Becoming an Authority - Recovering from Florida/Austin Options

[Webby]

Like many search engine marketing companies, some clients have been negatively effected by the Florida/Austin update (read disappeared from the serps). I have carried out my own research and have read many reports and analysis on the Florida / Austin algorithm here and elsewhere. I'm increasingly seeing more references to Localrank and Hilltop as the most likely factors regarding the new algorithm and these articles and reports back up my own research.

I'd like to make perhaps some practical suggestions, or at least things to try out, for those affected by Florida/Austin.
Disclaimer: These suggestions are essentially for trial purposes and I do not claim to hold the definitive answer.

Becoming an authority

Localrank is essentially all about the inter connectivity of pre-florida SERPs for a given keyword. It is believed to be based upon the top 1000 pages of the old serps, although I suspect it is likely to be less. What this means is that the results of the top pre-Florida SERPS (old algorithm) get put through a new filter which then forms the basis for the current SERPs. The localrank is calculated, in layman’s terms, by the amount of incoming links a website has from websites that were previously ranked well in the old SERPS. In other words, are websites on your theme/keyword that were previously well ranked, linking to you?

There is then a calculation based upon the old algorithm SERPs (OldScore) x Localrank (LRscore) to determine the Florida/Austin SERPs.

Evidence that theming/localrank/Hilltop is factored in to the current algorithm is pretty strong imo. There are the odd exceptions but they may well apply to ‘weak’ themes (weak meaning not commonly searched for terms).
Portals, large websites, sub domains of authority sites, High pr sites (7+), resource/info sites and professional spam sites are rising to the top.
On ‘weak’ themes there is a correllation between the number of internal pages indexed and the fact that the internal pages that are ranking well, have the exact phrase as the file name.

As mentioned, I’m seeing a great deal of websites at the top of the current serps that have lots of incoming links from not only similarly related sites but even their competitors. For the most part the top sites are indeed authorities on their subject. For those that aren’t authorities on their theme, yet still rank well, the website owners seem to have a large marketing budget and/or carry out:

1. Purchase of text links on similarly related sites.
2. Blog spam
3. Have multiple domains (on varying c-block ip numbers.)

Of the varying theories out there what I personally don’t buy is:
a. There is an over optimization filter. Many sites at the top of florida/austin keywords have high kw densities, h1 tags etc.
b. The Google Adwords trigger theory. That Google have specifically targeted keywords based on Adword price for example. I believe Google has enough search data to know what is a "strong" theme (many searches) and what is a "weak" theme (terms with few searches).

So how do you get to be one of the authority sites?

Well of course, the usual way is to create great content that webmasters will feel is worthy of linking to. Not any old link will suffice, but links from sites that are themselves regarded as authority sites. For "weak" themes I still see good results from high link popularity that are not necessarily thematic. Hence for weak themes you will likely see link farm spam rising to the top.

Here some suggestion for becoming an authority site:

