Survive Google’s SEO Apocalypse With 4 Linking Building Tips
Avoid Google’s Penalties And Learn To Manage Your Link Profile
If you receive a penalty from Google this can lead to your web site’s pages to be ranked lower on search engine rankings. Google can even remove your site from its search index, and ultimately lead to your business losing all traffic from google. As Google continues to wage war on spam bots, excessive optimized links, companies small and large have to be more careful than ever in ensuring and protecting their links.
Google, the search giant, has already admitted that in the future, links will be devalued over time as Google seeks new ways and ideas to enhance user experience. This is all at the cost of removing relevancy and reducing popularity of web pages that google links to. To elaborate more on this, Google is seeking to retain its users on their site by displaying accurate data for search queries immediately and directly on its search results. This leads us to believe that links aren’t that important in the future. However, today links are still a great way to rank a page versus other pages. Google has constantly been trying to figure out how to sort out bad links from good links and unfortunately web designers and marketing managers have been caught in the crossfire.
Let’s talk about how you can maintain a clean link profile and avoid becoming a victim of Google’s penalization in the future SEO apocalypse.
Let’s first talk about the different types and scenarios of trouble that can happen to your site, whether by accident or intentionally.
Google’s algorithm is constantly scanning your websites and links, this can be viewed in the Google search console manager. You can view what links are valid and not valid, and view the issues for the reasoning behind the algorithm.
The best practice is to fix these problems before they happen. If you change a link, ensure that you have proper redirects for that link. This can be done with software like screaming frog, this can be done with WordPress widgets such as redirection or 301 redirects.
It is commonly known in the industry that Google can also take manual actions against websites with link profiles that are unnatural. With this scenario in mind, your cleanup process of that link can also require a request for reconsideration. This involves a lengthy and unknown timeline of contacting Google and letting them know that you’re sorry about the issues and that you’ve corrected your actions. This commonly occurs with your Google my business page or now known as Google profile page. A scenario that commonly causes issues is registering addresses for the company on GMB or now GBP. Businesses have to use an address that’s not a PO. Box to receive their verification code in order to create a panel. For many business owners this may not be their first and only business and tend to use one address for multiple companies when initially created that differ from the actual address. Even just leaving this address on your GBP is an issue when you have two online companies using the same address. This flag can completely remove your Google Business Profile on Google until the issue is resolved through the process described above. The simple solution is to use an address and ensure that the address is removed after verification or changed to prevent this issue.
Here are 4 tips to ensure that your business and your links don’t end up in hot water and can stay in the clean category when Google updates their algorithm.
1. Clean Up And Remove Spam Links
In April of 2012, Google launched their Penguin algorithm update that completely changed the way that Google reviews links. This algorithm has been updated since and continues to target unnatural looking link schemas and link profiles.
How does Google identify bad links using the Penguin algorithm? Google has common red flags that you need to understand like these:
- Keyword stuffing in links
- Links from sites that are known for malicious activity, malware, etc.
- Links from spam forums or comments
- Links from post with websites that are not reputable
- Links from spam directories
- Anchor text match paid links exactly
- Links from spam forums or comments
When Google looks at your business they view it as a property, and any inbound or outbound links would be considered your neighbors, sharing in the value of each other’s property. It is your job to ensure that your web site’s neighborhood isn’t caught or plagued with these issues described above.
If you believe that your website may have these issues, or bad neighbors, there are many services that you can use to begin the process of Link removal. If you’re not having success with getting these links removed voluntarily from the spam websites webmaster, you can utilize Google’s Disavow Tool, which will automatically tell Google that these links should not be included in your link profile.
With this tool comes great power, and some have been known to go a little over the edge with this tool, removing almost all the links to their website. This is not a good strategy, as there is still value in having links!
2. Higher Value Links Are Our Focus
Google uses your link profile, not as a single link but as a whole of all the links that direct to your website to rank your website. Let’s learn about how to gain legitimate link building to better change the quality of your links.
Content marketing is an amazing and incredible way to create high quality links. This requires creating high-quality content, and using reliable websites to host this content so that you can increase high-quality relevant links to your website.
The main takeaway is that we are seeking to attract links and we are not going out and asking for them. Create content on your website or high ranking platforms that people want to share, that people want to use as a source, and that people want to promote with your link.
3. Organize Your Outbound Links
Let’s now shift our focus to removing and cleaning up our own links that are outbound to other linked profiles.
These links can be created on purpose or by the users of your website. Take the time to check these links and ensure that the website that they’re linking to is a reputable website. The most common example that we see for out bounding links occurs on blog pages. Lots of times users will register for your website with the name, the title of the comment, and the comment itself being a link for a website which can be a negative or spammy website. We can control this by changing the settings on our blog to have approval requirements for comments. We can also introduce authentication methods through Google’s reCAPCHA system to reduce spam bots from creating accounts on our website.
4. Link Diversification
When we talk about link diversification we emphasize not placing all of your eggs in one basket. This can be applied by not just relying on web traffic from Google, but also using other reputable websites that have a high domain Authority and can provide traffic sources. Some examples of high domain authority and high traffic sources are YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. You’ve probably noticed the trend, in that social media is a great avenue for generating alternative sources of traffic to search engines. Then following social media is forums such as Reddit, etc.
What You Should Take Away From This
Do not go and disavow or create nofollow redirects for all of your links. Be very selective where you place your content and place your links where it will make the most sense.
Constantly review your links to understand the health of your link profile and how it applies to search engines such as Google to avoid becoming another victim of Google’s algorithm that applies penalties and grievances that can remove your business from the search engine.
