Bush

Perhaps the most well-known Google bomb of all time was this bomb targeting then US President George W Bush, who’s biography page on the White House website was the top result when searching for ‘miserable failure’. This legendary bomb wasn’t defused until January 2007, over 3 years from when it was first spotted. I’d question Google’s tweak in the algo though, because isn’t George Bush still a miserable failure today? Perhaps that page was hit with an unnatural link warning? I can just see the GWT warning now – “Dear Webmaster of whitehouse.gov, you have an unnatural link profile…”

Rick Santorum

After angering columnist and author Dan Savage with his anti-homosexual remarks in 2003, Savage and the fans of his “Savage Love” column created a Google bomb that linked politician Rick Santorum’s name to a the definition for a lewd phrase (I’ll leave it to you to find if you’re curious). Santorum complained about his ‘Google problem’ in 2011, which predictably, only caused more people to discover the Google bomb. His claim was that “if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it”. Well Rick, I think the difference is that you wouldn’t ever hear Biden saying that “I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts.” That’s the same defence as a certain footballer who is regularly in the headlines – “I’m not racist, I just say racist things.”

French Military Victories

Similar to the aforementioned Chuck Norris landing page, the ‘french military victories’ + ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ search brought this rather amusing result: “Did you mean: french military defeats”, and of course no other results to speak of. Even as a half-Frenchman myself, I can’t help but snigger.

Scientology

Despite Google’s claim that they had put an end to Google bombing in January 2007, a full year later a search for ‘dangerous cult’ would return Scientology.org as the top result. Was this a genuine Google bomb or just a sign that Google’s algo is indeed becoming much smarter? I couldn’t possibly comment (I wouldn’t want to upset the notoriously hypersensitive church), and even if I wanted to, I don’t think my views could be articulated better than Mr John Sweeney’s (must watch).

Silvio Berlusconi

In April 2006 if you were to type ‘buffone’ (clown, in Italian) into Google, the top result would have been Silvio Berlusconi’s website. Wait, this isn’t a Google bomb either, is it?!

Murder/Abortion

As recently as February 2011 a Google search for the phrase ‘murder’ delivered the Wikipedia article for ‘Abortion’ as the 2nd most relevant result. Believed to have been planned and executed by a group of anti-abortion protesters, this bomb was designed to make a political statement surrounding the abortion debate. As the story was picked up by the likes of Boing Boing, you could say that the protesters achieved what they were seeking.

Nicolas Sarkozy

“Trou du cul du web” (or “The A**hole of the Internet” for the non-French speaking amongst you) was the generous phrase used to Google bomb the French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s website in 2009. Many would argue that Sarkozy is not *only* a ‘trou du cul’ of the internet.

Bill O’Reilly

Controversial American political commentator Bill O’Reilly’s website began ranking in 1st position for the phrase ‘terrorist sympathizer’ back in 2005. Bill managed to offend most of the American population (he always offends some of them, this time it was all of them) by welcoming Al Qaeda to ‘blow up the Coit Tower’ in San Francisco. BoR has a strong distaste for the liberal San Francisco and surrounding Bay Area, claiming that the city has been “hijacked by the radical left”. Really. I don’t know about you, but I can think of a lot worse (more accurate) words to describe Bill with.

Creed

Last but by certainly no means least; god bothering Christian rockers were victim of being christened (pun intended) the ‘worst band in the world’ in the Google SERPs. What’s perhaps even more embarrassing is that when searching for that specific term, Google offered users the chance to ‘See results for creed’- burn. I always knew that Matt Cutts was more of a Papa Roach kinda guy. Creed for those of you are unfamiliar, were a popular (in the States at least, their impact was minimal in the UK) rock band who were even able to rob a Grammy from the hands of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 2001 (Creed’s ‘Arms Wide Open’ was apparently a better rock song than ‘Californication’…). Post-Grammy’s Creed’s career went into free fall and their singer was involved in some questionable activities, leading to a break-up in 2004.

