Why My Love for Rmoove Continously Grows

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I love Rmoov ImageNow that I’m working for a digital marketing agency I’m no longer dealing with link profiles I’ve built myself rather, profiles built by those previously in my position.

As most of us know or have heard with the 3 most recent changes to Google’s algorithm some of the techniques previously used by SEOs are no longer producing the same results. In fact, in most of these cases continuing to participate in such activities as link farms, spam guest posting and forth yield more damage to web property than benefit.

In some cases I’ve come across these web properties have had links built for them for quite some time resulting in extensive – but horrid – backlink profiles. With the most recent update the Penguin filter these extensive backlink profiles have caused the decline in keywords and therefore have to be remedied as soon as possible.

For those whom are unaware of procedure of removing links here’s a quick brief. Using your favourite tool like Majestic SEO you’re going to take a look at ALL the backlinks pointing towards your site. From there, without going into detail you’re going to have to differentiate the links pointing to your site that yield relevance and authority from those that don’t. Most tools provide some sort of ranking system like the trust flow and citation flow of Majestic SEO.  Now that you’ve determined the set of links that need to go you can use a service like whois.net to look at the registration info for the domain and collect the email of the administrator or technical contact if they differ. You’re then to send the admin or technical contact an email request to remove the link from the URL that you will include in your email. If they don’t then we prey that Google’s disavow tool will have some impact.

As you can see it’s a pretty grueling tedious task. Imagine for a second a website with over 20,000 links of which an estimated 50% need to be removed.

Faced with a few cases like the above I decided to search for a service to help make my life a little easier. That’s when I stumbled upon Rmoov and it’s wonderful staff.

Rmoov is a backlink removal service aimed at helping those like myself get through the task of removing backlinks with more automation and less headache.

How you ask?

Rmoov has users set up backlink removal campaigns which allows for bulk uploading of URLs from a file you’ve created or exports from Google Web Master Tools. From there the service automatically pulls the domain WHOIS registration information in order to contact the owner of the domain that you want to remove. The final setup has users input the WHOIS information for the few domains that are either proxy protected or have opted out of providing an email address and input outgoing mail setting for the domain in order to send out the email requests.

Once the campaign is launched emails are immediately sent out. Depending on the length of the campaign you’ve decided on you’ll pretty much sit back and wait with the hope of seeing a flood of messages come into your Rmoov dashboard from webmasters informing they removed the link(s).

That’s one other reason why Rmoov is so damn amazing. Within the email it provides a link so that the honest Ed webmasters who do clean up links are able to report back to you with a click that they’ve removed the links you’ve requested.

Once your campaign has ended in many cases you’ll find that there are still a few links that haven’t been cleaned up.  Another benefit to using the Rmoov service (yes, I know it doesn’t end) is the disavow report it generates for users once the campaign is over. This disavow report is exactly what Google is looking for. The report details the efforts you’ve made to manually remove spammy and(or) unnatural links pointing to your site and that in a few stubborn cases they haven’t been removed and you’d like them disavowed.

The above was my primary reason for using Rmoov. I almost shit myself when I contemplated the thought of having to send even 100 manual emails to spam webmasters knowing that I’d have to keep at transcript of each correspondence just in case I had to utilize the disavow tool.

THE CHERRY ON THE CAKE with Rmoov certainly lies with the amazing customer service. On quite a few occasions I’ve picked up the phone and riddled Sha with questions ranging from locating who.is information to general questions about the Rmoov service.

With the demand for link removal tools growing naturally so to will the supply; however, take it from me there’s no better service out there than Rmoov.

Advertising Agencies and SEO Services

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Wink and a PlungerWorking at a digital marketing company for the past few months has proven already to be one hell of a learning experience. Prior to the job I was a freelance SEO consultant dealing directly to the end client – however, my current position has me dealing with a mixture of end clients’ and advertising agencies whitelabeling SEO services.

Working with the end client is what I love. In my experience I’ve dealt with both the client who knows the gist about SEO and the client who knows nothing other than “it works”. Regardless of type I’ve found a way to come to a common understanding with each client as to the tasks SEO involves and realistic expectations.

Working advertising agencies whitelabeling SEO services has proven in only a few months to be quite the pain in the ass. The majority of the advertising agencies whitelabeling our SEO services were founded as traditional advertising companies (ie: print).  With the increased popularity in digital marketing these traditional advertising agencies have began looking for solutions they can offer in order to continue offering their clients complete solutions.

Of course not all advertising agencies are whitelabeling another companies service but in my experience I’ve noticed quite a few – hence the reasoning for this post. The ones that are whitelabeling SEO service I tend to view the same as a plumber you hired telling you he also electrical although he’s not certified.

These agencies in essence are selling a service they themselves cannot provide – the worst part being a lot of them don’t know how SEO works.

