Not Penguin- Google gets ready to go after links spam and TIERED LINK BUILDING -THIS SUMMER

I can feel it in my bones.

Lucky for me (and you) that we've both been building 'high PR' links all year.

People who have been banking on tiers are in deep doo doo. First Squidoo, and now this. You can be sure this is the real target of Penguin 2.0.

Cutts mentions 'advertorials' are going be cracked down on. I assume guest posts fall under this category too.

He also specifically mentions people 'hanging out' at 'Black Hat Forums' and buying 'packages' are going to be hurting. LOL.

We already have a Penguin thread so I won't go on about it but in the video he mentions P2 will do a much deeper job than the first. Can you imagine the crying in here even greater than the crying at penguin 1?

Thing that makes this more than the usual we are going to get them stuff is Cutts is putting down a time table on P2 AND the tiered thing. No sense in him doing that and saying by simmer unless this is ready to roll.

Thank goodness. I can finally crack down on these so called "gurus" and call em out on how they build their links. And how arrogant they get by boasting about how much they make every freaking month. Easy marketing tactic that a bunch of newbies get caught up with.

"Oh damn! He has a maserati? By using SENUKE?! I WANT TO LEARN FROM HIM!"

I don't think Google will penalize tiered backlinks/link pyramids. I suspect they will "water down" the effects of it like they did with the EMD update (which by the way still rank).

You can still use the methods but they won't rank as quick as the old days.

I won't lie Mike, I've done very well with tiered backlinks. It's not something I would ever do with client sites but it's a perfect strategy for my EMDs (I stopped building these in 2013 but they still rank well).

I'm not overly concerned to be honest. SEO has and always will be a dynamic industry. As long as you are happy to change, you'll be fine.

I thought Matt's point about multiple SERPs not ranking from the same domain was quite interesting.

I use tiered link building all the time...

Links from .edu sites, high PR resource pages, and authority blogs have tiers that would make the average SENukex user cry tears of joy.

This one will end in tragedy. Anyway learn from penguin 1.0, diluite your damn anchors and don't over optimize your site. Penguin 1.0 was about over optimizing crap (off/on site) , same goes for the EMD update.

I predict Penguin 2.0 to be EPIC...

The lesson that should have been learned from P1 is if you're a backlink builder focus on quality across the board and throughout all tiers of link building. The GSA crowd will probably feel the harsh effects just like the Xrumer crowd has over the last few years. I feel those of us who put care into our link building and push quality over quantity will be rewarded as we were after P1. I just feel bad for those who didn't see the writing on the wall a year ago.

Xrumer guys are still ranking, I don't use it, but i've seen other sites succeed.

It's the scrapebox boys that got punished, as someone pointed out google punishes you for the no follow links. So scrapebox spam has issues.

I don't understand how you could target tiered link building. Especially if you vary the sites and anchor text. I guess thats why the google guys have a high paying job there, but it seems like it'd be something really hard to code into an algorithm. Maybe no follow link juice will fall down further or something, so you can't spam links towards the buffer sites or something.

But like someone here mentioned, there will always be a system to game.

MATT CUTTS said.... (everything in bold is mine, thought it would be helpful to break it up)

Opening and Disclaimers

Hey everybody, today's webmaster video is answering the question: "What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google?" Okay, so, first off, we're taping this video in early May of 2013, so I'll give you a little bit of an idea about what to expect as far as what Google's working on in terms of the webspam team. In terms of what you should be working on, we try to make sure that is pretty constant and uniform. Try to make sure you make a great site that users love, that they'll want to tell their friends about, bookmark, come back to, visit over and over again, ya know, all the things that make a site compelling. We try to make sure that if that's your goal, we're aligned with that goal, and therefore, as long as you're working hard for users, we're working hard to try to show your high quality content to users as well. But at the same time, people are always curious about, OK, what should we expect coming down the pipe in terms of what kinds of things Google's working on. One of the reasons that we don't usually talk that much about the kinds of things we're working on is that the plans can change. Ya know, the timing can change, when we launch things can change. So take this with a grain of salt. This is, as of today, the things that look like they've gotten some approval or they look pretty promising. Okay, with all those kinds of disclaimers, let's talk a little bit about the sort of stuff that we're working on.

Intro to Penguin 2.0

We're relatively close to deploying the next generation of Penguin. Internally, we call it "Penguin 2.0″. And again, Penguin is a webspam change that's dedicated to try to find blackhat webspam and try to target and address that. So this one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0 and we expect it to go a little bit deeper and have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin.

Topic: Paid Ads/Coverage/Links

We've also been looking at advertorials that is sort of native advertising and those sorts of things that violate our quality guidelines. So again, if someone pays for coverage or pays for an ad or something like that, those ads should not flow PageRank. We've seen a few sites in the US and around the world that take money and then do link to websites and pass PageRank. So we'll be looking at some efforts to be a little bit stronger on our enforcement as far as advertorials that violate our quality guidelines. Now there's nothing wrong inherently with advertorials or native advertising, but they should not flow PageRank and there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure so that users realize that something is paid, not organic or editorial.

Topic: Examples of Specific Niches to Be Targeted

It's kind of interesting. We get a lot of great feedback from outside of Google. For example, there were people complaining about searches like "payday loans" on Google.co.uk. So we have two different changes that try to tackle those kinds of queries in a couple different ways. We can't get into too much detail about exactly how they work, but I'm kind of excited that we're going from having just general queries be a little more cleaned to going to some of these areas that have traditionally been a little more spammy including, for example, some more pornographic queries. And some of these changes might have a little bit more of an impact in those kinds of areas that are a little more contested by various spammers and that sort of thing.