Dave Trott @davetrott – Predatory Thinking

In hindsight Dave kicked off with my personal favourite presentation of the day. He started off with the buzz around being “creative” and what it means. He segments creativity into pure creativity – art galleries, shows, exhibitions and the like, and applied creativity – which can be seen implemented in the advertising space he knows so well.

£18.3 Billion was spent last year in the UK on ads, with 89% not remembered, 4% remembered positively and 7% negatively.  Dave’s advice? Kill everyone else (competitors – not literally), and go upstream with your thinking. He reminds us that with all the hype around social and other media outlets, one constant always remains – the consumer.

He breaks advertising down into 3 simple steps; impact, communication and persuasion and stresses the importance of impact. This is where most advertisers go wrong. Remember that the consumer’s mind is binary (either remembers something or doesn’t!) and you want to separate yourself from the 1,000 other adverts your target will see a day. He gives us more with his explanation of psychographics and says there are opinion formers and opinion followers in social groups. Each of the former will inevitably have more followers so if you can get at the opinion formers, you can get at the masses.

He gives a few examples of upstream thinking. Sainsbury’s wanting £3 billion extra in revenue in 2 years. Instead of targeting new consumers, they calculated they can raise an extra £1.85 from consumers per week. This launched the “try something new” scheme and they reached their target within a year! Steve Jobs utilising white headphones for the Apple brand compared to the remainder of the market using black ones. Find out what drives people, think upstream, find pure creativity and think how to apply it and find a solution to the problem.

Dave has his own book out entitled “Creative Mischief”, so check it out!

Antony Mayfield of @brilliantnoise – Do You Speak Brand?

Antony was blown away after reading John Battelle’s “The Search” and still sees the industry as a developing and growing place. Not an advocate of the ”SEO is dead” school; Mayfield reported that Coca-Cola are shifting their marketing efforts to 20% inbound and that the digital space will keep going that way.

Stephanie Troeth @sniffles – Speaking your User’s Language

Stephanie brought linguistics to the Dome focusing on “when designing a site you should specifically consider what language you use”. “Book online now” for example is flawed in that you would presume one is already online to view that statement. Consider whether the language used is rational or emotional; separate your on page language between the two and use in conjunction with brand image and values. She recommends using http://aarronwalter.com/design-personas/. Stephanie’s slides can be found here https://speakerdeck.com/u/stephtroeth/p/speaking-your-users-language.

Martin Belham @currybet – How to Make Friends and Influence Robots

Martin’s speech covered a few items which help aid user experience. The first was headlines, and considering how the title of your content will look when shared. What sort of response does this engage the user in and is it “clickable”. The second is when building or redesigning a site, use Google Analytics to see the flow chart of users. This will give you an idea for what pages they navigate to, and how best to build your navigation bar from then on. He says keep the site simple, as pages which use lots of coding etc. may take away from its UX focus. Site load time may need some extra investment to minimise bounce rates and he mentions to watch copy to see how users will interact and comment with your content.

Martin’s summary can be found here http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2012/09/how-to-make-friends-and-influence-robots.php.

Beccy Weeks @BeccyWeeks – Chasing the Algorithm: Smart SEO or Hopeless Effort?

Beccy talked us through an OMD client case study with her talk, which ended up using some content submission on PR2-4 sites and also buying some footer links (naughty!). Then along came the Venice update targeting localised results, Panda penalising sites with low content quality and Penguin wiping out keyword stuffing and unnatural link profiles. Her conclusion – you need quality content, bad tactics don’t work, and if you can’t do it all, don’t do it all!

Tom Anthony @TomAnthonySEO / Will Critchlow @WillCritchlow – API? WTF?

Will stepped in to deliver the slides Tom Anthony had prepared, which gave an interesting gaze into what the future of SEO might look like. Tom has already noticed the influx of widgets and other API’s (application programming interface – computers talking to other computers) which are appearing in the SERPs already, and how these will become more influential. The online space is constantly evolving, so don’t stand still.

