Why you'd want to know the update that caused it

The idea is that if you know which update caused your traffic to drop and you know what that update targeted, you only have to fix that specific issue and your rankings will be magically restored. The reality is that it's really not that black and white. Quite often now people blame one update, but if we look at the SearchMetrics stats for their domain, they've had a gradual decline over the last few months with a bigger decline in recent weeks. If we based our actions solely on what Penguin targeted (and that's not even really clear yet within the SEO community) we might be missing other issues.

There were other updates that didn't get named by Google in the same way but had a huge impact in some countries. We've seen sites with over-optimized anchor text being hit from the beginning of the year already, but suddenly people now attribute that to Penguin. The end result for you as a site owner: it doesn't matter.

You need to fix all your issues, not just the ones that this specific update "targets".

How to get "your" traffic back

First of all, it's not your traffic. It's Google's traffic. Being mad at Google, or anyone else for that matter, won't help you one bit, it's Google's traffic and they can do what they want with it. So to regain the traffic your website was getting from Google, you need to play by their rules and in all honesty: those rules haven't changed all that much over the last 10 years. The only thing that's happening is that all the ways people found of bending those rules are slowly breaking.

Don't try and play a game with Google if you don't understand what you're doing. There are dozens of great blackhats out there whom I respect, but that's because they do their own research and they don't start complaining publicly when Google catches them. If you have to read about and apply other people's tricks, you're probably not going to win. As the old saying goes: if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

So how do you get your traffic back? By getting your site re-aligned with Google's values. If you've lost in the Panda update and now recently lost a lot of traffic again, Google is sending you a message: your website doesn't fit our idea of quality. Fix that. Don't try to remove the one or two links that you think might have hurt you.

Now of course, you're more than welcome to order a website review and get our opinion, but please don't expect us to come up with a silver bullet. There are no silver bullets in SEO, just a lot of shiny silver drops of sweat, coming from your forehead.

As a side note, BlueGlass LA is probably the best conference I've been to in a while, with a ridiculous line-up of speakers, if you're going to go to an internet marketing conference, BlueGlass conferences are seriously among the very best in the US, second only to SEOktoberfest.

You see, bo.lt makes a copy of the page at the moment it's prepared for sharing, they say they do that because of speed. As Avinash tweets a lot, he probably made that copy a couple of hours before he shared it. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if I hadn't added stuff to the page in the mean time and fixed a lot of typo's. Everyone who'd use Avinash's link wouldn't see those changes. And bo.lt decided that for me, without asking me anything, or even worse, giving me the option to opt-out.

SEO Impact

Surely those bo.lt guys are at least trying to give the rankings for those pages people share through its service their links back? No. They don't. Well, not unless you're not already adding rel="canonical" elements to your site yourself. Each user has its own subdomain. Avinash's subdomain is zqi.bo.lt. As you can see for yourself, quite a few of his shared pages are indexed by Google. That shouldn't be possible. Bo.lt should add a canonical back to the original page if there isn't one in the source already.

No Analytics

They claim a webmaster gets all his normal stuff, ads and analytics etc. Except that for both Clicky and Google Analytics there are no views measured for that bo.lt link, because Clicky refuses pageviews from other domains and I've filtered those out of Google Analytics to prevent others from rendering my analytics useless (yes, people do try that). So, "my" visitors don't get the changes I made to the copy, making me look stupid and I can't track which visitors those were and where they came from... At this point, I want out.

Opt Out

I've gone through their documentation, both normal and for developers, and there simply is no documented way to opt-out. So I decided to dive a bit deeper and figure out which user-agent bo.lt uses. It turns out that they actually do have a page about their user-agent. The next step would normally be simple: add a line to your robots.txt blocking bo.lt. Unfortunately, in my tests, bo.lt never actually retrieved the robots.txt file so they're not adhering to the robots.txt protocol. They really should. They're taking my content, they're not asking for permission and they're not allowing me to opt-out. Someone could sue them over that. I'm just going to request, through this blog post:

Bo.lt, please add an option to opt my sites out of your service.

Also, in my opinion, if you're using bo.lt, you should probably start considering alternatives.

Disclaimer: please be aware that I like Avinash a lot and don't blame him for anything. He's a great guy and an inspiration to a lot of us in the online marketing industry. It's the bo.lt service I dislike and I think that after reading this he will switch to something else as well.

A "hard" out

I figured out a "hard" way to get out of bo.lt doing its thing, add the following to your .htaccess file:

RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} bo.lt/ua
RewriteRule . - [F,L]

This will block bo.lt, giving it a "forbidden" page.