Who Suffers When an Ad Agency Sells a Service They Have No Expertise In?

Answer: the client.

You have to understand that to a client that’s willing to spend $1,000/month of SEO through an advertising agency in reality spends a lot less. See, the agency itself pawning off the service as they’re own will cut into the clients spend in order make a profit.

The client believe he/she is spending $800 on SEO when the agency has opted to go with let’s say a $600/month SEO plan in order to pocket the remaining $200.

It may not seem like a lot but that $400 will effect the optimization the client’s website receives. For example: one package the digital marketing company offers is $395 and the step up is $595. The difference in price points for this company in particular is that the second package receives copywriting, which is effectively (to say the least) optimized.

So imagine the agency goes with the $400 package based on the fact they need to profit $400 a month themselves. The client doesn’t know this. All the client knows is that they’re paying simply $800/month to the agency for SEO.

Which usually results in the representative from the agency coming back monthly after receiving their clients report asking for a break down of what the report data is all about and what tasks took place that month. Why? So that when they go to the client they can pawn all the work off as their own and hopefully not look like they haven’t a clue as to what they’re talking about.

Sure, if fine for an agency to do this. But, I’d like the end client to be aware of this. Is all the cases I’ve seen the end client hasn’t a clue what’s going on or how their money is being spent.

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Guest Blogging… Spammer’s Delight – Digital Marketers Nightmare

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Those out there like myself in the search industry and others that own a website have an understanding as to the importance of backlinks pointing towards a domain. Moreover, we understand the difficulty faced nowadays to obtain valuable backlinks due to the abundance of link farms and increased weight on link neighborhoods.

Since the whole Panda and Penguin algorithm updates guest blogging / posting has become a popular method of obtaining backlinks. Traditionally guest blogging was a time consuming process that required patience. One would have to scan the web in order to find a relevant, non-competitive website and then inquire to see if the webmaster would be willing to accept content from other (let alone link out).

Sadly, the fact that guest blogging was originally a time consuming helped deter  black hat spammers from participating – regardless of the benefits.

However within the last year there has sprouted a few guest blogging communities. A couple of these have since gone mainstream and are widely used: MyBlogGuest and BloggerLinkUp. Both services were created with honest intentions of bridging the gap between authors and blogs open to receiving additional content.

Upon their launch I became a user of initially MBG. The service was amazing you had a small user base with an incredible customer service team, which included the founder. However, as time went on and the user base grew so did the amount of spammers looking to get on the guest blogging bandwagon seeing as how these services cut the time it used to take to guest blog in half.

I hate to say it but the black hat spam community is quite close nit and within a few months I found MBG to be filled with spun content, generic requests and a lack of native English authors. NOT TO MENTION the vast amount of usage sparked the founder to introduce paid plan which meant for those not paying: enjoy the spam.

At that point I decided it was time to give BloggerLinkUp a shot. Unlike MBG (which is a forum) BloggerLinkUp is a simple email list. Users like myself submit a request for a guest post or and ad for a guest post they’d like to share. Their message is than compiled in with everyone else and sent out Monday, Wednesday and Friday of every week.
Like MBG initially I was met with those alike. But with the popularity and ease can the spam.  Being an emailing list users who participate MUST give out their email in order to receive a response which as you can guess means an open line of communication for spammers.

I’ve since decided to use both selectively. BloggerLinkUp I use when I have a guest post I’d like to contribute – so, I ensure I’m subscribed weekly to see if there’s any site worth my content. However, I no longer post up requests for guest posts as I’ve been added to a countless number of spam emailing lists which have flooded my inbox.

MBG admittedly I use about once every three months and it’s mainly to see what’s changed – if they’ve weeded out any spam.

For those of you contemplating the use of either of these be warned. It’s a spammer’s delight and an ethical marketers nightmare.

A Simple Guide to Claiming Google Authorship

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By now, if you’ve been blogging as a little more than a pastime but not as a profession you should have wind of the term “authorship markup”. It’s been floating around countless blogging networks since it’s inception not to long ago. Rightly so.

Google has only recently introduced authorship markup capabilities – admittedly vast adoption within the blogging industry is a slow process. However, the authorship markup has spread like a wildfire and in my eyes it’s for one reason: credibility that causes an increase CTR.

By claiming authorship of a webpage you’ve created the content for, you’re putting your name and face out there for the world wide web to judge. These faces accompanying traditional SERPs allow users to more easily weed out spam results from others. Let’s face it, spammers know what they’re doing and like any troll on the Internet will happily participate in such shenanigans just as long as their identities remain hidden.

To the point. Yes, Google has released their own guide on how one can claim authorship but it’s a little more in-depth and confusing than we really need. So follow along and toss me a comment if you get lost anywhere along the way.

