1. Go to Google Analytics and review your traffic levels – are you seeing a sudden drop or any other worrying trends?
2. Log into Google Webmaster and see if there are any problems with your site – are there any crawl errors, messages from Google etc?
3. Go to Google and do this search: [site:yoursite.com] – review how many URLs are listed. Is this what you would expect or are you missing quite a few?
4. See what position your site comes up when you make this search: “domain-name” search (without the TLD). If you’re in position 50 or below it’s pretty likely that you’ve got some kind of penalty
5. Has your Google PageRank dropped suddenly? This isn’t always obvious since Google only updates this every 3-4 months, but it’s worth a look just in case
6. Check that your site hadn’t been blacklisted as unsafe for browsing. Type http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com (with your domain at the end)
7. Check your inbound links – has there been a sudden rise in poor quality links?
8. Check your outbound links – make sure you’re not linking to any questionable sites. Use http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
9. Do you have more than one website? If so check thse. Sometimes Google has seemed to devalue the WHOIS domain owner which results in the dropped ranks of all the sites under the same domain account.
10. Take a sentence from one of your website pages – cut and paste this exactly into Google with quote marks surrounding it (exact match). Check to see if the page you took it from ranks at the top
11. Add this bit of code to the search URL : &filter=0 (or click on the “show omitted results” link). If your site shows under this search it means that you’ve been hit with a duplicate content penalty

If you have been penalised then you need to make sure that you identify what it is that you’ve done to cause the penalty. Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines to ensure you comply.

Here’s a video from Google’s SEO spokesperson, Matt Cutts, where he talks about sites that have been penalised and how long these generally last for:

Link building, done correctly, should be a steady process – with a wide variety of links being generated, with a variety of anchor text pointing to a variety of pages.

What kind of activities should you be careful about?

Building too many links at one time: If your website has been ticking along for the last few years, without much work or SEO done to it, you might not have generated many inbound links. If you suddenly start on an Internet marketing campaign with the goal to boost your website, even if you’re doing things the right way, Google may be wary of you if you suddenly go from 5 links to 500 within a week. This is known as ‘link velocity’, and as Tad Chef from the SEOptimize blog says:

“Google is checking the link velocity – aka the rate in which you earn links – and if you get more links than you deserve, you risk a penalty even if the links are perfectly legit.”

Using identical anchor text in links: Anchor text is the clickable part of a link. Having your keywords in this anchor text is a good thing – it tells the search engines exactly what that particular link is about. However, when people naturally link to you, they wouldn’t always use the same anchor text – one person will use a different phrase to describe your business or a web page than another. So having all your inbound links with the same anchor text looks unnatural, and therefore will raise flags.

Getting links from the same sources: Variety is not only the spice of life, it’s the spice of link building too! You need to ensure you’re getting links from a wide range of websites. Getting a high number of links from the same site can look unnatural.

What are the common Google penalties?

Common penalties include:

• Any position 1 or 2′s being dropped to 6 and being stuck there (which was noted for the first time back in 2007, and is called  Google #6)
• All rankings being dropped by 30 places (named the 30 penalty)
• Particular rankings being pushed to the last position (known as the 950 penalty, as it’s an average of a drop of 950 places!)
• Complete ban

Take this case study from from SEOptimize. They wanted to test whether or not generating a high number of low quality links at once would result in any penalties. Author Marcus Taylor went about generating 10,000 spammy links to a new website he created specifically for the experiment. You can see the traffic volume the site was getting below:

Although the test site reached the number 1 position for its target keyword within a few weeks, eventually it was kicked out completely from these rankings. According to Taylor:

“Just as I was beginning to lack faith in Google’s ability to detect the most unnatural of link patterns, the site suddenly dropped out of search results for everything including brand searches, and what’s more it’s never bounced back.”

So what can you take away from this? Besides the obvious, “It’s not a great idea to build 10,000 low quality inbound links at once,” this case study also illustrates why it’s so important to develop a range of different link types over time. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – instead of relying on just one method to generate inbound inks, use a range of activities that will help to generate a natural link profile.

