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Starting up your own consulting agency can be quite a difficult process and often times the most challenging step to your endeavour will be finding new customers or clients.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday we will be covering some tips and tactics that you can use to get referrals and win customers. Don't forget to leave your own advice in the comments below.

Happy Friday Everyone! Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Last week I got an email from a Moz fan who said, "Hey, Rand, I am trying to start up my SEO consulting business. My network is not that great yet. How am I going to find clients? Can you point me to a blog post?"

We've done several over the years, but I thought it was a great time to refresh and offer some practical tips and tactics for finding new business. I know there are a lot of folks out there who are seeking clients, who are considering going out on their own and starting their own consulting business, who've had success in-house, who've had success at other agencies. Let me give you some of the things that worked for us when we were in consulting and that work for a lot of the folks that we connect with in the field. Obviously, nearly 40% of SEOmoz's membership are folks who do consulting and agency work, the other 60% being in-house. Of course, we get to interact with a lot of these people and hear their stories of what works well for them. I thought I'd start with a few of those.

So number one, if you're just starting out and you have nothing else going on, I strongly recommend building a handful of case studies. What I mean by this is having a few sites and pages and projects that you can point to, even if you're very early stage. Even if you're saying, "You're my first professional customer," that's fine, that's okay. But have a few things that you've done in the past to show off your work.

So your brother has a hobby site, great. Maybe you've helped him to rank for a few keywords. Maybe you've helped him to build up a powerful Facebook fan page. Maybe you've helped him with some web marketing efforts on his Etsy store, whatever it is. Your friend's got a LinkedIn profile. Maybe she needs some help outranking some other people who are ranking for her name. She knows that she's going to be on the job market. You want to help her get position for that. You're going to help her create other profiles and write some guest pieces and all this kind of stuff that's going to help her show up highly in Google for her particular name. Maybe there's a personal blog, either one that you're running, one that someone else is running, a family member, a friend, and you can help optimize that site, get the right things installed in WordPress, get it moved over from Blogspot, get the post titles, doing some keyword research, having a few of the posts go hot. Great.

Now you can point to all of these case studies when clients talk to you and say, "Well, let me tell you about some of the things that worked well for this. Go to Google and search for this, you can see this page ranking, the reason that it's ranking so well are these different things that I did. I can help you with that kind of stuff." Having those case studies in your back pocket makes you very credible and believable, even if you are a very first-time consultant.

Of course, if you have a history of working with clients, one of the biggest problems that the SEO field has always had is that a lot of clients say, "Hey, I don't want you discussing my particular project. I'd prefer you didn't share and disclose which types of things you've worked on for me or what you've done." That's okay, and that's another great reason to have this handful of case studies that you can show off so you can say, "Hey, here's a few clients we've worked with" or "I can't tell you who they are, but if we sign an NDA, I'll be happy to disclose the names, and then they can serve as references, and then you can see the projects publicly that we've worked on, and those include some of these other ones."

A great follow-up to this is to actually offer some pro bono work, and there are two types of organizations that I strongly recommend this for. The first one is local charities or non-profits. It could be national non- profits and charities if you have a high profile and you want to do that. So here's Adorable Adoptions. It's an animal shelter. It's not actually an animal shelter. It's an animal shelter I just created in my mind. Lives here in Seattle on this whiteboard only. Fantastic, right? So you can do some SEO work to help them rank well for adopt a pet, or thinking about what to do with my pets, or those kind of things.

The other one that I think is a really good option is when you see small local startups kicking things off, so maybe it's somebody's personal project, something they're putting on Kickstarter, or something that they're launching for the first time and some friend of yours through a network or through Twitter or through Facebook, you've seen that they're launching this product through the TechPress. Great. Especially if they don't have a lot of venture backing and they're kind of on a tight bootstrap budget, maybe the founders still have day-to-day jobs, offer to kick in and help out. "Hey, do you need some help with your web marketing? I've done some things. I'm trying to build a portfolio, and I would love to show you guys how I can kick ass and then maybe build up some referrals in your network." They're going to be very, very grateful for that, especially those early stage folks who don't have time and energy to focus on the marketing components. So I really like those.

But I have a pro tip here. Make the offer very specific, and make your pens work too. Make the offer very specific. The reason being here is that if you offer to do some work, you can find yourself in these pro bono types of situations where there's just a lot of demands on your time, and as your business gets going or you have other projects you need to work on, those demands can become problematic. It can feel like a big conflict. So make sure that when you commit to something, you're committing to a very specific project that has a clear end date or that has a very clear end point. So once that project or that date has been reached, you can reach back out and say, "Hey, really loved working with you guys. I hope you'll recommend me in the future. I'd love to be able to use you as a reference for some future clients that I might get." Fantastic, but you've made that closure happen and sealed that deal. Of course, if they need more of your time, they can ask for it and those kinds of things, but you want to have that built in from the start. If you don't, you can get into a messy territory.