Richard Baxter @RichardBaxter – How to be a Better SEO

A good and inspiring session by SEO Gadget’s main man, some of my top takeaways for becoming a better SEO include setting yourself some short, medium and long term goals, get a mentor or role model, learn to pitch yourself, be curious and ask, why? Don’t become complacent or feel your method is right/the norm. Put yourself out of your comfort zone every once in a while, make yourself a specialist, learn to build your own website and be prepared to hear negative feedback and act upon it. Richard’s expanded version can be found here – https://seogadget.co.uk/better-seo/.

Tony King @ToastedTeacake – SEO Deliverance

Tony really dug deep into his guide for delivering SEO. A tool he mentioned was the Semetrical Robotto Tool (http://robotto.semetrical.com/), which monitors site downtime and robots.txt changes. Tony’s slides will be available on the Semetrical blog shortly.

Lynne Murphy @lynneguist – …And Now for Something Completely English

Lynne presented one of my favourite talks of the day, although not entirely SEO related, about the annoyances in the English Language. The English language is constantly developing, and its influences from Latin and French hardly make it unique. Many of the American words are spelt how the English used to spell them, with the English adapting to the French influence (standardised/standardized English and ‘erbs and herbs; honestly!). If anything, this was a moral lesson in not being ignorant. Great talk!

James Little @3wdl– A Decade in Affiliate Marketing

Jason capped off some big affiliate history including Grubby Gate, and the Next Gate which got affiliates in a hoo-ha over the rate dropping from 5% to 1% by the high street retailer. He also mentioned his personal stories including his colleagues being involved with prostitutes and being held ransom in a taxi in the Bahamas! #RaggaRagga

Aleyda Solís @Aleyda – Mobile SEO

With more and more consumers using their tablets and phones over desktops, developing a comprehensive mobile optimised site has never been more important. Aleyda’s slides and tips can be found on http://www.slideshare.net/aleydasolis/7-things-about-mobile-seo-you-need-to-know-aleyda-at-brightonseo.

Simon Penson @SimonPenson – Using Content Flow

The ex-Max Power Editor ushered the importance of using peaks and troughs in your quality of content release. Think FHM’s Annual Sexiest Women and currently on ITV, X-factor (or at least how big they are trying to make it). Simon also mentioned ChromeExperiments.com and HighCharts.com for visualisation.

Yousaf Sekander @YSekand – Reverse Engineering Your Competitors’ Social/Content Strategy

Yousaf’s talk has some really actionable link building techniques in it. Content is Kingmaker, not King. Look at your competitors and look what is working for them. Social Crawlitics is a tool he built which can crawl a site, see what piece of content was shared the most, what author is the most popular and more. He mentioned BackTweets and Topsy, with the latter being paid but offering shares by influence amongst more features. He also mentioned DataSift, a social data platform.

He finished off with a cheeky tip, saying if you use a URL shortener in your infographic’s embed code, the URL destination can be changed to other pages. His slides can be found on http://www.slideshare.net/ysekand/reverse-engineering-your-competitors-social-strategy-social-crawlytics

Berian Reed @BerianReed – Tactics and Tools

Berian had a great tip by using Tynt. This tool measures when users copy and paste, which is vital as 70% of all web sharing being utilised via email as opposed to social media and other channels.

Another hint was to get a full URL for referring domains by hacking Google Analytics, full method can be seen on this blog post by Ruben Yau .

Changedetection.com is a free tool whereby you can get a notification if something on page changes, which can be useful. Tool recommendations from Berian are for Majestic, On Site Explorer and Link Detective, so check them out if you are not already using them.

His slides can be found here http://www.slideshare.net/breed01

Sion O’Connor @SionOConnor – Client Checklist for SEOs http://www.slideshare.net/sionoconnor

Sion’s presentation had some sound advice on how to prepare client checklists for SEOs and an outside view of how they are perceived. Remember that SEO is not an academic foundation as such and optimisation techniques and algorithms update frequently. He also tells us to be honest, if there is a risk, let clients know this.

