I recently wrote a post on how to use Google’s Disavow Tool to disassociate your website from other sites that might bring unwanted attention from Google (Penguin). In that post I brushed over the most important part: choosing what links/domains to disavow. Here are some guidelines on what to keep in mind as you investigate a link to decide whether or not you should disavow.

Getting Started

Before you start axing links left and right, you want a strong understanding of what links are helping, and what links are harming you. A good place to start is Google’s Quality Guidelines. Here you can find an easy-to-understand breakdown of what practices Google does not endorse. If a website that is linking to you is breaking most or all of these rules, you should strongly consider disavowing that site. Amongst their quality guidelines is this principle:

“Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines”

This is arguably the most important rule to keep in mind as you assess your backlink profile. When investigating a link, always be aware of whether or not the site was built with people in mind. If a site was built with search engines in mind, the chances that this link is hurting, not helping, is high.

On-Site Considerations

Websites that you don’t want linking to you give you some hints that they might be harmful. Here are a few of them in no particular order:

1. Styling: This is the most immediately obvious factor. If a site has no color, images, or formatting, there’s a good chance it wasn’t built for people to use.
2. Contact info: This is the first thing I look for after styling. If a website is concerned about the people that are using their website (user experience, satisfaction, etc.) they will make it very easy for those people to reach out to them. If a site does not provide a phone number or email address, this isn’t a great sign. Many websites (directories in particular) will have a comment box in place of this information. Sometimes these boxes are used by webmasters as a  valued means of communication with their users, sometimes they are just a guise to give the appearance that someone is monitoring a site. The only way to tell is to send in a form.
3. Office location: Do they have a physical location? If so, this is good for credibility.
4. Content: Does this site have any original content? Has this content been added to recently? Yes? Good for credibility.
5. Ads: What type of ads do you see? Are they high quality and relevant? Or do they seem spammy and cheap?

(hint, ads like these are a bad sign)

1. SSL: Is this site secure? If so, this is a good sign.
2. Reciprocal/Paid Links: If you can find anything on a site about engaging in reciprocal or paid linking, run.

Note: These considerations do not stand alone. There are many great websites that you want linking to you that don’t have SSL. Some great websites have poor styling. These considerations must be taken together, with the following off-site considerations, to get a broader picture.

Off-Site Considerations

You’ve poked around a site that’s linking to you. It breaks some of the guidelines above, but you’re on the fence about whether or not it could be a harbinger of Penguin. It’s time to look at some metrics to gauge how much trust you should place on this link. Depending upon the tools at your disposal, this process might look slightly different. I like to use a combination of Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz’s Open Site Explorer.

What to look at:

1. Domain/URL Rating: Plug your questionable link into Ahrefs and check its Domain Rating and URL Rating. Just as it sounds, the Domain Rating ranks the entire domain, the URL Rating is only concerned with the page on the website that is linking to you. If you don’t have Ahrefs, Moz Open Site Explorer offers similar metrics (Domain Authority/Page Authority, respectively), while Majestic gives Trust Flow and Citation Flow. These Figures give a baseline understanding of a website. If a site has a Domain Rating between one and five, this should be cause for concern.
2. Number of Backlinks vs. Number of Referring Domains: This is one of the most decisive considerations. All three of the tools mentioned above will give you their best guess as to how many links are pointing to a page, as well as how many different domains these links are coming from. What you want to watch for here is an outrageous amount of links, coming from a small number of domains. It’s important to understand that 100 links from one (generally spammy) domain is not as valuable as 100 links from a rich, diverse group of websites. This comparison can make it obvious that a link is trying to cheat the system. There is no threshold for the highest allowable ratio of links to domains. If you are unsure, use this information in tandem with other considerations to decide on the quality of a website.
3.  Spam Score: Moz’s Open Site Explorer spam tool feature attempts to put together many of the considerations mentioned so far. This tool isn’t always spot on, but it can give you an idea of what you’re working with. If a site has a spam score above three, this should concern you. If a site has a spam score of eight, it’s time to move on.
4. Momentum/Potential: Sometimes, if a site is new, it won’t have an established backlink profile. Its Domain Rating will be low, and if you’re on the fence about it, it might not seem worth keeping around.

As an example, take Wired.com. Earlier this year, Wired’s backlink profile was not nearly as impressive as it is right now. If Wired had linked to your website in March you might have been happy. But, because of the sharp improvement in Wired’s backlink profile since then, that link to your website is now worth much more. Today you’d be ecstatic. Basically, if a site links to you and it’s not impressive now but you think it has potential, or is already on its way, don’t disavow.

