For SO long I said that content did NOT matter! It was certainly NOT king, and I couldn't give a rats a** about it! I spouted that for about 5 years and even said with a chuckle "it may come back to haunt me. lol"

Well, it has, as those days are here as I now sit at my computer doing "on-page" competitive analysis, something I wouldn't of have even considered this time last year! 

So, how many things are YOU still doing things that can be haunting you and possibly killing your site and you don't even know it?

Here is an interesting case study that had me a bit stumped at first glance. Why did he take such a beating in the rankings lately.  As you can see in the screen shot below, my client was scoring higher (except for social signals) than everyone who was ranking for his keyword!

So, I headed on over to SEMRush in order to get an idea of when his traffic dropped, which might give me a clue to what algorithm change he might have been hit with. (NOTE: This site represents a real business with original content.)

The chart above tells me that he was hit by panda 2.5. No one really knows what algorithmic changes were changed on that one, but if you look at the chart below, you can see that his competitors were hit as well. The only difference is that he was also hit by Panda 3.3, but they were NOT!

So, I dug a little deeper into his off-page density stats and found out his link density was way OVER THE TOP for the his main keyword "NLP", which was probably hurting all of his other keywords with the term "NLPN in it.

(NOTE: NLP stands for Neuro-linguistic programming which is an approach to communication, personal development and psychotherapy created in the 1970s.)

And once again, here is another site that has a "Dead Link" ratio that is pretty high.

Of course, my advice, at this point, was to get his dead links down to 20% or lower and same for the keyword NLP (10% would be even better) and to get his brand/url links up, up, up to 20-30%

(NOTE: Just so you know, I am making these anchor link density recommendations on the premise of what the other sites in this market, for this particular keyword, are doing. In the video you will see the percentage as high as 17% for "NLP training" for the competition. I am making the 20% recommendation for getting his dead links down too and his brand links up to what I have seen from doing dozens of other competitive analysis', thus am generalizing on those two, as of yet I do not have a link type analysis on the competition, which is in process, but was not available at time of this publishing)

So, that gave me three pretty big flags to make recommendations on, but I still wasn't sure if THAT was all that was going on, as the other sites link density wasn't a TON better.  So, I kept digging.

I do know from Eric Lancheres findings that anything with a bounce rate of 55% or higher is going to have a tough time ranking on the first page for any decent term and I didn't know my customers bounce rate so I decided to go look at his site to see how if I could get any clues from it.

What I found was, with all due respect, something that wasn't very compelling for me to get in and click on or even go deeper into the site.  It also had duplicate images and static navigation, Two no no's post panda!

Now, I do want to mention that the site owner is in the middle of a site redesign and I don't know which of the above is new or old or if they are both old.  So, he could be getting all his on-site post panda kinks all worked out, but..

THEN I FOUND THIS!

After going through his site, testing other things, I came upon a resource menu on the bottom of his home page that had 11 small numbered links going to inner pages. Guess what I found?

A LINK FARM!

It may have been considered "reciprocal linking" back in the day or even a very cool three-way link "scheme", but make no doubt about it, having this many out going links to non-themed sites is what unfortunately Google would now probably consider a "link farm."

And it gets worse.

All of those links use content (for link descriptions) that have been duplicated over and over again.  So, his site is, unbeknownst to him, not only a link farm, it is a content farm as well. So, a Panda triple whammy!

1. Over optimized link density
2. Spam: housing a link/content farm that creates a high ratio of outbound links, which can also link to bad neighborhoods
3. Duplicate Content: a BIG Panda no no

And remember Panda is a "site-wide" algorithmic qualifier.  So, and this is important, it doesn't hurt just one page, it hurts them ALL!

So my simple note to him?

And..

If you are willing to get your site hammered by my hound dog Panda/Penguin recovery analysis team and then be publicly flogged by my findings, then by all means, let me at it!

However, it ain't cheap to get kicked in the pants and bound to the whipping post. lol At a cool $1k, you could get a VERY good bottle of wine or a fabulous dinner for 2, but if you are thinking that is a lot of money and are having a hard time making rent or your mortgage, you probably want to pass no matter how much you think my analysis is what you need to get back in the game.

There are NO guarantees in seo, especially now, and you would be better off watching the rich guys get hammered and learning what you can from their beatings and then apply to your sites.

On another note don't forget I am holding an Advanced SEO Training in September where I am not only going to to this type of stuff until everything in my brain is in your brain, I am also going to teach you how to build your very own link network with my proprietary software that let's you set it and forget it! That is until Google changes it's mind again about what signals it wants. But, this time you will be ready because you will have ALL of your links in your OWN CONTROL!