Danielle Fudge @D_Fudge – Pinteresting SEO

With 80% women as Pinterest’s audience, Danielle went through some great advice on how to rank for some perhaps mundane search terms with the use of the content sharing service! In her talk she went through her methods of ranking for “sheds”, on Forward’s new free tool – Pinalytics.

Tom Lewis of @dcstorm_uk – Attributing to SEO

Tom showed his slides which were great for all those involved in-house, which focused on attributing funding in digital strategy to actionable areas. His slides were packed full of cake! He said a lot of search was being attributed to brand, but we need to bear in mind (and account for in funding) the cookie-window length and have a more holistic view around how consumers’ visits can be longer than this period.

Jason Woodford @JasonAEWoodford – The Business of SEO and How to Make the World a Better Place

Another talk, which ushered the importance of our sometimes intangible industry. With 65% of organisations planning to increase their investment in SEO services over the next 12 months, search/digital is one of the areas still in its infancy and is important in any company’s marketing efforts.

Anna Lewis @Koozai_Anna – Quickfire Analytics

Anna finished off the day with an informative look into Google Analytics to give beginners and advanced users a few tips. They include using event tracking in the Yoast Google Analytics for WordPress plugin and a new Google shortcut tab, which can make laborious segmentations just a click away.

Don’t get me wrong, reading is great and I still read 90% of posts that cross my path, but I found out pretty quickly that the best way to pick things up (for me) was to actually do them. I created a blog on a subject I was vaguely interested in, and managed to achieve a nice balance between reading and attempting to implement what I had read.

It was during this stage that I came across a term that instantly piqued my interest, linkbait. After delving deeper into the subject, it became apparent that I had subconsciously fallen victim to linkbait multiple times during my various years on the internet, and I was thoroughly impressed when I looked at it from my new found SEO perspective. I shifted my focus to finding both good and bad linkbait examples, and learning from their mistakes and successes.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, linkbait is a piece of content created purely to attract attention, with the ultimate end goal of enticing links. They can take on many forms, whether it’s a fictional news story or highly useful tool.

I thought it would be great to show some of the best examples that I have come across thus far. I’ve included metrics and share counts where possible, that are accurate at the time of writing (of course, take these with a pinch of salt).

Number 10 Experience

710 Total Facebook Shares, 510 Tweets, 25 LRD

Wish.co.uk may have already popped up on your radar recently, as they seem to be churning out great linkbait like it’s going out of fashion. They specialise in gift experiences, which quickly became a very competitive and over saturated market with big names such as Virgin leading the pack. So how do you get noticed with minimal investment? Simple, come up with a killer linkbait idea, and that’s exactly what Wish did.

For a mere £250,000 you can take a visit to 10 Downing Street, netting you benefits such as using the toilet, meeting the big man himself and even the chance to ‘Convince him to steer policy in a direction of your choosing.’ Sounds like a bargain right? It’s all tongue in cheek of course, but it was enough to get noticed by Stephen Fry who thought it was worthy of a tweet. This alone sent over 20,000 visits in a matter of hours, gaining some great links in the process.

They have since gone on to have even more success with their zombie themed experience days, again netting some celebrity tweets and oodles of links.

Replica Iron Throne

3,800 Total Facebook Shares, 121 Tweets, 11 LRD

HBO’s on screen adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy novel series, Game of Thrones, has built up a loyal following due to its great reception across the globe. If you are a fan of the series you can own your very own replica Iron Throne for the measly sum of £20,000, which even includes free delivery! Regardless of whether or not Firebox expect to sell any of these, it racked up impressive amounts of social shares as well as attracting a handful of linking root domains.

