If you feel challenged by Facebook marketing these days, you should know you’re not alone.
In an increasingly crowded news feed, Facebook’s algorithm updates can make it tough for brands to get much notice.
In fact, brands are now responding to plunging organic reach on Facebook by posting more content to Instagram than they are to Facebook, according to a report by research firm L2.
But don’t despair; there’s plenty of life left in Facebook yet. We’ve been scouring the web to find out what’s working on Facebook ...
Back when I started my career in SEO, content marketing didn’t exist—at least not in the way it exists now.
We used strategies to boost traction and traffic to websites through the creation of great content—it was content marketing before the term even existed. And it worked.
I’ve carried the lessons with me ever since. And I’d love to share them all with you—everything I’ve used to successfully help hundreds of companies benefit from content marketing over the past five years.
Social media automation, when done with care and the right strategy, is awesome. It can amplify your great content while freeing up your time to create more of it!
We’ve talked before on the blog about automating some processes through services like If This Then That and Alfred, and in this post I wanted to share some of our favorite uses of another fantastic automation tool: Zapier.
Zapier integrates with more than 400 different web apps, which means most marketers are bound to ...
Of all the hundreds of social media acronyms and abbreviations out there, I think “KPI” has confounded me the most.
I think it’s because the phrase “key performance indicator” always sounds like something you need to be wearing a suit in front of a Powerpoint presentation in order to say.
But when you get down to it, it’s really quite simple. KPI is just a way of saying “This is the stuff that’s important enough to me to focus on and measure.”
Roger Dooley, neuromarketing expert, reminds us in his book Brainfluence that in 80% of cases we take a decision before being rationally aware of it.
Although Dooley explains this effect in terms of how our brain works, in my opinion, distinctly separating neuroscience and the theory of archetypes would be incorrect. On the contrary, I believe that these two aspects of the study of the human mind are complementary.
According to
Jung, archetypes are "[...] forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the Earth as constituents of myths and—at the same time—as individual products of unconscious". He then, added something that interests us greatly: "The [forms and images] are imprinted and hardwired into out psyches".
Being able to design a brand personality around an archetype that connects unconsciously with our audience is a big first step for: brand loyalty, community creation, engagement, conversions.
The Slender Man is the "Internet age" version of the archetype figure of the Shadow
Archetypes can be also used for differentiating our brand and its messaging from others in our same market niche and to give that brand a unique voice.
If we put users at the center of our marketing strategy, then
we cannot limit ourselves in knowing how they search, how they talk on social media, what they like to share or what their demographics are.
No,
we should also understand the deep psychological reasons why they desire something they search for, talk the way they talk, share what they share, and their psychological relation with the environment and society they live in.
Knowing that,
we can use archetypes to create a deep emotional connection with our audience and earn their strong positive attitude toward us thanks to the empathy that is created between them and us.
Narrative modes, then, help us in shaping in a structured way a brand storytelling able to guide and engage the users, and not simply selling or creating content narrative doomed to fail.
The chart above presents the 12 Jungian archetypes (i.e: Hero), to what principal human desire (i.e.: leave a mark on the world) they correspond and what is the main behavior each one uses for achieving that desire (i.e.: mastery).
Remember: if the audience instinctively recognizes the archetypal figure of the brand and its symbolism and instinctively connect with it, then your audience is more ready to like and trust what your brand proposes.
On the other hand, it is also a good exercise to experiment with archetypes that we would not think are our brand's one, expanding the practice of A/B tests to make sure we're working with the correct archetype.
The Creator
In my last post I used Lego as example of a brand that is winning Internet marketing thanks to its holistic and synergistic use of offline and online marketing channels.
I explained also how part of its success is due to the fact Lego was able to shape its messages and brand personality around the Creator archetype (sometimes called the "Builder") which is embodied by their tagline, "let's build".
Creators tend to be nonconformist and to enjoy self expression.
A Creator brand, then, will empower and prize its audience as much as it is able to express itself using its products.
The Ruler is the leader, the one setting the rules others will follow, even competitors. Usually it's paired with an
idea of exclusiveness and status growth.