1. Get a link from DMOZ, this supports the theming theory believed to be in place as the category page you have your link, is highly likely to have lots more occurrences of your keyword /theme and be very thematic (unless it’s a regional category). I am seeing a lot of google directory category links visible on the very top of Austin results.
2. There may well now be a stronger case for forking out the $299 for a Yahoo link. Although I haven’t tested this out yet so the Yahoo link may not be weighted.
3. More effort should be taken in finding thematic portals and quality directories where site submissions are accepted for review (in google try ‘keyword directory’ / ‘keyword +submit site’ etc.)
3. As links from a website of the same theme and links from authority sites appear to be important, you might consider trading links with a competitor. Here you might think Webby’s lost his marbles with that suggestion :-) but trading a link with a competitor that is ranking well in the current SERPs may bring about a large boost for your own site. Not easy to pursuade, but with a well formulated email feasible.
4. Large sites have by default lots of content. More content is likely to mean more chance of you getting one or more of your sub-pages linked to. It is also logical that large sites are seen by google as more effort being taken by a webmaster and the site deemed more of an authority than a smaller site. This suggests increasing the size of your website to compare with the number of indexed pages of the top sites in the current serps ('site:www.domain.com' in google). Think glossary/lexicon, faq, forum, detailed product description…) as potential areas for creating more pages.
5. Create something unique such as an on/offline tool or perhaps a research article. Basically something of worth that none of your competitors have on their sites.
6. If applicable to your theme, create a forum. This has two advantages, if it is an se friendly forum you will get many more pages indexed (I have thirty odd thousand pages indexed, mostly coming from my German language SEM forum). The other advantage is that posts in a forum regularly get linked to from other forums, or if it's a particularly good post, perhaps directly from an authority site.
7. If you are knowledgeable in your field, write articles and place them on your website (don't syndicate immediately). If the article is of worth, authority sites may well link to it. A little public relations (the other PR) can help here to get an article published on a major authority site, be sure to get that backward link though.
8. Google have a new patent for distinguishing duplicate pages and near duplicate pages. The important bit is 'near' duplicate pages. If you have several domains and the content is not completely duplicated, but very similar, consider a new layout and re-wording paragraphs to make the sites more different.
9. Google can identify crosslinking on multiple domains with the same ip c-block. A lot of the crosslinking merchants have lost their ranking because they hosted their multiple domains on the same c-block and none of the domains were themselves authorities. Another reason why professional spammers are still in the serps is that their multiple domains are on completely different ip blocks and they have a budget to buy their links (no names but you know I'm sure yourselves of examples of this).
Having multiple domains in itself is not however spam. Don't kick the proverbial out of cross linking and review your hosting arrangements. Are they on the same ip c-block?

For mom & pop small online businesses, getting a high ranking just got much harder. Most cannot afford to purchase text links from similarly related websites, they cannot compete with the professional spammers who have dozens of separate domains with separate ip blocks as the hosting of such is unaffordable. They can only rank well for minor (weak) terms as some posts here have already highlighted.

On-page optimization is still a factor but much less than it used to be imo. What imo smaller websites, that don't have link purchase kind of budgets can do, is to increase the size if their website as mentioned in point 4 above. Perhaps also split 'scrolly' pages in to 2-3 smaller pages.

On a side note, I've researched the No. of backward links and No. of indexed pages for many florida top 10 serps. There seems to be some correlation between the top results and:
a. Many backward links + many indexed pages
b. fewer backward links but many indexed pages.
c. Many backward links but few indexed pages.

I believe it is the combination of these two factors (No. of thematic links and site size) which determines an authority page, especially links from sites of the same theme. It is like there is some kind of a threshold where sites are filtered out and in. I don’t know what the threshold is but I imagine it is based on the strength of the theme and competition.

So, new sites with low budgets, or those hit by Austin/Florida need to increase the the number of pages in their sites, get something unique on their site which makes the site of value in order to get linked to. Really what Google and other SEM professionals have been saying all along.

However, more and more 3-4 word search terms are no longer showing up highly relevant 'smaller' websites due to the new algo placing far too much emphasis on authority.
The results often show authority sites coming tops with 3-4 keyword phrases with the keyword phrase, or even just half the phrase, occuring just once or twice. This hardly makes the page relevant. This is not good. It means that if you ranked well before and have now lost your ranking, It doesn’t matter how relevant your pages are or how good your on-page optimization is, if you aren’t an authority or at least becoming one, you have no chance of getting found unless it really is a very niche keyword phrase. You might want to do some synonym/thesaurus checks to find relevant terms that do not include a 'strong' keyword. That way you probably have more chance of getting found.

I can't tell you for sure if localrank or hilltop is in use. It is most likely a combination of the two plus some more filtering we don’t know about which might explain some anomalies. There again, i might also be completely wrong.

Anyway, I just thought that I’d at least provide perhaps some practical ideas to try out. For those devastated by Austin/Florida, some of my suggestions might be worth trying. It certainly cant hurt your site.

Cheers
Alan

[netguy]

Webby

That's the best overview of the situation I've read so far - many thanks.

You may be wrong about certain points but what you say makes a lot of sense. I also don't buy the over optimization hypothesis.

If I can throw in my cent's worth:

Make sure the links you get will be "proper" links direct to the website and not just to script that forwards to your site.