Apocalypse Kit

46,000 Total Facebook Shares, 1240 Tweets, 550 LRD

The Apocalypse Kit is a genius idea from Gerber, who sell a range of camping, hunting and survival gear. Each one of the ‘Apocalypse Survival Tools’ is available for purchase individually, but bundling them together and advertising them as a zombie survival kit transforms them into an effective link magnet.

This particular example not only attracted the second most links, it completely rocked the social shares, racking up 1048 +1s (wow!) and 1552 Pins on Pinterest.

Canned Unicorn Meat

19,000 Total Facebook Shares, 1450 Tweets, 530 LRD

For those of you who aren’t familiar with ThinkGeek, they offer an abundance of geeky gifts and gadgets, the majority of which are more than worthy of a link. One of their most linked to products is 14 ounces of succulent Unicorn Meat, netting 527 linking root domains, 44,500 combined Facebook shares, 600 tweets and 1,544 Stumbles. Before vegetarians and unicorn fans alike are offended, the can geniously contains a dismembered stuffed Unicorn.

Groupon Names Your Baby

5,000 Total Facebook Shares, 270 Tweets, 41 LRD

Groupon also boarded the linkbait train when they offered an exclusive opportunity to let them name your baby. Five vouchers were available to purchase for $1,000 each, all of which surprisingly sold. The PR stunt netted them some great links from the likes of Mashable, Huffington Post, Business Insider and The Inquisitr, as well as generating a buzz on social media platforms.

Project Utopia

7,800 Total Facebook Shares, 383 Tweets, 52 LRD

Once again we take a look at another baity Firebox product. How does your own floating island named ‘Project Utopia’ sound? Perhaps you could man the wheel sat atop your £20,000 Iron Throne you also purchased from them? Unfortunately the 100m long ‘yacht island’ exists merely in the form of 3D pictures, and is a far from subtle attempt at gaining some publicity. Unsurprisingly it succeeded, gaining over 50 links and nearly 8,000 social shares.

Are you getting the hang of how easy this linkbait business is now?

Harry and Kate Mug

28,500 Total Facbook Shares, 4,800 Tweets, 579 LRD

In the run up to the Royal Wedding, Guandong Enterprises jumped aboard the souvenir wagon and released a one of a kind ‘Will and Kate’ mug. Instead of portraits of the smiling married couple to be, Kate was joined by none other than brother-in-law Prince Harry. The mugs erupted over the web, scoring links from major news outlets and spreading across social media platforms like wildfire.

Complete with ‘Engrish’ description, it was first believed that the Chinese manufacturer had botched the wedding mugs. However after discovering that the Guandong Enterprises was actually registered in Britain, it became clear that it was a genius publicity stunt. The spoof scored them over 30,000 social shares and nearly 600 linking root domains, although it still isn’t clear who exactly was behind the whole ordeal.

Giant Swiss Army Knife

4,500 Total Facebook Shares, 200 Tweets, 385 LRD

The penultimate product in this list is another survival tool, this time made by the world renowned Swiss Army Knife manufacturer, Wenger. Measuring 9 inches in length and weighing 2 pounds it’s hardly the most portable of tools, but it boasts 87 different instruments and gets a 10/10 on the cool-o-meter.

An impressive 385 domains found it worthy enough of a link, with 4,500 combined Facebook shares and over 200 tweets further bolstering it’s popularity.

Giant Monster Foot

Plenty of links and brand awareness

MonsterSlippers, a company who manufacture novelty footwear, graced the pages of all the major UK news outlets when a customer claimed they had accidentally sent him a 7ft slipper. The Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail all took the bait, and BBC London Radio even interviewed the claimant in question. It was then noticed that the supposed customer bared a stark resemblance to MonsterSlippers’ very own Web Manager, and the whole thing was revealed as an elaborate PR stunt.

The shenanigan resulted in some highly authoritative links and an unmeasurable amount of brand awareness. Links of note include ABC News, The Guardian, Huffington Post and The Telegraph. They later auctioned off the slipper, raising an impressive £1,500 which they donated to charity.

