Real Estate and Negative SEO, the real scoop - #seopodcast 147

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. That is right. That is right. What did you think about it? Yeah, the camera looks a little close today. Is it me or? I think we just missed a week. Just looks a lot closer. Yeah. My name is Chris Burris, owner of Eat Web Style. I am Charles Lewis, a internet marketing specialist. You guys are listening to the most popular SEO slash internet marketing slash all things web and interesting podcast on iTunes. Web and interesting. As usual, we start with a tip from our previous podcast. By the way, this is podcast number 147. The tip from the previous podcast is use PPC and SEO when your budget and time permits. Yeah, yeah. Do both of them if you can. What you want to do is first off, use PPC in order to gauge how much competition there is, which keywords are working the best, which ones you should spend most time optimizing for. Then once you get that data, start your SEO plan using that data to make sure your SEO campaign is running as best as it can. Did you just give away all our secrets? No. No, I didn't. I wouldn't do that. Yeah. Well, it's during. No, no, that wasn't all of them. Do remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers where our mantra is Don't be a deuce. Dude, that was good. Good. Fired up today. Oh, yeah. That was good. And if you guys are in front of any sort of electric device that allows you to tweet Facebook, G+, something, throw something out onto the web, go ahead and do that now. Yeah. And you should do, I don't think I can see this, SEO Podcast 147. Hashtag SEO Podcast 147. Tag us at eWebStyle. That way we'll know you did it. We'll give you a couple punches in the face and appreciate it. Cool. Very good. All right. Let's jump into, we do have some reviews. You know what? I'm going to start

off with the bad one. Well, yeah, I knew that we had reviews because you weren't tatted up this morning. Yeah. Weren't no new tats. Yeah. But I saw the tat gun. So, tat gun but no new tats. With an actual tear right next to the tat gun. This first review reads, poor quality. This is by Tyson Downs. Higher quality audio equipment is needed to be able to listen to this. I can't hardly understand what is said, especially from the second guy that introduces himself. So, Charles, the SEO rapper has now been relegated to the second guy that introduces himself. The second guy. See, the tear was actually yours. And I do want to go back because we had a review last time. We had a negative review. We went back. We addressed it. And check out the update. This is now Great Guys, Great Podcast. Still by H.J.K. Banker. I do owe him a sheet of paper with the review. And he says, these guys are great on the podcast and even better in person. Chris is a magician. He can turn one ninja star into five ninja stars. Thanks, guys. Wow. Yeah. I can do that. You like that pose? You almost startled me. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. Oh, my God. He's got stars. Just a little bit. He's flailing like they might be flying somewhere. It was the y'all. It was the y'all that got me. It wasn't the stars. It was the y'all. All right. The next one is the Chuck Norris of SEO Podcasts. I'm so tired of Chuck Norris. Go ahead, though. This is by Frustrated and Fat. This is on May 3rd. It took three or four podcasts before I realized that the banter really is a benefit to the podcast. Getting SEO right is more about web philosophy than website coding. The coding is just the tool to present that philosophy to people and bots alike. Give these guys a listen and notice how much you are thinking about the point of your website.

Huge punch in the face, Chuck Norris style. Wah! Yeah. Appreciate it. Appreciate it, man. That's five stars, too. Yeah, that's five stars. But see, the reason I hate Chuck Norris is because my Twitter handle is at Chuck. And so, everyone just assumes, yeah, add Chuck. Man, all the Chuck Norris jokes, I've read every one possible because they all come to me. So, yeah. For what it's worth. Any of them funny or worth mentioning? Some of them are. And most of them are just stupid, but, you know. Stereotypical Chuck Norris jokes. Yeah. All right, here we go. Last podcast. Last review. I punched myself in the face, title of the podcast, for not finding you guys earlier, the beginning of the podcast. This is by, of the review. I keep saying podcast when I mean review. I just, we're, we're just one review. That's all we do. It's Jinseng Geek. And it says, for not finding you guys earlier, just found you all tonight, y'all. Download all year's worth. Love the live, no BS style. Keep it up. Cool. Good luck with that. You downloaded a lot of stuff. If you did that. That's a good. This is 147, so. That's a lot of content. Yeah, that's a lot of content. And then I've got this email, and actually it's from, I can't remember his name off the top of my head. Go onto our Facebook. He actually won our contest, our most recent caption. Bill, there you go. Thank you. Just totally went blank there. Matrix White Room. Yeah. That's what I call it. Yeah. I know how to get there. I know the path. I know how to take the pill. I'm just not there. And he sent us an email, because I sent him an email, hey, great job on the caption. We're going to get a gift card over to you. Yeah, it's just one white room after the next, isn't it? Is it Amazon okay? And he wrote back, he said, hey, Chris, hope you had a great time on vacation.