There You Have it

These are just a few of the many tactics you can use to look in to your backlinks.

It’s that time of year again. The SEO world is reflecting back on a year defined by unexplained shake ups in the search results. Rather than taking a look back on 2016, it’s much more fun to look ahead to 2017. Some writers were so excited for 2016 to end, they started their predictions as early as August. Other writers, like the brilliant David Mihm, have just recently published their predictions for 2017 (definitely worth the read). In this post, I want to look at a few different common SEO trends/predictions and offer my thoughts in a ESPN(ish) talkshow fashion called “Good news, bad news, no news.” Essentially, I’ll be sharing whether I think this SEO trend will benefit law firms, hurt them, or have no real impact.

More Traffic to Paid Advertisements than Organic on Mobile

…Bad news

Google has been stressing the importance of mobile experience since back in March of 2015 when the digital marketing world had a simultaneous heart attack about the impending “Mobilegeddon.” Mobile search has continued it’s astronomical growth and with that, Google is capitalizing on a huge opportunity for additional revenue. We’ve seen this trend already with new ad extensions (reviews and location data) and even more recently with the addition of local search ads on Google Maps like the example below.

So why is this bad news for the average small law firm? I say bad news because it’s becoming a pay-to-play game, and fast. Legal has always been a hyper-competitive market – while you can still get solid results from beating your competition organically – you now have to compete with more advertising than ever before with less room on the search results pages than ever before. 2017 may be a good time to start thinking about the various mobile advertising options.

Tracking Keywords Rank Becomes Obsolete

…Good news

Search queries are getting longer and more specific with the growth of voice search and shift in searcher behavior. Soon, tracking your ranking for broad terms like “bankruptcy lawyer” will become more difficult. This is great news. It’s very easy to use ranking as a measuring stick of success, but we shouldn’t, and soon won’t be able to. We’ve never used ranking as a measure of success at Mockingbird and never will. Our philosophy has always been to focus on the metrics that matter, which for law firms is new leads and ultimately new clients (not ranking for “car accidents”).

This inevitable shift will free up business owners and their SEO agencies to focus on optimizing their website in a way that drives revenue, not rankings. Instead of focusing our efforts on rankings, we can focus on the user’s intent and how to solve their problems.

HTTPS Becomes a Must

…No News

We’ve known that Google is using HTTPS as a ranking signal since they announced it back in August of 2014. Since then, Google has been running their own PR campaign to push site owners and SEOs to make their website’s more secure. Google even offers help articles, a post on why HTTPS matters, and a variety of tools to check your site’s security. They have been preparing us for the shift to HTTPS for the last two years and “Beginning in January 2017 (Chrome 56), we’ll mark HTTP pages that collect passwords or credit cards as non-secure, as part of a long-term plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure” (source). This should be “no news” to all of us. Our lead developer, Matt Stahl, wrote a great post on this: “Why HTTPS? Well that’s a stupid question.”

Looking Ahead to 2017

Things are changing fast and it’s important to keep on top of the trends. In summary, think about investing in mobile advertising, forget about keyword ranking, and make sure your site is secure with HTTPS. Please comment with your own thoughts and predictions below!

We recently subscribed to an SEO toolkit called Ahrefs at Mockingbird. We did this because the overwhelming majority of voices weighing in across the web seem to agree that while Ahrefs is a little more expensive than, say Majestic or Moz, it’s more accurate. We like accuracy.

After playing around with Ahrefs, investigating features, and watching many of their help videos, I put together this guide that can serve as a how-to-get-the-most-out-of-Ahrefs manual, complete with basics, some cons, as well as some advanced features offered by Ahrefs.

What Ahrefs does:

Ahrefs brands themselves as:

“A toolset for SEO and marketing. We have tools for backlink research, organic traffic research, keyword research, content marketing & more.”

Basically, Ahrefs crawls the web and reports on what it finds. Its key functionality is its backlink checking capabilities. According to a study we found, Ahrefs reports on a higher ratio of live, accurate links than any other similar service. Based on our own experience with other tools, so far this seems to be the case.

