Google’s Penguin and Ranking Payday Loans with Hacked Backlinks

By Alex Fusman

Everyone in the field of online marketing, and beyond, has heard of the latest update from Google, codenamed Penguin. This isn’t actually an algorithm update but rather a filter that will be run occasionally. When it was introduced last month, it caused chaos in the SERPs and that chaos has still not subsided.

As an example, let’s take a look at one of the most competitive niches in SEO – payday loans. A first page ranking for “payday loans” and related phrases can bring in thousands of dollars per day. So there is a lot of dubious activity surrounding these sites, primarily in terms of backlink building. Additionally, it’s the kind of thing that many people will want to test on other sites before exposing their own money sites. For example, they will try their newest backlink schemes on a totally unrelated site that they don’t even own. If that site ranks for the term, they monitor how long it stays up there and what else Google does with it. With that kind of knowledge they have a better understanding of how to approach ranking their own sites for the big money phrases.

Right now, when I search for “payday loans,” I get the results above. Notice anything strange? There are two magazine sites on the first page of results! Completely unrelated sites. And the site int he #10 spot looks pretty new, given the lack of data shown in the SEOmoz stats. Clearly, there are some very aggressive linking practices going on here and the magazine sites seem to be being used as test sites. Let’s take a look a bit deeper.

This is the backlink report for KiwiMagOnline.com. It’s clear that the site was recently hit with a massive amount of links. Assuming that ahrefs found only a fraction of the live links, and it’s showing about 1,000 new links in the past couple days, it seems safe to say that a large link blast will rank a completely unrelated site – at least, for a brief period of time. But kinds of links will have this effect?

Some quick Googling reveals that the site got a lot of backlinks from hacked sites. Take a look at the source code above, taken from a perfectly innocent looking website. In the header, someone inserted a few links to URLs that are completely unrelated to their anchor text. The links are in a div with the “display:none” property, meaning the browser won’t show them. But a search spider will still read and count them as backlinks. Did I mention this is on a PR6 site? The header is sitewide, so from a PR6 site it’s safe to say there were some high PR inner pages as well.

And then there are these…

This is taken from site-connect.net, one of those sites that generate statistics about any domain. Looks like their crawler determined that the title of the site is, “PayDay Loans online – No Fax Needed” and pulled in a fitting meta description as well. That’s not what I see in my browser when I go to the site. Interesting, no?

I could go on and on with this, but I think the point has been made:

A large amount of anchor text backlinks from high authority sites, even if they’re in a hidden div, will rank a completely unrelated site for a highly competitive search phrase.

Don’t let @MattCutts or @RandFish tell you otherwise.

Use AdWords Extensions for Better Campaign Performance!

By Alex Fusman

I recently read a case study over at Ad Hustler in which he showed the results of a campaign in which he used the Call Extensions for local lead gen.

The top comment in that post was from someone who says he never even thought of using extensions until he read that post. This is something I see quite often when I look at competing ads in the SERPs. Whenever I run campaigns, I always try to use extensions when possible. There’s just no reason not to. But the majority of advertisers don’t seem to really be utilizing that feature.

For those of us who are aware of the value of ad extensions, we have a nice advantage over those who don’t use them. Not only do we get extra space in our ads that pushes down competing ads, we get the trust factor of showing a phone number or even a location, depending on the extension being used. And to add to that, we get phone calls from free impressions!

Let’s talk about that for a few moments. When you show a phone number in your ad, whether you’re using a Call Extension or pulling info from your Places listing, you’re giving the user an opportunity to convert into a lead without even clicking the ad. And as Ad Hustler showed, his campaign generated 60 calls from 4,970 impressions. That’s a conversion rate of over 1% – pretty nice for not having to pay for the clicks. Of course, you do have to pay for the calls if you’re using the Call Extension, but if you’re displaying a phone number from a Places extension, it’s free.

If you’re running AdWords campaigns for clients or for yourself, make sure you get familiar with the different types of extensions you could use. There are more types than I discussed in this short post, and using them gives you the potential to raise your conversion rates significantly.