SEMSEO 2010: great sessions and big announcements

Tue 2 March 2010 12:40, Evert Veldhuijzen

SEMSEO is one of those few conferences where also experienced search marketers can learn something. Organizer Alan Webb of Abakus Internet Marketing opens every conference with the words „We assume that you're a little experienced in SEO and that you know what a title tag and a meta description is!“ With this phrase he expresses exactly the goal of the SEMSEO conference: being an advanced conference for professional search marketeers.

This year's 4th edition of the conference brought a few hot announces:

- Abakus Internet Marketing announced a new tool called "SEO Diver". SEO Diver, which will be launched in about two months, is a tool to analyse the reach of search. Unlike other tools like Sistrix or Searchmetrics SEO Diver doesn't use a predefined keywordlist to determine rankings, but it will use a large panel of searchers. Big advantage of the tool will be the deep natural long tail database with over 200 million keywords. Besides that it will be an international tool.

- Prof. Dr. Mario Fischer announced the launch of a new German magazine for online marketing called "Website Boosting".

So what about the sessions? Some of the sessions were really great. I'm not going to cover all of them, but I would like to stick with my favorite one "Link Building and Reputation Management" by Prof. Dr. Mario Fischer.

Link Building and Reputation Management
„When Google Bot sees a print version of a page he gets very horny, because of the good code/content relationship“. Prof. Dr. Mario Fischer is a great speaker and entertainer. I saw a lot of his presentations, but I think this one was one of his best. In his presentation Mario not only talked about the usual link building strategies, but also gave the audience a deep inside view how Google’s algorithms (probably) work to find spammy link building:

Why should you be carefull when it comes to link building?
- 22% of all sites are spam
- 33% is duplicate content
- 90% of all seo's are douchebags :)

Mario considered to watch a few things: use clean content links, watch your broken links, stabilize url structures (if possible), avoid canonical issues (use 301, canonical tag) and use noindex,follow to index out duplicate content.

How to find link sources?
One of the tricks to find link sources Mario mentioned was googling for "site:.edu inurl:post a comment". As you can see here (scroll down) many seo's are already doing this :) Or you could try to find public webmaster's statistics (by searching for a bot IP for example) and look at the referrers in the statistics you find. Most important thing: be creative!

How can Google detect Link spam?
Well, Google can search for some strong spamsignals, like for example:
- Domainname length (80 of the 100 longest Domainnames are about subjects known for spamming like porn, finance etc.)
- unusual footprints (HTML or URL)
- keyword density
- many domains on one ip

Of course the signals don't have to get you a penalty, but a combination of different signals probably will. Once Google finds spam it's pretty easy to find the rest. Think of:
- Degree of dependance
- Same IP D-Block
- Same Provider
- Same Admin-C
- Identical Fax or Phone Number
- Same Google Accounts or same Adsense Code (very clever :))

So what do you need for good link building?
- Trusted links
- Relevant links
- at least 50% of your backlinks should point to your homepage
- use a lot of different c-classes
- build no follow links too
- spread the page rank of your backlinks
- use different anchor texts. Also use generic anchor texts like „more, www.domain.tld etc.“
- Deep link your keyword anchor texts. (but not more than 20%)
- link growth: not more than 10% a month

Another great presentation was about Blackhat PPC, by Metapeople CEO Tim Ringel, but I'm not going to blog about it as I'll be speaking with Tim in a panel with the same subject at SMX Munich :)

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