Number three, be a connector of people. Maybe you're an introvert or you have introverted tendencies and you don't love to go networking, that's okay. That's fine. But help people to find each other. Be on top of your local ecosystem in whatever world or niche you're in and whatever geographic region you're in. By being on top of what's happening in the field, you can say, "Hey, I noticed that you said you're looking for some software to help you with recruiting. I heard about The Resumator last week via TechCrunch or HackerNews or whatever. I'd be happy to make an introduction because I reached out to the founder there when I heard about it." Don Charlton, the guy from The Resumator probably doesn't need SEO help, but just as an example. And then help put those people together. If you have friends, if you have colleagues from former jobs, if you have people that you know through friends or family that have needs, putting them together and making those introductions can be fantastic. That becomes a referral source all on its own, and you will quickly see that other people who you've connected in the future will say, "Hey, you should meet so and so. She helped me connect with this person in the past, and she knows SEO stuff. So you should talk to her." Great way to get business.

Number four, choose a specialty. For goodness sake, especially right now it's critical because the field of web marketing is so crowded. There are so many people doing so many things that if you can choose a specialty and focus on it and then write about it and become known for it, this can really help your career.

I'll give you a great example. So this guy over here who I'm going to label AJ Kohn. So AJ, right, San Francisco-based SEO guy wrote what I consider the definitive guide to Google+ for marketing and SEO, and does a fantastic job of posting on there regularly. He's the only person I see in my stream who's really posting six, seven, eight, nine times a day, posting a bunch of interesting stuff, a bunch of fun stuff, personal stuff, whatever it is, great photography stuff that he always posts. He's made his topic area very unique. He started on Google+ in the very early days, was an early adopter of that. He wrote the definitive resource for it. By the way, he also wrote the definitive resource for Rel=Author and setting that up for sites, which I think is a great offshoot of that specialty. He contributes continuous updates to that and to other sites, like SearchEngineLand. He offers, obviously, to guest write for others, and he's showing off his skills by actually winning in that arena. When I do a lot of searches inside my Gmail account, which is the one that's connected to Google+, there's AJ, the stuff that he's Plus 1'd and shared and all these things, always ranking on page one for me because he shares so much content around the things that I consume. So he's done a great job of this.

There are tons of areas of specialty that still need or could use people in them. I would still say even old school kinds of things, like we need a new update to the old masters of curated research, guys like Dan Thies and Richard Baxter. We need someone who's getting into that world. We could definitely use someone to talk about the great advantages of Pinterest or LinkedIn. Chris from 97th Floor, Chris Bennett, does a phenomenal job with link-based still, infographics, interactive graphics. Once you get that association and are known for those specialties, people remember you, you have that branding, and then you're going to get recommended for these things. So find something you love and find the unique angle on it and the specialty. Phenomenal way to get content out there on the Web and get your name known.

Number five. This seems counter-intuitive, but when you're most desperate for business is when you make a lot of mistakes as an SEO consultant. I did this myself all the time, and I've talked to so many other people from the consulting and agency world who do this as well. They go, "Well, we have some people time free. I have some hours free. We really need the revenue coming in." So you expand to take on projects and customers that you normally wouldn't. The problem is that a lot of times, remember with accounts receivable, you're not getting paid with a credit card up front here. So you need to count on that trust factor and the likeability factor and the familiarity to make sure. It's actually a great idea when you're desperate to be able to say to someone, "Hey, I'm sorry. This is not in my wheelhouse. You're not the right kind of customer for me. I hope that you'll refer business my way, but let me point you over to this other person who does this work and who I think would be a fit." That interaction is oftentimes going to be much more positive than, "Yeah, let's start some client work. Well, I can't pay you that much, and besides I know you're desperate for business. So I'm going to offer you pennies on the dollar or 50% your normal rate. Then you're going to be locked into a contract with me, and by the way I'm unpleasant to work with." This makes for very frustrating stuff. So be cautious not to be accepting everything, to be cutting your rates, all that kind of stuff early on or when your business is struggling on the consulting side. A lot of the times, particularly in our field, you can take on some personal projects that are likely to either win you business over the long term or can actually be a channel for direct revenue, so anything from an affiliate project to a blog that sells advertising, this kind of thing.

Number six, my last recommendation and probably the best one I've got, this is via Wil Reynolds over at SEER Interactive. Help people. Help everyone you can and not just in the ways that are around marketing and SEO and social media and inbound. Help everyone you possibly can with anything that you can possibly do for them. So you see somebody who has a problem on Twitter, someone needs help moving something and you go, "Man, that guy's pretty cool. I'd really like to know him. You know what? I've got a van. I'm going to offer to pick up that chair that he needs at whatever furniture store. I'll reach out over Twitter or maybe I'll reach out over email." Fantastic, right? You have a friend who's out of work. I know you're struggling as well, right? You're trying to find clients. You obviously don't have a position for them, but it doesn't matter. As you're looking across clients, you're meeting with someone, maybe they don't take you up on it and you say, "Hey, I know that we didn't end up being your SEO agency. I didn't end up being your consultant, but I have a friend who's really good at project management and you said you were looking for a project manager position. I'd love to make the introduction." Fantastic, just by helping people in any way you can. There's a new local news site out there. There's a new neighborhood blog. Fantastic. Offer to contribute. Get to know all the people in the space. As you build up a network of people who know you and like you and who you've done nice things for in the past, you will have no problem winning clients and influencing referrals in the future.

