I have been asked a lot about what I think about the state of SEO, what others are saying about it, and if I think blog networks have a future.

And an even bigger and growing question, what do we do now?

First, because it is still really early since the recent Panda and Penguin updates, no one really knows "exactly" what is going on, (except for Google of course) but there has been some great analytical data done on it. My personal favorite is MicroSiteMasters is seo dead write-up on the Panguin deriving at some interesting conclusions from looking at the data they had. (its a must read!)

I personally have been locked in my office for the last couple of weeks analyzing sites that ARE currently ranking against sites that have fallen and you know what, I have a sickening feeling that Google has played us a fool. :-(

Let me explain..

DID SOMETHING JUST CLICK IN YOUR HEAD? It should of, cause the JC Penny thing happned LAST YEAR!

I wrote that post Feb 24th, 2011!!

And of course that was the Panda 1.0 update and the Article Networks were hit HARD! The seo community divided on the use of posting articles as a seo benefit.

One year later, Article Network pages still don't appear on page 1 results as they once did, but links are proving to be benefitial in proper link density. (more on link density later)

So lesson #1. Deja vu!

One year later, the seo community is taking another beating almost to the day! This time it is blog networks taking the brunt of the hit as everyone turn themselves in when Google sent out those dreaded "Un-natually Linking" emails into webmasters inboxes.

Here is the rundown of the last couple of months as "I" saw it.

Jan-Feb, 2012		Un-naturual Linking Emails From Google Google sends out in excess of 750,000 "Unnatrual Linking" notices to webmasters boxes and scares the crapola out of even the most savoy seo'ers. Webmasters turned themselves in and the blog networks started to unravel. At first presumming moles, it is later consistantely believe that seo hosting IPs were the point of entry after webmasters declaration of sites and services they used. Google does what is presumed to be manual review and massive deindexing of sites used in these services. Google demands that webmasters get rid of these "un-natural links" that are pointing to their sites and the frenzie begins as webmasters panic and start link removal campaigns.
Jan 14th		Panda 3.2 Refresh -
Jan 19th		New Layout Improvement Update Google introduces new layout update that dials down sites with aggressive ad layout above the fold and goes almost unnoticed in comparrison to the above. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html
Feb 7th		I launched SeoLinkMonster with Brad and Matt Callen
Feb 15		We noticed a server of sites deindex, we get hammered in forums, we quickly replace sites thinking it was a bad batch of IPs
Feb 29th		Panda 3.3 Refresh! WOW! This refresh was the most dramatic since 1.0 in my openion and is when we really started seeing sites drop like bricks. Everyone is scrambling to try and figure out what the devalue is. I stop development on a seo course I was working on until we could figure out what was going on.
March 10th		We notice more sites being deindexed and start monitoring and replacing. It feels like Google is playing wack-a-mole with us as they deindex everything we put up. Customers quit in droves and link removal requests start to come in the masses.
March 15th		Matt Cutts confirms on twitter that blog networks are on their radar. :-(
March 20th		BuildMyRank Closes its doors calling it a good run :-(
March 23rd		Panda 3.4 Refresh
April 4th		I release update to SeoNitro customers signing a NDA
April 18		Negative SEO Case Study Reveled on Traffic Planet http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/ This reveals the possiblity that by pointing to many "exact match" anchor links at a site, that site will drop in rankings and opens the doors for much discussion concerning Google opening the door for negative seo attacks on competitors.
April 19		2012 Panda 3.5 Refresh
April 24		Penguin! Penguin Update is launched with an aim at combatting WebSpam and give examples of "keyword stuffing" and "linking schemes." http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html They create a dividing line between black and white hat seo and it is apparent that anything other then making your site easier to crawl and putting good content on your site is Black Hat. From Matt Cutts "We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites." …"even no optimization at all…" yeah right, and pigs may just fly one day too! (From Matt Carters Blog in response to that, as it was too good not to repeat! lol)
End April to Present		The Aftermath An endless amount of outrage, reviews, analysis and water cooler gossip about Google's new approach to seo. (how could they?!?) A couple great analytic reviews reveal that excessive "exact match" keywords in addition to excessive on-page optimizationto are major culprits of the dial down.

And then...

May 10, Google's Matt Cutt's makes a revealing admission...

(citation: http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463)

Um, "not about bad link networks?"

So even though the blog networks took the brunt of the blame this time around, all those notices were not the result of the blog networks? Wow!!

But, it actually makes sense.

Blog networks traditionally and if done right can't take on a massive amount of customers. I had only a little more then of 400 in both SeoNitro and SEOLinkvine Elite so I knew "my" networks weren't responsible for 700,000 notices!! I don't know about BMR, HPRS, or ALNs membership stats but I would be surprised if all of us put together totalled more then 10k customers.

I had put that 2 + 2 together a long time ago, but it didn't seem to matter, the damage had been done. We (the collective seo industry) told on ourselves and the unravelment of the incredible blog network ranking machines were thrusted into the cross hairs of Google's deindexing committee, and we did NOT win.

But here is the kicker.

Not only did they deindex the sites, they demanded that webmasters have their links taken off of those de-indexed sites before any reconsideration would be done.

