DANGER: Major Google Game-Changer!
Well that’s if you have been playing games with search engines (which we don’t).
If you are involved in ‘black hat’ SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) STOP NOW and read this article so you can minimise the damage done. Google has created a new version of Penguin and it’s putting a lot of shifty SEO companies and webmasters into a mad panic. The last Penguin update back in April, changed search results significantly for a lot of website.
Many webmasters who had invested heavily in SEO and found there way to the top for a lot of keywords, found themselves drop away almost overnight. It hurt a lot of dodgy website owners. If you thought that was a big hit, just wait for what Google are going to unleash now. I personally, am very excited by the changes because we only deal in high quality SEO practices. We never try and trick search engines into giving us more traffic than we deserve, we only work to earn the traffic ethically by giving search engines what they want, high quality useful websites. We do the same for our customers so we can’t wait to see what happens in our industry.
If you have invested in SEO now or even years ago, and are not quite sure what your SEO provider did for you, you could be sitting in a very dangerous position right now. Here’s a few tips I would suggest you take action on immediately before you get whacked by Google.
Clean-up dodgy Backlinks
The Penguin update has been designed to identify spammy, low quality backlinks and penalise the websites responsible. The shame is a lot of companies have unknowingly had a lot of spammy links created for them by SEO companies in an attempt to rank higher in search engines. If that’s you be warned, your rankings are going to drop away significantly.
The first thing you need to do is identify the poor quality backlinks and then get rid of them pronto. Sounds simple? Not really! This will likely take you a long, long time to work through depending on how much damage has been done.
The general rule of thumb is to avoid backlinks that:
- Come from ‘dodgy neighbourhoods’ such as adult website.
- Use the same keyword rich anchor text for many backlinks.
- Use site-wide footer links.
- Come from spammy websites built for the sole purpose of creating backlinks.
- Come from websites that are not related in any way to yours.
- Websites with very low Google PR (PageRank) Anything under PR1 I would suggest removing.
- Webpages with stacks of external links.
If you have backlinks like this you need to get rid of them.
Identifying Backlinks
We use specialist SEO software that finds backlinks from a variety of sources and compiles them all together. However you can do it yourself using some free tools online. We found these online, we don’t use them ourselves however they should be of some help if you want to do-it-yourself:
Using the free tools may not give you as many backlinks as our system would however, it’s a great start and will probably give you plenty to follow up on.
Checking your Backlinks
This can take a long, long time but its well worth doing before the next Penguin update arrives. You need to open each webpage and take a look. Generally if you open up the page that has your backlink and it looks like rubbish, has many links all over it and seems to be spammy, remove your backlink.
How to remove the Backlinks
You need to contact the webmasters and request a link removal. Hopefully the website has a contact us page so you can email the webmaster your request. Some spammy websites make it tricky to track down the webmaster. If you can’t find the contact details for the webmaster try this: www.whoismydomain.com.au It may help however some webmasters hide there details here.
You should also use Google Webmaster tools so you can stay on top of your backlinks and remedy any new backlinks that may be created down the track.
Check back later to see that the backlink was removed and follow up if need be. Chances are you won’t be able to get rid of all the bad back-links however if you can get rid of the majority you will be a lot better off.
Of course, if you need a hand with any of this, please give us a call on 1300 724 778.