Pricing:

The costs of different Ahref plans run as follows:

How to Use it:

Dashboard:

The first step towards using Ahrefs to the fullest is adding important sites to your dashboard (adding a “campaign”). This allows you to quickly and easily keep tabs on the websites you are most interested in. This is helpful insofar as you wont need to enter a url each time you want to check on a certain site, but adding a site to your dashboard also allows you to setup automated email reports. These reports give you your site’s vitals as they pertain to backlinks (new/lost/broken), keywords (are you still ranking for important keywords?), and online mentions (who’s talking about your website?) on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your preference.

Backlinks:

Ahref’s backlink checker is its meat and potatoes. They have an easy-to-use interface that makes checking in on your sites’ backlink profile relatively intuitive.

To illustrate some of Ahref’s backlink checker tool’s capabilities, here’s an example that came up the other day; A co-worker noticed an unusual amount of dofollow links pointed at a client’s website in the past two months. She wondered if there was a way to quickly check in on backlinks that had been added in the last two months that were dofollow, and whether any of these links were related to each other. Let’s review:

1. New links within last two months
2. Dofollow
3. Related to one another?

To figure this out, I used Ahref’s “New Backlinks” tool. Once inside, I adjusted the settings as follows:

As you can see, the date is set to include the last 60 days, the link type is set to “Dofollow”, and, perhaps most importantly for what my coworker was trying to accomplish, the links are set to show up as “One link per domain”. This last feature allows you to condense all links from the same (generally spammy) domain into something more easily digestible.

Once here, use the toolbar above the backlinks to further hone in on the information you’re interesting in seeing. Here you can prioritize how your backlinks are presented to you based on highest/lowest: Domain Ranking, URL Ranking, # of external links on page, social, date found by Ahrefs, or the number of times a domain links to your site.

Disavow tool:

This feature impressed me. Once you’ve added a site to your dashboard, the “Disavow Links” tool becomes available. This tool allows you to stockpile and organize links that you don’t want linking to your site. As you go through new backlinks, or all backlinks, you’ll see a small box waiting to be checked:

Once you click this box, you can choose to either disavow only that URL, or the entire domain. Once you’ve done this, the backlink is saved to your disavow list.

Once you’ve compiled a list worth disavowing, Ahrefs makes it easy to export the list as a txt. file, so you can send it straight to Google’s disavow tool (with the addition of some annotation on your part).

As a relative newcomer to the world of SEO I’d like to take a moment to zoom out.

There are a lot of things one can do to bring traffic to a website and get the phone ringing. In my almost two months here at Mockingbird my hands have been dirty redirecting URLs, nofollowing links, looking at content data to see what works and what doesn’t, answering the phone, getting Google Analytics certified, conducting onboarding audits, running competitive analyses… you get it. Trying to get stuff done, it can be easy to lose sight of what is most important to SEO and why we’re doing what we’re doing. That’s why I’ve made this SEO: Beginner’s Guide to What Matters.

Leads, Not Ranking

This list is not in order of importance, but I certainly didn’t list this first on accident. The one detail that has been emphasized to me the most, whether in my interview, training, or since, is that you can’t lose sight of the reason SEOs have jobs: to bring business to the client. It’s easy to get caught up in traffic, likes, shares, and yes, page rankings, when measuring the impact of your SEO efforts. Oftentimes these metrics are closely related to your end goal. But they aren’t it. Your end goal is to connect your client with people who want to pay them money in exchange for services. I would be happy showing up as the 2,573^rd Google search result for all keywords if it also meant a steady, bountiful flow of leads. What I mean to say here is this: stay focused on goals that matter.

This article will mention ranking. Moving forward, keep in mind that ranking only matters if it generates leads. For more on this, check out Conrad’s blog post

Content

We’ve all heard it. Content is crucial. It might even be king. But what is a king without a queen, a couple knights, peasants and a jester? Just some guy. What I’m trying to say it this: content is valuable, but only when used in the right way. First, the content being posted to your website needs to be of good quality. Search engines can easily sniff out fodder, the stuff used to fill a page. The content being posted must be actually relevant and helpful to somebody who stumbles upon it. Next, high quality content needs to be regularly promoted and marketed. Today, people are starting to figure out that in order to get traffic (and, ideally, leads), they need to post a lot of high quality content. The gig is up. There’s ample high quality content out there. So in order for yours to be seen, you need to push it out.

