 This huge stock listed multi-billion dollar company and I had the problem that after 10 minutes I found out that there was a Misunderstanding of what a link on a page going out of the page and a link to that page wasn't clear To that person that was probably responsible for 500 jobs just in Germany alone Yeah, so right now just to clarify I'm talking only about links going from outside the web or from outside your website into your website for the simple reason that this is the secret of Google I'll get to that in a moment But everything that probably the conference covers besides that is about content where you link out or where you do internal linking Which is important too but This is a picture of the web and if you try to answer the question our links important You have to look at this because what we see here as the nodes or the dots are Websites or maybe pages on websites and these edges here also called links Are the connection from A to B and this is not about an href tag This is not about a charter script link. This is about a path For a human going from one piece of content to the other piece of content This is true inside your website, but also outside your website on the whole web If a search engine as they always say it tries to understand what we as humans do you cannot not Use this the webs is content and links and you cannot not see it Who have you heard that yandex actually turned off their links and as a search engine? It was like three years ago. Yandex turned off the links and still wanted to serve search results That was true for three months, and they turn it back on Google themselves confirmed in 2016 October 2016 that ranking without links is really really hard It's not impossible, but really really hard in most cases this guy here who called himself search quality senior strategist at Google which is Google speak for senior developer said what do you talk about the third ranking factor? Which was rank brain or is rank brain number two and number one? Are content and links? That's what made Google popular in 1989 This guy certain burnestly invented the web and the web was hypertext hypermedia You know back then some of you may remember those CD-ROMs multimedia CD-ROMs That was multimedia and that guy invented a connection from a to b and called it hyperlinks And suddenly the web was complete and it doesn't matter which technical implementation will look at the idea to follow people Where they serve the web or could serve the web is what made Google successful And this is still the core of Google and all the other search engines that somehow compete with Google or comparable Who have you noticed HubSpot a content marketing? Product marketing automation head of global marketing Now with two names even harder to pronounce Matt And no info for I don't know ten years just treated this a couple weeks ago There's hardly anything then awesome links to push your rankings and they specifically have a product that sells and supports of course content marketing Creating great content and waiting for links to come Well, who have you tried that finding great content and expecting links to come in and lots of visitors Works awesome Of course, I'll say some words about that But there is a little piece of the puzzle missing that I'm gonna talk about links have a huge interest in a industry We have over a thousand new software trials of our software package per month of link research tools Okay, so how to build those great links some ideas that still work I could talk for weeks We have a multi-day training just for special cases But some ideas that still work and I want to start with the most Interesting one for many of you because many agencies and Google Scares the hell out of you to not buy links. Oh, you shouldn't buy links You get into trouble you violate the terms and conditions blah blah blah blah blah and because of that We shouldn't buy links because we will penalize you. Yes. Who have you does Facebook advertising? Come on Facebook ads Okay, and who of you was recently throttled down by Facebook Because you did too much of engagement bates or cat content or would you rather drink coke or fun stuff? Huh any of you? Okay, it happens to companies with multi million dollar budgets that the engine that they paid Throttles them down and changes the rules if they find out that it has been gained Just it has been gained for many years with links Okay, when it comes to links you want to find the right ones you want to do risk assessment on links before you build them There was a time until 2012 where you could build and my key here in the audience knows exactly what I'm talking about Where you could build any link and nothing would happen or something good would happen and then check good It changed the rules so that either positive effects or negative effects would happen, which is actually not surprising now looking back Anyways, we don't want to get caught by cooby. I don't want to say buying links is without risk but Isn't that true for about everything in life? Or in other words just following the terms and conditions of cooby does not guarantee good rankings and cooby went on file seeing that as well Okay, having great content and amplifying that Gentlemen, you built great content. Did you amplify it which is a buzzword in the recent 12 to 20 months? Did you amplify that great content? Did you send out some emails about