Do I really have to 301 redirect the “none www.” version of my domain to the “www version” or the other way around? Yes, because if you don’t this can happen:

It happened to one of my clients (ignored my advice). After many years of running that site on the “none www version” Google decided one day that the “www. version” was actually tastier.

Welcome to this site! I am Kim Pittoors, a Dutch SEO expert at Nethit and also the founder of SEOnieuws.com. A news website about SEO. Today I am gonna share my story for the first time, the story of a simple gardener with a hobby that got way out of hand.

How I got into making websites

Computers have always fascinated me, even as a child I had all sorts of fantasies about what computers would be able to do in the future. But I actually didn’t start making websites until late 2005 when I signed myself up for an online course to learn HTML just for the fun of it.

Little did I know that this was about to change my life completely within a couple of years. At first, I made a couple of websites about free games and software. It was a great hobby to have. Later on, I started making free websites for friends and family members.

Going Freelance and getting a Steady Job

Next thing I knew friends of family members (and family members of friends) also started to contact me, that’s when I decided to become a freelance web designer (while still working half-time as a gardener).

After Freelancing a couple of years, I got offered a full-time job at a small web design agency where I learned the tricks of the trade. It was a very exciting time and I learned a lot. (HTML/CSS, Javascript, PHP, WordPress, Joomla etc ..)

How I got into SEO

While I was working for the web design agency, I also kept working on my own projects. I made lots of websites, but guess what: Nobody came, no visitors!

Maybe you can imagine the frustration I had to deal with. All the hard work that I had done seemed to be useless, a complete waste of time! It felt like whatever I did, it just wasn’t good enough!

Do you know that feeling? Do you know how it feels to put so much energy into something and to get nothing in return?

It’s a horrible feeling many starters have to cope with! So that’s when I got into SEO. I didn’t know anything about SEO at that moment. I just started reading lots of articles about it and tried to apply what I had learned to my sites. And after a while, it started to work.

My sites went up and the visitors finally came in:

It was great! My hard work finally started to pay off. My websites were growing and I kept making more of them. That’s when I acquired the taste for it! I developed an instant addiction to winning in Google.

How I became an SEO

A couple of years later someone offered me a steady SEO job, I was a bit reluctant at first because I actually liked being a web designer. But after a while, I decided to do it. I needed a new challenge anyway.

I started working for a big SEO company where I was given the opportunity to specialize and gain experience. Meanwhile,  I also got married and became the father of a beautiful daughter. Money was not a problem and life was good!

How I started my own company

Meanwhile, my sites kept growing and growing and In the fall of 2014, I realized that the ad-revenue from my sites would even be sufficient to live on.

At work, things didn’t go so well, the company I worked for was becoming a bit too greedy and that made my job a lot less pleasant.

That was when I decided to start my own SEO and web design company called Nethit.

Nethit is a company that makes and monetizes popular websites. When I am not busy working for clients I work on my own sites which provide a steady flow of passive income.

I already know how to make websites and how to rank them. So I am currently more focused on conversion, usability, web psychology and social media marketing.

But I also spend time learning more about Linux and about Linux servers (Bash scripting, Python etc..). I switched from Windows to Linux last year and that was one of the best choices I ever made. I wish I had done this sooner. I love Linux Mint by the way. I can recommend it, especially for starters.

My own Projects

I have lots of activities, but my online business guides are still the best source of revenue I have. Since 2017, I use the commercial name RTX Media for these activities. But the real company behind it is Nethit.

Another commercial name I use is Joomlacy. At Joomlacy you can download One Click Registration and Add user Frontend, a couple of popular Joomla Extensions I originally made back in 2009.

But at this moment I spend most of my time writing for my Dutch SEO news website SEOnieuws.com and working on a new interesting project called SEOradar.nl (a Google Algorithm Tracker).

Next, to all this, I also have lots of other (newer or less successful) projects which I don’t mention here. Not every project can be a big success. Trying and failing is part of the journey, it’s the best way to learn something new. And there is always something new to learn just around the corner.