All right everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to maybe seeing some tips from you down there in the comments, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Yesterday, I filmed some quick thoughts on Google's Penguin update. You can find the full video on our Google+ page:

In it, I cover a few unique items about Penguin:

It's (weirdly) not focused on improving search q… Continue reading →

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Today is a good day. Whether you're a Mozzer, a fan of what we've built, a Seattle-startup supporter or even tangentially involved in the field of web marketing, there's reason to celebrate. After 5 years of organic grow… Continue reading →

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This week we will be covering a topic not often discussed on Whiteboard Friday. We are going to be talking about negative SEO tactics and how these practices function. Negative SEO is definitely not something we condone here at SEOmoz but education around these techniques can be a helpful, precautionary method that could prevent you from being the subject of malicious intent.

We hope you enjoy the video and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about a very concerning and controversial topic – negative SEO. Now, negative SEO has a number of meanings. I want to walk through them and get to some points. If you've been paying attention to the Twitter-sphere or the SEO blogosphere over the past week, two weeks, there's been a lot of discussion around negative SEO, particularly backlink pointing to bring down sites. I will get to that, but first I want to start with some of the classic ways that negative SEO could potentially hurt you.

The idea behind negative SEO is that rather than doing good, positive things that will promote signals in the search engines that bump up your rankings, there are ways to do bad, terrible, negative things. Now, obviously you could do these on your own sites, but hopefully you're smart enough not to do that. There may be things that other site owners, webmasters, marketers, or black hat SEO's, mostly we're talking about black hat SEO's, spammers, and even people doing very illegal things to bring down your website in the rankings or to even take your website offline.

There are classic types of things, like malware, hacks, and injections. So this is the first one I'm going to talk about. Basically, what we're saying here is that you've got your site, it has some pages on here, and hackers may find security vulnerabilities in your site, in your FTP logins. It may be a WordPress install. Earlier this year I had a hacker essentially come in and inject spam and malware onto my personal blog at RandFishkin.com/blog. The idea is that they all inject spam, links to spam sometimes, sometimes very subtly. They will make changes to your site. One of the classic examples of this is someone going and editing your robots.txt file to block Google bot or to restrict all IPs from a certain range, or those kinds of things. Obviously, that's going to take your site out of the search engines. Or inject viruses or malware that will install itself on computers that visit you.

Unfortunately, I was actually visiting MozCation.com, which Gianluca Fiorell, one of our Pro members from Spain – he's Italian but from Spain – had set up last year to promote MozCation in Barcelona, in Spain. Unfortunately, it looked like some spammers had injected some malware on that site, and it had been on there a little while. I think he's taken care of it now, but these are the types of problems. What you'll see is a download will go into your cache, and sometimes Microsoft Security Essentials will alert you that that's happened, hopefully if you've got it installed. So this is something to watch out for. You want to close those security holes.

The other kinds of things to watch out for is spam reporting. Sometimes a lot of people, unfortunately, in the SEO-sphere still do manipulative kinds of link building. Obviously, most of the people who watch Whiteboard Friday are not in that group, but some of you probably are. Maybe you buy a few directory listings. You go on Fiverr and you buy some cheap links. You find some spam through some forums that potentially works. You're doing sorts of things that are on the grey hat/black hat borderline, in terms of link acquisition, and sometimes you will see that your competitors might spam report you. So this guy's going to go over to Google and maybe he'll leave a threat at the webmaster forums, or he'll send it through a spam report in his Google Webmaster Tools. A lot of this spam reporting, I think they said they get tens of thousands of spam reports each month, I believe it was. Actually, fewer than I'd expect, but a lot of people do report spam to Google. These might be your competitors. These might be other webmasters. They could just be random people on the Internet who are like, "Why isn't this site ranking here?. This looks terrible. I don't like this."

When this happens, Google might take a closer look at your backlinks, and obviously this might bring you down. There are arguments about the ethics inside the search engine industry. Personally, I think that removing low quality crap from the Internet is all of our jobs, and I like to be part of that. I think that it's a good thing to make the Internet a better place, and if you're not making the Internet a better place, I hope that you're not doing web marketing because it makes the rest of our industry look bad.

However, certainly reasonable minds can disagree. Aaron Wall, from SEO Book, who I highly respect, who I grew up with in this industry and think the world of, takes a complete opposite view. He thinks that because I support disclosing spam and manipulation to Google and to search engines that this makes me a bad person. That's too bad. That's frustrating, but I think reasonable people can disagree. Certainly whatever angle you are on, on this, you should at least be aware that this stuff happens and know that it's a potential risk, particularly if you're doing highly manipulative things.

The last one I want to talk about is actually the biggest one and probably the most important and the most salient and relevant to what we've been talking about today. That is pointing nasty links to your website. Now this has been something that a lot of webmasters have been discussing actively over the last couple of weeks in this sphere, essentially kicked off by a forum thread on Traffic Power Forum. I haven't previously spent a lot of time there, but it's a very active forum populated by a wide mix of white hat folks, grey hat folks, some pretty dark black hat folks, which I'll show you in a minute.