Now, I scratch my head. Why would they demand this if these links were on de-indexed sites that were dead, gone, forgotten, virtually rendored useless in the eyes of Google. Except for the tattle tale element, there was nothing really compelling for it, I mean, surely Google is smart enough to know when a link is on a deindex site and rendered useless? Right? But the drill continued over and over, until we all blindly followed the piper and we took down links and then finally just huge portions of networks.

Mistake?

Now I would never want to open the can of worms or even suggest that deindexed sites can still have some sort of relevance in Google. That would be ludicrus, wouldn't it? And I certainly would not want to get in ANY debate over it, I am still incredibly sore from the forum bashings and hate mail I have recieved in the last couple of months over the entire de-indexing debacle!

But.. I will say, I do have people in my line up that want those links.. de-indexed or not.

Strange right? I thought so until they have showed me examples of sites ranking for amazingly hard gambling keywords with the majority of links coming in from BLOGROLL LINKS on DEINDEXED SITES!! Yeah, that's right, blogroll links!! Forget that the site is deindex, if that isn't enough, they were BLOGROLL LINKS!! (I haven't given blogroll links any credence in years, but I saw it for myself.)

And I checked those links and sure enough, most of them are on de-indexed sites. (I can't publish them here to protect the site owner so you will have to trust me on that one.)

Then I thought to myself, well it is true.. whenever we suffered patial de-indexing in the past it NEVER corralated with a drop in rankings. Hmmm

So what if it wasn't the de-indexing of the networks that made a lot of these sites drop? Hmmm

(I was amoung everyone that thought the ranking drops of blog network users were because of the loss of links derived from the mass deindexing. I mean, if the site was deindex, the link was as good as gone, right?)

Well, just what if..

..what if it was actually a loss of links from the networks taking down links at customer requests in combination with the "exact match" keyword dial down?

(the "exact match" keyword dial down had been coming and getting stronger (or should I say weaker) for a while. I had done an entire write-up on it for my seo mastermind back in Nov, 2011 and had been advising customers to make sure they had a large percentage of URL links to balance their linking profile for years)

I then wondered if Google still crawled de-indexed sites?

Well one way to find out was to go look at the logs of the sites that I had that had been de-indexed.

And to my surprise... they DO!

WOW!

This made me start digging a little deeper into sites that dropped.

And what I found was that in the sites that "I" looked at, every single one of them had a higher dead link percentage. (IMPORTANT: this is NOT a link from a de-indexed site, it is a link that is no longer there or the site is not available)

Average for dead links is running around 20% and anything with 40% or higher was NOT on the first page for their respective keywords and the ones over 70% were not in the first 100 for their respecive keywords.

Here are three case studies I did for this article. Each of them in a different market and each had used blog networks, some more then others, but they all had dipped their toes into it.

You can see the affected sites on the left have a WAY larger % of dead links (in blue) and the two that dropped into the hundreds on the top lack a wider range of link types when compared to the sites on the right side that are high on page one for their repsective keywords.

IMPORTANT: Dead links are NOT a link from a de-indexed site, it is a link that is no longer there or the site is not available. This tool does not decifer if the link is coming from a de-indexed site or not.

So what does all this mean?

I don't really know, but if we have a site ranking in the gambling industry whom left their links up from de-index sites and sites that have dropped because they took those de-indexed links down, that there might be something here, and Google may have played us big time.

So, I am testing it.

I have created case study on one of my own sites that ranks respecitivly in it's market and have just started a linking campaign towards it using ONLY de-indexed sites.

I am linking using industry phrases that I am currently NOT ranking for (top 1000) and if I show up for those keywords, then we know that de-indexed sites do play a role in ranking efforts. If I go down in my established rankings, then we know that links from de-indexed sites can be used to negatively seo a site. If nothing happens, then we know de-indexed sites do nothing. (which I am still inclined to think, but I will finish this out lol)

Now with that said, I don't want to leave here with you thinking that the dead links are the ONLY contributing factor to the aboves sites loss in the rankings. That was something I just considered worthy of discussion.

As I studied them and their competition that is currently on page one of Google for their respective keywords, in every case I found the following post panda/penquin off-page disqualifiers.

1. Over 40% of their links were dead: as reported above(not de-indexed, dead as in sites that are NOT crawlable)
2. Social Factors were lower then competition: This means, not as many FaceBook "likes," "shares," Twitter "tweats," or Google+.
3. Links were not diversified as much as competion: (I am seeing a lot of directory, forum, blogroll, footer and sidebar links, go figure lol)
4. Abnormaly high "exact match" keywords: in what I have looked at it is really hard to come up with a general number as I have seen percentages all over the map, so look at your percentage as compared to your competitions whom is ranking above you.
5. Lower amount of onesys and twosy links: sites generally get a LOT of strange, varried links as no one thinks the same when linking so this also goes in hand with #4. Get your percentage of anchor text that are only used once.

[possible pic of anchor]

Below are the SEOMoz comparative features of each of these case studies. You can see that the sites that have been lowered in the rankings are decent sites and in some facets even better then the ones that are out ranking them now.

[pic of seomoz reports]