When you think of search engines, the first thing that immediately comes to mind is Google. It is synonymous with the internet, and the word itself has become a verb.

Today, instead of people saying “search for local businesses,” they say “Google local businesses.” The search engine king has dominated the World Wide Web, ruling over all that is accessible over the Internet. As the reigning monarch of search engines, Google has created a set of guidelines for every webmaster to follow — or else suffer the consequences of a penalty.

What is a Google penalty?

Over the last two decades, Google has been working hard to refine its core. Its algorithm began detecting and eliminating poor content, while elevating quality pages to the top of search engine results.

In 2012, Google rolled out one of its major algorithm changes — the Penguin update. According to Search Engine Land, the update flagged sites that “deemed to be spamming its search results.” It hit more than 1 in 10 search results overnight, wiping a few websites out of search entirely. It also blasted poor-quality content off the radar, forcing search engine optimizers to be more careful and strategic with their content marketing schemes.

Since then, Google was steadfast in releasing algorithm changes that continue to challenge the online marketing industry.

Why should you care?

Statistics show that 71 percent of small businesses have a website, with 73 percent being mobile-friendly or responsive. Additionally, a staggering 92 percent of small businesses without sites claim that they will have one by the end of 2018. These numbers prove just how significant an online presence is in the marketing industry.

If you are a small business owner, you already know the importance of developing a website. It is the online storefront of your business — an incredibly useful tool that, when done correctly, reaches beyond the local market and magnifies traffic and sales.

In aspiration of beating hundreds and thousands of online competitors, you begin investing in digital marketing strategies that catapult you on Google’s coveted first page — where every business owner wants to be. However, meeting Google’s guidelines play a crucial role in favor of your website. The main objective of Google is to give its users access to relevant, accurate, and unique information. That is why it continuously modifies its algorithms so that each website gets the exposure it rightfully deserves.

However, your primary concern is you can be penalized. If you use “illegal” or Black Hat SEO tactics to top search engine page results (SERPs), you risk getting Google penalties that impact your business. With that said, it is crucial for every SEO professional to evolve, adapt, and remain alert for Google’s plans. If not, your website may obtain a penalty that heavily impacts its traffic, sales, and overall visibility.

How do you recognize a Google penalty?

From Google’s point of view, any website that attempts to manipulate the search results is not only harming Google, but also its users, too. Google penalties are either automatic or manual. While manual penalties involve a warning, automatic penalties just happen. So, how do you know if you had been automatically penalized? Here are some clues, according to KissMetrics:

• Poor ranks.

  Is your website failing to rank even for your own brand name? How about when you use your primary keywords?

• Slipping into the back pages.

  Did your web page suddenly appear on the second or third page when it was initially in the top five of the SERPs?

• Not on Google cached results.

  Was your entire website removed from Google’s cached search results overnight?

• Cannot be found:

  Does running a site search (site:yourdomain.com keyword) show your website?

• Wrong listing

  . When you find your Google listing, was it for your homepage or another page on your site? (It should be your homepage).

If you run a few tests and notice one or more of these factors, the chances are that a penalty has affected your site.

How do you recover from a Google penalty?

The first step to recovering from a penalty is to know the cause. You must analyze your website’s links and identify all the ones that are causing your rankings to drop.

Depending on the cause of penalty, solutions may vary. But here are some of the quick fixes you can try:

• Remove bad backlinks.

  Poor-quality backlinks can hurt your rankings in many ways, which is why it’s important to get rid of them. If you don’t know where to start, read this article about How to Spring Clean Your Bad Backlinks.

• Use Google’s Disavow Tool.

  There is a way to ask Google to disregard troublesome links that are harming your website. Just keep in mind that the Google Disavow Tool is an advanced feature that must be used with caution.

In cases when the domain is tarnished, there is very little you can do to salvage or rehabilitate your website.

Can I submit a consideration request?

Once you successfully clean your backlinks, you can submit a reconsideration request. You must provide accurate information regarding the cleanup process, which should include one or more of the following:

• 
  

  An excel file of all the bad links your removed

   

• 
  

  Details of your malware cleanup activities

   

• 
  

  A list of spam comments that you deleted on your website

   

• 
  

  A thorough explanation of how will prevent the same issue from recurring

   

After submitting your request, you should receive confirmation from Google. If you had correctly diagnosed and resolve the cause, you should get another notification saying that the penalty has been lifted.

