It’s a common enough problem. A site owner, keen to get right into off-page SEO, builds up inbound links too fast and gets a search engine penalty. Far from being in the number one spot they envisioned, the site owner is suddenly faced with being far worse off than when they began. What to do?
The best step to prevent this tragic occurrence is, of course, to get an SEO company involved. Much of the worth of hiring a search engine optimization consultant is in their experience of SEO. This experience is what prevents mistakes from happening. You can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about your search engine optimization campaign. If you’re not able to consult a professional, or if you just want to resolve the problem yourself, you need to know what you’ve done wrong and how to deal with it.
Step 1: identifying the problem
More often than not, the most difficult thing with search engine penalties is identifying that you’ve been penalised. If your original position was number 27, and you’ve dropped down to number 58, all sorts of things could be responsible. How do you know that it’s your fault, rather than an increase in competition that’s caused the sudden dive?
The sharpness of the drop is one indication that something is definitely wrong. Competitors aren’t really capable of pushing your site back more than a few places in a short time. If your position has gone from middling to absolutely horrible in one fell swoop, the problem is probably you.
A major indication is if you’ve performed work on your site recently. If you’ve implemented some new SEO techniques or tried out some internet marketing on your site’s pages within a few weeks of the drop, you might have caused the problem yourself. In this instance, if you’ve gone out and got yourself lots of inbound links, you need to remedy the situation.
Wait – too many links? How is that possible?
It is indeed possible to have too many inbound links, usually because they’ve all sprung up in a short time period. The search engines place worth on inbound links because they indicate a natural popularity around the net. The key word here is natural. A site that suddenly goes from having 20 inbound links to 300 raises suspicion. Search engine engineers are aware that sites will buy links to boost their linking profile and as a form of internet marketing. To stop that happening a link filter has been built into the search engine algorithm.
The concept of a link filter is one that hasn’t been thoroughly investigated by the search engine optimisation community. This means that no-one’s really sure how many links are too many and how short a time period is too short. This makes link building an even more complicated process for search engine optimisation.
The answer is to go about things slowly. It’s not worth dedicating your first week of SEO to building and buying as many links as you can. Let it happen at a more natural pace to avoid problems.