A brand that presents itself as a Ruler is suggesting to their audience that they can be rulers too.
A classic example of Ruler brand is Mercedes:
The Caregiver
Altruism, compassion, generosity.
Caregiver brands present themselves as someone to trust, because they care and empathize with their audience.
The Caregiver is one of the most positive archetypes, and it is obviously used by nonprofit organizations or governmental institutions like UNICEF, but brands like Johnson & Johnson have also shaped their personality and messages around this figure.
The Innocent
The Innocent finds positive sides in everyone and everything.
It sees beauty even in things that others will not even consider, and feels in peace with its inner beauty.
Dove, obviously, is a good representation of the Innocent archetype.
The Sage
The Sages wants to know and understand things.
The Sage is deeply humanist and believe in the power of humankind to shape a better world through knowledge.
However, the Sage also has a shadowed side: intolerance to ideas others than their own.
Google, in both cases, is a good example a Sage brand.
The Explorer
The Explorer is adventurous, brave, and loves challenges. He tends to be an individualist too, and loves to challenge himself so as to find his real self.
Explorer brands prompt their audience to challenge themselves and to discover the Explorer within.
Red Bull is a classic example of these kinds of brands, but REI and Patagonia are even better representations.
The Hero
In many aspects, the Hero archetype is similar to the Explorer and Outlaw ones, with the difference that the Hero many times never wanted to be the hero, but injustice and external events obliged him to find the courage, braveness, and the honor to become one.
Nike, and also its competitor Adidas, shapes its brand voice around this archetypal figure.
The Magician
The Magician is clever, intelligent, and sometimes his ability can be considered supernatural.
The Magician is able to make the impossible possible. Because of that some of the best known technology brands use this archetype as their own to showcase their innovation and how they use their advanced knowledge creatively.
Apple—even if you are not an Apple fan—created a powerful brand by shaping it around this archetype.
The Outlaw
The Outlaw is the rebel, the one who breaks the rules in order to free his true self.
The Outlaw goes against the canon and is very aware of the constrictions society creates.
A great example of a brand that very well represents the Outlaw archetype is Betabrand.
The Everyman
It is perfectly fine to be "normal," and happiness can come from simply sharing things with people we love.
Brands targeting the Everyman audience (and painting themselves as such) craft their messages about the beauty of simple things and daily real life.
Ikea is probably the brand that's achieved mastery in the use of this archetype over the past few years.
The Jester
Fun, irreverent, energetic, impulsive and against the established rules at the same time, the Jester is also the only one who is able to tell the truth with a joke.
Jesters can be revolutionary too, and their motto could be "a laugh will bury you all."
A brand that presents itself as the Jester is a brand that wants to make our lives easier and more bearable, providing us joy.
The Lover
Sensuality is the main characteristic of the Lover archetype, as well as strong physicality, passion, and a need for deep and strong sensations.
But the Lover can be also the idealist, the romantic longing for the perfect love.
Therefore, once we have decided what archetype figure best responds both to our audience and our values as a brand,
we must translate the psychology we created for our brand into
brand storytelling.
That storytelling must then be attuned to the psychology of our audience based on our psychographic analysis of them.
Good (brand) storytelling is very hard to achieve, and most of the time we see brands that miserably fail when trying to tell branded stories.
Introducing the Theory of Literary (or Narrative) Modes
In order to help my clients find the correct narrative, I rely on something that usually is not considered by marketers: the
Theory of Literary Modes.
I use this theory, presented first by
Northrop Frye in it essay Anatomy of Criticism, because it is close to our "technical marketer" mindset.
In fact:
The theory is based on a objective and "scientific" analysis of data (the literary corpus produced by humans);
It refuses “personal taste” as a metric, which in web marketing would be the same as creating a campaign with tactics you like but you don’t really know if your public is interested in. Even worse, it would be like saying "create great content" without defining what that means.
Moreover, the
Theory of Literary Modes is deeply structured and strongly relies on semiotics, which is going to be the natural evolution of how search engines like Google will comprehend the content published in the Internet. Semantic thinking is just the first step as well explained
Isla McKetta here on Moz few months ago.