Two members there, Jammie and Pixelgrinder, hit two different websites. One is called SEOFastStart.com, that's owned by Dan Thies. Dan, of course, early keyword research guru in the SEO space, big industry mover and shaker. Spoke at a lot of the early search engine strategies conferences. I've met him a number of times, really good guy, solid guy. He complimented Matt Cutts, the Google Webspam Chief, on the search quality team. He complimented him over Twitter on knocking out some spam. Some people on the forum felt that it was, I don't know, in poor taste. Right? Essentially they felt that because he was being complimentary to Google for kicking out webspam, that he should then be the target of this negative SEO. The other site was NegativeSEO.me, which was essentially a website offering services to get someone banned from the search indices, and this a little concerning in and of itself.

Now the thing that's interesting about these sites, and Dan admitted this about SEOFastStart. Not a very big site. Right? Not a lot of great brand or link signals. Potentially some small amounts of not wholly white hat types of activities already happening around these sites. So we're not talking about (a) big brand sites, or (b) sites that have no idea about the SEO world and aren't doing anything manipulative and are clean as the driven snow. These are a little off that track. These were both hit by these guys, at least presumably, according to the forum thread, and lost a lot of their rankings.

When I say hit, what I mean is this type of thing happens. So here's your site.com up here. Right? Essentially, what's going on is you've got some nice white hat, editorially given, earned links, high quality stuff, and that's great. Then there's some kind of this dark cloud of black hattery, spammy, manipulative posts. They talked about a number of things, XRumer blasts, buying links on Fiverr, buying links from some link networks, pointing some links that they had seen get hit on other sites at this site, and essentially trigger this loss of rankings. Now, they didn't get banned from the index, but they fell from, I think Dan Thies' site in particular fell from ranking #1, for his personal name, to number30, 35, somewhere around there, and hits like that similar across both these sites.

The second example was another forum thread started by a user with the user name, Negative SEO, and that was for the domain JustGoodCars.com. Now again, Just Good Cars unfortunately looks like they were doing a little bit of things that might be construed as manipulative, even prior to this attack on them by the Negative SEO guy. Some links that were of questionable sources or how they were acquired, and then a big network of websites that were all pointing back and forth to each other from many different pages on these many different sites. This guy took it upon himself to say, well they were . . . I guess this website had been complaining in the Google webmaster forums about some other sites outranking them, so this person took it upon themselves to do some pretty nasty, evil stuff.

Now I can't support this in any way. I'm frustrated that unfortunately this is a part of our world. But you should be aware of it, because what they did was creative, almost to the point of ingenuity, but definitely dark and evil, maybe even bordering on illegal depending on the legalities. I'm not really sure. Here's what they said they did. Of course, I can't prove that they actually did these things, but here's what they said they did. So they did go do a lot of manipulative, nasty backlinking to the site from a lot of those sources we talked about. They mentioned a few XRumer blasts. They posted a lot of duplicate content. They set up fake WordPress splogs, essentially a spam blog, and then they re-posted the content that existed on JustGoodCars.com on tens of thousands of pages across the Web so that Google might say, "Oh, well why is this duplicate content?" I don't know that that's actually highly concerning in and of itself. A lot of people copy content from all over the Web for both good and bad reasons.

Then they did something that's really nasty. They went to Fiverr and they asked for people to post fake reviews to Google Reviews to make it look like Just Good Cars was manipulating Google Reviews, and actually got them thrown out of that program. According to the forum post, anyway, that's what happened. They got their stars and their Google Reviews and their ratings removed, and all that kind of stuff, which that's whew, that's really low. That sucks if that's what really happened.

It's even more terrifying, but they sent fake emails. They set up email addresses that looked like they came from Just Good Cars, and sent fake emails to websites that had posted good editorial, positive links, saying, "Hey, you should stop linking to this site. There are these problems with it. We're requesting a DMCA take down action against it. Our attorneys will be in touch if you don't remove your links." Those kinds of things. So really just, oh man, that's really evil. But stuff that we definitely need to be aware of in terms of the world of negative SEO and what this kind of stuff can happen.

Now, it's very tough to verify anonymous users on an anonymous forum posting and whether all of this stuff actually happened, but certainly the ideas behind it are very concerning. What I want to express today is that there are some things you can do on your site that will make you higher risk and lower risk to these kinds of things.

Higher risk is going to be, like some of these other sites, you've already done a little bit of manipulative linking. Right? You've already done some spammy stuff. You have manipulative on-site stuff. Meaning for example, like Just Good Cars there's kind of that footer with all these links pointing to all these other places. This was mentioned in the forum thread. So I'm not giving away new information here, but there's stuff on this site that looks like it might be not wholly kosher, not wholly white hat.

