Like Me? Follow Me.
As a genuine SEO, it can sometimes be frustrating to see cowboy SEO freelancers and companies taking on clients and selling them something vaguely resembling ‘SEO’. We have seen it a thousand times: the client is promised insane results in a relatively short amount of time in return for a payment of peanuts – and usually the results do get delivered. “So what’s the problem?” I hear you ask? The answer is that Google isn’t stupid and it will come to bite you soon enough, and it’s going to hurt.
Google has a complex algorithm that decides how high or low websites should rank. Cowboy SEO’s can ‘play’ with the algorithm using ranking factors to get results quickly. If you play the algorithm this can only go on for so long before Google clocks what is going on and hits you with penalties that will take a long while to recover from. This can leave you waving a sorry goodbye to sales, revenue and waving hello to the job centre, feeling the pain of the decision you made to go with the cowboy SEO that trashed your business.
So how do these blighters go about it? Well genuine SEO’s call it ‘black hat’ technique. There are lots of things they can do to smash you into the search engine results in next to no time, but I’m not writing a book today, so let’s just cover the link building aspect.
Smashing The Link Building
Let’s put our school hat on and teach you something about how links work first. If your website has links pointing to it from other domains, then this is a good indicator that your website is of a decent quality because people have decided to link to you. Having a link on good quality website domains passes authority through to your own and will help you to rank more easily, as this link is essentially a vote in confidence. Having many of these links from high authority domains makes Google think your site must be worthy of ranking high up in the search results as people have seen it fit to link to you from great sites.
So as an example if you wanted to rank for ‘garden spades’ then one of the techniques would be to build links with the anchor text ‘garden spades’ pointing to your site. This tells Google that the page you are linking to is about garden spades and therefore maybe it should rank for garden spades due to all the authority passing through. “Great! Let’s build loads of links quickly so I can rank easily for garden spades tomorrow!” I hear you say. If only it was that easy – well it is for cowboy SEOs.
All a cowboy SEO has to do is ring up a dodgy link building company that owns many domains with high authority, which by the way is completely faked authority, and put in an order for 300,000 links to be built, and away you go into the rankings. This may carry on for a few months with thousands of links being built using one keyword. Your ranking increases, traffic increases, sales increases and you are one happy customer, until you wake up one day and the ranking has completely disappeared, cue the panic.
If the same anchor text e.g. ‘garden spades’ is used literally thousands of times with no variations on the keyword and there are thousands of links pointing to one page on your website it does flag up unnatural linking practice. The link building should essentially look like genuine humans linking to the site because it is a good site – I doubt 300,000 people will all link with the anchor text ‘garden spades’ to your page in one month. Does it make sense now, why people that do genuine online marketing try viral campaigns with great content? It gains you a high volume of natural links and everyone who likes your content does the hard work for you and Google is still a happy camper.
Here is a brilliant case of bad linking practice – JC Penny employed an agency who were using black hat techniques and they got what we SEO’s like to call ‘Google slapped’ for insane link building practice. They plummeted out of the rankings in spectacular fashion and boy it must have hurt. JC are a massive brand and it did nothing for their online reputation and good SEO’s would put money on the fact that their poor marketing manager didn't have a clue what was going on. Check the story out here.
Is SEO Spam?
So many genuine SEO’s roll their eyes at this question. Black hat SEO is spam, white hat SEO is what we do here at I-COM. A good SEO will be following Google’s good practice code and reading blogs by those who work for Google (namely Matt Cutts) to ensure they are at the cutting edge of white hat SEO. It would take another blog post to explain how white hat SEO is performed and perhaps I may indulge in this at some point for you all, but until then remember this - cheap SEO isn’t always good SEO and be very, very careful who you choose (we look forward to hearing from you!).
Discussion
Leave a Reply