Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

How good am I?

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I’m not very good at tooting my own horn, but for the record, there are over 1,000 reviews of my service floating around on the internet, an 998 of those are 5-star feedbacks.

I’ve been doing website development since 1995, and SEO since 1998. Even according to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, that makes me an expert in both areas a few times over.

I just had a moment this morning that reminded myself just how experienced I am what I do. One client signed up for my monthly SEO service a few weeks ago. Normally it’s a month before I issue the first update but I do like to keep an eye on how things are going and check the data fairly regularly.

So when he wrote to ask how things were progressing I was very happy to be able to send him this graph, showing the number of times his site was seen in Google search results over the past 90 days, with a crudely drawn arrow indicating when he started working with me.

So how good am I? Very good. I’m just not always very good at telling you about it.

Lies

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Here’s a pretty typical advert you’ll see online when searching for SEO, “I can create 33 SEO backlink Panda Penguin safe from PR10”.

The trouble is it’s all LIES.

I know I bang on about the trouble with buying backlinks to try to help your SEO. Regular readers will be familiar with my disdain for people selling the impossible—since Google’s Panda algorithm tries very hard to find people buying links, saying any scheme like this is “Panda safe” or even worse, “Panda friendly” is a massive fib.

So at the risk of repeating myself, I’m going to say some things I’ve said before – albeit in a more concise and succinct form.

It is true that Google does like to see links to your site. But they are excellent at discerning real links (where someone liked your site or service enough to link to it) from purchased ones. Those bought ones are usually just low quality directories and profiles. When I say profiles I really mean it, user accounts get created on the Apple website that have your domain in the user description and the scam-sellers have the nerve to say that’s a PR10 link from a high quality domain. As if Google can’t tell the difference between say, a news story on the BBC and a bunch of comment-user accounts.

I generally stand against buying backlinks because of my SEO ethos. My ethos is simple by the way – Google have given us a swag of information regarding what search engines do and do not want – so I say we give them what they’re after. But on the flipside we need to be sure to avoid what they don’t want.

I have about three jobs a week come in from people who bought back links and got caught – and dropped off Google completely. When they penalise you, they really hit you hard.

Technically speaking really awesome backlinks would certainly help your SEO. But 99% of the time buying them is not awesome, and I recommend avoiding it.

I (like Google) see SEO as a long game, if done properly. But also, if done properly, it “sticks”. A site with good SEO that’s risen to the top should stay at the top.

And with that, I shall get down from my well-trodden soap-box.

SEO’s walking dead, and their house of cards

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I read an article this morning which shared Gale Ann’s view on Internet piracy (she’s the producer of a popular TV show called The Walking Dead) .

However, this post isn’t commenting on piracy as a topic, rather Ann’s own comment that a Google search for Netflix’s House of Cards (another very popular TV program) doesn’t even bring up the official site in the top 50 results.

On the surface, she’s saying “look at all the piracy sites that come before the proper one!”, but behind that is the idea that by default, the official site for anything should come top. The problem is, Netflix’s site for House of Cards has terrible SEO, that’s why it performs so poorly.

There’s not nearly enough textual content, and the meta tags are actually about Netflix, not the show, and therefore they score very poorly for relevancy (how many words in the tags also appear on the page) which is likely to have them penalised by Google, not shoved higher up the rankings.

This serves as an excellent cautionary tale. Just because you feel you deserve to be in the top spot, doesn’t mean you will be. If other people are writing about your industry, product or service, and do it better than you do—they will beat you in the rankings.

If you care about your position, invest in some proper, industry-leading SEO—and get where you want to be.

Buying backlinks

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a.k.a. Why it’s best to follow my advice. 🙂

I talk a lot about the importance of doing SEO properly, and not trying to cheat the search engines.

Of all the tricks out there, the most tempting by far is buying backlinks.

Google wants lots of sites to link to us, right? So let’s just get some and get moving up those rankings!

Terrible, terrible idea.

A client of mine bought some from a seller claiming to be Google safe, Panda safe, Penguin safe, PR10, quality links.

But you can’t be Google-safe. All that will ever mean is they haven’t caught you (or the system being used to generate your links) yet. But they’ve been promising for a decade that they will, and more often than not, they do.

The image above is a bit small, but I’m sure you can pinpoint when they bought the so-called “safe” links.

Their sales fell proportionately.

On moving home

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My family and I moved to a new home almost two weeks ago. That statement is a little over-simplified because the process of moving really takes a lot longer than the single day the truck is filled with your stuff.

In some ways we’re still moving, but telling ourselves we’ve settled (or at least are settling) into the house we plan for our kids to grow up in.

We’re thrilled to have bought a house in this economy, in our favourite town (Glastonbury). There was some fairly well-attended shindig in the area around the time we moved, but by and large it stayed out of our way.

The day of the move was itself stressful—as they tend to be. Everything took longer than planned; we got everything in only to realise we’d designated the wrong rooms and needed to move it all about, and just where the hell are my clean pants anyway.

And now I find myself settled in my office, with my computer on, speakers operational, second monitor shining it’s light upon me, and I’m struck by how reliable the net can be.

Sure, Facebook can’t make up its mind how it wants to dress itself, email servers can be a bit of an arse sometimes, and Amazon is still convenient, if not a bit ethically questionable.

But it’s all right there. The methods I use to interact with friends and family across the world, the means to put dinner on my families table—they haven’t changed.

My surrounds have, but I have this little window through which the world doesn’t look so different.

And while technology is mercifully always adapting, it can also function as as a dependable “room with a view” from any house, train, or airport lounge.

In turn I reflect on my own website. While I was packing boxes, only to unpack them the next day, and helping move heavy bits of furniture that I’m sure we paid someone else to carry about, my website was viewed by 200 different people.

I’ve carved out a piece of digital real estate, that even in my absence, when my mind is firmly elsewhere, still attracts people from all manner of places. It’s a good thing I’m happy with it.

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