Your site has few high quality brand signals. High quality brand signals, things like lots of people searching for your domain name and brand name. Lots of mentions of you in the news and press, in outlets that are high quality. Lots of offline sorts of signals. Lots of user and usage metrics types of signals. Lots of verification kinds of things. Using high quality providers of everything from the IP address, where your website's hosted, to the domain registration link, to the services you might have installed on your site, Akamai or any of the CDN networks suggest you're very popular. Any type of signal like this that looks like a highly brand intense signal.

Lower risk is going to be the opposite. Right? So things like a totally clean backlink profile. Never done any kind of manipulative linking, at least not intentional outbound backlink building. Don't forget, everyone's going to have some spam links. Even if you've never done any manipulative backlinking or any backlinking or marketing of any kind, you will have some bad backlinks, because the Web, just there are all sorts of weird crawlers and bots that host links all over the place. It's fine. Don't sweat those. It's the normal volume. Things like having a beautiful, elegant, high quality UX. A great UX is a fantastic defense against a lot of spam and manipulation. It's even a great tactic for folks who are trying to do SEO. It's just a great signal in general. Right? Having a great UX is going to get you more conversions and more people using your site. Anyone who is browsing your website, say, from the Google Search Quality team or the webspam team, or the Google reviewers, which Google hires, or from Bing, any of those folks who are looking at your site are going to say, "Oh this is clearly a great site. We want to have this in our index."

If you review some of these other sites, you can take them or leave them. One that does not feel very SEO. I think you all know what I mean. There's sort of that sixth sense of, boy, they're doing a lot of things on the page and off the site that don't feel like they're natural, don't feel like they're for users. Whenever you have that sixth sense around a site, that's going to put you in a higher danger category. Not doing that, having that very natural sort of site, you can target keywords, do a good job with your titles, do a good job with your content, do a good job with your internal linking, but make it feel very natural. I'll give you good examples. Amazon, very well SEO'ed, but doesn't feel SEO'ed. Zappos, doesn't feel SEO'ed. Even SEOmoz, it doesn't feel very SEO'ed, but it's doing a good job. TechCrunch, doesn't feel SEO'ed, but ranks phenomenally well.

Finally, having those strong brand signals, the branded searches, lots of people searching for your brand name specifically. Good links, good mentions, good press, good user and usage metrics, all these types of things are going to protect you from a lot of these types of spam attacks.

That being said, there's nasty stuff that other people can do. So you want to (a) keep your eyes wide open. Make sure you're registered with Google Webmaster Tools so you can get any of these warnings ahead of time. If you happen to see an influx of really nasty looking links, you might want to send a preemptive reconsideration request to Google saying, "Hey, we don't know where these came from and we have nothing to do with this. We just want you guys to know that this is not our activity. Please feel free to disregard or not count these links." 99% of the time Google is not going to say, "Oh these bad links that are pointing to you, we're going to count those as reducing your SEO and bringing you down in the rankings." They're instead going to say, "Oh well, we're going to ignore these. We're going to remove the value that these pass." They're not going to pass PageRank or anchor text value or link trust, or whatever it is. We're just going to count the good stuff.

I remember being in a session, this was years ago, probably five or six years ago, with Matt Cutts, the head of webspam for Google. He was looking at a site on his computer, and the person asked about their website from the audience, and he said, I see, I don't remember what it was, 14,000 odd links pointing to this site, but Google's actually only counting about 30 of them. That's why you're not ranking very well. Most of those links we've removed all the value that they pass. So it's not that they were having those bad links hurt the site. It's just that they're saying, "Oh these are not going to pass any more link value."

Now, what I would suggest here is, if you see stuff that looks like manipulative and negative SEO, you just be careful. We are trying to do some things here at SEOmoz to help with this. One of the things our data scientist, Dr. Matt Peters, is working with some folks here at Moz to build a large list of spam so we can do some classification, and eventually inside the Mozcape index, which will appear in Open Site Explorer, show up in your Pro-web app, show up in the Mozbar, we'll try and classify sites to say, "Hey we're pretty sure this is spam. This looks like the kind of thing where we've pattern matched and seen Google penalize or ban a lot of these sites." We're also trying to build some metrics to show what are really good, high quality, and editorially given sites. So domain authority and page authority already exist to try and do that.

Then, we're also running some experiments where I've offered up my personal blog, which is a relatively small site, probably has as few links as any of these, probably fewer than Just Good Cars, RandFishkin.com, to see if some of these nasty folks, who are hitting and taking down sites with negative SEO, would like to concentrate their focus on my sites. For two reasons, number one, we'd be very curious to see it happen, and number two, we can certainly afford the hit. We offered up SEOmoz as well. Most people seem to think that SEOmoz is not a good target. It won't actually be taken down.

