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!

Link Farming – Just Say No! is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

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.

Page-Level Ranking Penalties on the Rise from Google? is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

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.

Visit our SEO Blog and enjoy all information we provide about search engine oprtimization.

Google Japan Punished by Using Pay Per Post Practices is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

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?”

Let’s start about my talking about what a bad site is – spam generator, screen scraper, URL manipulation and malware are all words that can be used to describe a bad site.  It’s a site that is designed to interrupt or throw off the web experience rather than to compliment it.  In short, it’s the dregs of the Internet.

In SEO land we know that we can’t control who links to our sites – wouldn’t it be great if we could?  So why would a search engine punish us for who is pointing to our site? The good news is that in most cases they aren’t going to punish you. They know that most (if not all) sites have some questionable sites that are pointing to them. For the most part the search engines do a good job of classifying these sites and throwing out their effect on your rank. 

Having said that it is important to realize that bad sites linking to you could have effect your ranking in certain situations:

• Does it appear that you engaged in a paid linking scheme to boost your rankings? If so, be prepared to be hit hard by Google and the other search engines. This is, in their eyes, a mortal sin.
• Do you have more bad sites linking to you than good?  This can be hard for small sites just getting started, but percentage does matter.  If most of your inbound links are coming from sites that aren’t of high quality it can affect your ranking.
• Have you engaged in link manipulation? When taking on a client project you may not know the answer to this as they might not know themselves what the “previous guy” did.

So what do you do if you find yourself being penalized for bad inbound links and you haven’t done anything to encourage it or participate in it?  First, fire off a letter to the search engines asking to be reconsidered.  Be sure to include a list of sites that are linking to you that you believe are hurting your ranking. Stick to the facts – in most cases if they haven’t detected anything underhanded going on they will work to recalculate your rankings.

Second, work on building the good inbound links. The more links you have coming to you from trustworthy sites the better off you will be.  Not only will it help improve your rankings, but it will also attract more readers from the other sites.  It’s a win-win situation and a good piece of SEO advice to follow every day.

SEO Insight: Can Bad Links Hurt My Rankings? is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

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!

So how do you protect yourself, your company and your good name when it comes to SEO?  Like anything else in life you need to make sure you perform due diligence of new clients. This isn’t as hard as you might think, and taking a few minutes up front can save you a lot of headaches down the road.

The beauty of this is you can turn this due diligence into a saleable product for your company.  Many times a client will come to you wondering why their site has fallen off the search engine radar, or why sales have plummeted suddenly.  You can sell them on SEO forensics – or as I like to call it “WTF happened to SEO!”

Start looking at SEO from the inside out – what are they doing on their site with links and what do the search engines know about the site?  You want to find out how they link to themselves internally, what is hiding behind the web pages (the code), and what Google and the other guys have in their index.  All of these tasks are simple to perform.  You are pretty much doing a very basic site analysis.  Something you should be doing for every client.

Next start looking for cloaking – the practice of the search engines indexing one thing and the page displaying another.  This practice has no place in proper SEO and should be rooted out and eliminated.  The best way to do this is by “pretending” you are a search engine index bot (there are a number of Firefox extensions and other scripts that can help with this) and see the site the same way the bots do.

Finally, look at backlinks; you will find most of the time that deceptive linking practices are one of the most common shady SEO practices that have been used over the years.  You want to look at everything from anchor text to sponsored links and everything in between.  How many links coming to the site are from low-quality sites, like spam blogs?  Are there hidden links on the site?  Does the same link show up over and over on the site?  Root out these bad links and eliminate them – especially the links from low-quality sites.

You want to use your SEO skills to perform a “smell test” of the site.  You’d be amazed at how much you can pick up just by a quick review.  Over time you will know what to look for and will be able to spot shady SEO practices a mile away.

In the end, your business and your clients will appreciate your efforts and skills.  Instead of battling the ghosts of bad SEO past you’ll be helping your client list move forward with modern, acceptable SEO techniques.

Shady SEO Tricks Can Have Lasting Consequences is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World