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Penalty Avoidance

Find out how to prepare your website for a Google Algorithm update and avoid getting your site penalised.

Case Study for google algorithm update

How to Prepare Your Website for a Google Algorithm Update [Case Study]

I hope that you’ve never had to go through the pain of being hit by an algorithmic update. You wake up one morning, your traffic is decimated, and your rank tracker is littered with red arrows. Algorithmic penalties are not a subject I like to trivialize, that’s why the case study I am about to share with you is different than most you’ve read before. This case study is a testament of faith and hard work by my agency, The Search Initiative, in light of a huge shift in the SEO landscape. Unfortunately, with core algorithmic updates you can’t simply change a few things and expect to get an immediate ranking recovery. The best you can do is prepare for the next update round. If you’ve done all the right things, you experience gains like you’ve never seen before. Read More

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7 “White Hat” Link Types that Can Get you Penalized in 2024

Foreword by Matt Diggity: Very shortly, I’m going to be turning things over to Rick Lomas. Rick is an expert in manual penalty removal. I’ve been working with him for quite some time, helping folks recover from manual actions, whether they be “unnatural links”, “thin content”, etc. Starting last year with a Christmas Day spree of manual actions going after scholarship link building, we’ve seen an uncanny amount of manual penalties being triggered by supposedly whitehat seo techniques. This is kicked up significantly in 2018 as we’ve had 3 waves of manual penalty sprees already, compared to typically one-per-year. Rick has kept track of all the “white hat” link types that Google themselves has pointed out problems with. You’re about to learn all of them. Read More

How to lift AN ALGORITHMIC PENALTY

How to 91x Website Traffic – A Case Study Blueprint for 2024

Every once in a while you run an SEO campaign that changes the way you do everything. The lessons you learn, the challenges you face, and the results you achieve inspire you to rewrite your whole SEO gameplan. This is the story of one of those SEO campaigns. As you might already know, I’m a director of a very talented SEO agency called The Search Initiative (TSI).  Since coming on, we’ve encountered many wins and this case study is one of them. In a few months, we lifted their algorithmic penalty and increased traffic by 9,109%.  You’re about to learn the exact steps we took to achieve this. You’ll learn: A detailed onsite, offsite, and technical SEO audit process How to repair algorithmic penalty problems A safe link building strategy for Conversion rate optimization strategies for fast growth Fair warning: the strategies detailed ahead are intense but worth it. Here’s the success one reader found after following this case study: Read More

10beasts interview

The Story of 10Beasts.com – An Uncensored Interview with Luqman Khan

About a year ago, I was introduced to a site called 10beasts.com. At the time, it was an 8-page affiliate website in the technology niche that quickly busted out of the sandbox in six-figure profitability within 8 months.  December 2016, it broke $80k. This site became incredibly popular when it was featured on Glen Alsop’s Gaps.com.  I mean, how often does someone go public with an affiliate website of this level? Fast forward one year… 10Beasts grew in size and earnings and flipped for over half a million dollars. And then the unspeakable happened. It got penalized with an unnatural links manual action in Google Search Console. And guess what? The penalty had recovered in 5 days. Meet Luqman Khan. Luqman is the creator, builder, and recoverer of 10beasts. In this no-holds-barred interview, Luqman discusses the entire story of 10beasts, how he got it ranked, how he sold it, and how he recovered it. Read More

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How to Block Google Fonts and More: A Paranoid Schizophrenic’s Guide to Tin Hat SEO

Most folks are familiar with the various types of SEO. We have black hat SEO, where people are using techniques like content automation, backlinking software, hacked sites, and sneaky redirects in order to climb the ranks. On the other side of the equation, we have our white hatters, who like to stay within the guidelines of Google’s terms of service. Somewhere in the middle, we have the grey hats, who dabble in a bit of both. But, you may not have heard about the ever elusive band of SEO’s called the “tin hats.”  In a nutshell, tin hat SEO has a lot less to do with actual “ranking” then it does with “generally being freaked the hell out about everything crashing down in a single instant and ruining everything you’ve setup for the past year.”  Read about the origin of the term “tin hat” here. Tin hats are often the butt of jokes in the SEO community.  They’re made fun of because of their lack of actual progress in ranking and earning due to the immense amount of time spent geeking-out about Google reading their emails, tracking their IPs, and discovering their foot prints. Laugh as you might, but we all have a little tin hat inside of us.  I know I do. Read More