Top Industry News

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• 12 Best Free Social Media eBooks
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• Increase Your Following on Pinterest
  There's an interesting discussion over at SEOchat forums around various ways to increase the number of Pinterest... Read More
• Secret Link Value Factors
  Judging a link is easy when you do it based on the numbers. If the numbers are high, it's good; if they're low, it's weak. Except like everything else in SEO it's not that simple... Read More
• Ninja Song Parodies
  Song parodies have been a long standing part of Ninja Tradition. When you work in SEO long enough sooner or later everything becomes about search engines and links... Read More

SEO Tip of the Month

Google Updates: Panda 3.9 & June - July 86 Pack
Panda 3.9 was quietly announced via tweet on July 22nd with very little chatter about it but if you have been impacted by the Panda Update, it is worth checking if there have been fluctuations in Google traffic around that date. However, we have not seen any announced changes for the Penguin Update, since May 26th when Penguin 1.1 was released. Also, on August 10th, Google Search Quality Team released 86 Search Quality Updates For June & July. It is worthy to highlight that some of the updates do discuss site clustering that some webmasters have seen last month, where one domain dominates the search for a given query. There are also no less then 5 on page search quality updates, although Google is being vague regarding the details of these updates.

Knowledge Graph Expanded To English Speaking Nations
Last week, Google expanded Knowledge Graph, it's contextual and intelligent search service to English speaking countries. Since it's release a couple months ago, Knowledge Graph has released a bunch of tweaks but overall, Google believes that this will be the solution to bring visitors to a result more instantly then just showing links. Although this is a big change for certain queries, and an effort to get a leg up on competitor Wolfram Alpha and partner Bing, it has not yet deeply impacted commercial queries.

How to Find Negative SEO Artificial Backlinks
There is a lot of talk about negative SEO and the potential impact of such a strategy on websites. So, how do you detect if one of your competitors may be using this strategy against you? There are several easy ways to detect if your competitor is building low quality links to your site. One way to detect this behavior is to pull a link report from Google Webmaster Tools. In the past, this report has been an odd mix of links that Google is counting and links that they are not counting but they have made some fresh updates to show fresh links to our site that are worth exploring. Another tool worth checking out, if you're a subscriber to MajesticSEO, is their 'backlink history report. If you see a recent spike in this graph, in the number of back links to your site beyond the amount of effort that you're investing into link building, this is something worth exploring further. Also, if you're a subscriber to Ahrefs, they also offer a 'new links' report where you can evaluate if the number of back links to your site has dramatically increased. I recommend doing this check every six months or so.

This week the Ninjas are at SES San Francisco giving away awesome swag at their booth and Jim is sharing some awesome Ninja secrets :-D

Stay stealthy my friends!