Mark Ginsberg KahenaconMay 23, 2012

Announced on April 24 official Google post Originally feared Over Optimization Algorithm mentioned by Matt Cutts at SXSW on March 16, 2012 audio available here - http://www.seroundtable.com/google-over-seo-update- 14887.html Matt Cutts said at the conference: What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO - versus those Posted by Rick Bucich making great content and great site. We are on Google+ trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect

Penguin launch followed on heels of Panda refresh, parked domain classifier bug, and previous deindexation of blog networks Webmasters were already seeing major shifts and changes in the SERPs Penguin followed on heels of infamous unnatural links email in Webmaster Tools See Andrew Shotlands interesting theory Site usually took a dive in the rankings ~2 about the origins of the weeks after the initial email name on his blog Question of Negative SEO can you hurt another site with offsite attacks

SEO Visibility data provided by Search Metrics -http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/

Historical Ranking data provided by Search Metrics -http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/

What you will need: A list of your sites backlinks Free subscription to the awesome tool Link Detective Microsoft Excel Steps Pull external links in OSE to root domain Upload the CSV file to Link Detective and let Eppies magic tool go to work

Initial Steps Save the csv file as an Excel workbook any formatting you do will be saved and will save lots of aggravation later when you reopen it and its all gone With one of the cells of data selected, hit CTRL + L and turn the data into a table much more fun to work with easier to sort and filter

Clean Up the Data Make all anchor text lowercase Decode HTML in anchor text (SEO Tools for Excel) Use nifty formula to clean up target page URL Pull linking root domain to additional column Pivot Table Row Labels Values (make sure you choose the right settings for each) Target Page Count of Anchor Text Link Type Average of PA Anchor Text Average of DA

Create a new pivot table Row Label link type | Values count of link type Create a pivot pie chart from the table Thats a lot of dead links!

Filter out for dead links That looks a bit better

Create the pivot table Select any of the PA values Right click and select group Starting at 1 End at 100 By:10

After removing deadlinks, we seeunnatural rise athighest spectrum ofgraph whatscausing this?

Break down each groupvia targetpage, LRD, specificlinking page, thenanchor text canalways remove rowlabels you dont need!

Group smalleranchor textstogether

Break down backlink profiles with pivot tables Page level and domain level Do this for your competitors and compare Identify any unnatural footprints Look at your anchor text distribution use branded anchor text, naked anchors, more variety and synonyms Clean it up as best as you can, hope this helps Build more high quality natural links w/ smart anchor text Give Google a mea culpa or better yet, blame it on a competitor

Independent SEO Consultant @markginsberg www.marksginsberg.com Google+ Skype: msginsbergSample spreadsheet availablefor download -http://bit.ly/penguin-pivot