Hey everyone, I almost didn’t send anything this week, but I feel committed
\nat this point. So I’ll get right down to it. <\/p>\n
Penguin 2. whatever the f**k rolled out last Friday. <\/p>\n
You gotta love the timing, just starting to get your buzz on and the work days over,
\nyet you still obsessively look at your smart phone and see the breaking news. <\/p>\n
New penguin rolls out. Freak out, check your rankings, do a Google dance,
\nnot a good feeling overall. <\/p>\n
If you were hit, my SEO heart goes out to you. You must know though, if you
\ndid get hit, you have two options. <\/p>\n
Option 1 – Apply for a credit card and start paying for traffic.<\/p>\n
Option 2 – Take it in stride, learn from it, and come back stronger. <\/p>\n
When the initial penguin update rolled out last year, I got beat up pretty
\nbad. And when you get punched in the face about 15 times in a row it’s tough to
\nsee the “bigger picture”.<\/p>\n
The bigger picture, is you now have incredibly powerful experience and knowledge
\nthat SEOs playing it “safe” do not. They have no clue how far you can push,
\nin their minds, automation is a complete waste of time. <\/p>\n
But I’m here to tell you they are very wrong, and if we were to be competing for a SERP
\nwith two “authority sites” and had matched each other on high quality links
\nand killer content, I’d still break out the big guns. <\/p>\n
I’d grey hat me some high PR links, not a lot, just enough to push my site over
\nthe edge. <\/p>\n
Because you see, even the most natural link building campaign won’t always yeild the
\nexact anchor text you need to rank. <\/p>\n
You’re going to get awesome links but usually you will not have control
\nover the anchor text.<\/p>\n
Sure you could reach out and ask for them to change it, but that won’t always work. <\/p>\n
So why not snag a handful of expired somewhat related domains and create a small network. <\/p>\n
Cover your tracks and no one will be the wiser, especially if you have 100%
\ncontrol over all the links you build.<\/p>\n
Ok so we’re going to cover two main things today.<\/p>\n
1. What I’ve seen in the SERPs and what happened with my own sites. <\/p>\n
2. Some ways to kick this penguin’s ass once and for all.<\/p>\n
Overall my portfolio was untouched. This time around I have way more sites,
\nparasites, new domains, old domains, expired domains, youtube videos,
\nblah blah blah. <\/p>\n
And I used some diversity in my linking strategy, but not a ton honestly. <\/p>\n
The first time around I was juicing every site I owned practically with a public
\nblog network. <\/p>\n
Public blog network went down, so did my sites, all of them. <\/p>\n
Not this time around G, not gonna catch me slipping twice. <\/p>\n
Fortunately I did have two sites that got the living shit slapped out of them. <\/p>\n
Yes fortunately, otherwise we wouldn’t have a newsletter this week. <\/p>\n
Now I haven’t analyzed the penalty very much, I just know it’s fallen out of the top
\n100 for all keywords and no longer comes up for the brand name. <\/p>\n
The domains are still indexed, but for example if it was Seomoz.org, you would
\nquery “Seomoz” and see nothing from the domain. <\/p>\n
I don’t really have much need to analyze the penalty, I just know it’s bad.<\/p>\n
That’s all the evidence I need. <\/p>\n
The more important factor, is the links I built and domain metrics in comparison to
\nthe other sites that I have still crushing. <\/p>\n
Simple right? <\/p>\n
And here’s what I found. <\/p>\n
I had used an identical linking strategy on many other domains and they are standing
\ntall as I write this. <\/p>\n
Yet these two domains got nailed. Why?<\/p>\n
My only conclusion is domain age and lack of link diversity. <\/p>\n
These domains were only a few months old and had nothing but automated links.<\/p>\n
All of my other sites are either expired domains with existing backlinks
\nor domains I’ve had sitting on ice for at least 1 year. <\/p>\n
And my parasites such as blogspots, squidoos, etc have held strong. <\/p>\n
Spam still works, but it really kicks ass when you have a domain with
\nsome decent traction under it to confuse the overall evaluation. <\/p>\n
The best is when you have links from neighborhoods that spammers would never be able
\nto acquire. Big news sites for example or other authority sites in your niche. <\/p>\n
When comparing two identical link blasted domains, say the first domain has a few links
\nfrom Huffpo, WSJ, and Cnet and is three years old while the other has nothing but
\nautomated links and is only 3 months old. <\/p>\n
You be the judge. <\/p>\n
Hope you learn something from that. <\/p>\n
Some Tips for Fighting this Penguin<\/p>\n
*Focus on natural anchor text more than ever. Do not get lazy here. <\/p>\n
*If you’re blasting, do some manual work and increase the diversity of your
\nlink profile. Anything you can to expand it beyond having only the platforms
\nhit by software is key.<\/p>\n
*Buy baller expired domains and have them sitting on ice for a bit, then use
\nthem for money sites if you can find a congruent angle with the past history
\nof the domain. <\/p>\n
*Parasites still rank. Get some of that YouTube love, it’s out there just
\nwaiting for you to take it, are you man\/woman enough to take it? <\/p>\n
So that’s the newsletter and now I have some goodies to offer. <\/p>\n
Over the past couple months I’ve been reaching out to different service
\nproviders asking for discounts on everything needed to run the link building empire. <\/p>\n
And in light of my recent post – https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/black-hat-seo-cost<\/p>\n
I realized I should come up with some cool tricks for reducing costs,
\nbut I’ve also been trying to leverage the blog a bit and get people some legit deals. <\/p>\n
And this week I’ve gotten an awesome deals from SquidProxies for 10%
\noff monthly proxy costs.<\/p>\n
You can grab the deal here – https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/squidproxies-coupon<\/p>\n
Enjoy the weekend everyone! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hey everyone, I almost didn’t send anything this week, but I feel committed at this point. So I’ll get right down to it. Penguin 2. whatever the f**k rolled out last Friday. You gotta love the timing, just starting to get your buzz on and the work days over, yet you still obsessively look at… Read More →<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jacobking.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}