We're going to run some experiments internally as well on this front and hopefully be able to disprove that negative SEO is a common thing that works very well. I'd hate to see an industry spring up like this. I think that this type of activity, particularly some of these really nasty things, are just an awful part of being around the black hat spam-sphere. I hope that it's something that we can defend against. I hope you'll join me in contributing. I look forward to your comments. If you've seen stuff like this before, please do feel free to talk about it either anonymously or openly in the comments. I will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

p.s. from Rand: I incorrectly noted the keyword for which Dan Thies' site lost rankings in the video as being his name. It was actually "SEO Book." My apologies!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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I got a couple emails last week I wanted to share in anonymized format. Here's the first one:

It's me again <redacted>, just wondering I have been learning allot more about how to link build without software like&nbs… Continue reading →

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Having overly optimized web pages could soon get your websites in some hot water with Google and their search results. It has recently been announced that Google will start to penalize websites that engage in over-optimization practices.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will be covering some changes that you should be making to your SEO practices in order to avoid this type of penalization.

We hope you enjoy and don't forget to leave comments below! Happy Friday Everyone!

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another addition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’ve been hearing a lot of chatter in the SEO blogosphere and on Twitter and on the forums about this new potential Google penalty that’s coming down the line around over-optimization. Now, one of Google’s representatives mentioned at a conference, South by Southwest, down in Austin, Texas, about a month ago actually, that Google would be looking into penalizing over-optimized websites and folks who have engaged in over-
the-top SEO.

There’s been a lot of speculation around when that’s coming out, whether that’s coming out. There are a few things happening, actually, this week and last night about, "Hey is this already something we’re seeing?" Seer Interactive, right, Wil Reynolds’ fantastic SEO company out of Philadelphia had this penalty, and people were wondering whether that was related to this. Not really sure.

But before this penalty hits, for goodness sake, SEO folks, let’s make these changes to our websites because we could be in real trouble if we don’t impact these things beforehand. I think these are some of the most likely candidates to be hit by Google’s over-optimization penalty, some of the most likely patterns they’re going to try and match against in this upcoming change. So let’s talk through them.

Number one, your titles need to be authentic. They need to sound real. They need to sound like a human being wrote them that was not intending necessarily simply to rank for phrase after phrase. I’ll give you a good example. Bad: web design services, web design firm space brand name, whatever your brand name is, web design. What does it sound like? It sounds like all you’re trying to do is rank for keywords, not show off your brand name, especially if this is your home page or those kinds of things. You’re repeating keywords three times. Web design is in this title three times. Think about whether a normal human being would read that title and think, oh yeah, that sounds legitimate. No, they’d think to themselves there’s something fishy here, something spammy, something’s wrong, something manipulative. Try instead, probably equally effective, if not more, brand name web design Portland Spiffiest Design Services. Now look, I’ve got the word "design services," which you wanted to get in here. I’ve got the city where you are that you’re trying to target, got brand name web design, right, sort of branding myself as the product and the keyword. Much, much better.

Try and look through your sites and see if this is a potential issue. I’ve seen tons of sites where SEO folks have just gone overboard again and again. Don’t get me wrong. I used to do this too. One of the crappiest things about this is, even if your rank, your click through rates go down. So you can rank in position two or three and be getting less than the people below you, because people don’t think that these are legitimate titles and they perceive them to be manipulative, especially if you’re targeting more higher end, savvy or sophisticated technology customers.

Number two, manipulative internal links. I see this a lot on side bars, inside of content, where people have taken all of the instances of a particular word or repeated it throughout the side bar or in the footer, those kinds of things, and are pointing with exact match anchors to the same page over and over again. Now, we all know as SEOs that the first anchor text link counts and only one on the page is going to pass that value. Linking repeatedly to the same page with the same anchor is not helpful for SEO, and it makes our sites look really spammy and manipulative and questionable to someone who’s browsing it. Why would we want to hurt our conversion rates like this, and why would we want to point out to the engines that, hey, over here, I’m trying to manipulate you? What are you thinking? This is crazy.

Instead, go with logical, useful, change it up when you’re linking to pages, maybe a couple of times, in some spaces. You have a blog post and it mentions a page on your site that you want people to actually go to and that you think is useful in context. Great, link over there. Fine, use the anchor text. Maybe use a modified version of the anchor text, a little longer, a little shorter, a little more natural sounding, and you’re going to get these same results, but you’re going to do it in a much more effective way. You’re not going to be at risk of whatever is happening with this over-optimization penalty.

Number three, cruddy, link filled footers. I see this all the time still. You’re just having a bunch of exact anchor links down in here that no one would actually really click and that come in lists. I often see them in light gray on light gray so that it’s not particularly easy to read. Use your footer wisely. Use your footer to link to the things that people expect to find in the footer. If you really need to get anchor text on pages, find natural ways to put it in the real menu at the top, in the content itself. Don’t be trying to mess around and throw footer links site wide, across things. This 2002, man. We’re ten years later. It’s like at least a decade past that.

Number four, text content blocks built primarily for the engines. You know how sometimes you get to a page and there’s good content, usable stuff, an image, a call to action, and then weirdly there’s this block of junk. It’s this block of blah, blah, keyword, keyword, blah, blah, blah, keyword, keyword, blah, blah, blah. Why is that there? Why does that exist? Does that really work? Does that really trick the engines? Yeah, it tricks them into thinking that they should penalize you. Get that out of there. Rewrite that stuff, man. Seriously, this is going to cost you far more than it’s going to help you. If you’ve got those spammy blocks of text in your pages, that have no purpose other than to get your keywords or some keyword into the text, and it’s not actually helping anyone, it’s not a good call to action, it’s not helping your conversion rate, it will actually drive people away from you. Why are you trying to rank if not to get people to do good things on your site, and like your brand, and appreciate you and come back again and again, and tell their friends, and share it socially, and link to you? Don’t be putting this stuff in here. This is dangerous for all of those reasons, and super dangerous given this over-optimization penalty that’s potentially coming down the line.