that content? Did you buy some Facebook ads for? amplifying that content which is means Giving that content a wider reach Anyone doing that or just yeah, okay. Did it work? You're happy with the results so far or at least you got a little bit out of it, right? You made sure that the content is yeah It's better than not doing exactly and with micro segments with custom targeting That actually Facebook got on the fire a lot recently. You are able to put Content in the front of an audience that potentially either buys or shares or links. Yeah This is one way to do it sending it to an email list is another way to do it I'm sure the privacy laws Changing will scare some people off from cold lists, which you shouldn't use anyways But just sending it out to your existing customers is something that a lot of companies do anyways Those companies do not that do not use their newsletter list to get their customers or their fans See the audience are writing that content for nothing Every potential reader is a potential linker. Okay There are software solutions for using mass Emailing in a smart way like pitchbox with which is a product we integrate with sorry By the way, who of you enjoys the spring weather Yeah, who of you has a porn allergy as well ah Great it went great last year, so I didn't take any medications until this morning. So that's why my eyes are red In case you noticed We have some educational products about building such linked networks or buying links For those of you who are not aware What this is Buying a link on some website is what gets you started buying a lot of websites and Connecting them to something that is actually a part of the web and making it look really really smart is what a lot of Large brands do a lot of large brands build small artificial parts of the web when I say small I mean a couple dozen maybe a couple hundred and employ an army of webmasters and content writers and outreach people to artificially Build that part of the web that they fully control. This is where it goes for large companies in verticals that need Organic search who if you know as an example of a company or a vertical an industry that needs Link-building that needs SEO where you cannot get away with oh we do AdWords. We do Facebook Ponsites of course you run concerts I worked for the biggest concerts in the world many years ago, so I know a thing or two from that agency business We were in all of these Verticals another example who cannot advertise on Facebook or AdWords Of course grambling a gambling your pharmaceutical products or most of them I mean legislation changes in many countries, but there is something very popular who of you is not happy that Bitcoin dropped to 7000 They just cut it all out the whole market of crypto just suddenly needs links and SEO Because they cannot advertise anywhere So all of these loans credit cards payday loans cash advances mortgages all of that and all these companies the bigger ones build their own networks Okay, and some of you may have heard about Google always taking care of this and Panelizing and this is true if you overdo it if you get too big if you try to shortcut it Google goes after you large companies suffer that Smaller companies not so much. We looked at some examples and in January We looked at 43 manual actions that Google took that fell into that time frame Where let's say the industry or the scene the SEO scene talked about PBM penalties The truth is there was no PBM penalty at all It was just made up fluff another scar tactic fear uncertainty and doubt are typically Let's say mechanisms that Google uses what we just saw is strong pages with overdone anchor text optimizations Which means people were too greedy and let's say too risk-taking But the good news is you can undo these things fairly quick if you know your money Inca text ratios if you don't know your distribution of link texts in the world Then you have a problem if you don't know what your competitors Inca text ratios in their backing profile is you don't know what blends in so you don't know if you and when you have Overdone it. These are things that we analyze for many many years In a nutshell you can say that great links Don't fall from the trees or get served from a silver plate Thinking outside the box today is more important than ever Again, if you search the web on how to build links if you search the web for these forums blog posts a lot of free knowledge is Dangerous because everything that is from pre-2012 gets in trouble everything that is let's say Not so much to read and comprehend that you can read it on your phone. I would not even start looking at most of the time It could be misleading one of those things I want to still address because it's been going around in the last weeks in the SEO industry It's called fake links Actually, not fake links, but it's an old but still working trick Company profiles are companies. We write about your company. We put this in your press profile We gonna write a great interview with your CEO and your CEO and your CEO and then all these companies feel really really um pampered ego-stroken And the link back to me Your company links back to me because I interviewed a CEO your company links back to me because I interviewed a CEO Etc. And that is also called a reciprocal linking and Google would figure that out and take it out of the equation and The simple and old trick is