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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?

+1 - I used to spend a lot of time getting high off good rankings and low off poor ones. But it's too much of a rollercoaster, and as kchan says, doesn't actually help you build your business. These days I try to stay away from timesinks like this as much as possible and focus on strategy and implementation. (Don't open your email until 11am - my top tip for getting your business moving

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.

I get this a lot on one of our sites due to a large set of hover dropdown menus. I ignore the warnings because the menus are useful to our users. I would imagine that yours is a similar situation, but it's not a false positive - the links are on the page so Google has to crawl them. I don't think this type of linking is going to have contributed to problems in Penguin - we've been hit too and we're looking to external links to find the problem.

With the recent Penguin update meaning we have to work even harder to get links to our ecommerce site, we are trying to come up with creative ways to make our product and category pages more linkable.

The recent Seomoz articles on the topic here and here are brilliant and have stimulated some ideas, but we also have a unique opportunity that I want to make the most of.

Some of our eBook products contain original cartoons by the author, which relate to various products on the site. They are funny, and sometimes poignant, and seem to me to be very shareable.

The question is how to make the most of these. We have thought about simply embedding the images on the product page, with sharing icons directly underneath. And ditto for categories where the images make sense.

Then we were wondering about creating a separate Artwork area in the content area of the site where the image could be downloaded in large format for printing, should people wish. Again with the sharing icons.

The other thought was to create a Flickr account with the cartoons in, which would hopefully lead to widespread use of them, but I guess the trouble with that is the link love ends up on Flickr instead of our site.

We think there's a real opportunity here, and just want to make sure we make the most of it! I'll happily share the results once we decide what we're going to do with them.

(I've attached an image so you can tell us if you think we're woefully off the mark

ayKQX.jpg

Thanks for your answer. The thing is, I think any conversion increase would be marginal, if any. So if we assume no improvement in conversion, what would you say then?

Hi

We've just had a spanky new design implemented on Hypnosis Downloads.com

My concern is over the top nav. While it's nice for users to get those handy dropdowns, it adds a lot of links to every page, and spreads link weight out equally over all sorts of pages.

The place I really want the link weight is under the Downloads link - in those categories and so I am thinking about removing dropdowns for everything but this category.

Does that sound like a sensible move to you? Is it likely to actually make a difference?

Cheers

Roger