Travel Babble

Welcome! Travel Babble – Search Landscape Marketplace 2012

• Who is Fresh Egg?

- Fully integrated digital marketing agency focussed on UK work

(Content, Social, SEO, PPC, UX, Insight, Web & App Dev)

- HQ in Worthing with a London presence

- 12 years of successful performance-led client work

- 120 clients and growing…

Welcome to Fresh Egg

The Google Penguin

• Reasonable community consensus

• First one to hit 'real' SEOs

• Reliably five main conclusions

Google Penguin

• Anchor text diversity

• <A>click here</A>

• <A>my brand</A>

• <A>what my brand does</A>

• Depth – Root, L1, Article

• Variety – avoid exact-match!

• Avoid over-programming (35-65%?)

More About Anchors Than You Ever Wanted

Bad Neighbourhoods

Class-C Concentration

Location Clustering

Follow/no-follow ‘Splog’ structures

What is your recommendation on how I can rectify this problem? Recovery

• Weighing our options:

- Do nothing

- Fix ourselves or seek out professionals?

- Abandon site and start afresh

Making the Right Decision

• Recovery – do we ditch sites?

- Yes, potentially…

- Or ditch methods, keep the site

Decision Making Process

Full off-page audit

Understand Link Equity:

=> Domain

=> subsection

=> Landing

Evaluate Taxonomy Toxicity =>

Classification

Logical re-org.

New copy?

Re-indexation

& Recovery

• You’ll need in-depth analysis tools to accomplish this

• Popular options:

• Price vs. functionality

• Or… bring in an expert

Tooling

Data screen shot Normality in - <A> text, TLD, ‘Follow’, Class- C

Data screen shot Anchor Text Keyword Graph

Can you identify quality travel blogs to guest post on?

• Yes, lots

• Words of caution

• Valueless to tell all of you – stop chasing the game

• Work toward a methodology – build relationships

Protect Your Sources

• Appraise your platforms thoroughly

• Tripping no-follow rates

• Spurious domain profiles

• Overly programming Anchor text

• Taxonomy planning

Re-cap Best Practice for Identification

Questions: I’ve heard a lot about rel=author lately and that it is important to utilise in order to improve rankings – what is this about? Is there increasing recognition in the Search community that fresh, original, high-quality travel content makes a difference to Search and Inbound Marketing? And are we seeing more companies willing to invest in securing that content?

• What is rel=author?

• Additional, optional mark-up in links and microformats

• Higher visibility in SERPs

• Greater content consumption in circles

• Extensible authorship association beyond Google

• What is agent rank?

• Google Patent Sept 2011

• Intended to augment PageRank initially

• Overall attempt to improve authority and reduce clutter

Google Developments

A Look to the Future – from Platform Rank to Voice Rank

• Platform authority – domain and PR

• Agent/Author authority

• Object based semantics?

Journalistic commoditisation:

Cars, Jobs, Homes, Holidays

Add More Value and Control Your Voice

Change the way you think: Plug content gaps - perhaps not typically/previously related to travel

Thank You!

#TravelBabble