Finally, Northrop Fryed
considers also archetypes this theory because of the psychological and semiotic value of the symbolism attached to the archetypal figure.
Therefore, my election to use the Theory of Literary Modes responds
To the need to translate ideal brand storytelling into something real that can instinctively connect with the brand's audience;
To make the content based on that storytelling process understandable also by search engines.
The Theory of Literary Modes in marketing
To understand how this works in marketing, we need to dig a little deeper into the theory.
A literary work can be classified in two different but complementary ways:
1) Considering only the
relation between the nature of the main character (the Hero) and the ambient (or environment) where he acts.
2) Considering also
if the Hero is refused or accepted by society (Tragedy and Comedy).
In the
first case, as represented in the schema above, if the Hero:
Is higher by nature than the readers and acts in a completely different ambient than theirs, we have a Romance;
Is higher by nature than the readers, but acts in their same ambient, we have an Epic;
Is someone like the reader and acts in the reader's own ambient, we are in field of Realism;
Is someone lower by nature than the readers and acts in a different or identical ambient, we are in the realm of Irony, which is meant as “distance.”
A fifth situation exists too, the
Myth, when the nature of the Hero is different than ours and acts in an ambient different than ours. The Hero, in this case, is the God.
If we consider also if society refuses or accepts the hero, we can discover the different versions of Tragedy and Comedy.
I will not enter in the details of Tragedy, because
we will not use its modes for brand storytelling (this is only common in specific cases of political marketing or propaganda, classic examples are the mythology of Nazism or Communism).
On the contrary,
the most common modes used in brand storytelling are related to Comedy, where the Hero, who usually is the target audience, is eventually accepted by society (the archetypal world designed by the brand).
In
Comedy we have several sub modes of storytelling:
"The God Accepted." The Hero is a god or god-like kind of person who must pass through trials in order to be accepted by the society;
The Idyll, where the Hero uses his skills to explore (or conquer) an ideal world and/or become part of an ideal society. Far West and its heir, Space Opera (think of Interstellar) are classic examples.
Comedy sees the hero trying to impose his own view of the world, fighting for it and finally being awarded with acceptance of his worldview. A good example of this is every well ending biopic of an entrepreneur, and Comedy is the exact contrary of melodrama.
On a lower level we can find the Picaresque Comedy, where the hero is by nature inferior to the society, but – thanks to his cleverness – is able to elevate himself to society's level. Some technology business companies use this narrative mode for telling their users that they can "conquer" their market niche despite not having the same economic possibilities as the big brands (this conquering usually involves the brand's tools).
Finally we have the Irony Mode of Comedy which is quite complex to define.
It can represent stories where the hero is actually an antihero, who finally fails in his integration into the society.
It can also be about inflicting pain on helpless victims, as in mystery novels.
It can also be Parody.
Some examples
The Magician, gamification, and the Idyllic mode
Consider this brand plot:
The user (the Hero) can become part of a community of users only if he or she passes through a series of tasks, which will award prizes and more capabilities. If the user is able to pass through all the tasks, he will not only be accepted but also may have the opportunity to be among the leaders of the community itself.
And now
consider sites, which are strongly centered on communities like GitHub and Code Academy. Consider also SAAS companies that present the freemium model like Moz or mobile games like Boom Beach, where you can unlock new weapons only if you pass a given trial (or you buy them).
The Magician is usually the archetype of reference for these kinds of brands. The Hero (the user) will be able to dominate a complex art thanks to the help of a Master (the brand), which will offer him instruments (i.e.: tools/courses/weapons).
Trials are not necessarily tests. A trial can be doing something that will be awarded, for instance, with points (like commenting on a Moz blog post), and the more the points the more the recognition, with all the advantages that it may offer.
Gamification, then, assumes an even stronger meaning and narrative function when tied to an archetype and literary mode.
Ikea, the Everyman, and the Comedic mode
Another
example is Ikea, which we cited before when talking of the Everyman archetype.
In this case, the Hero is someone like me or you who is not an interior designer or decorator or, maybe, who does not have the money for hiring those professionals or buying very expensive furniture and decoration.