and you can look at that with a free browser extension that we have called link redirect trace that many SEOs use for chrome and firefox The simple trick is simply make that page Where I link out to you and no index. That's a technical directive for Avoiding that page getting indexed or followed by you can tweak this there are let's say now at least 15 different variations of how To do it which we all display here But if you see some red then this is a red flag for that link that you just got out of this barter Yeah, it's a little bit technique Technically, but actually easier to spot if you do this in bulk, of course link research tools has you know The capability to analyze hundreds or thousands or millions of links to do that. You don't want to do that one by one And we have a couple more details. So for example, if you're getting links from websites That's specifically walk some specific bots Like a driv spot or majestic pot. It means someone is sitting there Knowing that they don't want to see their links. Someone is trying to hide the links From typically link products link database or link analysis products That actually is a red flag too because we're a link Analytics product as well. I have to say We do not comply with the robots Directive this gets us a lot of complaints But our job is not to be a nice bot our job is to find links and That's a trade-off because between you know being not so nice Let's say according to some guidelines that the ITF came up with and providing data for a competitive Advantage and you need that in some industries Yeah, because you could get into trouble not seeing all your links Watch out for toxic redirects. Who of you does redirects on the website himself on the HE axis? Okay the other ones more or less rely on Yoast SEO who if you uses Yoast SEO show of hands Okay, and the other ones use other plugins, I guess and the all they all Use a 301 redirect Which is actually also recommended by Google the problem is and we found that in 2013 if you have a website that has toxic links That has a penalty You can get into trouble With that redirect who of you did a rebranding or a domain name change in the last five years Did you make sure that the website that you redirected does not have a penalty? You still have Google search console connected and checked out if there are any penalties Did you do a link audit on those links? Because in May 2013 The rules changed and that redirect passes on the penalty and we wrote a lot of case studies one for a big retailer called home 24 who got themselves into trouble not with bad linking tactics on their main brand But actually previous websites that they migrated over in 2012 in 2011 So Google changed the rules and hide side We need to be aware that not only the tax authorities change the rules and hindsight and penalize us Google also does that and did that and he was to the thing that you know who knows the name of this little character anyone Come on Gary I also Gary Ilyas I never know how to pronounce this is I think it's Portuguese But he's a press speaker or webmaster relations is sort of say that the press Related that the press relations team from Google to webmasters and I met him many times But in September I walked up to the stage where he just came off and gave him one of the shirts with his You know nice character on that we printed Thousands from actually and he said you do for a fantastic job or great job of reminding people about the importance of links And we don't appreciate that Because that is still that one thing that guru needs that they cannot Fix themselves They cannot and they tried even met cards many years ago Confirmed that they tried to take links out of the equation and confirmed that this is the one strong signal that all the way It's spammed. Although it has negative aspects sometimes to rank negative from their point of view is that we push the rankings Keep in mind SEO does not mean just following the Google guidelines. SEO stands for search engine optimization or If you want for search engine ranking manipulation Just playing by the book and making your website clean fast HDPS SSL Fast converting. This is what you want anyways. This is an hygiene factor Nobody wants to work in an office with a spoiled toilet. Nobody wants to visit a bad website That is slow where he feels insecure, but that doesn't get you better rankings guru promised better rankings anyone followed that You get better rankings if you put on an SSL Trick you and did you get better rankings? Did you also clean up other stuff at the same time? Yeah, I have not found a single isolated test for that And I think it's great to put websites on SSL. I think it's great that website should be fast websites need to be Pleasant for the user because if websites are not then users don't use it and then Google returns shitty results from a user standpoint but That is not necessarily Acquisition just because a website is fast doesn't improve its rankings and All things being equal all having the same links then the faster website wins Anyways Google said Sometimes we figure all of this out. You don't need to worry actually Gary Illes said Quote I Don't like the disavow tool. I don't use it on my own website That's what he said and discuss into this. We figured all out themselves and on The other hand at the same time a question for all the bad links or just bad links and We