Avoiding Penalties

Make sure that your link building is done naturally and at a steady pace. Focus on generating and promoting high quality content. Avoid any black hat SEO activities, such as keywords stuffing, using link farms and other dubious link building activities. The goal is to build up a natural looking link profile – full of nice, high quality links.

If you’re looking for some link building help, please get in touch with us today! Email info@SMEketing.com or complete our contact form.

We’ll submit your website to 500 social bookmarking sites for just £50. Imagine getting 500 valuable links on high PR websites pointing to your domain… for just £50! That’s just 10p per link!

We’ve probably all had an email like this at some point, but unfortunately sometimes people get lured into the idea of all those wonderful, high quality links and actually follow these spammer up with their offer.

There’s so many things wrong with this offer, it’s hard to know where to start, but I’ll give it a go:

• Firstly, you don’t submit websites to social bookmarking sites, you submit a URL that contains a particular piece of content – so if this company is just submitting your homepage URL, there’s a good chance it will be rejected.
• Most social bookmarking sites use the NoFollow attribute on their links – this means that you don’t get any link juice from the linking site. Some social sites remove this attribute if your content becomes very popular and makes it only the first page, but this takes effort and it’s unlikely that this company will be putting in any extra effort for you.
• It’s unlikely that all 500 social bookmarking sites will relate to you, your product/services or industry. Many of these will be niche sites which won’t even accept your content.
• At the same time as submitting your site to the social bookmarking website, they’ll also be submitting the links of the other poor buggers who fell for this scam – owners and administrators of these sites don’t take too kindly to this kind of activity.
• Many social bookmarking sites don’t offer permanent links – the links stay on the site for as long as the submitting account stays open and active – spammer accounts often open and close quickly, which means your links get deleted too.
• Some of the more popular, influential social bookmarking sites (such as Stumbleupon and Digg) could also ban your domain indefinitely, meaning that when you want to manually submit high quality content on your own time, you’re out of luck!

Social bookmarking isn’t about generating as many links as possible – it’s about sharing high quality content to people who will find it interesting. It’s a social thing and something that takes time. But if done correctly it can have fantastic repercussions for businesses.

So next time an email with an offer like this comes into your Inbox, mark it as spam and forget about it!

If you’re interested in the benefits of creating and promoting high quality content online, get in touch with SMEketing. We love writing copy for the web – blog posts, articles, website copy and more! Call us on 023 8083 7271 or email info@SMEketing.com.

Quantity
All things being equal, the more links the better. However, things are rarely (if ever) equal. So the advice is to build as many links as possible, however some links are pretty worthless (such as those found on link farms, mass directories etc), so it’s best to make the best use of your time by focusing on those that will give you the most benefit.

Quality
What makes a quality link? This is a pretty broad area, but basically you want to get a link from a high quality site (i.e. an established site, not some spammy directory), and one that is relevant to your industry. A link on a very focused page from a high quality website is worth a lot. Just think ‘focus’ – you want a link from a relevant industry website, on a page focused on your particular service/product, within a paragraph that’s talking about what you do.

Position
Where are all the other links of the page situated? Are they right next to yours? Where is your link? Closer to the top and sitting on its own it the best.

Keywords
Do you have keywords in the anchor text of your link? Having your URL or a simple ‘Click here’ isn’t great since it doesn’t tell Google any additional information about your website. A link like ‘Southampton Marketing Agency‘ is worth far more to SMEketing than just our URL listed somewhere.

Dilution
The more links on a page, the less yours is worth. Links pass ‘link juice’ to the pages they link to… so the more links, the less ‘juice’ you get. So try and get a link on a page that only has a few links (internal links are included in this too).

Nofollow
This is an attribute that many websites use to stop the flow of the above mentioned ‘link juice’. Many social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and comments within blogs and forums use this attribute within their link tag. It looks like: rel=nofollow. It stops people from spamming sites and means that you don’t get any SEO benefit from that link.