By the way, I did. The great Northwest, insane, beautiful views, everything was awesome. Are you guys on tomorrow? Here we are. He's on an early morning apartment. He'll be back in time. You guys going to be talking about Penguin nasty stuff this week? Of course. Of course. Hopefully you didn't get hit too hard. Nope. Of course. I have a WP site I've been struggling with, limited budget. If you guys can help, they'll be running PPC. We'll talk to you about that. Let me know if you can help. And he goes, can you do a Starbucks card? Who is the Amazon chick you keep talking about? I don't know. I just thought. Yeah. I like it when we get to interact with people who actually watch our podcast. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Starbucks card shouldn't be a problem. And I'm not aware of any Amazon chick we talked about. No. No. Because I would have remembered that. I forget. I have lots of white room. As soon as you bring up the subject Amazon chick, I'm boom. I'm present. And I was not there for that. Oh, I'm not done. I have a little bit of news. Yeah, a little bit of news. We're going to be exceeding the Gino time limit, so let me blow through this. Anything really important? I thought that was interesting. Walmart dropped the iPhone price at select stores for a whole $74. The iPhone price. That's just the power of Walmart. Be careful if you get in bed with them. Lockheed won a government contract for security. It's a $400. They said a couple million dollar contract. It's not a couple million. It's $454 million. And it's for internet security and basically electronic security, system security. Interesting because they were majorly hacked in the news about three or four months ago. Interesting. I thought this was interesting. The Google not provided search term, right? So when you're logged in to your Gmail account and you do a search, Google is no longer allowing the search keywords data to be put

onto any analytics. It's not being passed onto your server, meaning the server that's hosting your website. It says it's affecting more than just SEO sites. Yes. Publishers is affecting. So the quote here is the conventional wisdom has been that it's a problem that mostly affects SEO and search related industries. And they go on to say, that was quote unquote, they go on to say, because those are the type of people who are logged into a Google account. At a minimum, they're logged into Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools. But I never, that was never my conventional wisdom. Well, I think, I think, because I read the same article and I believe what the message he was conveying that it affects, when he says SEOers, I think he's referring to the people who care about those keywords. Not necessarily the industry itself. Well, he meant, what he meant was the industry, because people in the industry are inherently logged into a Google account. Yeah. And I kind of see that. I just never thought that that was going to be the only people who would be impacted. Because, I mean, when we get new clients, some of the time we're putting them onto Gmail, Google Apps. We put everybody on there. Yeah, exactly. So, or try to. Yeah. So, if we're doing that, there's lots of other people who are doing that. There are lots of people who are doing it on their own. So, now, it's no longer just SEOers who are inherently logged into. I think it impacts more people in the SEO industry. But I don't, in no way did I think, I didn't think it was conventional wisdom that SEO and the SEO industry was the only ones who were going to get affected by this. And then, I think it from a mobile perspective, right, with the tremendous growth of Android phones and mobile searching. So, it's not just the fact that you need that Gmail account to have the full effectiveness of your Android device. Right. But, if that Gmail account

