Back last April Google put through a couple of corrections in their search engine protocols that seemed to hurt a lot of websites in some fashion. Their intention was to clean up their algorithms so that their search results were not only more accurate, but to penalize those websites that they somehow deemed as having a lot of keywords or spam-like characteristics. They also took a look at links back to websites and started taking away some authority from websites based on the quality of who was linking in to them.
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Whenever something like this happens, the crowd goes on a lemming rampage and starts decrying SEO tactics as something that won’t work anymore and some people even start saying that people who say they do SEO services are taking advantage of everyone else.
I’m here to tell you that’s not true across the board. In reality, some people are either always sneaky or always honest; the only middle ground is being somewhat incompetent, recommending things that search engines don’t even look at anymore as major SEO components.
Here’s some truths.
First, the basic principles of SEO will always be valid. I’m not mentioning them again because the tips are in the article I linked to.
Second, if you purchased links you knew whether they were good or not, so that’s on you. If you didn’t purchase links that’s a different story. I know that my main business website has more than 8,500 links from sources that I never submitted that site to, and a lot of them are questionable. However, I don’t have the time to reach out to that many sites, so if Google decides they’re lousy sites, there’s really not much I can do about it.
Third, if you’ve written your content well, and you’ve made sure that you haven’t overused your keywords and keyword phrases on all pages, then you should be fine. However, if you have, and you’ll know if you have, then you need to put some corrections through to fix that.
Fourth, and this is an interesting one. If your website or blog has a lot of links, you might have to perform some maintenance and check for broken links. Turns out that a lot of blogs got hit badly because of that one.
The rest of your marketing, if it’s solid stuff, will still do you well. I look at my main website and even though traffic has dropped to the blog after the updates, I’m still ranked highly for the keywords on the site that I’ve worked hard to get there. Other keyword phrases have fallen, but as long as the main ones still work, it shows that my marketing campaign for them was legitimate.
Unless your traffic drops in half, don’t panic. Just put some time into looking at your sites, maybe fix a few things, add a little bit of new content if you can, and you’ll be heading in the right direction in no times.
By the way, last Wednesday I interviewed a friend of mine, my oldest friend, Chuck Price of Measurable SEO on many topics, the biggest two being entrepreneurship and SEO; how timely. Here’s that video; you should check it out:
Hi Mitch,
Well, that’s very good that you’ve clarified few of those SEO misunderstandings.
Few months ago, a blogger who is supposed to know about SEO, links and all… told me that I should mark as no-follow basically anyone I link on my blog.
So, when I wrote my post about 42 bloggers you should get to know (which you were part of) I painstakingly added the no-follow tag on each one them.
Then my web developer told me that it was not a good thing to do, and that whomever told me to do that didn’t know what they were saying. As a proof for his agreement he mentioned a big name such Neil Patel who personally told him what and what not to do in this regard.
Bottom line, he had a point, and would I have known that before I wouldn’t have added those no-follow tags.
Bottom line, when adding links, common sense is the best tool! It’s OK to link to other bloggers, when you’re a blogger. Google can make the difference when it’s genuine and when it’s not.
Have a wonderful day!
~Sylviane
Sylvaine, I hate when people tell others to make every single link nofollow. Google hates that as well because they see it as trying to manipulate them. On this blog, if I link to another blog I never make it nofollow; that’s just silly. If I link to a sales site or a news site I do it. But there’s no hard and true rules for all times I do it.
Goodness, having to take all that time like you did… wasn’t it bothersome? 🙂
An SEO tip from a person that is 15 years an SEO professional. Things have never really changed in SEO, nor the SEO strategies, nor the algorithms. The thing is that every possible niche is extremely saturated, due to fact that every year there are few billion new websites arising. It have always been about hard work, there have never been a shortcut and being realistic, there isn’t any serious marketer or a company that will write junk content, just for the sake of content.
One other thing, SEO is a branch of online marketing and to make SEO work always, online marketing strategies like PPC, social media marketing, “footslogin” (in terms of press release, product anouncement, newsletters, etc…) should also be implemented to support SEO.
For the most part you’re right Carl. Some things have definitely changed, like the reliance on meta tags to help us get across what we were hoping to be found for. Even on blogs, tags aren’t necessarily our friend anymore. Some of the principles haven’t changed though, like making sure your content actually gets across what you’re talking about and trying to stick as close to your topic on a normal basis as possible.
Which, of course, this blog doesn’t do all that often. 🙂
The thing which I have read on some high quality and authority blogs is that if you have written your article with perfect SEO and keyword density then everything will go fine. Google will not penalize you ever. Recently a Google’s employ also said that backlinks is not only the way to take your articles at the top. So go for quality always. Thanks for sharing such a informative guide.
Rahul, the problem with trying to write a perfect SEO post is twofold. One, there’s really no such thing as perfection. Two, some of the posts that try to do that are dry reading, aka boring, and sounds like an automaton wrote it. Frankly I’d rather go for personality than trying to read a post that sounds inhuman, especially with as much reading as I do. One can do proper SEO without trying to overdo it; at least that’s my thinking.
High quality backlinks always add value to website link juice. I will always choose between quality than quantity.
It doesn’t even have to be totally high quality links. It definitely needs to contain related links, which is where lots of sites fail.