But, faithful to its mission statements ("design for all", "design your own life"...), Ikea is there to help Everyman kind of people like me and you in every way as we decorate our own houses.
On the practical side, this narrative is delivered in all the possible channels used by Ikea: web site, mobile app, social media (look at its
Twitter profile) and YouTube channel.
Betabrand, the Outlaw, and Picaresque Comedy
A third and last example can be
Betabrand.
In this case both the brand and the audience is portrayed using the
Outlaw archetype, and the brand narrative tend to use the Picaresque mode.
The Heroes is the Betabrand community who does not care what the mainstream concept of fashion is and designs and crowdfounds "its fashion."
How to use archetypes and narrative modes in your brand storytelling
The first thing you must understand is what archetype best responds to your company tenets and mission.
Usually this is not something an SEO can decide by him- or herself, but it is something that founders, CEOs, and directors of a company can inform.
Oftentimes a small to medium business company can achieve this with a long talk among those company figures and where they are asked to directly define the idealistic "why?" of their company.
In case of bigger companies, defining an archetype can seem almost impossible to do, but the same history of the company and hidden treasure pages like "About Us" can offer clear inspiration.
Look at REI:
Clearly the archetype figure that bests fits REI is the Explorer.
Then, using the information we retrieve when creating the
psychographic of our audience and buyer personas, matching with the characteristics each archetype has, and comparing it with the same brand core values, we can start to understand the archetype and narrative mode. If we look at REI's audience, then we will see how it also has a certain affinity with the Everyman archetypal figure (and that also explains why REI also dedicates great attention to family as audience).
Once we have defined the best archetype commonly shared by our company and our audience, we must translate this figure and its symbolism into brand storytelling, which in web site includes design, especially the following:
Color pattern, because colors have a direct relation with psychological reaction (see this article, especially all the sources it links to)
Images, considering that in user-centric marketing the ideal is always to represent our targeted audience (or a credible approximation) as their main characters. I am talking of the so called "hero-shots", about which Angie Shoetmuller brilliantly discussed in the deck I embed here below:
If you want to dig deeper in discovering the meaning and value of symbols worldwide, I suggest you become member of
Aras.org or to buy the Book of Symbols curated by Aras.
Define the best narrative mode to use. REI, again, does this well, using the Idyllic mode where the Hero explores and become part of an ideal society (the REI community, which literally means becoming a member of REI).
We should, then:
Continue investigating the archetypal nature of our audience conducting surveys
Analyzing the demographic data Google Analytics offers us about our users
Using GA insights in combination with the data and demographic information offered by social networks' ad platforms in order to create not only the interest graph of our audience but also to understand the psychology behind those interests
Doing A/B tests so to see whether symbols, images, and copywriting based on the targeted archetypes work better and if we have the correct archetype.
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Last year, Google expanded the Knowledge Graph to use data extracted (*cough* scraped) from the index to create answer boxes. Back in October, I wrote about a failed experiment. One of my posts, an odd dive
into Google's revenue, was being answer-fied for the query "How much does Google make?":
Objectively speaking, even I could concede that this wasn't a very good answer in 2014. I posted it on Twitter, and
David Iwanow asked the inevitable question:
Enthusiasm may have gotten the best of us, a few more people got involved (like my former Moz colleague
Ruth Burr Reedy), and suddenly we were going to fix this once and for all:
There Was Just One Problem
I updated the post, carefully rewriting the first paragraph to reflect the new reality of Google's revenue. I did my best to make the change user-friendly, adding valuable information but not disrupting the original post. I did, however, completely replace the old text that Google was scraping.
Within less than a day, Google had re-cached the content, and I just had to wait to see the new answer box. So, I waited, and waited… and waited. Two months later, still no change. Some days, the SERP showed no answer box at all (although I've since found these answer boxes are very dynamic), and I was starting to wonder if it was all a mistake.
Then, Something Happened
Last week, months after I had given up, I went to double-check this query for entirely different reasons, and I saw the following:
Google had finally updated the answer box with the new text, and they had even pulled an image from the post. It was a strange choice of images, but in fairness, it was a strange post.
