GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 22 - October 2012

By Mike Litson, Blueclaw SEO: Think ahead Before writing this article I asked myself what is the most common question that I hear from clients, affiliates and pretty much anyone I meet in the online marketing sector who wants to pick my brain about all things SEO. The answer that I came up with was the inevitable, “How can I future proof my SEO? Sure, I’m doing great now, but what about in 12 months’ time?” The answer to this question is by no means a simple one, and some of it may not be pleasant to hear if you’ve been working with some “gray” to “blackish” tactics in the past. However, I’m going to try to cover the key points that you can implement to help secure your site’s position in the SERPs and avoid penalties and/or the devaluation of your work down the line. Anchor text is DEAD While I expect a lot of arguments to the contrary on this point, that doesn’t change the fact that a natural link profile for a large brand with natural links is always going to be mostly made up of brand and compound terms (compound being terms containing a mix of brand and money terms – for example, “pkr poker” pointing to pkr.com). Even though some sites are getting away with a very high amount of Money based terms, currently we are already starting to see this change. I know an awful lot of webmasters who have recently received warnings from Google in Webmaster Tools (WMT) about unnatural link profiles and a lot of them seem to be guilty as charged. There are other factors involved in this, but anchor text does seem to be a major contributor. Future Proofing SEO 8