Step One

Ensure you have a Google+ profile set up with a claimed email address. Sadly there have been some who believe they can bypass verifying an email on G+. Remember the authorship markup is all about creating credibility and verification let’s not leave anything out.

Step Two

I would strongly suggest those reading this article from SRN if you haven’t done so already begin to fill out your profile. Although you may not consider G+ in your SM mix up now I assure you, you will soon enough.

Anyway, head on over to update your profile settings. Under the links section will be the contributor section – this is where you’ll add (for example) sonyrumors.

Adding Authorship to G+

Step Three

Now that you’ve added your website to your contributor section the rest of the work lies with the webmaster, developer or whatever special name you gave ‘em.

For those of you who like to know more here’s what required from the webmasters. On whichever page you would like an authors profile picture to display you’ll need to create a link on said page pointing back to the authors G+ page. In order for the profile picture to show ensure you’ve added the rel=”author” attribute to the link.

Where is Common Courtesy?

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In my 13 or so years taking the TTC I’ve grown accustomed to people and their arrogance, ignorance and blunt disrespect towards other riders. I truly believe to a certain extent cultures in different regions may have a different way of handling themselves on public transit but its not excuse when not in the native area.

As an example, admittedly up until recently I was quite ignorant towards how other cultures may handle public transit. I thought that all little old Asian ladies were simply rude. Turns out that in Japan the whole pushing to get onto a train even though there’s another one in a minute is standard. So now I don’t mind it and tend to bite my lip….. Until I get pushed out of the way without a simple excuse me – but that’s for another day.

What really disgusted my this morning was when I had arrived at Finch station to catch the Viva bus. As the bus pulled in and passengers exited a blind man was among them. Stumbling into the door and almost out it was clear he was having a bit of trouble.

Like myself, there were others looking on. As the man got stepped off the bus his next was towards a pole. At which point people began boarding and those that got off were either heading to the TTC or onwards to work.

I decided the bus could wait and to walk the man down to the subway. We had a conversation about the traffic and weather, he thanked me and we went out separate ways. Sure I missed my bus but really is five minutes going to kill me like it apparently kills others?

This made me think. We all have seen this type of scenario mocked at on television skits – hell there’s even the show what would you do – but, if I haven’t stepped up who would have.

I would like to believe people out there would think “what if this were me”. How would they hope to be treated?

Authorship, Authorship, Authorship

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For the past few months I’ve been preaching to those around me the need to begin claiming authorship on webpages whenever possible.

Everybody, literally everybody has adopted the idea of authorship based on the immediate increase seen in CTR’s. I also have a bad habit of hypocritically preaching the need to begin using Google+ more and more frequently I believe it’ll play a role on SERP rankings (I and others).

I also happened to post an article earlier this evening on Google introducing the business logo authorship markup utilizing beautiful Schema structured data. Now, not only can an individual claim authorship but a business – I can only imagine how the web will change in a year.

As time goes on and adoption furthers SERP’s will become a totally different place. No longer will pages be plagued with traditional dull text ridden rich snippets instead, text ridden rich snippets accompanied with photos. Photos of the person who’s proud of their content enough to have their face associated with it and companies the same.

I would think that this would make the fight on spam that much easier. Going forward one can be wary of webpages with traditional rich snippets as content. These SERP’s should make people think: this content has been published however, the person who wrote it is not willing to claim authorship of said work… Why?

Nonetheless I’ll be putting together a post later this week… Maybe even weekend on how to claim authorship of your work.

Here’s a great infographic highlighting the top 500 tech writers and their adoption of authorship.

tech writers with authorship

Image courtesy of Search Engine Watch

Company Logo Markups Coming to SERPs

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For the past few months I’ve seen a crap load of articles on structured data markups flood my news reader. Just as it should.

Structured data mark ups is a broad term but, for those of you following search industry news – you should automatically be thinking authorship markups and the schema micro format.

Anyway, to the point. Today while skimming through Feedly I found an amazing piece on a new authorship markup for businesses.

The authorship markup has been available for quite sometime for primarily indie bloggers and although it hasn’t been confirmed by Google to increase rankings the search industry has adopted it with open arms. One primary reason for the adoption has been widely demonstrated to increase CTRs for those pages with the markup.

For the most part the authorship markup has served it’s purpose helping authors use their social standing and face as SERP endorsements. However, for businesses the authorship markup is to an extent useless as a business is composed of more than one individual so why should he or she have their face all over SERPs.

To combat this problem Google introduced the logo markup functionality for businesses looking utilizing beautiful schema markups.

For those of you that are a bit lost I apologize. This post is a tad all over the place – so I’ll make sure in the next week to pump out a more thorough post on the basic authorship markup and why I’m so excited for the introduction and adoption of the business logo mark up