Interestingly, Google also added the publication date of the post, perhaps recognizing that outdated answers aren't always useful. Unfortunately, this doesn't reflect the timing of the new content, but that's understandable – Google doesn't have easy access to that data.
It's interesting to note that sometimes Google shows the image, and sometimes they don't. This seems to be independent of whether the SERP is personalized or incognito. Here's a capture of the image-free version, along with the #1 organic ranking:
You'll notice that the #1 result is also my Moz post, and that result has an expanded meta description. So, the same URL is essentially double-dipping this SERP. This isn't always the case – answers can be extracted from URLs that appear lower on page 1 (although almost always page 1, in my experience). Anecdotally, it's also not always the case that these organic result ends up getting an expanded meta description.
However, it definitely seems that some of the quality signals driving organic ranking and expanded meta descriptions are also helping Google determine whether a query deserves a direct answer. Put simply, it's not an accident that this post was chosen to answer this question.
What Does This Mean for You?
Let's start with the obvious – Yes, the v2 answer boxes (driven by the index, not Freebase/WikiData)
can be updated. However, the update cycle is independent of the index's refresh cycle. In other words, just because a post is re-cached, it doesn't mean the answer box will update. Presumably, Google is creating a second Knowledge Graph, based on the index, and this data is only periodically updated.
It's also entirely possible that updating could cause you to lose an answer box, if the new data weren't a strong match to the question or the quality of the content came into question. Here's an interesting question – on a query where a competitor has an answer box, could you change your own content enough to either replace them or knock out the answer box altogether? We are currently testing this question, but it may be a few more months before we have any answers.
Another question is what triggers this style of answer box in the first place? Eric Enge has an
in-depth look at 850,000 queries that's well worth your time, and in many cases Google is still triggering on obvious questions ("how", "what", "where", etc.). Nouns that could be interpreted as ambiguous also can trigger the new answer boxes. For example, a search for "ruby" is interpreted by Google as roughly meaning "What is Ruby?":
This answer box also triggers "Related topics" that use content pulled from other sites but drive users to more Google searches. The small, gray links are the source sites. The much more visible, blue links are more Google searches.
Note that these also have to be questions (explicit or implied) that Google can't answer with their curated Knowledge Graph (based on sources like Freebase and WikiData). So, for example, the question "When is Mother's Day?" triggers an older-style answer:
Sites offering this data aren't going to have a chance to get attribution, because Google essentially already owns the answer to this question as part of their core Knowledge Graph.
Do You Want to Be An Answer?
This is where things get tricky. At this point, we have no clear data on how these answer boxes impact CTR, and it's likely that the impact depends a great deal on the context. I think we're facing a certain degree of inevitability – if Google is going to list an answer, better it's your answer then someone else's, IMO. On the other hand, what if that answer is so complete that it renders your URL irrelevant? Consider, for example, the SERP for "how to make grilled cheese":
Sorry, Food Network, but making a grilled cheese sandwich isn't really that hard, and this answer box doesn't leave much to the imagination. As these answers get more and more thorough, expect CTRs to fall.
For now, I'd argue that it's better to have your link in the box than someone else's, but that's cold comfort in many cases. These new answer boxes represent what I feel is a dramatic shift in the relationship between Google and webmasters, and they may be tipping the balance. For now, we can't do much but wait, see, and experiment.
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Let's face it. Getting slapped by a manual link penalty, or by the Penguin algorithm, really stinks. Once this has happened to you, your business is in a world of hurt. Worse still is the fact that you can't get clear information from Google on which of your links are the bad ones. In today's post, I am going to focus on the number one reason why people fail to get out from under these types of problems, and how to improve your chances of success.
The mindset
Success begins, continues, and ends with the right mindset. A large percentage of people I see who go through a link cleanup process are not aggressive enough about cleaning up their links. They worry about preserving some of that hard-won link juice they obtained over the years.
You have to start by understanding what a link cleanup process looks like, and just how long it can take. Some of the people I have spoken with have gone through a process like this one:
In this fictitious timeline example, we see someone who spends four months working on trying to recover, and at the end of it all, they have not been successful.