is your primary account on the Android phone and you're searching mobily, then that counts as a. Does it? I was just wondering. Yeah, that counts as a logged in search. And so, that's why the original number that Cuts put out, he said it was going to affect like 3% of all searches. The number is actually closer to 35 or 40%. Right. All of our accounts that I check analytics on every day, frankly, the number is over 15%. Yeah. Not provided is the second. First or second term. First or second term that I have no clue what those terms are. That's bad. Yeah. And I didn't realize that. So, that means that skews. You can't track search data from people using an Android phone. Search keywords from people using an Android phone. That all did. Wow. That's bad. All right. That's all I got. That was, that's Google, get your, change that. Yeah. Yeah. Fix that in a hurry. Okay. So, I got a question. Question came from, and I might play with his name some. A question from, uh, Jake, maybe. No, no. We only have yes or no. This one, Jake, maybe. We'll call him Jake, yes or no. Yeah. He posted a question on, uh, on Twitter. And he's at Jacob, maybe. That's M-A-B-E-Y. Um, about keyword research. Right. So, his question was, uh, by the way, unbelievably, unbelievably important keyword research. Yeah. Yeah. Extremely important. His question goes, uh, should I target high search or low competition or does competition only relate to paid campaigns? So, it's kind of three questions in one sort of deal. And so, my answer is going to be, uh, Jake, maybe you should, uh, no, but for real, um, I think if the question is in regards to SEO, um, by default, I think you should at least target one high competition phrase, especially if it's, if it's a money phrase and it's a phrase that's, that's going to convert into visitors. Well, not converting to visitors, but convert into paid visitors. I'll tell you that.

Target that phrase. That's absolutely right and has so many caveats, right? Because as just an extreme example, real estate in general, right? Yeah. You should just, don't target real estate if you're a local real estate. You need to target, target real estate as a term if you're a realtor.com. And frankly, they're probably not targeting that. Yeah. They just write so many articles. It, it, it's kind of an, uh, it flows naturally, which we will talk about if you got affected by penguins. So realtor, real estate is one real estate, say Houston, a city as large as Houston, also a term that you may, I wouldn't call that the high traffic term that you want to go after. Um, or that may be, but real estate, no real estate, Houston possibly, or real estate, your local area. You know, it probably more likely you'd want to do a suburb around Houston. We've got like Sugarland or Baytown or whatever your town, uh, large city is, communities are go, that would be kind of the, the, one of the main phrases that you go after. And then maybe your large town is the high, high phrase that you're going after. Yeah. So part two of this question says, uh, low competition or does competition only relate to paid campaigns? No competition relates across the board. Whether it's a, um, an SEO campaign, a paid campaign, a social campaign, whatever your campaign is. If there is competition, then you are competing. Therefore, it goes across the board. Um, I would say, um, depending on your industry, cause you, you didn't indicate what exactly you do. Uh, no competent, no competitive words may be your best bet. Easier to rank for. They usually have a, um, a higher quality visit to the site. Right. And, uh, you're talking long tail phrases and, um, and then it's frankly, it's easier to rank for those. And so, um, target some low comp words, sprinkle in some high ones because, you know, you have to do that. And, um, and then you

should be okay. Let me know how that works. Hit us up and, uh, and keep us posted. Punch in the face for the interaction. Yeah. So hopefully Jake, maybe that helped you. You know, I know you're holding off on that and we're both bad cause we see the opportunity. We're both like, ah, pounce. Would have been more effective. Not pounce. Yeah. All right. So I think we have reached our Gino time limit. Now it's actually time to do content. Got some content. Yeah. So a couple of things. One, um, somebody hit me with this search engine. We'll brief through this one. Um, DuckDuckGo. Right. Y'all check that out. It's literally not DuckDuckGoose. By default, when they told me, I typed in DuckDuckGoose. Yeah. But it's DuckDuckGo.com and, um, it's a search engine. Um, I've heard, I haven't read this, but I've heard it was created by, um, a former engineer from Google. Okay. I don't know how relevant that is or not. If you have some information, let me know. I'll be doing some research later this weekend and next week, and we can either confirm or what's the opposite of confirm? Deny. Deny that. But anyway, check it out. Let me know what you think. It's very simple. Like Google of times past, you know. And it's interesting because, uh, I sent an article to you. I don't, uh, actually, yeah, I sent an article to you about how Bing has actually simplified their results. Simplified, yeah, I saw that. And, and we, I pulled up DuckDuckGo and it's like, it looks naked. Yeah. Right. And, and it's hard now we're so deep into this. It's hard to remember that that's what Google was in the beginning. It was literally search bar results, nothing else, absolutely nothing else. So that's kind of where DuckDuckGo is now. And Google has been adding stuff and Bing has actually been subtracting. I think they, they. Well, they changed their layout is what they did. They didn't, they said they removed some things, but they adjusted their layout,