have seen a lot of recoveries in the last one and a half years tremendous recoveries where companies big brands like Hertz Eastern Europe could five extra traffic by just cleaning up their links fixing some redirects It's not That they did anything bad. We just cleaned up trash that they earned You get bad links naturally on the web from scrapers, but let's imagine for a moment that Google would Change the orders and rules and hide inside and make all bad links work negative Let hundred thousands of websites then drop overnight Google would never do that right Google doesn't do evil. Who remembers that statement from Google, huh? Who if you remember when it was taken out of there the official Google, huh? It's like a couple years ago already. It's not in there anymore It worked really really great whole generation of webmasters Followed it I didn't Anyways in 2012 Google changed the rules in hindsight and that's the thing called Google Penguin It's in its current version number 4.0 and automated links BAM algorithm still that works on a granular level. So Even single keywords single pages single folders could be De-moded could be penalized could be you know pushed back in the rankings real time means a single crawl can affect your rankings already Real time is not really real time But from a search engine point of view it means the moment they crawl it They can recalculate that and that was different in 2012 where the rankings dropped essentially overnight but only when everything was recrawled so thousands of websites dropped overnight and It looked like that And if all your traffic drops overnight, that's not a fun time You come to the office on Monday morning. Who have you experienced a drop like that? The phone doesn't ring IT is crazy. Everyone's hair red head Marketing's fault. It's technicals false. No the website is broken all of these things and some companies did not notice this for weeks They didn't get any new traffic from Google For a long time and that changed however It can now silently hold you back because if only some important Folders go down. You do not anymore Expect apparently like this This was a great time when we've been around to the 12th already to diagnose if you have thousands of websites that drop And thousands of websites that win you can collect a lot of data like we did From 10,000 of penalties because we give away our product for free and then analyze today This is all soft and it drops down a little bit a little bit and some people don't even know they have a penalty on some They blame the content. They blame the website speed. They blame the SSL. They blame the keywords to blame the conversion rate They blame whatever of anything and don't even look at the audit of their backlinks So it could silently hold you back and make your efforts worthless There's a simple trick to you know, at least check that off your list It means Auditing your backlinks looking at your backlinks. Who of you did a backlink audit in the last 12 months 24 months three years Four years who if you have never done a backlink audit or looked at his external backlinks Okay, who of you is too intimidated from this question There's a lot of different ways to do audits like that, but Most of them suck Because it always has to do with taking some link data looking at that and saying it's fine It's not going to the dentist and saying hey check this tooth here. And if this tooth is okay The rest of my teeth is not So this is why we specialize in our product and under doings for many many years to combining so many different link data sources In general when it comes to should we do this? Oh, I don't need that Google is gonna take care of this anyway I don't care about this Kemper guy You want to be better safe than sorry if you work for a company that there's so many different things and You cannot say we check this off our list We could cross out that the backlinks are even remotely responsible for what we're seeing and a negative Then what are you doing in a data-driven marketing space? So I'll link out. It's a link more monitoring important. Let's remember for a moment that Links bring you real traffic. And when I say real traffic, I mean people clicking on it and buying stuff Let's forget SEO. Let's turn off Google They can lead to actual purchases a link that is broken will not do that So any broken link is a problem anyways regardless of Google and the other search engines But the good ones help you big and Google and other search engines For instance, we have a lot of new business now from the Eastern Europe and Russia I don't know what's going on there, but they seem to get more and more money So Jannecks plays a role Of course the opposite is possible too and a link can be totally worthless now. It can even be, you know, risky It can hurt your rankings in Google and other search engines because Bing Jannecks they all have their algorithms to penalize Does it make sense to watch those links? I say yes and therefore a link-outed guide that we have is a self-do-it-yourself Handbook if you want an ebook. I think with 80 pages is super popular in our link research tools Academy At the SMX Munich, I even made a presentation about some free links are free link tools So there's plenty of stuff that can get you started The takeaway is you don't want to leave this up to Google because all the webmasters from the past 15 years left it