A lot of time and money have been spent, and they have nothing to show for it. Then, the people at Google get frustrated and send them a message that basically tells them they are not getting it. At this point, they have no idea when they will be able to recover. The result is that the complete process might end up taking six months or more.
In contrast, imagine someone who is far more aggressive in removing and disavowing links. They are so aggressive that 20 percent of the links they cut out are actually ones that Google has not currently judged as being bad. They also start on March 9, and by April 30, the penalty has been lifted on their site.
Now they can begin rebuilding their business, five or months sooner than the person who does not take as aggressive an approach. Yes, they cut out some links that Google was not currently penalizing, but this is a small price to pay for getting your penalty cleared five months sooner. In addition, using our mindset-based approach, the 20 percent of links we cut out were probably not links that were helping much anyway, and that Google might also take action on them in the future.
Now that you understand the approach, it's time to make the commitment. You have to make the decision that you are going to do whatever it takes to get this done, and that getting it done means cutting hard and deep, because that's what will get you through it the fastest. Once you've got your head on straight about what it will take and have summoned the courage to go through with it, then and only then, you're ready to do the work. Now let's look at what that work entails.
You will want to pull in data from all four of these sources, get them into one list, and then dedupe them to create a master list. Focus only on followed links as well, as nofollowed links are not an issue. The overall process is shown here:
One other simplification is also possible at this stage. Once you have obtained a list of the followed links, there is another thing you can do to dramatically simplify your life.
You don't need to look at every single link.
You do need to look at a small sampling of links from every domain that links to you. Chances are that this is a significantly smaller quantity of links to look at than all links. If a domain has 12 links to you, and you look at three of them, and any of those are bad, you will need to disavow the entire domain anyway.
I take the time to emphasize this because I've seen people with more than 1 million inbound links from 10,000 linking domains. Evaluating 1 million individual links could take a lifetime. Looking at 10,000 domains is not small, but it's 100 times smaller than 1 million. But here is where the mindset comes in.
Do examine every domain.
This may be a grinding and brutal process, but there is no shortcut available here. What you don't look at will hurt you. The sooner you start on the entire list, the sooner you will get the job done.
How to evaluate links
Now that you have a list, you can get to work. This is a key part where having the right mindset is critical. The first part of the process is really quite simple. You need to eliminate each and every one of these types of links:
Article directory links
Links in forum comments, or their related profiles
Links in blog comments, or their related profiles
Links from countries where you don't operate/sell your products
Links from link sharing schemes such as Link Wheels
Any links you know were paid for
Here is an example of a foreign language link that looks somewhat out of place:
For the most part, you should also remove any links you have from web directories. Sure, if you have a link from DMOZ, Business.com, or BestofTheWeb.com, and the most important one or two directories dedicated to your market space, you can probably keep those.
For a decade I have offered people a rule for these types of directories, which is "no more than seven links from directories." Even the good ones carry little to no value, and the bad ones can definitely hurt you. So there is absolutely no win to be had running around getting links from a bunch of directories, and there is no win in trying to keep them during a link cleanup process.
Note that I am NOT talking about local business directories such as Yelp, CityPages, YellowPages, SuperPages, etc. Those are a different class of directory that you don't need to worry about. But general purpose web directories are, generally speaking, a poison.
Rich anchor text
Rich anchor text has been the downfall of many a publisher. Here is one of my favorite examples ever of rich anchor text:
The author wanted the link to say "buy cars," but was too lazy to fit the two words into the same sentence! Of course, you may have many guest posts that you have written that are not nearly as obvious as this one. One great way to deal with that is to take your list of links that you built and sort them by URL and look at the overall mix of anchor text. You know it's a problem if it looks anything like this:
The problem with the distribution in the above image is that the percentage of links that are non "rich" in nature is way too small. In the real world, most people don't conveniently link to you using one of your key money phrases. Some do, but it's normally a small percentage.