made the tabs a little bit easier, made the nav a little more subtle, uh, in regards to like, you know, uh, file and images and things like that at the top. And so, um, and I think, I think it looks okay. They did some sub nav too, right? I think is what I read. So I haven't checked it out yet. But it's interesting how people are doing that. Second thing, April 24th, uh, Google released another algorithm update called Penguin. And the Penguin update, um, was really targeted towards spam. More importantly, web spam. Um, and, and in regards to how it affects websites, link spam people. And it's targeting sites that have tons of, um, of links coming in that, that are spammy. Um, and so they, they, I found an article on Search Engine Watch, uh, posted by, uh, Danny Goodwin. Um, then he talked about, um, different types of unnatural links that the Penguin update was really going after. And one of them was, um, um, um, paid links using exact match anchor text. And so this is, this is, if you go to one of these other, you know, it's kind of interesting because the, the Penguin update also effect affected the other Google algorithm updates. Right. So for example, they released Farmer, right? And Farmer attacked content forms and link forms and things like that. And so this first one kind of goes that direction, uh, paid links using exact match anchor text. So for example, if you are buying a link from, you know, ABCDEF.com. Link seller. Yeah. ABC link seller. Yeah. Dot com. And, um, and, um, and your link says, um, we are, um, we do SEO Houston and call us today and SEO Houston, which is the anchor text is the link and it's a paid site. Then Google is probably going to devalue that if ABC link seller.com site is already spammy and they have tons of pop-ups and, and their site is already flagged. Then if you have a link coming from their site, then, um,

you will probably get devalued. And this kind of goes to the whole, uh, negative SEO deal, which is really a whole nother podcast, but we will talk about it briefly. Um, the second one was a comment spam. And so, uh, comment spam. I hate comment spam because I like four blogs, right? Right. And I get tons and tons of comments and I always wait to the end of the week to go through and process them. And usually 90% of them I market spam. Right. Because there is comment spam. Yeah. And, and so if you have a blog site, we should really call it comment douchiness or douchey spam. Yeah. We've come up with a new word, but yeah, for that, um, yeah, I almost had it, but yeah. And so, and what happens is if let's say you have a blog site and you aren't, um, um, managing those comments, you have it set to automatically post, then you end up with hundreds and thousands of comments and that's a lot, but a whole bunch of comments, um, that are spamming, um, that have links in them that go to various places and all these are coming from your site. So take the time to check the comments that says you have to approve the comments first and take your time and go ahead and moderate them. On the side note, if links to your site are coming from these spam comments, meaning you're out posting these spam comments or links to your site, then you'll get dinged as well. And so definitely, um, don't do that. It's not a good look and that would classify you, um, as a douche. Yeah. And now what, just, just to clarify, we are not go on to other blog posts and don't be social, don't interact. I'm not saying that at all. Yeah. What we're saying is, is there's a huge difference between just posting a link, a comment so that you can get the link. So just posting the comment to get the link and posting

a comment to add value, which has a post, which has a link, right? So add value first to, to your process of being social, to your process of interacting with that particular community. And then hopefully you're also mindful that if there's the opportunity to have a backlink to your site, take advantage of that backlink to your site. Exactly. Can I give you a real time example of that? What I'll do once this podcast is posted is I'll go back to the article that we're talking about. Right. And I'll discuss it. Great article. I learned something. We talked to our fans and viewers about it. Here's what we did. Right. And so this brings value to them and it gives value to us because I'll include a link to this podcast. Right. And so that way they can see how we explained it. We can start building a relationship with them and things like that. But I won't go and just put a link or put a link to something else or anything that's not relevant to the article. So, yeah, keep them relevant. That's the word I was looking for earlier. Guest post on questionable sites. Yes. And, you know, I had to turn down some of these. I got two offers. It's your rapper, blah, blah, blah, blah. Would you mind guest posting over here? Sure. Send me the link. Right. Probably not after I look at the site. So, you know, guest posting is a great way to generate content and links to your site. I mean, especially if the site is of value. It's a great site and they have good content and they're not flagged or anything like that. And it's a blog site and they allow people to come guest post, then create a nice article and post it on their site. And then link back to yours. By default, as a guest author, you get the right to link back to your site with whatever text you would like. And so, take advantage of it. But what they're saying