If you read any blogs in the world, by now you'll know WordPress dominates the top 100 blogs in the world, Matt had some interesting comments about that. We've seen more WordPress stats, like these by Lorelle. I then started adding more stats on my own.

I asked Experian Hitwise to give me some stats about visits to WordPress.org, Drupal.org and Joomla.org in the UK and US, which they did (thanks!). oDesk and Freelancer.com have some great WordPress stats pages and of course there's a bit of info on WordPress.org itself. So, with all of that and some I'm probably forgetting, Design by Soap made the following infographic for me, I hope you like it, if you do, please share it! (click here for a larger version)

WordPress Stats

My background

As a former Theology student and as someone raised in the Christian tradition, I have a fairly specific (and in some eyes: stringent) set of ethics. I don't work on gambling or porn related sites because of that. I'm aware that others have different opinions on this and I don't judge others when they have other ethics with regards to their work. To each his own. Sometimes though, I draw the line.

Among my friends are some of the world's best black hat SEO's. These are also guys that will never break a law or willfully hurt other people to get their rankings, they just game Google's algorithms. I know Matt knows at least some of them and there's even a form of "honor" among them: he seems to appreciate their ability to outwit their algorithm. Unfortunately not everyone in the SEO "community" is that clean: some people are willing to break laws or hurt other people.

After the last SES conference in Amsterdam, which I arranged the speakers for, one of the speakers (not the keynote :) ) admitted to me he wouldn't mind teaching other people how to hack sites or how to build trojans to gain links. I was too startled to give a proper response but decided later that day that I would never allow him back on a conference I arranged speakers for.

Spammy Link Building in the Netherlands

The last few days there's been an outcry in the Netherlands over several companies using comment spam and forum spam as a method of gaining links. They'd been caught creating fake profiles on all sort of sites and pretending to interact while really only inserting their links. I had to laugh a bit, as would most of my UK, American and German friends, as that's so common outside of the Netherlands nobody would be surprised to see that anymore.

There was one specific case though that "hurt" more than others (which was by another company by the way). Someone had willfully created an account on a forum for MS (multiple sclerosis) patients, claiming to be a patient, while was spamming links there to health related offers. That's so low that it hurts.

Outing Non-ethical SEO practices: immoral?

Recently Joe Hall, whom I respect a lot, did a post saying SEO "outing" is immoral. He mentions that while the outed practices themselves might be non-ethical, those people have families too, etc. Basically: people lose their jobs because of it. That's true. And that's sad. Especially as most of those people will not know what hit them.

I will counter that though: those companies have grown by using their unethical methods, costing other people their jobs in other companies. This is a zero-sum game in most cases. Google doesn't tell people what to buy, it helps them find where they can buy it. Keep this in your mind at all times: search doesn't create demand, it merely funnels it. I refuse to let people who use unethical SEO methods "win" because they support families, simply because their more ethical competitors support families too.

I recently outed GoDaddy over using spammy link building techniques and got a lot of flack for that from other people in the industry. Some seem to think that it's all of "us" (SEO's) against "them" (Google). I wholeheartedly disagree. GoDaddy was using its paying customers to strengthen their own SEO without consulting them, in fact, they were specifically hiding what they were doing in their editor.

I don't mind them "playing" Google's algorithms. I mind them abusing their customers websites without their consent. The only way of making that stop is to ask Google to remove the value that abuse has. In the same way I loathe WordPress plugin developers who add links to their users sites without consent.

I will not "out" people for buying high quality, relevant links from high quality websites related to their own topic, I have less issues outing people who hack into my website to gain a few links. This happens more often than I dare to admit.

Policing the web

Joe goes further and says:

"If your paycheck doesn’t say “Google” on it, it’s not your job to police the web."

My paycheck doesn't say Google. I'm not policing the web. Neither is Google. Google is trying to maintain a set of rules within its own index. It has all the rights in the world to do that. My paycheck doesn't say "WordPress" either, yet I help develop that project because we all benefit. There really is such a thing as "the common good".

That's entirely different from outing every SEO I find that does something outside of Google's guidelines, I'm smart enough to create my own set of ethics. I hope you are too. I for one intend to help them battle unethical SEO's because I think we all benefit from that.

We often advise on how to gain trust in our website reviews, and I've compiled a list of some of the advice we've given over time. Of course, trust can be earned in more ways than this, but we'll give you these seven to start with.

