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Thanks Zack, sometimes you just need to hear someone else say what you're thinking 'out loud'

Hi all

It used to be (allegedly) the case that you should have all your sites on different Class Cs or Google would hit you with the spam hammer. Which I guess made some sense because back then they probably didn't have many other ways of detecting unnatural link networks.

But today with all their data on who is related to who, can this really matter any more?

I'd like to move 3 or 4 of our sites (all long-established with widely varied link sources) onto one server, one CMS install, one less headache but I wanted to check first in case I'm about to shoot myself in the foot.

Thanks

Roger

As someone who has also been pecked by the Penguin Thomas, I can relate. The best advice I've read on this topic is here: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/penguin-strategies/

Good luck!

Roger

I'd forgotten about that post, nice one, and it usefully widens the scope of brand signals.

That's an interesting idea riplash, I had thought before that a search for our domain with or without the .com might be considered a brand signal - that is, rather than the search being 'keyword1 keyword2' the search is performed as 'keyword1keyword2'. It seems that if that is the case, encouraging search in offline could feed into that.

Great example in the Electric Fan Services thanks Adam, it applies directly to our situation. We have Keyword Ltd in the footer (as that is actually our registered company name). The trick now will be to see how we can get Keyword Ltd in anchor text. I smell some guest posts approaching.

Got it, thanks for taking the time to explain that Ben.

Thanks for clarifying that Ben. Tell me, how would Google know which Facebook page to associate with your site - I am guessing simply the one that you link to from the site?

Thanks Adam. That's interesting - so a link with http://www.keywords.com as the link text is considered a brand signal. That makes sense.

Would you say then that a link with 'Keywords' as the anchor pointing at http://www.keywords.com would be considered a brand signal? This is where it gets fuzzy for me. Clearly, a generic description phrase cannot be claimed as a brand trademark in legal terms, but I'm not sure if the delineation is as stark in the view of the engines.

In our case, our brand is effectively Keywords(.com) which is great if we end up getting the 'Hoover' effect, but not so great if it prevents us from creating a brand strong enough for Google. And of course, as branding decisions go, it was a bad one. Damn you Google and your former preference for exact matches. Damn me and my former preference for easy wins.

One signal we saw on this was that we used to get sitelinks for our generic phrase - in other words, Google considered us the brand for that phrase. That stopped probably 2 years ago and hasn't reappeared since. We still rank 1 for the phrase of course, but that is not as good as being considered a strong brand in our market.

Thanks Ben. Are you're saying that social signals to a page on the site would be considered a brand signal?

After being hit by the Penguin stick, like good content marketers we are trying to focus on improving brand signals for our site. But I keep coming up against what exactly brand signals are.

I can understand that if you are called 'Ziggle' and someone links to you with that in anchor text or mentions that name, that would be a brand signal. But we're on a generic domain (descriptive of the produt type), so what would constitute brand signals in our case?

I remember that post by Rand too, and using hashtags certainly didn't hurt us.

In the post-penguin era though, I might be a little cautious about those affiliate links because if your program is of any size, you are likely to fairly quickly create an unnatural linking profile with them.

Despite (or because of) our hundreds of thousands of affiliate links, we are making them all nofollow now.

As someone who has also been pecked by the Penguin Thomas, I can relate. The best advice I've read on this topic is here: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/penguin-strategies/

Good luck!

Roger

That's an interesting idea riplash, I had thought before that a search for our domain with or without the .com might be considered a brand signal - that is, rather than the search being 'keyword1 keyword2' the search is performed as 'keyword1keyword2'. It seems that if that is the case, encouraging search in offline could feed into that.