Friday 29 November 2013

Backlink update for 2014

We often get asked, what is a good backlink and how can I avoid bad links?

The answer to this is easy. A good link is one that gets indexed and a bad link is one that does not.

There are two things we know for sure:

1. A good link will improve your ranking.
2. A bad link will not harm your ranking.

We blogged about the misconception of a bad link back in April and we have certainly seen what we thought was happening happen. So let’s look at what Google say in their webmaster guidelines.

“In some circumstances, incoming links can affect Google’s opinion of a page or site. First and foremost, we recommend that you remove as many spammy or low-quality links from the web as possible."


What's interesting is how none committal Google are when it comes to the affect that bad links will have (see where we have marked the test red). Our believe is that they are creating a hysteria surrounding links in order to convince people that link building should not be done and any links you have built should be removed.

What we know is that backlinks are still the most important off-site factor when it comes to ranking. We also know that Google uses a robot to find and index these links. So, with current technology it would be so hard for Google to decipher whether a backlink is bad or not, they could make a guess but this is not something that they would be able to rank people lower on. Also, if bad links lowered ranking there would be a whole industry of bad link building to competitor’s websites and Google could not allow that.

So in the words of Ferris Beulah “we’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again” a bad link will not lower your ranking, it just won’t move it higher.

Our core SEO product fuses perfectly the important on-site work with a low frequency manual link building strategy that will give your site the maximum ranking benefit without any chance of being penalised by any search engine.

Thursday 14 November 2013

Twitter Ads. Live update!

So, Twitter has today rolled out a new advertising platform allowing advertisers to connect with potential new clients via their network.

In their e-mail to user they stated:


Watch your business take off. Twitter Ads gives you the power to:


Increase followers
Target your messaging
Reach wider audiences


Sounds great, doesn't it? It is.


...But is it?


We like to test any new advertising platform early in order to assess if it's worth adding as a managed feature to our existing product range. In the past we tested Facebook Ads. The results were pretty poor and as a result we decided to shelve any roll out of managed Facebook advertising services. We only want to offer our clients products that we feel can really have an impact. We felt that Facebook Ads were only good for generating more "likes" but then our unique like to follow product does this already, and it's free!

So, what about Twitter Ads?


We launched a campaign this morning. We created 3 campaigns targeting potential SEO resellers and also direct SEO clients. We only targeted the UK and selected to only target users on laptops or PCs. Initial results have been fairly positive. Here are the stats across all 3 campaigns:

Number of impressions: 6,325
Number of engaments (clicks or follows): 70
Total spend: £50


Do we recommend it?

It's very early days but so far the results are pretty good and it's not too expensive. The question though long term will be, does the traffic convert? We intend to test this further over the next 14 days and then make a decision on whether to offer this to our clients.

We hope that this offers you an insight in to this brand new roll out from Twitter and also the diligence we apply to any new advertising platform before we offer it across to our clients.