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It wasn’t too long ago when one of the acceptable practices in the world of search engine optimization to gain a rankings boost was to setup multiple domains and engage in linking back to the content on the primary domain. Known as link farming (a black hat practice), it was a way to easily cultivate rankings – at least until the search engines got wise about it and started penalizing the practice. Today, link farming is a practice best left in the past – you might get away with it for a while, but eventually the search engines catch on and penalize you for it.
There are two types of link farming that we still see out there today as practice of some seo services: Paying for links and Multiple Domains. The paying for links idea is still being practiced by some, though its on life support at best. This is the classic scheme where you just go around and pay other sites (who have at least some rank) to link to your content. It doesn’t take long anymore for the search engines to figure out who is collecting the cash and turn off the juice you get from those links.
The second practice, of buying multiple domains and linking back to content on a main domain, is something that is easily detectible nowadays. Not only so search engines look at the content on a domain, but many of them also look at the registrar data as well. So if you register 100 domains to provide links back to a main domain it won’t take long for them to put two and two together and de-rank you.
To put it in a nutshell, the only good way to get links is to earn them. Quality content is what gets the important sites (the ones that rank well themselves without resulting to trickery) to link back to you. After all, even if your link farming tricks were to work – once people get to your site, then what? You have to provide something of value to them for them to stick around. So many websites fail at this very basic fundamental – quality content that is related to the domain and/or search term the user queried against.
If you have quality content and people just aren’t finding you – don’t despair. Use tools such as Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms to make your site known. Let them discover you with a little help. Every time you post new content send out a short summary “Tweet” about it. You will find that over time the links will come naturally and your rank will start to go up without you having to resort to old-fashioned tricks that can hurt you more in the long run than they will ever help!
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It can be frustrating trying to track down why suddenly a page (or even an entire site) that ranked well falls in the rankings or worse yet drops off Google’s radar completely. Is it because a competitor has done a better job, because Google changed their search algorithm yet again, or because you have been given a penalty by Google? Lately it seems the answer to this question has all too often been the third choice – and today I’m here to talk a little bit about what we are seeing and how as an SEO professional you can be prepared and try and take action before it hits.
First, let’s talk about Google penalties. Unfortunately, they don’t like to talk much about them or why they give them. However, historically, there has been a pattern to when and why these happen.
First, make sure that your site has simply not lost ranking to a competitor. Sometimes the simplest thing is the answer! Next, check to see if your site is still being indexed by Google using the site:url.com moniker in the search box. If it comes back negative then Google has removed (banned) you from search. Start working to cleanup your site and file a re-inclusion request with Google once you have your act back together.
Check to see if your site is still ranking for its domain name or other unique branded terms? If not, then you’ve probably been hit with a penalty because you are linking to bad sites, are engaging in paid link schemes or have on-site spam such as keyword stuffing or cloaking going on. Clean all of that mess up and then file a re-inclusion request and don’t do it again!
Try searching for some terms that appear in your title tags and see where you land. If you aren’t in the top 10-20 (and you were before) then most likely what has happened is that Google has wiped a lot of your links of their value. This happens pretty frequently, so you aren’t alone in this regard. The best thing here is to get more natural links from quality sites and build your site that way – it isn’t worth the time or trouble to get links from the “here today, gone tomorrow” sites.
Normally, if you get through this then you don’t have a penalty, but rather you just lost rank. It’s time to put some of those SEO skills to use to get that rank back up!
Now, before you get too excited, let me warn you. Recently Google has been applying algorithms to how they apply penalties and we’ve seen some additional behavior taking place. Let me explain what is going on best that I can.
First, in the past penalties usually affected an entire site. However, recently we’ve been seeing more and more penalties affecting only a single page. Now this is better than having your entire site banned – but it makes you wonder what they are looking for!
Keyword specific penalties are on the upswing as well. These are a pain to track down sometimes because they can be so narrowly focused. This usually occurs because you have paid links pointing to a page and they all have the same anchor text. However, the pain in tracking this down comes from the fact that long tail searches will work just fine, it’s only the very specific exact keywords that will be penalized.
The algorithmic penalties can be difficult to track down, but there are some tell tale signs it might be taking place: the page selling links are constantly being crawled by Google, and the penalty might appear one day and be gone the next as Google fine tunes their detection mechanism.
To detect such behavior, the following information might be useful:
- Do you have paid links from a link network that Google can detect automatically? If so, get rid of them!
- Paid links are all using the same anchor text and linking to the same page.
- The page being linked to doesn’t rank well for the target keyphrase.
- The page in question does rank well for the long-tailed searches, but not for the specific ones.
We’re still watching what Google is doing and this information is subject to change, but there is no doubt that Google is taking more automated, aggressive approach to keeping rank and search as natural as they can.
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Hello Fellows,
Recently Google Japan launched a new home page where it was promoting a list with the most searched terms typed on its search engine. It´s a kind of “HotWords” also found on Twitter:
Accordantly with TechCrunch, that new service has been already available to include in the iGoogle page of any user. The big trouble arose when Google Japan decided hire an online marketing company, Cyberbuzz, to promote that new tool, already available as a widget to webmasters, through pay-per-posts.
Well, some good integrations arose from that process as reported by TechCrunch, but this number was really low if you get note by the research in Google BlogSearch.
Google Japan swam against the flow of good online advertising practices supported by its headquarter in the USA, when it dicided to use pay-per-posts campaigns. All of us know how Google USA fights Pay-per-Post practices.
So far so good for Google Japan. But just for now.
Yesterday, Fabio Ricotta an SEO blogger from Brazil noticed a twitter message written by Matt Cutts leader of the Google Anti Spam team where he announced a punishment to Google Japan. He made a question to him about the issue and Matt gave a positive answer confirming the punishment.
We don´t know if that was an isolated action, took by the Anti Spam team, because the Google Japan was punished after 46 paid posts (Noticed at the Google BlogSearch research). It´s a little suspected think that an algorithm detected the issue, but we cannot discard this hypotheses.
Well, the most important thing to learn from the whole history is: even the Google branches in other countries can’t walk away with something concerning the Google Anti Spam Polices, and if you intend or actually do pay-per-posts then you must open your eyes, maybe you are the next to lose Page Rank from one day to another.
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So you’ve worked hard to get your site SEO optimized with quality content that should score you big points in the rankings; or maybe you have signed on a new client who wants you to help them get recognized better out there in the search world by contracting your SEO services. Whatever the case you will probably find in your SEO analysis that a number of “bad sites” are linking to you and the question on your mind is, “How is this going to affect my ranking?”
Continue Reading: SEO Insight: Can Bad Links Hurt My Rankings?Related Posts:
We all know about skeletons in the closet that can pop out years later and have potentially destructive consequences on one’s career. What’s true in real life is also true on the SEO front – if you aren’t careful when taking on new projects and clients you can have a lot of their “skeletons” falling out of virtual closet with you left to try and stuff them all back in.
Ask yourself this: When a new client or project comes along how well do you research what has been done marketing and SEO-wize before you came along? Many of us leave ourselves wide open to walk into sites and work with clients whose shady search engine optimization practices of the past are haunting them – and you are left to take the blame!