Summary

Of course, not everything goes to plan. While compiling this list I came across just as many linkbait attempts that unfortunately didn’t take off, because they either weren’t strong enough or were poorly executed (perhaps this is another blog post!). I can’t help but wonder why people don’t adopt this tactic more often, there is minimal investment and if you really put your minds together the payoff can be huge.

If you do decide to give it a go, be sure to exploit your social media channels to put it on people’s radars. If it really is a good idea it should do all the hard work itself, allowing you to sit back and reap the rewards.

If you can add to this list, don’t hesitate to get involved in the comments.

An old client who owns an ecommerce website with a multi-million pound turnover and sells electronic goods called me out of the blue a few weeks ago on a Sunday morning, extremely concerned because their website had completely dropped out Google’s search results. Never the type of phone call you want to receive.

Overview

This is how the plummet in visibility looked in Search Metrics to help you visualise what happened –

A quick analysis showed they were no longer appearing for any search terms, even their own brand. But their website hadn’t changed, they didn’t have any problematic robots directives, their pages were still indexed (they showed under a site: command) and they had no obvious signs of hacking with embedded links or malware etc.

I immediately looked at their backlink profile which was quite clean. I couldn’t see anything immediately problematic at all. But there certainly appeared to be a penalty.

Our old client no longer had a Google WMT account, so I asked them to verify this immediately and see if there were any messages from Google. Sure enough a few hours after verifying the account, the following message arrived -

I had to double take at the above message. They were being accused of selling links that pass PageRank.

As I mentioned above, this is medium sized business with a multi-million pound business who sell electronics goods through their ecommerce website, why on earth would they ever sell links? Our old client assured us that this wasn’t the case at all.

Analysis

So we looked into the issue and performed a crawl of the website (yes using our SEO spider) and found a handful of external links. Of which, two product pages on the website appeared to be linking out to a direct competitor which was strange.

These two product pages had 4-5 embedded keyword rich links within the product description all to the competitor, linking to the brand overview of the product, the model number, product page and even a help guide.

As an example, I’ll use the well known Currys website. Please note, this did not happen to Currys, this is an example. Their product description is fairly standard as you can see below –

Now just imagine that 4-5 of the key phrases in the ‘product details’ area at the bottom such as ‘Samsung’, ‘SA1UTMG’ and ‘Fridge Freezer’ etc were all hyperlinks to a direct competitor.

This is what we discovered on two of the pages. Stupid yes, but selling links? Really? No, of course not. Why would they sell links on a product page to a direct competitor? Was this really the problem?

Anyone who works online will probably be able to guess quite easily what had happened for these links to appear. Quite simply a couple of new products had arrived and a member of the team wanted to upload them manually to the website. Instead of writing unique content, they just wanted to upload the standard manufacturer’s copy quickly. To do this they copied it from the said competitor and pasted it directly into their CMS. When you copy and paste in this manner, it can also copy the hyperlinks though! Hence, they also copied the embedded internal links from their competitor into their own product description.

Again, stupid yes. Very. Their team knows that they should write unique copy for each product, but from time to time they do use the standard manufacturer’s descriptions when in a rush. A much larger concern was copying content from elsewhere for obvious legal reasons, but without condoning this behaviour, the said team member knew it was just the standard manufacturer’s copy.

Recovery

Our old client removed the hyperlinks and submitted a reinclusion reconsideration request to Google. Exactly 18 days later, they received a message saying the manual action had been revoked –

3-4 days later, the website was nearly completely recovered, as can be seen in (now the standard) Search Metrics visualisation –

Summary

You might argue that being silly enough to copy someone else’s website that this was their own fault, and you would be right. But the really interesting part of this case is that –