Passionate about SEO

So this is why I am so passionate about SEO. It changed my life and my future. To me SEO is freedom. The freedom to do stuff you like without having to worry about where your next paycheck will come from.

The freedom to choose your own working hours and to work from home. (No more stressing about being late for work in traffic jams.) The freedom to start my own company without much pressure and to spend time on innovation and creativity if I want to. And most importantly: The freedom to spend a lot of time with my family. I can recommend this lifestyle to anyone!

And you know what? SEO can change your life too. I’d love to help you reach your goal, whatever that is. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about SEO.

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon a very interesting French SEO news website called Webrankinfo. My French is pretty well because I lived in France a couple of years. But I never thought about following the SEO news there too.

The website webrankinfo.com is managed by Olivier Duffez who has been writing about SEO on that site the past 15 years (Think of him like the French Barry Schwartz).  He and his team also developed a well know  SEO tool called My Ranking Metrics (which will get an English version soon!).  So basically he has access to all data an SEO you could dream off.

Having a news website about SEO myself (seonieuws.com), I considered him to be a pretty good source of information and asked him a couple of questions on twitter about his article on Google Fred, which was pretty interesting.

But this article is not about Fred, please shut up about Fred! Fred is a very silly name for a Google Update (sorry Gary).  No, this is way more interesting. Olivier also told me that he had just conducted a big data driven SEO study and would be publishing it very soon.

@kimpittoors en effet j’ai accès à du big data! Je vais prochainement publier une étude SEO basée sur + de 200 millions de visites « organic » !!!

— Olivier Duffez (@webrankinfo) April 17, 2017

A couple of days later the SEO study was published and Olivier was so kind to let me know via Twitter.  Because I thought it was very interesting material I decided to translate it to English. It won’t be perfect because English is not my first Language either. But I hope you will enjoy the information anyway 😉

3 key characteristics of web pages doing well in Google based on a study of 8 million pages and 210 million visits by Ranking Metrics.

Are your SEO and web editor right when they recommend you to avoid having poor quality pages, to invest in editorial content and to avoid pages with excessive depth? Ranking Metrics (a well known French company providing SEO tools, courses and more) decided to conduct a large study on big data they have access to in order to answer these 3 questions.

This study of unprecedented magnitude in Europe was carried out in April 2017. It covered 8.5 million pages from 831 site audits and 210 million visits. You will see that the numbers speak for themselves and reveal the characteristics of the best-performing pages pretty well.

Here is the summary of the data driven SEO analysis:

– Importance of page quality
– Importance of editorial content
– Importance of the depth of pages

Importance of page quality

Is your SEO right when he tells you to avoid having poor quality pages on your site? To answer this question, Ranking Metrics analyzed 8.5 million pages which are using their SEO tool. They analyzed several criteria: speed, content, titles, internal links, the absence of broken links, etc.).

For each page, they calculated a metric they created themselves called QualityRisk. QualityRisk is a value between 0 (no problem according to My Ranking Metrics) and 100 (many SEO problems). They investigated which pages generated the most visits (out of 210 million visits measured by Ranking Metrics).

The graph below shows the results they came up with:

After analyzing 8.454.873 pages on 831 sites and 210.431.200 visits, they came up with the following insights:

Pages with a QualityRisk rank of 0 generate on average 10 times more visits than those with a QualityRisk rank higher than 20.

And since there are lots of pages having a QualityRisk rank higher than 60:

Pages with a QualityRisk rank of 0 generate on average 29 times more visits than those with a QualityRisk rank higher than 60.

Importance of editorial content

Are web editors and SEOs right to recommend you to invest in editorial content? Is it really cost effective from an SEO point of view? To answer this question by “letting the data speak for itself”, Ranking Metrics investigated the editorial content of 8.5 million pages which make use of their tool.

