SEO 2011 to 2012

[xploit]

Just found this on another forum, maybe some useful information to some here:

So what does not work anymore??

• Shallow links or shallow link profile sites.. Links like Forum Profiles or blog comments on pages having on-page PR of 0/na. Xrumer which was once a king of automation industry and used to create thousands of profile backlinks has lost quite of its worth after the Panda updates. You should read about JC Penney Disaster and how there site went down because of spammy link profile
• Links from pages having high number of OBLs. Such kind of links does not pass any juice anymore. Its better to get a link from a PR 2 page having 2-3 OBLs then getting a link from PR-6 page having 500 OBLs
• Shallow content sites are getting weeded out day and night. With Google paying more attention to Quality than ever before sites having duplicate content, auto blogs and thin pages(having less than 100 words on page) are losing in SERPS.
• Site-wide links/ footer links Got hit pretty bad after the Panda updates.. Its not that they don’t work anymore but only if you get a sitewide from a Good authority site having PR 4-5 in your own niche. I prefer getting links from PR 5-7 Sites in my own niche.
• Un-natural link profile. If you have all the links coming from PR3-5-6 sites and there are no links from certain amount of low quality sites even that doesn’t work anymore..

What Works and will continue to work in 2012

• Social Media: Google and FB thinks the best quality links are from the social platform. Since these links are not easy to manipulate.. It’s difficult to get 1000 tweets about your website but easier to get 1000 spammy links. Same reason Google started indexing Facebook comments. Cause they are more relevant and less spammed out.
• While Google has begun giving more importance to social media signals they also pay attention to the authority of the referring accounts. A tweet by Larry page or Mark Zuckerberg for that matter will give your page more authority then from your uncle/neighbor or some hacked account.
• Quality over Quantity: I have seen sites having more than 20K backlinks being overtaken by sites having 500 Good Quality links. Unfortunately in this case the site with 20K links was mine.. So I know what I was targeting and I thought I was doing a Good job.. (I learnt an important lesson that day )
• Content Freshness: Recently it has been noticed that getting links from Fresh content makes more sense than old content. This has been noticed quite recently and does seem to be making huge impact. Getting links from fresh blog posts and Guest Blogging is making more SERP changes than ever before.
• Anchor Text Variation: This has been in rumors since quite a while but I would like to clear it today. Yes anchor text variation does play Good role in ranking your site. I have tried it on my sites and my client’s sites and they work like a charm. It’s all about appearing natural in Google’s eyes now. So fellows Anchor Text variation does work.
• Onsite and On-Page optimization is more important than ever. It’s so much easier to rank a page with good 1000 Quaity words article properly formatted with h1-h6, titles and description tags having a couple of images or video embedded then some 100 words gibberish

Though this is not a complete report but this should give you an idea about what works and what doesn’t anymore.

Also one last thing: With the fall of yahoo site explorer, people are confused as too what backlink checking tools they should use. So these are the best available

1. Linkdiagnosis.com(works good in firefox only)
2. Majesticseo.com
3. SpyGlass(with their new crawler there reports are better than ever, looks like they were smart enough to prepare themselves for the demise of YSE)