Number five, back links from penalty likely sources. So this is one of the toughest ones because it’s really hard to control if you’ve already gotten links from these places. But you can see with those 700,000 Google webmaster tools, pings that they sent everybody that said, hey, it looks like you’ve done some manipulative linking, and that kind of thing. Be really careful for all of these, link networks, anything that says private link network, or I have a link network and I’ll place your site on it, or building up a network of sites that you then interlink to one and other. Come on. There are so many better ways to get links. You’re putting a lot of time and effort and energy into building all of that stuff. You can do so many authentic things with that time. This is time terribly spent. Comment spam, especially those that are sent though automated software blasts, so you think of your XRumer or your SENuke, the article marking robot, or whatever, that’s going to submit your site to tons of places or find open holes in the web where they can leave comments and link spam and that kind of stuff. Forum signature links, this is actually one where I suspect it’s one of the places where Google really gets to know, hey, this guy clearly is a manipulative, black hat/gray hat SEO, because look, they’re pointing to the same site where we found all the link spam from forum signatures, particularly on webmaster sorts of boards. That clearly indicates that’s their site and their trying to rain for it, and all that kind of stuff. They’ve got a long profile, and they keep linking to all these things from their forum signatures. Just be very cautious about this. I’m not saying don’t link to it, but maybe don’t use your exact match anchor text or try to make it more of a branding play, try and make it more authentic feeling. Certainly participating in communities is a great thing. Just watch that.

Reciprocal lists, right, people are emailing each other back and forth and saying, "Hey, I’ll put you on my list of links. You put me on yours. Oh, and we’ll do it 20 times and we’ll form this big reciprocal circus that’s going to get all of us penalized." How great is that?

Article marking sites, I’ve talked about article marketing in the past. Generally when you see, hey, we’re an article marketing site and we can help you rank higher, and submit your content to us and we’ll link out, and the same is true for SEO focused directories, anytime you see a site that is essentially extolling the virtues of participating there, or contributing there, as being primarily related to the link and the anchor text and the page rank you’re going to get, you can bet your sweet hiney that Google does not want to count that. That’s exactly what they’re trying to prevent, and I’d worry, whether it’s this penalty or a penalty that Google makes in the future, that this is the kind of stuff that gets hit.

Last one, number six, large amounts of pages that are targeting very similar, kind of modified versions of keywords and keyword intents, with only slight variations, slight variation being the key here. So think:
used cars Seattle, used autos Seattle, pre-owned cars Seattle. Why are those three different pages? It sort of feels like keywordy, SEO-y, spam, right, and then there are pointing exact match anchors at all of these. This is the same page. You can target all three of these keywords very nicely on one page that’s called Used and Pre-owned Cars/Autos in Seattle. Right, one page, good, you’ve got it. You’ve combined all of the things. You want to have that great user experience there. You don’t want to have to build that three times. You’re not trying to build a bunch of spammy anchor texts to each one that’s pointing from each of the different ones. The used cars Seattle page has a link to the used auto Seattle’s, it’s sort of like, "What?" From a user perspective, "Why is that there? What is the difference between a car and an automobile exactly? I don’t understand why these two exist." This kind of thing is something where I think it’s a very clear pattern match that the engines can detect. Looks like they did some research and then just built a page for everything, and then they pointed links at all of them. Its manipulative, right. This is the kind of thing, also, that will get you in trouble.

So, one, one, two, three, four, five, six. Six things you should change, and even though I’m not the Count from Sesame Street, you should still pay careful attention to these, because I’m super nervous that when this penalty going to come out, there are just going to be so many webmasters and SEOs who are doing this kind of stuff, and I don’t know which one Google’s going to hit on this time and what they might hit on in the future. But I just want you to be okay. I want your sites to do well, and this is such bad stuff for user experience too. So please avoid it. Be careful. Good luck to you, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Are you and your content suffering from the blues after this long Winter? Well have no fear, warmer weather is here and it's time to overcome that winter of dis-"content". Today we will be talking about 5 ways to overcome the content fatigue you may be experiencing. After watching the videos, please share the ways you help keep your content fresh, unique, and successful.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are trying to help you overcome the winter of your discontent, meaning, well, really the winter of your dis-content. You see, I hear a lot of people talking in the industry about the challenge of successful content marketing and I understand. Producing content is hard. If you don't produce great, fantastic, amazing content, it tends to do this: launch, reach some people, fall flat on its face. This is sad, this is tragic, this is frustrating. It makes you not want to invest in content anymore. I understand that, and I want to give you some strategies, some specific strategies that will help you overcome this problem.