To be clear:
They did not just count the number of words on each page in order to get an idea how much content they contain. They have programmed complex algorithms to determine which part of a page contains the ‘real content’ and what the quality of that content is like. These algorithms seem to be very good at identifying thin and low-quality content.

Here are the results:

– The perfect page has a rank of 0
– A page with thin content has a rank of between 1 (not severe) and 100 (the worst).

They investigated which pages generated the most visits (out of 210 million visits measured by Ranking Metrics).

The graph below shows the results they came up with:

After analyzing 8.454.873 pages on 831 sites and 210.431.200 visits, they came up with the following results:

Pages with sufficient textual content in the main area generate 4 times more visits than those that lack textual content

Importance of the depth of pages

Is your SEO right to recommend you to avoid pages with excessive depth? To answer this question by “letting the data speak for itself” again, Ranking Metrics calculated the page depth of 8.5 million pages which make use of their tool. They did this by counting the number of clicks required to reach a page starting from the home page.

You may have heard already about the “3 clicks rule” by Steve Krug. The idea behind this rule is that users will only click three times to find something they are after before leaving a site. Of course, this rule is not applicable to all sites, it must be adapted according to the size of the site. This is also what is done in each My Ranking Metrics audit. But most sites will fall under that rule and they wanted to keep things simple.

So here are the results:

– A depth page 1 to 3 is usually not too deep
– From level 4, the page is most often too deep

Again they investigated which pages generated the most visits (out of 210 million visits measured by Ranking Metrics).

The graph below shows the results obtained:

After analyzing 8.454.873 pages on 831 sites and 210.431.200 visits, they came up with the following results:

Pages with a page depth between 1 to 3 generate on average 5 times more visits than those with a page depth of 4 or more

Curious about the QualityRisk of the pages on your site?

Thanks for reading this article, I hope you found this as interesting as I did. By the way: If you are you curious about the QualityRisk of the pages on your site you can try My Ranking Metrics for free. Too bad the English version isn’t out yet. I will post a new message here when it becomes available.

I have already tested the tool thoroughly and I must say I was very impressed. Of course, it is not perfect, but it works very well. Especially when combined with the data from Google Analytics. Olivier was nice enough to give me some free credits so I could use those paid functions too. It’s a very promising tool I can tell you that 🙂

Want to see more posts like this? You can follow me on Twitter. And if you speak French a bit, be sure to also follow Olivier Duffez, he posts lots of good stuff all the time!

If you have questions or if you have anything to add to the discussion you can leave a comment by using the form below:

A while ago one of my clients asked me if free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt are good enough for SEO.

I didn’t know because I am only using paid SSL certificates, I never asked myself that question.

So I Googled it but I didn’t find much information about it. I only found something about this in the MOZ forums where someone else asked this question.

People answered that they wouldn’t take the risk and that a paid certificate would probably be better. But no one seemed to know for sure.

So I asked Gary Illyes from Google about it:

@kimpittoors @letsencrypt Nope, that’s perfect!

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) 8 april 2017

Free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt are good enough for SEO

So, yes free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt are good enough for SEO. Apparently, Google doesn’t care about what kind of certificate you are using, they just want to encrypt the web.

I just discovered that Google Fred is not one but multiple updates with different goals.

The idea came to mind when I was writing a new article about Google Fred for seonieuws.com. I was writing about the discussion currently going on in the SEO community about Google Fred being a website quality or a link related update. Personally I saw signs confirming both.

Things are never as simple as you would like them to be

I also started to think this because one update would just be way too simple. Ofcourse people like simple a lot, but in real life things are never that simple.

I wish they were sometimes, but that is certainly not the case when looking at Google Fred. Besides, the way Google works is not simple at all so why would their updates be simple?

I decided to ask Gary Illyes about it. And to my surprise he responded:

@kimpittoors From my perspective every update is a Fred, but there were a number of updates around the date @rustybrick declared Fred a single thing.