Link building is something that you must be continually working on – it’s not enough to build 1000 quality links and then sit back and relax… because it’s likely your competitors are still link building. The Internet is constantly changing and you must keep up in order to build and maintain a strong position with the major search engines.

There’s a lot to learn with SEO, if you want more information, or are interested in registering for an SEO workshop, please get in touch – info@SMEketing.com.

Hi!

Fantastic video, sooooo helpful!!!

It would be fantastic to see a video on how to create inbound links…..

I went to university in Southampton, and now I am within my first year of a new job and been asked to build 700 links in the next MONTH which is impossible and I dont want to? get my company blacklisted from google how can I do this?

Can you help me with creating quick inbound links to my website?

Thanks

This was our response:

Glad you found the video helpful.

So link building… being asked to produce so many new links in such a short time is not only a bit unrealistic, but it’s not really a good idea. If your site goes from having about 100 links to about 800 in the space of a month, that’s going to look a bit dodgy/spammy to Google.

Link building is all about building up quality links of a sustained period of time. Google wants to see a site that is growing in size and popularity – and getting a steady stream of good quality links is an indicator of a good quality site.

Link building is both about quality and quantity – it’s not an even/or thing (although if you had to pick, going for quality over quantity would be the way to go). You want to have a lot of good quality links.

There are loads of factors that make up a good or bad link. In a nutshell, a good quality link is one that comes from a reputable website, has good anchor text (the blue bit you click on), is on a good quality relevant page (i.e. relevant to your industry) and does not have the ‘nofollow’ attribute (which a lot of social media channels/blogs/forums have – basically the ‘nofollow’ attribute stops the linking site from passing any link juice to you through the link).

So the best way to build links is to create really good content that people want to link to. There’s a thing called ‘link bait’ which is basically defined as any kind of content that people want to link to. Imagine yourself as an industry blogger, seeking to cover the most exciting, unique trends and pages in the sector. If this individual stumbled across your content, would they be likely to write about it? If the answer is yes, it qualifies as link-bait.

So you can create content such as:

- Free Tools
- Web 2.0 Applications
- Top 10 Lists
- Industry-Related Humor
- Reviews of Events
- Interviews with Well-Known Insiders
- Surveys or Collections of Data
- Film or Animation
- Charts, Graphs or Spreadsheets
- Contests, Giveaways and Competitions
- Trend-Spotting
- Advice from Multiple Experts

Also things like press releases that you can upload to free newswires and articles that you can upload to sites like Ezine are a great way of generating links.

So I hope this helps! If you need any additional marketing assistance, let me know. We offer a range of outsourced marketing services at SMEketing and can do as little as an hours work, right up to a certain amount of days a month. You can email us at info@SMEketing.com.

Also follow us on Twitter – http://twitter.com/SMEketing and follow our blog – we normally blog a lot about SEO – http://www.SMEketing.com/blog/

Link building is something that should be taken on as part of an on-going marketing strategy; it’s not something that should be done in short, sharp bursts. Think about what content your prospects and customer want to use and read. High quality content will always create high quality links – it just takes time and effort.

This is a common problem businesses have – how can you increase the number of links pointing to your site. We’ve already established that link farms and reciprocal linking is a big no no. So what other options do you have available?

Here are a list of link building ideas:

• Blogging: Good quality blog posts help to build links, as other bloggers may link to them. You can also register your blog with RSS feed directories and submit each blog post to social bookmarking sites (such as Digg, StumbleUpon etc)
• Social Media: Social media is becoming more prevalent in marketing than ever. It’s not clear yet exactly how much weigh the search engines will place on the links resulting from sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn etc, but it’s still a very worthwhile area to invest some time in. There are many more benefits to social media than just link building
• Press Releases: Creating optimised press releases and submitting them to online newswires are an excellent way of generating a high volume of good quality links
• Article Marketing: Creating well written and well optimised articles and submitting them to sites like eZine and GoArticle will help generate not only good quality links, but click throughs from reputable sources
• Link Building Through Competitor Analysis: This is as simple as looking at the links your competitors have, and copying them! See here to find how to How to Increase the Number of Links to Your Small Business Website using the Yahoo! LinkDomain search query

The final part of this six part series will focus on how you can measure and track your SEO campaign.

