Total SEO Blueprint - Google #1 Rankings Made Easy (PART 2)

What is Ground Zero SEO?

• My System of Analyzing an SEO project BEFORE I do anything!
• There are many questions you need to ask yourself that will determine the project path
• Type of Site, New or Existing Site, Budget / Time, Niche
• Lets look at these…

Type of Site

• What kind of site is this? 
• Local Business     Local SEO - Google My Business, Maps Ranking
• Blogs Info Site / Reviews     Blog SEO (rank each post)
• Global Company Website      Core Pages, Blog Setup
• Ecommerce SEO    Product Specific SEO
• User Generated Content (UGC) SEO     Forums, Wikis, Marketplaces, Classifieds, etc.

If Site Already Exists...

• (for new sites this is not applicable skip this)
• On-Page Audit – A quick look
• How much SEO done already
• Analyze Metrics (via Google or Tools)
• Current Rankings, Traffic, 
• WMT, Search Console
• Google Penalty? Current or Past
• Quick look at Socials (if applicable)

Niche Analysis

• How competitive is the niche – Top Sites Data
• How competitive are keywords (suggested or discovered)
• User Intent in niche… Query Type 
• - Navigational
• - Information
• - Transactional

Time and Budget

• Looked at last after quick evaluation
• Is the budget too little?
• Are expectations too high?

A quick overview of the top SEO ranking factors

Is there a “Duplicate Content Penalty?”

• No such thing. 
• It just forces google to choose which page to rank. 
• And it always chooses legacy + authority
• You don’t want Google to have to choose if your site content is unique or not
• Google trusts sites with duplicate content LESS
• Duplicate content (is a quality issue) and is a canonical (technical) issue.

How To Fix Duplicate Content Issues

• Use tools like - pubsubhubbub, xindexer, and tell search console to spider your content first
• Install view-source blockers… the ones that block right click copy paste
• Use Copyscape tool to find copiers (use their batch search)
• File DMCA requests with Google
• Maintain an Accurate Sitemap. ( this may not be important any more)
• Finally rewrite your duplicate content, and add video and images and did you know factoids etc.

Be Aware of where is Google going with this…

• Currently SEO is getting to depend more and more on Google tracking user behavior
• Google is using links and social signals to find trusted pages to rank and then solidifies the rankings by tracking user behavior and engagement metrics etc.
• Google Search is now a Mobile First Index
• User tracking is just an interim stage until Google perfects their AI and Deep Learning.
• Once they reach the perfect AI stage, Google will then understand and identify the best pages for rankings, automatically without needing any external ranking factors like backlinks and or tracking user behavior.

A Quick History of Search Engines

• Early days of the dot com era… 1995, before Social etc.
• About 10 Search Engines Altavista, HotBot, Infoseek, Yahoo, Excite, Looksmart, Megellan, WebCrawler, Inktomi, AllTheWeb, Lycos, & Yahoo!
• No Real Algorithm. Easy To Game. In Minutes!
• Tons of Search Index Spam (enemy of Search Engines)

Along Come Larry & Sergie with Google

• Born Out of Stanford 
• Simple Logic from Real World
• More Popularity = Backlinks
• More Popular Circles = More Powerful Backlinks
• PageRank is the Key
• Yahoo, Excite & Others Turn Down Google

How Google Ranks Pages (way back then)

• PageRank Is The Key 
• The more links a site gets, the higher it ranks
• Link Juice and Anchor Texts make it rank for the Keyword
• Link Juice is power passed down
• Page linking out does not lose any power
• Higher PR Pages pass down more Link Juice

Hello SEOs and Webspam

• SEOs Start figuring out how easy it is to game Google 
• Absence of readily available mass linking tools
• Close kept secrets, small community
• Things change slowly though for Google
• Mass link building tools and methods flood the web!
• Google senses trouble. Needs to Fix it!

Hello Panda Version 1.0

• The “Panda” Algorithm is Born, early 2011
• Targets Low Quality sites with thin content
• Content Farms, Doorway Pages, Scrapers, Web Spam
• New “Updates” to Panda released
• Google always tightlipped about their Algorithm. Why?
• But, even with Panda 1.0 around ranking was easy.

The Attack of the Penguins

• “Penguin” Update Attacks SEOs April 2012
• Counters “link spam” initially. 
• Unnatural Links, How do they know? 
• They have a picture of 99% of the linking patterns
• Anything unnatural is penalized (deindexed or devalued)
• Manual Penalties & the leaked document

SEO Changed Forever

• Before Penguin Update doing SEO was easy.
• You could build mass links to your site.
• No fear and No danger from bad links. 
• The link juice worked positively or just gave zero power.
• Now, with Penguin links can hurt your site.
• Too many poor links = ranking problems

Algorithm Threshold Levels

• Google Algorithm has 100s of “Signals” it controls.
• Think of them as Dials that Google plays with. 
• Panda and Penguin are just a set of Similar Dials that Google plays with.
• Too many “unnatural” high signals = *Google slap*
• The birth of Negative SEO

Google Slaps & Penalty Recovery

• Algorithmic vs Manual Penalty / and WMT Notice
• How to get out of a penalty? 
• Disavowing your links – does it works? 
• Crowdsourced clever move.
• In very rare cases. Maybe less than 5%.
• There are other ways to recover. Blackhat *grin*

The New Badly Done SEO

What looks unnatural? Over stuffed anchor link profile, keyword stuffing in content and in your URL, Exact Match Domains (EMD / PMD), too many thin links, bad link clusters, low link relevancy, bad content on page and site, lack of social signals, slow site,  no updates, high bounce rate, poor user experience, low search termination, duplicate content, duplicate images, similar pages… there’s a ton more!

You Need to be Careful with SEO Now

• Backlinks or poorly done SEO can hurt you.
• Every link needs to be well placed and made
• You can build links in mass – but there is a method
• Larger Niches are treated with different Algorithm threshold levels vs Smaller Niches
• Similarly larger sites are treated differently (more tolerance)

What Links Not To Buy

If you’re linking directly to your site (Tier 1 links)
Directory Submissions, Press Releases, Mass irrelevant blog comments, forum spam links, mass article links, spun content, social bookmarks… basically most of the stuff you get on Fiverr.
However, these can be on Tier 2 links
That is pointing to sites that link to you main money site

Regular Updates and More Animals

• Google keeps releasing new updates.
• EMD update, Humming Bird, Mobile Armageddon.
• Millions of sites and real people lose lively hood.
• PageRank Data updates stop - over 1.5 years now
• SEOs and Community come together to Fix Things 
• It’s a lot of hard work and fun! (until your sites get hit)