1. Use clear and normal language

This is an often overseen issue that causes a lot of misgrief with your visitors. You should speak their language, not drown them in a sea of technical specs you don't even understand yourself. Use a clear and direct style of writing. Keep your audience in mind. Do not focus on telling them what you want to tell them, focus on providing as many arguments as possible why their quality of life improves after buying that specific product.

2. Testimonials

Do not brag about your products yourself. If your products or services are really that good, I'm sure you'll find someone else that can do the bragging for you. Make sure your visitor understand that the testimonial is written by an actual customer, by listing at least name and company and if the customer agrees, even a picture of him. Video seems to be the next big thing in testimonials, by the way. In my opinion, that video testimonial should be accompanied by a written excerpt:

Testimonials as seen on cloversites.com

3. Verified signs

Everyone can create a verified sign, so don't let those verified signs fool you. But the majority of your visitors actually believe that you are the 'Most appreciated hairdresser of Mississippi' or the 'Best Plummer 2006'. Man, I hate those signs. But when the signs are from well-known companies, they really do add value to a webshop:

"Verified" signs

By investing in the guidelines of the right verification companies  the webshop shows that it has been keeping the customer in mind when setting up the website.

4. Pictures

If you recognize the woman on this picture, please call the following toll-free number...:

You can do better than that stock photo. Listing actual pictures of yourself and/or your employees pushes conversion due to recognition and identification.

5. List your physical address

This one is really simple: people want to know there is a place to go to in case of problems (if any). Having an actual store next to your webshop works even better, especially if a lot of your customers are relatively local.

In the Netherlands digitalstreet.nl made this concept into a huge success, even though they're located in the south-west of the Netherlands (quite near to where we are), people come from all over the Netherlands because they'd rather buy the product in the store. There are more stories like that, but even if you don't want to do that, just listing your address on check-out pages increases trust a lot.

6. What happens after check-out?

There's this hesitation in almost all buying decisions: right before you click the Pay Now button. What's going to happen next? Am I charged for taxes, import, anything else? Can I select a wrapping paper? Explain what happens after clicking that button. That way the customer is included in your ordering process and there are absolutely no suprises. That can be done with just a few short lines of text:

7. Show you care about more than making money

The most important thing is that your website has to reflect your believe in the product or service you provide. Just a list of products is not enough. Also tell your customer about your company, your main values or mission statement. I really love the 1% for the Planet from Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia) and Craig Mathews (Blue Ribbon Flies) http://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org. Next to showing that you are involved, it also creates a huge sympathy and trust factor.

We'd love to hear your tips!

If you are selling products or services on your website, you must have thought about this subject. I'm curious: What have you done on your website to increase trust? What are you going to do?

All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site.

So, Google wants to do something about over-optimization. That's not saying they want to do something about SEO. As Matt said on that same panel one more time, they have nothing against SEO, they have something against spamming.

So, if you write texts with a keyword density of 25%, you maybe should be worried. If you install an SEO plugin that helps you write more search engine friendly content (and even warns you when it thinks the keyword density is too high) and optimizes most of the technicalities for you, there's nothing to worry about. Several Googlers use my plugin, do you really think they'd do that if they considered it over-optimization?

Now, stop over-analyzing everything Matt says and get back to work, building good websites for users.

My presentation on how to use my WordPress SEO plugin (warning, I was a bit groggy and it shows), was recorded by Webschorle.

My interview with Tobias Fox:

Now, the webinar with SEO Braintrust was recorded and you can view it right here:

For a full transcript and the slides, see the post on SEO Braintrust.

Yesterday I was helping out Rick, and found something that was the reason for this post. His blog, Noah's dad is a blog about a child with Down syndrome and aims to help other parents with children with Down syndrome. Rick contacted me over Twitter as he'd recently switched to my WordPress SEO plugin and a new theme, but his rankings were dropping.

Turns out that the theme he was using had a faulty rel=canonical link in its header, pointing to the site's homepage instead of the proper URL for a page or post. He was also using my SEO plugin, which added the correct canonical link, but because of how the theme was built, the canonical from my plugin was below the one in the theme and thus Google picked up the wrong canonical. That caused Google to literally remove a lot of the blogs pages from the index.

I've since emailed the theme authors and they're taking action to fix it, so there's no reason for me to name them here, but I think it shows that they, as goes for many theme authors, didn't really know what they were doing.

Some themes have a better reputation in this regard. StudioPress first hired me and later on my good friend Greg Boser of BlueGlass, one of the best SEOs in the world, to make sure their themes were SEO friendly. They, unlike others, have earned the right to say their themes are SEO friendly. Others might have invested in the same way, but it's hard to know for sure. Do you want to bet your site's rankings on that?