Call us on 023 8083 7271 if you want more information on SMEketing’s SEO services.

They have so many benefits, especially in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO). This weeks post will focus on just one of the benefits (come back next week for the next benefit):

Benefit Number 1: Google LOVES Fresh Content
Google, and the other search engines love fresh content; same as humans, we don’t want to read out of date content, and neither do the search engines (not that they actually ‘read’ the content, but they don’t want to present old content to searchers). Because of this, Google will prioritise fresh content over old content in their results. So imagine you have recently created a blog post all about the benefits of your product – such as your particular brand of easy clean paint brushes. When someone searches for ‘easy to clean paint brushes’ in Google, there’s a good chance that your blog post on your super easy to clean paint brushes will show up high in the search results. Your result is likely to be higher than some of your competitors who just have a product page featuring their brushes, that they’ve not updated in six or more months. In terms of search engine optimisation, you must remember that search engines don’t rank websites, they rank pages – and they love brand spanking new pages! Having a site with regularly updated content and regular new pages also means that overall your site gets more ‘trust’ from the search engines. So some of the benefit from the new content will roll over to other pages as well, even if they haven’t been updated in a while.

Another benefit of adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis is that the search engine bots will crawl your site on a more regular basis – meaning that any crucial updates you’ve made to your site/content will be refreshed in the search engine results a lot quicker. Have you ever wondered what the ‘cached’ link means when you look at search results in Google? Clicking on this will show you the last time Google crawled that web page – so you can see exactly what Google is seeing. If you have updated your website with some new product pages, Google will not know about it until the next time it comes to crawl your site. So if you hardly ever update your site, Google will be in the habbit of only crawling your site on a monthly (or so) basis. This means that none of your new product pages will appear in the search engines results during this month – not until Google crawls your site again. However, if you constantly add new content to your site, Google will get into the habbit of crawling your site a lot more often – the ideal crawl amount is daily, but realistically, weekly will do. Having your site crawled on a regular basis, means your brand new product pages will show up in the search engine results a lot quicker.

So we’ve established that the search engines love fresh new content. However, it can be difficult to continually add new content to your site - you don’t to be adding pointless pages to your site just for the sake of it – this is where blogs come in. Each time you add a new blog post, that creates new content and a new page on your site. Ensuring that you update your blog at least once a week means that the search engines will start to crawl your site on a regular basis and will start to prioritise your new pages (and pages in your site in general) in their results.

Come back next week for ‘Benefit Number 2′.

In the meantime, if you want any assistance creating a blog for your small business, please come and talk to us here at SMEketing. Not only can we create blogs for you, we can also write and optimise your blog posts! Click here to contact us.

The reason why links are so important, is because it helps to build up the ‘trust’ value of your website. In order to be ranked high, the search engines need to have trust in your site. Many factors affect this trust issue, such as domain age, site size, freshness of content, but most of all it is the number of good quality links pointing to it. Each of these links are like a vote – a vote from one website saying that they trust and value your site enough to mention it on their site.

So how can you increase the number of inbound links? Well like most things, there are many ways – here are a few summarised within three areas:

• Link baiting: Generating such great content, that people can’t help but link to it
• PR: Creating press releases that link to your site
• Manual Link Building: Finding sites that are relevant to yours where you can submit your link to – such as directories, community organisations, as well as bloggers and industry sites.

Yahoo LinkDomain Search

To find out more about generating some links to your site, view the video below. This will show you a way in which you can not only generate some links to your site, but also keep an eye on what your competitors are doing using the Yahoo LinkDomain search query. It is also a good way of keeping track of who is linking to your small business website.

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If you want to know more about link building strategies, or about other ways in which you can increase your online presence, please get in touch with us at SMEketing. Call us, email us or complete our Contact Us form!