up to Google were screwed They were screwed. I've seen them all screwed That's the truth. It's your website. It's your traffic and you expect Google to do good for you And this will work as long as it's good for Google Who view the schema markups? Hmm. Ah, great stuff. Let's make it easier for Google to index all of that and then put it into the carousel, huh? Let's replace all those travel sites with my own travel finder would never happen, huh? They spend too much at words. Oh wait, it just happened right in some countries. I Would not leave all of that up to Google especially not if you get 140 character recommendations on Twitter This is a little bit more from Gary on Facebook where he talks about how it's not about sites getting demoted But parts of the website getting demoted So a quick reminder is to monitor important folders and pages every day for the rankings if you drop in rankings for Your folders for some keywords. This is a problem and who of you has a disavow file already There were some when was the last time you looked at that and removed some disavows Huh ever Remember that panic attack in 2012 when you wanted to disavow everything to get out of a penalty, maybe maybe the web has changed Meanwhile, it's been six years And we see Who of you has taken on a client? Maybe agency a client from another company and has earned or inherited a disavow file That should be a main Topic whenever you take on a new job as a webmaster. Is there an existing disavow file? I can tell you in my disavow file for my company one trainee added two Very special disavow commands one was for Adobe comm and the other one was for SEM rush Who view knows SEM rush? I mean Adobe? I guess we all are aware. That was a link 2004 super trust is super worthy and disavowing therefore is a way to build great links And when you look at your past disavow file and you realize there are some good links in there that shouldn't be in there You can take it out, but please make sure you boost or link detox boost is the topic Thank you 15 To make that disavow file work faster for those who may be confused by the disavow file That's a simple text file where we can tell Google this and this and this link or this and this in this domain should not count Yeah Okay, so which links matter go for high trust links. What's a high trust link? It's websites like BBC or Newspapers, but be careful with newspapers for example newspapers Engage in links selling Some of them engage a lot in links selling and that makes them a potential target for Google spam algorithms So just because you think it's trusted doesn't mean it's trusted and therefore we have a way to Emulate a risk of a link before it's actually built you want to go for low or very low risk links in the first place So again, I also call this a time machine for links with all the data that we have and the knowledge that we have In the past six years of machine learning on spam links and what Google did to those spam links We can simulate what would happen if you get a link Fun fact is I even got sued in 2014 in Germany This thing was tested in German court and the current German court decided that this is actually in line with what Google does Someone thought this is all bullshit. I don't like it. It was a link seller, of course He didn't like my judgment and therefore he sued us big time and we won so That was quite annoying to prove to a court, but I think it worked And how this works is if you have a list of links where you a list of websites Where you would like to get a link or can buy a link or have a friend that would you know? like to have another drink and would then place a link for you tomorrow or Have this interview with and see oh that you know needs a link back You could just put it in a list Simulating all of this together with our data and then we would spit out the risk before the link is built because the problem Is if you have that link, it's already toxic by the moment. It's built and crawled you want to avoid that So you don't have to clean up later Okay, so which links to work with and which to audit I said it before and I repeat again It's of utmost importance that you look at all the links not just a fraction. It's a tooth example and I give you Lots of smart people in the room you all know statistics, I guess extraplating data, you know when what they do when the election is up Brexit United States they have some Statistics some numbers a little sample and then they try to decide is it a or B. Is it president this or president that? We know that that didn't work so well and maybe Facebook had their fingers in the play as well But essentially if statistics is about deciding a or B or C from a defined set what we're doing here is the orange piece of the cake is unknown number of domains and domain names You cannot extrapolate domain names. You cannot extrapolate Places where a link is unless you crawl the whole web as Big as possible by combining the data. You don't know where those links are So and then you find a good the bad and the ugly and of course we want to keep the good ones We want to disavow the bad ones. We want to tell Google. Hey Google these links are bad And I don't like them and so you shouldn't count them for me and again Google there are some rumors Google will figure it all out by themselves and The simple reason why they would not do it is if you look at their HR profile 