Other types of bad links
There is no way for me to cover every type of bad link in this post, but here are other types of links, or link scenarios, to be concerned about:
If a large percentage of your links are coming from over on the right rail of sites, or in the footers of sites
If there are sites that give you a site-wide link, or a very large number of links from one domain
Links that come from sites whose IP address is identical in the A block, B block, and C block (read more about what these are here)
Links from crappy sites
The definition of a crappy site may seem subjective, but if a site has not been updated in a while, or its information is of poor quality, or it just seems to have no one who cares about it, you can probably consider it a crappy site. Remember our discussion on mindset. Your objective is to be harsh in cleaning up your links.
In fact, the most important principle in evaluating links is this:
If you can argue that it's a good link, it's NOT. You don't have to argue for good quality links. To put it another way, if they are not obviously good, then out they go!
Quick case study anecdote: I know of someone who really took a major knife to their backlinks. They removed and/or disavowed every link they had that was below a Moz Domain Authority of 70. They did not even try to justify or keep any links with lower DA than that. It worked like a champ. The penalty was lifted. If you are willing to try a hyper-aggressive approach like this one, you can avoid all the work evaluating links I just outlined above. Just get the Domain Authority data for all the links pointing to your site and bring out the hatchet.
No doubt that they ended up cutting out a large number of links that were perfectly fine, but their approach was way faster than doing the complete domain by domain analysis.
Requesting link removals
Why is it that we request link removals? Can't we just build a
disavow file and submit that to Google? In my experience, for manual link penalties, the answer to this question is no, you can't. (Note: if you have been hit by Penguin, and not a manual link penalty, you may not need to request link removals.)
Yes, disavowing a link is supposed to tell Google that you don't want to receive any PageRank, or benefit, from it. However, there is a human element at play here.
Google likes to see that you put some effort into cleaning up the bad links that you have gotten that led to your penalty. The more bad links you have, the more important this becomes.
This does make the process a lot more expensive to get through, but if you approach this with the "whatever it takes" mindset, you dive into the requesting link removal process and go ahead and get it done.
I usually have people go through three rounds of requests asking people to remove links. This can be a very annoying process for those receiving your request, so you need to be aware of that. Don't start your email with a line like "Your site is causing mine to be penalized ...", as that's just plain offensive.
I'd be honest, and tell them "Hey, we've been hit by a penalty, and as part of our effort to recover we are trying to get many of the links we have gotten to our site removed. We don't know which sites are causing the problem, but we'd appreciate your help ..."
Note that some people will come back to you and ask for money to remove the link. Just ignore them, and put their domains in your disavow file.
Once you are done with the overall removal requests, and had whatever success you have had, take the rest of the domains and disavow them. There is a complete guide to
creating a disavow file here. The one incremental tip I would add is that you should nearly always disavow entire domains, not just the individual links you see.
This is important because even with the four tools we used to get information on as many links as we could, we still only have a subset of the total links. For example, the tools may have only seen one link from a domain, but in fact you have five. If you disavow only the one link, you still have four problem links, and that will torpedo your reconsideration request.
Disavowing the domain is a better-safe-than-sorry step you should take almost every time. As I illustrated at the beginning of this post, adding extra cleanup/reconsideration request loops is very expensive for your business.
The overall process
When all is said and done, the process looks something like this:
If you run this process efficiently, and you don't try to cut corners, you might be able to get out from your penalty in a single pass through the process. If so, congratulations!
What about tools?
There are some fairly well-known tools that are designed to help you with the link cleanup process. These include
Link Detox and Remove'em. In addition, at STC we have developed our own internal tool that we use with our clients.
These tools can be useful in flagging some of your links, but they are not comprehensive—they will help identify some really obvious offenders, but the great majority of links you need to deal with and remove/disavow are not identified. Plan on investing substantial manual time and effort to do the heavy lifting of a comprehensive review of all your links. Remember the "mindset."
Summary
As I write this post, I have this sense of being heartless because I outline an approach that is often grueling to execute. But consider it tough love. Recovering from link penalties is indeed brutal.
In my experience, the winners are the ones who come with meat cleaver in hand, don't try to cut corners, and take on the full task from the very start, no matter how extensive an effort it may be.
Does this type of process succeed? You bet. Here is an example of a traffic chart from a successful recovery:
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