My top five are, number one, precede your shares, whether that's links, whether that's people talking about it in social media, whether that's people e-mailing it and sharing it, whatever it is, by including the people that you want to share in the process itself. This sounds complex. It's not that hard.

Here's what I mean. Imagine doing this. These are the people I want to share this. I'm going to send them a survey. I'm not even going to send them a survey. I'm going to send them an e-mail. That e-mail is going to say, "Hey, we'd love your help with a blog post I'm going to write or an article I'm going to write or an infographic I'm launching. Which of the following five appeals the most to you?" Guess what? Not only do you get from them the response that says, "Oh, yeah, this one, that's the one that I really am interested in. That's the one that I think is the best idea of the bunch that you've got," but once you get that feedback, that person has now bought in.

So when you launch it, you can e-mail them again and say, "Hey, remember that thing you helped me with? Really appreciate it. You rock, dude, and by the way, we made it. Here it is. Can you check it out? Give me any feedback." Then once you launch it, you can ask them for their help in sharing. By involving these people, and it doesn't have to be just a survey. It can be something where you actually get data from them, where you interview them, where you're featuring them in videos, or you're featuring their content in some way or whatever it is, but involving the people that you want to share in the process or the content itself means that you're going to get them helping you. This works tremendously well. This will help you get over that problem.

Number two, try to appeal to an influential or underserved or marginalized or politically, culturally, cohesive and connected group. Here's what I mean by this. What I mean is that there are a lot of times on the Web when we're trying to find a group of individuals who are going to share something. If you can find a group that already feels passionate about a topic, for example, in this case, I've got these guys, right, and they really care about the open source movement. You can find someone who cares about a political issue, an issue like taxes or gay marriage or fashion or whatever it is, but they have to be passionate and they have to be united and unified around that, and you're essentially going to leverage the unified power of that existing community and produce content that appeals directly to them.

For a ton of people who are in B2C and B2B, there are a lot of opportunities to do this even if you think you're in a boring industry, because supporting a cause, making a large donation, essentially running a promotion that helps something can get that group behind you and can get that group sharing. That's why so many companies support things like breast cancer awareness or a multiple sclerosis run or whatever it is, because it's powerful in and of itself. It helps create great branding, and it means that you're going to get things shared. When you can do this content-
wise on the Web for an event, for a promotion, for whatever it is, this can really go a long way.

Number three, turn things that are interesting, data in particular that's interesting but poorly formatted data, so what I mean by this is something that's hidden in a PDF somewhere, something that's just literally a list of bullet points that exists in a slide show on Slideshare, something that's merely a few data things that someone shared in a blog post but hasn't turned visual yet, and make it exciting and interesting. So make that beautiful and useful through whatever sort of graphic system or visual system you can, and then go and reach out to the people who made it and get their review, their buy-in, their approval, because when you do that, you not only make sure that you're protected against any legal problems, but you also get their community and themselves behind that. Of course, you can share with them and give that to them and they'll promote it. They'll help you promote it because, of course, you're citing them and you're saying that they're the source and you're helping them to look good. So of course they're going to help you to look good. This is a great way to build up some industry credentials, some respect in your sphere, as well as to get a better content piece to launch.

Number four, popular conversations and discussions are happening all the time in whatever industry you're in. I guarantee they are. If you're in the startup world, Hacker News has all sorts of discussions all the time. If you're in the meme space, there are all sorts of things going on, on Reddit. If you're in the political world, there are all sorts of things going on in political forums and blogs and the news and that kind of stuff. No matter your sphere, there's almost always interesting conversations. If you're having trouble finding these, I highly recommend going and searching on Topsy.com. Just take a look at that website, and you'll be able to find a ton of opportunities. Just search for your keywords. Broad industry keywords are best. I wouldn't go for very highly specific things, but you'll find a lot of content.

Then jump in. Essentially, I want you to jump into those conversations and continue them. Add to them, and by the way, please, by all means, ping the people. Send an e-mail over to the person who wrote it and say that you did. Go find their profile of whoever it is through Follower Wonk and tweet back at them. Go find your connections on LinkedIn. Go talk to the people who are already engaged in the conversation. Make them aware of the content that you've produced. Then they will be likely to check it out and also to share it. It really, really helps when you're looking to join a new industry or become a voice inside an industry, gain some thought leadership and get that content out there.

Number five, my last and final one, is just too easy. Rank stuff. I'm serious. Rank anything. Rank people. Rank social media profiles. Rank blogs. Rank content. Rank companies. Rank investment bankers. I don't care what you rank. If you rank things, then people who are high in those rankings will want to share that information, and people who are in the industry will look to that as a leadership board. The more beautiful and creative you make this and the better job you do with real data, so gathering data that people would actually think is influential and should be in the rankings, this works tremendously well and it works every single time. I'm constantly amazed that more people in more industries don't take it upon themselves to rank interesting people, interesting blogs, interesting websites, interesting companies, whatever it is, in their sphere because this is just an easy, easy win in the content sphere.

All right, everyone, I hope that you're over your winter of discontent. I hope to see some great content from you in the future. Take care, and we'll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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