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) 1 april 2017

He confirmed that Google Fred is not one update but multiple. And said that to him every update is a Google Fred Update. Now I also wanted to know if these updates also had different goals like I thought. He also confirmed this:

@kimpittoors @rustybrick Oh they do.

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) 1 april 2017

Google Fred Updates might look at website quality, links and maybe even more!

So I guess we can end the discussion about wheter Google Fred is quality or linkrelated. And maybe we should start calling it Google Fred Updates or even better, stop using the name Fred for updates.

Because its a very stupid name for an update in my opinion. The only thing I like about Google Fred is the image of the cute fishes I made for stories about Google Fred. Or am I the only one thinking this? don’t be afraid to comment 😉

Google Fred, the story continues (Added on 4 April 2017)

The Google Fred question I asked was well received by the SEO community. Barry Schwarz even used my Twitter conversation with Gary as a source for his article: Google: There Were Other Updates Around The Release Of Fred.

But surprisingly Barry decided to come up with a different interpretation than me. He wrote that there were also other updates around the date Fred got launched.

In my opinion this is not what Gary Illyes said. Gary wrote: ‘around the date @rustybrick declared Fred a single thing’. This  strongly suggests Fred is not a single thing.

When I asked him about it he replied: “Maybe”. But Gary seems to agree with me I would say. So thats why I decided to ignore it and leave my article as it is. It was my question after all 😉

Follow the conversation on Twitter:

@rustybrick BTW @rustybrick: @methode basicly said they are all Fred updates. Fred is not one thing. No need to add more animals 😂

— Kim Pittoors (@kimpittoors) 3 april 2017

@kimpittoors @methode maybe

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) 3 april 2017

@methode @rustybrick @methode thats okay with me. I was prepared, still have plenty of fish left 😂 pic.twitter.com/xWhRhlslus

— Kim Pittoors (@kimpittoors) 3 april 2017

All Updates are Fred

Gary Illyes keeps repeating that to him all updates are Fred. Thats fine with me, lets have Fred 1, Fred 2 and so on. I really don’t care about the name, I care about the state of the SERPS! And at this moment the SERPS are a big mess! So I hope Google continues to update and improve, its needed!

@kimpittoors @methode pic.twitter.com/hHnAmoBxGi

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) 3 april 2017

And ofcourse, I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t end the conversation with a joke about pot, booze or sex. I mean, lets be honest we all like at least one of those three things. And I am always in for a laugh!

@rustybrick @methode Yeah happiness straight from the bottle: https://t.co/W9UCMvqcTr 😂

— Kim Pittoors (@kimpittoors) 3 april 2017

I will keep an eye on the Freds and other Google Updates

From now on I will be closely monitoring the SERPS with my own Google Algorithm Tracker called SEO Radar, the site is tracking Google since 10 March 2017 and will be launched on April 10 2017. If anything interesting happens you will the first to know. You can find me on Twitter

The word is going around that Google did an algorithm update in the beginning of February. Most tracking tools are showing signs of a recent update. But most white hatters are not experiencing big fluctuations.

At the blackhat forums however, they are talking about it a lot, and they labeled it an update that target PBNs, private blog networks.

So it might very well be a link based algorithm change. But Google keeps quite as usual. They never want to talk about Penguin related stuff and blackhat techniques in public.

Personally, I do hope it’s a Google Penguin tweak or another link based change. Because most of us already know that the new Penguin 4.0 is not bulletproof: https://www.nethit.xyz/2017/01/19/keyboost-linkscheme-still-working-well-despite-penguin-4-0/

And I would love to see those ‘keyboost motherfuckers’ go down. The same goes for any other black hatter copying other peoples stuff. Let’s see who will have the last laugh. Its only a matter of time..

I am ready for the show. Bring it on, can I have some popcorn with that Google? Want to know how this ends? Follow me on Twitter and I will keep you updated..

Do you have more information to add? Do you have a question or do you want to comment? Use the form below:

Last year I wrote an article with the title: Keyboost proves scraping, cloaking and other Black Hat SEO Techniques still work. The article is about a linkscheme called Keyboost.