99.9% of Google employees are what? Google Edwards ad account managers selling advertising on a search engine We all know Google as a search engine for organic rankings, but the core product is actually very small Google is an Advertisement company that sells ads on top of this search engine on top of a second search engine They bought YouTube and there is a couple. Let's say 20 30,000 people that we call webmasters or SEOs that game Or or work with that search engine and that's about it It's a small portion for Google actually they don't have the time or the resources Inside allocated to do all that because really They don't care too much on many things Although they might say different but in industries That are very competitive. We see all of this on a regular basis All of these tricks work all of these tactics work If there is enough fire in the market if you work for a let's say boring niche where there's little competition If you only have five competitors, you don't need SEO at all because then you always have ten results on the first page And you should be one of them. Yeah, if your website is fast has nice content on it and SSL Okay, but the ugly ones we want to repair. What's an ugly link? It's a broken link It's a broken link where people cannot visit my website anymore. It's Maybe a link that goes to previous version of my website so maybe I'm just finished migrating from a dot PHP kind of site structure To clean URLs using Yoast SEO. I hope all those redirects are there If not Looking at the server locks alone is not enough most of the time we find a lot of let's say ancient links from a long time ago Going to parts of the website where there are no visitors give you an example for financial sites websites that have been around for ten years Whenever a new company started, it's usually registered with whatever a bank directory a finance advisor directory All of these links are in long long very reputable, but hard to get lists Same with essentially every company So we find that the bad and the other ones often hide in this bigger chunk of not so fresh links If you just look at the links that you got in the last couple of weeks couple months Maybe in the one last one two years for many companies. That's not enough so Who of you is confused now? Thank you so much. I was waiting for some of you. I I get it. I tried to achieve that In a certain way because I needed to pitch you on the link research to his academy. I Can say that there is more knowledge that I can you know provide in a day in a week Everything off-page everything linking redirects penalties. Let's say is a certain art or a certain part of SEO and SEO is already a niche inside online marketing Everyone who wants to make you believe that all these connections that are talked about Are not important or not worth looking at Doesn't have the time or the resources or the will to look into that. So this is why we only do linking We do only back linking So we have a couple trainings and online training like the LAT associate that you can do in a couple hours To get deeper into this topic We have two-day workshops one in Vienna end of April in English where we have one seat left and one in German And we even have these, you know info products or e-books As you may know them For example on how to build such a link network. They already start at a certain level of Technical detail and If you're interested You can actually get that at 50% off until next week if you would like to hear more about my background From software development building a company and how I learned coding with my dad age of 10 So I could build my computer games at 13 Then I have 20 books for you that I can sign with you for today with today's date So you can later on say you got one of the early works from Christoph because I'm writing the second book already And the one last thing that I have here is we're searching for developers surprise surprise any developers in the room I've been sitting in a developer session before Maybe you know something that knows some know someone that knows someone full-stack react Java back-end test attack writer and Just to be clear We're not just a backlink checker a lot of what we do is actually competitive research and Trying to make sense of all the data combining a lot of link data is not the objective What we do is we look at that and try to understand for websites What makes sense to actually pursue if you are selling let's say pet toys You have huge competition anyways with Amazon. Everyone knows that you got Amazon and eBay there So it starts with a simple question of you know, does it actually make sense to spend my time and money on that? this is usually not done and I'm talking about large companies not knowing what they're doing because they spend tons of money on Some let's say keyboards or verticals or products that they can not win That's the truth. It's 2018 competitive analysis should actually be in this image here the first one is learning but because it's a circular thing It's okay. We start here. We learn we grow them. We recover them. We protect Um Yeah, if you're passionate love to work hard with a great team in a nice place learn from the best in an exciting industry I think that you can make a difference that I want to meet you. This is what I would ask you to pass on For my team you can now ask me anything and I think I'm done in time, right?