[NorthStar]

I agree that this is a great summary and it agrees with everything I've seen. I would also like to point out that this is the first place that I've seen it mentioned (other than by me) that size matters. I've proposed this before and see plenty of evidence. Its not just page rank that matters but the size of the overall site. There is plenty of evidence of this. And it just makes sense as a factor in an algorithm.

Nice work

[rustybrick]

I think it is important to add:

There is a lot of discussion about what is an "Authority" and I feel it is important to clarify the differences of authorities and hubs, plus show you how a search engine will use both concepts to rank a page.

Authority: What makes a page an authority? There is strong belief that an authority is determined by the value of their InDegree (an InDegree in our terms is the number of pages linking from page A to page . The larger the number, the more authoritative that page is in terms of the types of themed pages that are linked to that page. A page within a theme is stronger based on the number of times a query term is found within the page.

This works just fine by itself for ranking pages if we did not have words with double or even triples meanings (windows, java, etc.). To make up for this factor we need something called "hubs" to help determine the best possible returned results for a keyword phrase.

Hubs: What makes up a hub? A hub can be defined as a site or page that has many links from pages that have the same links. So page A links to page B and page C, page B links to page A and page C, page C links to page A and page B and so on. The more similar and related links, the larger the hub is.

By looking at the authority of a page (InDegree) plus the hub or hubs the page is within (the similarity), the search engine can provide a better results page then just by looking at authority.

Most this information is from an article published by Jon Kleinberg while he as at Cornell. I tried to summarize to help us all understand the importance of what we are calling "authority sites". Paper can be found at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf[/i]

[cline]

Webby, thanks for such a well-thought-out summary of what's probably going on with the Google algorithm.

I'm quite convinced of the issue about multiple interlinked sites on the same IP and about duplicated copy. I've got only one client that has been substantively negatively affected by the changes in Google, and it's the only client I have running multiple cross-linked niche-oriented sites on the same IP, and using a modest amount of duplicated content between the sites.

[Webby]

Well, of all my thesis that one is actually perhaps not quite the case. I'm hearing reports of sites right up there with extensive cross linking on the same ip address. I really am not sure about the IP c-block thing. Since I wreote my article there has been some firming up of my thesis from many people who have noticed the same. I've got a few tests out which should help in being in more of a position to confirm my theory (and should add others). We shall see. Google I'm sure hasn't finidshed with its fun and games yet anyway. Too much authority and not enough relevance right now. I'm sure they havent done tweaking and this next update (probably very soon, if not tomorrow or even tonight) should help or muddy the waters even more :-)

Cheers
Alan

[searchbuffet]

From one of the notes to SE supremacy, you put "use a SE friendly message board"...do you know any names? Is Ikonboard SE friendly? Any help would be appreciated, but thanks for the large informative article already.

[Webby]

Truth be told, no it isnt. It is a cgi board and although with a lot of Mod_rewriting you may get the urls flat, there are other boards that are much more search engine friendly. php boards tend to be the most flexible. Particlularly phpbb (this board and my own). I wrote an article on the subject of forums & SEO a while ago that I recommend you have a read of. Check out http://www.darwinmag.com/read/120103/forums.html

Hope it helps.
Cheers
Alan


<edit - removed period from the end of the URL to make link clickable - WJS>

[stripey]

Hi Webby.

Very interesting ideas you have there, I'm going to take them into account on my current web site build.

Just one thing, the link in the post above is broken. You need to move the full stop out of the URL.

Regards

Stripey

[rcjordan]

While I can assure you that it is possible to cross-link multiple domains on the same server within the same c-class and sustain Top 5 rank in serps returning 1M to 8M listings, it's sometimes prudent not to do so. However, if I were doing, say, 3 unique content sites for a company and the content warranted each having its own domain I wouldn't hesitate putting them on the same server and c-class.

Nor is a dmoz listing mandatory for top rank. It's a good link to have if you can get it, but not the holy grail that it's often made out to be.

[nuevojefe]

There seems to be a lot of weight on authority, I saw that a client of mine got hit very heavily. At first glance, maybe from heavy cross linking. But on second thought it became apparent that he has not become an "expert" yet nor is he a highly valued "target".