Its a service of the Belgian company “iPower”. You can find it by typing that company name in your address bar and adding .eu behind it. They operate in multiple countries on multiple domains under the name Keyboost (you can also find it by typing that words with .eu behind it).

I found websites in Dutch, French and English. I hoped Penguin 4.0 would kill them off but it didn’t. Their website is doing very well in Google.

Go ahead and check them on Semrush. They are ranking well on multiple keywords with lots of competition. And the same can be said for their Keyboost domains.

What is Keyboost?

Keyboost is a private network of scrapersites spread over multiple IP’s and using variating anchor texts. They are probably buying expired domains with a high DA for this. The main content of the websites in the network consist out of scraped texts and “nofollow” links. I suspect this content is directly scraped from the Google SERPS.

On each site in the network you can find hidden blocks of code containing links to their own sites and sites of their clients.  The visible links are all “nofollow”, but the hidden links are not.(You can view these blocks in the source code or in the cached version of Google.)

So they are basicly Scraping content, Cloaking Googlebot and using rel=”nofollow” to guide the link juice where they want. And Penguin 4.0 does not detect it.

I hate to admit it, but it seems to work very well. I wouldn’t encourage you to participate however. It might damage your site later on. Want to see it for yourself? Google this and you will find lots of scrapersites.

And here you can also download an excel document with a number of links I extracted from Google with SEO Quake. They are all very spammy domains. I found a lot more of them by the way. This is just a small part. Their network is very big. They have at least 3000 domains at this moment.

Conclusion: Some Black Hat SEO Techniques still work despite Penguin 4.0

Its really frustrating to see that these simple Black Hat SEO techniques still work and are rewarded by Google despite Penguin 4.0. I believe that most Dutch SEO experts are trying to do a good job. By promoting their clients in a safe way, by creating good content that people like and will link to.

But if this shit also works why even bother? This is much cheaper and it also works, how do you want us to compete with that? I hope someone at Google will look into this now. Because I already mentioned it last year on Twitter and nothing has changed despite Penguin 4.0 being launched.

Do you have more information to add? Do you have a question or do you want to comment? Use the form below:

Yesterday I stumbled upon yet another a scraper site linking in. I see those much too often and find it quite frustrating that people are still doing this. If you would have asked me about this before, I would have told you that these kind of black hat SEO techniques no longer work. Because they shouldn’t. But guess what, I was totally wrong! (But don’t do it anyway. It might hurt you in the Future!)

After a little investigation, I discovered a Belgian firm (iPower from Gregory Lienard) selling links quite successfully trough a service called Keyboost (Not linking to it!).

Having 69 reviews with an average of 4.3 stars on their Facebook page. Almost all people were very positive about the service.

But when I looked at their website I could not find any explanation about how this service works. They are very vague about it.

But they had some text about backlinks and they also mention that no on-page changes are required to participate.

So you can fill in the rest for yourself. But there is no need to. I also found them admitting its link based in Dutch on Facebook. After some research I discovered that this firm has 2000/3000 domains filled with scraped content.

Successfully spamming the Google search results way past page 10

Whatever they are doing, it works very well (in the short term at least). After seeing all the good reviews, I went to Google and Googled “Keyboost complaints” in Dutch.

I was amazed to see how they successfully spammed the the Google search results way past page 10. There are still some real sites appearing on top but almost all other results where clearly search engine spam.

This is a screenshot of what I saw:

This triggered my interest. How are they doing this? And even more important? Why doesn’t Google detect it? How come this works?

Those questions will remain unanswered. Only Google knows! But I did some digging and this is what I found..

Scraping content, Cloaking Googlebot and using rel=”nofollow” to guide the link juice where they want

When seeing the scraped pages the first time I figured it might be some kind of amateurish negative SEO tactic. But when I had a closer look at the source code of the Keyboost pages I saw that all scraped links had a rel=”nofollow” attribute.