• Google were convinced enough that they were selling links, that they even dropped them for brand related search queries. This was not just a penalty, but an extreme penalty. The website those links were pointing to (so the website which was therefore ‘buying links’) was not impacted at all.
• Google were wrong. They convicted the website for selling links without trial when most who work online (or perhaps my SEO mindset has too much bias), it was pretty evident that this was not the case. The fact that this was a manual action also shows this was a real person who reviewed the case, it was not an automatic penalty. So even Googlers make mistakes, they are just a little more costly.
• How did they discover these links when it was just two pages on a website with over 1.5K product pages? It’s my belief that they got flagged due to quantity (there were 4-5) within textual content which were extremely keyword heavy. So watch overdoing links in articles guys, it’s a clear signal. We also considered that conversely the website who our old client was linking to might have been accused of buying links. But this does not seem to be the case at all, their link profile is clean and they have remained in the search results.

On a final note, this is exactly why you should never put all your eggs into that one Google basket. Even when you try to stay by the rules, you can make silly mistakes, which end up causing much, much larger ramifications to your business.

I’d be happy to answer any queries regarding this case if anyone has any questions.

Here are a few of our photos from the morning.
You can see the full collection over at our Facebook page

Previous background colour choices have been yellow, purple & blue and now today we can add this lovely pastel green to the lists of tests.

I’m only seeing this ‘new’ colour on a handful of searches and so I’m guessing it is only a very small test, but I would love to see what impact these changes have on the CTR of the ads as people have in the past (myself included) worried that previous colours were ‘lost’ when users viewed the search results on certain browsers/ resolutions which meant that it was sometimes very difficult to differentiate between the paid listings and the organic results below.

New SEO spider features include the following –

• Word count – The SEO spider now counts the number of words on a given URL between the body tags. This is useful for finding low content pages, you can read our word count definition here.
• URL rewriting – The SEO spider now allows you to rewrite URLs. This is particularly useful for sites with session IDs or excess parameters, you can now simply remove them from the URLs using this feature. You can read about URL rewriting in our user guide.
• Auto check for updates – You don’t have to manually check for updates anymore, we let you know when one is available. (You can also disable this feature!)
• Remove URLs – We allow you to delete URLs completely from the SEO spider (upon the right click). So if you only wish to export certain URLs, or create a sitemap with specific URLs, you can do it in the interface (rather than exporting to Excel).
• Advanced exports – We have renamed the ‘export’ option in the top level menu, to ‘Advanced export’ to differentiate it from the usual ‘export’ option. This area allows you to export in bulk, rather than just from the window in your current view. We have included additional exports under this section as well, including exporting of all alt text and anchor text. You can read more about the advanced export feature in our user guide.
• Crawling outside of sub folders / domains – As default the SEO spider has always crawled from sub domain or sub directory forwards. This is really useful for most sites, but there are some configurations where this can be a pain. So, we have provided a couple of extra options to crawl outside of start sub folders or sub domains for greater control of crawl. So you can now crawl from anywhere you’d like on the site using this feature and we will crawl all URLs for example. Both of these new options can be found under the ‘include‘ option in configuration.

The list above contains the most significant new features within version 2.00. However, we have also made a number of smaller changes, these include –

• Amended the definition of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ – Historically links from the domain you are crawling can be included under the ‘external’ tab as well as the ‘internal’ tab. If you crawled from a sub folder for example, anything outside of that sub folder would be treated as ‘external’, including links from the domain you are crawling. This was by design for a number of reasons, but we understand that it has at times been a cause of some confusion. Hence, we have changed our crawling. The ‘external’ tab, will now only show links pointing to other domains (or subdomains).
• Renamed ‘Meta & Canonical’ – We amended this tab name to ‘directives’, as it makes more sense. This gives us more room to include additional directives under this tab such as rel=alternate and rel=prev/next etc.
• Fixed Keep Alive Headers Issue – There was a bug in the Mac version of the software with keep alive headers, this has been fixed.
• Ubuntu version now supports openjdk-6-jre – There were some bugs in openjdk-6-jre which mean we couldn’t support it, we now can.

Enough reading, what are you waiting for? Go download the new version of the Screaming Frog SEO spider now!