is, guest posting on questionable sites. You know, don't go write a post on ABCDlinktome.com. Right. And then your post is full of links and keyword stuffing and that's a ding, ding, ding, you know, penguin knockout. You know, don't do that. I used to go back to that image of the penguin and it just doesn't look like a penguin. It takes me to Angry Birds. Yeah. Penguin flying at you. Now we know how the pigs feel like. Article marketing sites. Stand content featuring links, exact match, anchor text. Yeah. So, article marketing, that's like article spinning, this and that. So, you write an article, you submit it to a site, they rewrite the article, it gets submitted to another site. That same content gets spread across and now it's in a whole bunch of different places with all links coming back to you. So, yeah, spammy articles, spammy content, spammy links and don't do it, you'll get penguinized. Penguinized. Penguinized. Don't get penguinized. Let's see. And links from dangerous sites. And I think this one really kind of walks that thin ice between a natural link and negative SEO. Because when you have inbound links coming from sites that are dangerous, sites that maybe have malware on them. Or war as sites or something, yeah. Something like that. Link sites that have tons of pop-ups and ads and potentially contain viruses and things like that. You don't want links to your site from there. Because, you know, my grandmother says it, birds of a feather flock together. So, if they're linking to you, then chances are you may have some of those same issues. And so, Google's penalizing for that. Now, I'm curious to know how they're valuing it and how the algorithm is interpreting it. Because, like, with regards to negative SEO, I can't control who links to me. So, first off, what is negative SEO? Negative SEO, in a nutshell, is the art of devaluing your competitor's sites using SEO tactics. And so, you know, like he said, if this malware porn site over here

is sending out bad links and I want to bring down my competitor, then I'll post a comment on his page with a link to my competitor's site, right? Right. And then that will negatively impact his site. And according to the Penguin update, he could be penalized for that. And so, but Google is saying that they're controlling that somehow. So, I'm curious to know how. Well, I think my first thought is if Google gives value, Google, you know, the first thing that really set Google apart was the fact that they valued inbound links. And this kind of page rank concept, which was. Yeah, these votes. Yeah, the votes for a particular page. And so, if that's the premise of the algorithm and they're saying that we're going to negatively impact if the inbound link is from a bad place, really, if it used to have value and now you make that value zero, that is a negative impact. Now, it's a great PR spin because I just, because of negative SEO, you cannot allow a situation where people can downgrade a competitor's website. That's just, that probably goes against their, I don't know what their mantra is. It's not, don't be a douche. Well, one of the things I read was that, and I read this on Google's blog, is that if your link building is correct and if all your links are natural and you're pretty good at what you're doing, then your positive signals far outweigh any negative signals and therefore, by them devaluing the negative signals shouldn't have a huge effect. My logic to that was, well, that's probably great for a huge site or somebody like us who has plenty of natural links and things like that. But if you're a small site or maybe a new site, and unfortunately, the few links you get came from not so great sites, then an effect like this will probably bump you out of the first five, you know, first few pages. And so, I think, what I think is, is those links just

get zero value. I think they're doing PR and they're trying to present the case as if they'll give you an actual negative impact. And because of the risks of negative SEO, it's too risky, you know, right? So, you know, you take a website, whatever, Search Engine Land, and you say, you know, let me get 20 of my buddies and go to every Juarez site we know and point to Search Engine Land. And then all of a sudden, I mean, at what point do they say, okay, well, now Search Engine Land has used this? It's funny you mention that because Rand is running that test. He opened it up. Against his own site? Yeah, against his own site. He opened it up just to figure out what would happen. He hasn't posted the results from that, and he did it last week. And so, we think about the same. That's crazy. And so, we will, you know, we'll see how that works. So, I think the PR is, hey, we will ding you. Yeah. And what they're probably hoping that'll do is cause a number of people to stop doing that. Of course, Rand's article will not do that. But even if the real impact is if you just are, if you've got a backlink from a bad site and we are not going to give you any credit for that, I'm not going to ding you per se, but we're not going to give you any credit for that, then, you know, that's enough, right? So, stop doing it, wasting your time and or money. Yeah. Stop being a douche. So, how can you tell if you've been penguinized? Yeah. Penguinized. Ooh. Yeah. That might be the subject. I just see it like an Arnold Schwarzenegger character with a reverse penguin. I think I just want to see the Angry Birds slingshot. Yes. With the penguin on it. Penguinized. Yeah. How can you tell if you've been penguinized and what you should do? Check your analytics. You know, we'll wrap up. Check your analytics so