And that’s comforting even though Google has stated earlier that you shouldn’t be concerned about nasty backlinks from scraper pages. They say they will be able to see the difference, but if they do, why is this Keyboost system working then?

After having a look at the source code I figured something must be hidden from me. Why would they have create pages like this? All links were nofollow, so none of the linkjuice was passing trough. Search Engine Cloaking was the first option that came to mind so I went back to google and checked some of the cached versions.

This is what I saw:

In the Cached version I saw that there where eight dofollow links on top of the page. The first three where links to their own websites, and the other five are very probably Keyboost Clients. My theory: They are scraping content, cloaking Googlebot and using rel=”nofollow” to guide the link juice where they want. (To be more accurate, the nofollow is preventing it from going where they don’t want it, but the result is the same.)

But how do they escape from the dangerous Penguin? Well I don’t know! And neither do I know if they will be able to keep doing this. And the saddest thing is, this could have serious consequences for the people that are unknowingly participating in this linkscheme. And I know that those people also have kids to feed, some of them are my clients.

What will happen to the businesses of those people when the new Real-Time Penguin really comes? If it comes by the way.. We have been waiting for ages now. Hopefully this new version will ban this kind of Black Hat SEO techniques forever!

UPDATE 24 September 2016:

Google Penguin 4.0 has been launched by Google. Lets see if this update knocks them down.

UPDATE 13 Januari 2017:

Google Penguin 4.0 seems to hurt the keyboost system. But its not dead yet. The number of keyboost ‘scraper sites’ in the SERPS is lower than before, but I still see some. And iPower (the company behind keyboost) is still receiving good reviews on Facebook (those might be fake anyway, not sure). The beast has not died completely.

UPDATE 19 Januari 2017:

The Keyboost system still seems to work. So I decided to write another blogpost about this called: Keyboost Linkscheme still working well despite Penguin 4.0

Conclusion: Some Black Hat SEO Techniques still work but need to die!

Beeing a professional SEO I want to offer quality services to my clients. I play by the book because I would never want to risk damaging businesses and families for my own profit. This also means that SEO is a lot of work. You need to think along with your client and understand their business to make good websites. My goal is to make sites that do well in Google and also convert visitors into leads.

How can I sell this to my clients if these kind of old black hat SEO techniques still seem to work? It won’t work forever, thats for sure! But in the meantime it does work doesn’t it? I would’t encourage you to participate however. It might be very damaging for your business on the long term!

UPDATE 27 April 2017:

If you speak Dutch you can read more about Gregory Lienard, iPower and Keyboost here. It’s an article written by Nathan Veenstra from Optimus Online based on this post.

Do you have knowledge, questions, comments or anything else that might add to the discussion? Feel free to leave a comment.

We just finished the French version of the original Nethit website at Nethit.nl. After numerous requests from our foreign customers we finally took the time to create a French version of our website. This website will most probably never be as active as our Dutch website. We don’t have enough time to actively maintain multiple sites, but it will be handy for our foreign customers anyway.

The design of this website is a little bit more modern and flashy then the Dutch version. This is because the Dutch version is mainly focused on the content and we dont want to distract users to much. On the French version the focus is different, so we decided to do something else here.

What do you think about it? Let us know by filling out the comment form below! We appreciate your feedback!

Are you looking for a Multilingual Web designer in the Netherlands? Sometimes it can be hard to find a Web designer that knows the right languages to work on your multilingual website or project. This is where Nethit comes in handy!

Nethit offers Webdesign services in Dutch, English and French. Nethit is located in Haarlem near Amsterdam and can easily be reached by car, train or plane. It’s a five minute walk from Haarlem’s Central station. And its twenty minutes away from Schiphol Airport.

We already have many customers in other regions and even abroad. This is possible thanks to our good location and the benefits of modern communication methods such as Skype. Feel free to contact us and arrange a Skype meeting.