So in short, I believe that with update brandy, his poor rankings can now be attributed to one krishna@google.com.... damn genius....

[newsphinx]

Webby. Thanks for the informative post. However, I am on the overoptimization penalty side. I had a site dropping out the serps in Florida update and I deoptimized it by lowering keyword density and removing some reciprocal links, I am now coming back to the first page, fluctuating between No 1 and number 8, although I was No. 1 for that term before last november.

[gravelsack]

Many good points here

...but FWIW...

I have one customer site that vanished under Florida and Austin updates.

It used to be No.1 for a very competitive phrase.

I knew the site content was good and better than all the competition for the phrase in question. I persuaded the client that changing anything could be dangerous, as Google would surely have to fix their SERPs eventually, and when they did he should come back in somewhere.

Now. checking 64.233.161.99, he is back in at No.1 and is also No.1 for the plural and has improved over pre-Florida for a whole load of other phrases.

So sometimes the correct advice is 'stand yer ground - what would have happened if I had acted on the 'over optimisation' panic?

Not the right solution for everyone, but worth mentioning.

[Webby]

@newsphinx I honestly don't believ ein an over optimization penalty. If you are an authority then there certainl yisnt one. My own site is highly optimized with h1, h2 and a relatively high keyword density. I think its mor eof a case of a different on page optimization algo than over optimization penalty. For 'weak' terms for example I'm seeing alot of top results with keyword at the end of the title tag which goes against the ole keyword prominence rules for the title tag.

on page optimization has lost considerable weight imo and the focus must be now on more content and as many thematic links as you can get (not necessarily pr4+).

@gravelsack
Good point on the waiting out. I think Google realised that authority was taking too much control of too many keywords in the SERPs and some balance has been brought back in. I don't intend to change anything until I know for sure what the final algo is going to look like. And we still arent ther eimo. Brandy is more of an algo tweak than an update. I expect more such tweaks to happen and not necessarily over the regular update time scales.
What I would do now however is start to increase site size. Glossary is a good one as is a faq or 'product in detail' pages. If your theme can support a Forum then consider phpbb. Some themes however are saturated (SEO one of them) for forums. Blogs are a good alternative though if your theme has regular 'news'.
As for on page optimization, I'd wait out an update or two before making changes.

[bwelford]

I wrote an article on the subject of forums & SEO a while ago that I recommend you have a read of. Check out http://www.darwinmag.com/read/120103/forums.html

webby, I really liked that article. You make a lot of sense. Congratulations.
:glasses:

[Kali]

Tend to agree with Gravelsack, Google has a history of hitting hard with its filters and slowly relaxing them thereafter.

The other option is adding pages - as many pages as possible they don't have to be particularly good quality.

[Chatmaster]

I have to agree with Webby! I doubt if their is a filter. The filter simply doesn't hold with me, to many complications! What is clear to me though is that they have different ways they are tweaking their algo. For example, real estate has a different result from online casinos. Onpage SEO is more at play with casinos but with real estate... I have NO IDEA, it still gives useless results.

[bwelford]

Welcome to the Forums, chatmaster.

I agree with you. I don't believe there are filters, rather it's a weighting scheme on all those 100 or more factors. However this present update is not finished yet, so who knows where the wheel will stop.

[Chatmaster]

Thanx for the welcome.

I must say I can't wait at this stage my sites are have a dance contest. Lets hope it all reach calmness asap.

[sarahk]

I would also like to point out that this is the first place that I've seen it mentioned (other than by me) that size matters.

Hi NorthStar, I've seen this bandied about since "Florida". I was tempted to put some content into subdomains to increase my dominance in the top 10 for certain keywords - I didn't always like the 2 pages that Google chose - and these are minor keywords, based on a person's name. Instead I've left the site "biggish".

Personally I prefer one big "honest" site. Much easier to manage

And Webby, great article, especially your comments about beating the spammers & their resources. It's one thing for us techies who are interested but what about the sites selling first aid kits, recreational activities etc. They want to focus on their business and have their site working quietly in the background. While I'd love to take their money for SEO it shouldn't be as vital as it's becoming.

Sarah