you can, he says, assess the damage. So, basically, Penguin update was released on April 24th, right? So, why don't you check, you know, a month prior to that and then a month after that? See if your traffic declined. If it did, then he says, go to your keyword referral report and figure out which keywords were bringing you the most traffic prior to April 24th. Or which ones had the most delta between a month prior and a month after. And then, and not only that, which keywords dropped off? Yeah. Because then those, you know, if it's a money keyword, then you should take action immediately. Then it also says, manually check your rankings on your top key phrases. So, find your money phrases. SEO Houston, PPC Houston, Internet Marketing Houston. These are all the terms that we rank first page for. Go and check those. Right. And make sure that, you know, we haven't slipped or anything like that. If you have, then, you know, revise your content. Matter of fact, his next thing says, check your link profile. See who's linking to you. Make sure that everything is kosher. Right. He also says, check Google Webmaster Central. And kudos to them because they've been updating it and making changes, you know. And so, there's a lot more features in Webmaster Tools that didn't used to be there. So, you can go there and they may give you a message. Yeah, we de-ranked this particular site because of XYZ. And so, check there and, yeah, and run redirect tools. So, just basically check your site from other angles to see what's happening with it and maybe you can get some analysis there. So, if you've been penguinized, that's how you check the site and, you know, try to climb out of it. So, that's it for content. Do got blanks there. All right. I blanked. This one was blank worthy. Yeah. This one was blank worthy. This blank stare goes to the Best Buy employee. So, God brings his cell phone in the Best Buy to

get it repaired. And once he leaves, the employee who's working on the phone logs into his guy's Facebook and changes his status to gay. And so, then the guy finds out immediately, comes back, blah, blah, blah, Best Buy guy gets fired. You know what I'm saying, though? Like, you thought that was cool, you know, to go in and change somebody's Facebook status to gay. And it probably was cool to him. He probably thought it was awesome and fun. Like, this will be hilarious. This guy, I'll put gay. And probably it's the dude in the back who didn't even meet him, right? There was, you know, maybe it was the dude, you know. Yeah, or even the salesperson. If it were the salesperson and, you know, he just was upset at him and did it because he was, you know, angry. And the guy was whatever, appeared to be gay, whatever that means in anybody's own mind. He's like, gay. That's actually more funny than the dude in the back who just does it because he has access. Yeah, just because he hates his job. I mean, you know, stuff like that really has deeper issues. Yeah, yeah. He probably doesn't want to be there. Or maybe he's gay. In which case, there's probably some weird way to remove the firing because the actual cause of the behavior was that he was gay. And so, anyway. Yeah, blank stare at him. Yeah, stare at the people's stuff, man. Fix the phones and get a man's phone back. Do your job. Hey, you can follow us. You can stalk us. You can annoy us. You can do that at facebook.com slash e-webstyle. Twitter.com slash e-webstyle. YouTube.com slash e-webstyle. And you can send us an email at podcast at e-webstyle.com. Please do. Please, you know, the reviews are great. They keep coming in. You can go to our website. If you're on a site right now, if you're listening to our podcast right now, happen to be at a computer or something, go ahead and go to e-webstyle.com

slash seopodcast. And on there, towards the bottom, just under the videos, you'll see a link to our Google Plus account. Go on to Google Plus and give us a review of our podcast right there on our Google Plus account. And on iTunes, all you need to do is go to iTunes, create an account, write a review, and if you so choose, send us information about that review. And we will punch you in the face. I think one of the reviews I did today, actually frustrated and fat, also submitted a website analysis and sent us an email letting us know that he submitted a review. So go ahead and do that. We will give you webinars, man. Punch in the face to everybody who's been submitting them. We've been getting crazy webinars, and frankly, we've just been backed up on those. But we'll get those done. Check your inbox soon. Great. All right. Until the next podcast, my name's Chris Perez. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now.