Topic:Going Upstream and More Sophisticated Link Analysis

We're also looking at some ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers--some people who spam links in various ways. We've got some nice ideas on trying to make sure that that becomes less effective and so we expect that that will roll out over the next few months as well. And in fact, we're working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated link analysis. We're still in the early days for that, but it's pretty exciting. We've got some data now that we're ready to start munging and see how good it looks and we'll see whether that bears fruit or not.

Topic: Hacked Sites

We also continue to work on hacked sites in a couple different ways, number one trying to detect them better, we hope in the next few months to roll out a next generation of hacked sites detection that is even more comprehensive, and also try to communicate better to webmasters, because sometimes they/we see confusion between hacked sites and sites that serve up malware, and ideally you have a one stop shop where once someone realizes that they have been hacked, they can go to webmaster tools and have some single spot they can go where they get a lot more info to sort of point them in the right way to hopefully clean up those hacked sites.

Topic: Shout out to the Spam Lords

So if you're doing high quality content whenever you're doing SEO this shouldn't be some big surprise you shouldn't have to worry about a lot of different changes. If you've been hanging out on a lot black hat forums and trading different types of spamming package tips and that sort of stuff then it might be a more eventful summer for you.

Topic: Authority Sites

But we have also been working on a lot of ways to help regular webmasters. We're doing a better job of detecting when someone is sort of an authority in a specific space, could be medical or could be travel or whatever, and trying to make sure that those rank a little more highly if you're some sort of authority or a site that according to the algorithms we think might be a little more appropriate for users.

Topic: "Borderline Quality" Sites... Possibly Good for Sites that Were Pandalized

We've also been looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals and we think we've got some to help refine things for the sites that are kinda in the borderzone/in the grey area a little bit. So if we can soften the effect a little bit for those sites that we believe have some additional signals of quality that will help sites that might have previously been effected to some degree by Panda.

Topic: Ranking Multiple Pages of Same Domain for the Same Query

We've also heard a lot of feedback from some people about that if I go down three pages deep I'll see a cluster of several results all from one domain. We've actually made things better that you're less likely to see that on the first page and more likely to see that on the following pages. And we're looking at a change which might deploy which would basically say that once you've seen a cluster of results from one site then you'd be less likely to see more results from that site as you go deeper into the next pages of Google search results. And that has been good feedback that people have been sending us. We continue to refine host clustering and host crowding and all those sorts of the things. But we'll continue to listen to feedback and see what we can do even better.

Topic: Back to Hacked Sites

And then we're going to keep try figuring out how to get more information to webmasters. I mentioned more information for sites that are hacked and ways they might be able to do things, we're also going to be looking for ways we can provide more concrete details, more example URLs that webmasters can use to figure out where to go diagnose their site.

Conclusion

That's just a rough snapshot of how things look right now, things can absolutely change and be in flux we might see new attacks, we might need to move our resources around, but that's a little about bit of what to expect
over the next few months in the summer of 2013.
I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm really excited about a lot of these changes
because we do see really good improvements in terms of people who are link spamming or doing various black hat spam would be less likely to show up I think by the end of the summer. And at the same time we've got a lot of nice changes queued up that hopefully will help small/medium businesses and regular webmasters as well. So that's just a very quick idea about what to expect in terms of SEO for the next few months as far as Google.

So, yeah was a mouthful.

That "Borderline Quality" Sites thingy can become a great thing.

I was never hard hit by Panda except 3 sites i never understood they got hit that hard.
They ARE borderline sites at some degree but for sure not black hat or worthless.

I already noticed they was coming back over the last 3 month, one site really good with the last panda.

The point is, that i had not the time to change them. So, i think its already the first sign of better Panda signals dealing with sites which are not total crap.

I think i will delay some other work and update that 3 sites now. With that and a Panda helping "borderline" sites they should go good.

I've tried to tell people on this forum for a while, stick with the same overall niche for backlinks & you can't go wrong. Google is all about relevancy.

A site selling golf carts looks legit If they have links pointing to other domains/pages that are selling golf clubs, golf lessons, golf vacation packages, etc...

Stop buying random links on IM forums & stay the hell away from fiverr, go straight to the legit link sources (same niche webmasters) If you have to buy links.

As long as your links are on same niche sites, you'll most likely end up getting the benefit of the links for SEO + direct niche traffic which is a safety net for traffic.

If you have a site that no webmaster would ever link to from a legit site, well, your screwed no matter what you do. You guys with the Amazon doorway pages know what I'm talking about (zero real content).

"We've got some data now that we're ready to start munging and see how good it looks and we'll see whether that bears fruit or not. "

Disavow data perhaps? Muahahhahaha

"Try to make sure you make a great site that users love, that they'll want to tell their friends about, bookmark, come back to, visit over and over again, ya know, all the things that make a site compelling."

To me, this was the most interesting quote. On the surface it sounds like generic advice, but it gives a clue to how they look at a site's popularity and legitimacy.

It's already known that they use Chrome to track bookmarks and user behavior. These human interaction signals are going to become more important as they're impossible to game.

I have my own theory about this, but it boggles my mind that they still haven't targeted backlinks within spun content. That's a pretty big one.