Site Architecture

This is broad, but important. Site architecture is paramount to online marketing. It includes anything from website crawlability to mobile capabilities, site speed to duplicate content. In order for your website to garner attention from a search engine, in needs to be easy for the search engine to engage with. If Google has a hard time crawling your site because it has massive amounts of outdated, irrelevant content, non-descriptive URLS and no sitemap, it won’t be happy and there will be repercussions. But it’s important to remember that search engines aren’t ranking for themselves. They rank based on how helpful/effective they deem a site to be for the user. If Bing can tell that your sitespeed is in the pits, it’s going to recognize that this will annoy a user, and ding your ranking. When building a website, architecture should be kept in mind to easily accommodate search engines.

HTML

HTML, similar to site architecture, sends signals to search engines to help them determine what information needs to be put before a user. Title tags, meta description tags, and header tags all fall under HTML. When sifting through every piece of information on a site, tags give the search engine some guidance. Searchengineland aptly uses the example of a book; say you open a book shop with 100 books you’ve written. You happen to be a pretty bad writer, and you gave each book the same title, each chapter the same name, and put the same information in each sleeve. An interested reader who steps into your shop is going to have a hard time determining where to find content on their favorite genre, political intrigue. Or Vampires. The same is true for search engines. If a search engine can’t easily understand what content is stored on what pages, that content might be left by the wayside. Offer your content to search engines with plenty of explanation: relevant titles, descriptions, and header tags.

There you have it

An oversimplified summary of SEO priorities.

Everybody is moving to their websites to HTTPS! Google says it’s a must. You even get a nice green shield on the url bar – see below – security proven! It’s clear that HTTPS is a good thing for your website and the entire web is moving quickly to adopt HTTPS.

Better get on board or your traffic is going to tank! Woah woah woah… That’s not necessarily true, but let’s explore they what, why, and how of HTTPS.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS is a combination of two things – HTTP(Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and TLS(Transport Layer Security).  This security layer essentially encrypts communications between the website server and the visitors device. It doesn’t protect your device or server themselves from intruders (they should have their own security measures), but it does protect the communications from being read or altered by intruders. This way a visitor to your website can be ensured that their data is not being mined when they send you a contact form message or digital payment. If a website has HTTPS enabled correctly it will have a green shield in your browser’s address bar and “https://” before the site address – refer again to the image above. An incomplete/incorrect implementation will have a red shield, x, or some other error/warning message to go along with the “https://” to warn visitors of non-encrypted or unsafe data transfer.

How to HTTPS?

HTTPS requires an SSL(Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS(Transport Layer Security) be installed on the web server. To get more technical… these terms are now used interchangeably as SSL3.0 was the last SSL version in use and TLS1.0 is often referred to as SSL3.1. The latest production version as of writing is TLS1.3 which is probably what your “SSL” is using. All of that aside – you need to buy these “Security Certificates” through your hosting provider to apply to your domain name. Ask your hosting provider, web developer, or marketing company to set up HTTPS for you!

Why HTTPS?

Well it’s far from perfect, but it’s the best, most standard communications security that is currently have available. And guess what? It’s going to continue to be upgraded as attackers get more sophisticated – see SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, 1.3, etc… Your hosting provider and your devices security systems will also be upgraded as intruders try new methods.  Google thinks you should use HTTPS. WRC – the international consortium that develops web standards thinks you should. Even the slow moving bureaucracy that is our government requires it for their websites. So clearly it’s a must have for security and visitors trust (this can increase lead conversion).

There’s one more reason that you probably weren’t even thinking about. HTTP2! Yes, that’s right, the first HTTP update since HTTP1.1 in 1999. Before HTTP2 came along, HTTPS could increase a websites loading times because of the extra time taken for encrypted connections. With HTTP2, your devices can access multiple resources from a website at the same time! Before this, a visitor would have to load a single websites average of 30-100 resources 1 at a time. This change allows HTTP2 to decrease load times by 17-50% as reported by WPengine and CloudFlare. What does this have to do with HTTPS you ask? Well HTTP2 doesn’t require a security certificate, but browsers require security certificates for HTTP2 to function. So if you’re host has HTTP2 enabled and you have a Security Certificate installed – you get a website speed increase AND a security increase. Win Win.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Internet security is a deep and interesting subject with lots of reading material. With the emergence of the “internet of things” powering unprecedented DDoS attacks and botnets infecting massive amounts of devices – the web is a warzone. For us little fish, we have to hope that the big guys have our backs. As we await “Quantum Computing”, you can be sure, Google and others are preparing TLS defenses for your small business website!