Takeaway  

Google acts much like a legislator in the digital world. Its penalties serve as rules and regulation to maintain order, as well as implement fair punishment or praise to websites residing in its community. Without proper guidelines, tactics like Black Hat SEO will continue to reign, and search engine users (which include YOU), will not get the results they seek when using Google.

Are you in need SEO services?

Just because your rank is dropping does not automatically mean that you are dealing with a Google penalty. Remember that your competition is getting tougher by the day, and like you, they are doing their best to climb the ranks of Google. You may think that you have a Google penalty, when in fact, you just need to improve your search engine optimization methods. This is where PrimeView comes in. For effective SEO strategies, call us at 480-970-4688 or complete our online form.

So you set out to create an SEO strategy with the hope of boosting your rankings which will hopefully result in increased traffic, higher conversions, more leads, and business growth. As far as you’re concerned, you’re employing only the best and acceptable practices. However, you still experienced a drop in rankings.

Initially, it’s normal to get worried. But it’s important to act fast and figure what caused that ranking drop and address it from there. Typically, negative ranking changes happen for several reasons. Some can be dealt with on your end, while others are just way beyond your control.

Let’s look at 10 reasons why websites experience ranking changes and the ways on how to deal with them.

1. Links

Links leading to your domain can affect your rankings in several ways.

First, if you have an influx of new links leading to your website, you can experience a temporary drop in rankings. This usually happens when you had issues in the past regarding unnatural links.

Meanwhile, lost links can also contribute to a ranking change. This happens when there are links going to your website that has been removed or may be temporarily unavailable.

Low quality links pointing to your website is a bane of SEO, and you want to avoid them at all cost if you want to maintain good rankings. If you have a lot of poor and irrelevant links leading to your website, search engines can view that as spamming and your website can be penalized or worst, get de-indexed. If you fell victim to link buying schemes or manipulative linking practices, it’s recommended to do a link clean-up.

Track links actively and continue building up high quality links to your domain. You can do this through creating quality content that’s share-worthy, substantial, and relevant. You can also market your content and brand through participating in different platforms to share your insights and expertise.

2. Search engine penalties

Search engines can also penalize websites if they violate the practices recommended for SEO, which are ultimately geared towards improving user experience on the web.

When Google rolled out the Panda algorithm, a lot of websites suffered a huge drop in rankings because of thin and low-quality content. Meanwhile, websites who employed spammy linking techniques were greatly affected when the Penguin algorithm update rolled out.

If you have been penalized, don’t fret. It may feel like doom and gloom has set upon your website, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t recover. What you need to do is to re-assess your website, revamp your strategy, remove low quality content and links,  adhere to recommended practices moving forward, and always monitor the performance of your website.

3. Search engine changes and tests

There are cases when search engines implement changes or conducts trials, and it may affect your rankings. There’s not much you can do about these instances as they are not within your control. If you’re employing best SEO practices, you wouldn’t have to worry so much and you can expect your rankings to be back up in a few days. 

4. Slow page speed

Page speed plays a crucial role in user experience, and ultimately in your rankings. It wouldn’t matter if your website has the most comprehensive design and content if it will not load fast enough. So check your servers, and make sure that they are efficient in giving your visitors a fluid way of navigating your website. Likewise, use tools that can help track your website’s page speed and determine what elements are slowing down your pages.

5. On-page problems

Sometimes, issues within your pages cause your rankings to take a plunge. It could be due to poor internal linking and optimization of your website, incorrect robots.txt file, incorrect canonical tags, absence of index tags, slow page speed, or worst, due to a hacking incident. This further reiterates the importance of conducting website maintenance and regular monitoring of on-site elements so that you can spot errors and address them before they can affect rankings.

6. Competition

If you used to be on the first spot and you suddenly dropped one to two notches, it could be that your competitor outperformed you. While it’s important to always keep your website well-maintained and strategies in-line with acceptable marketing methods, you also need to monitor your competitors if you want to stay on top. Be aware of their recent actions so that you can stay one step ahead and devise new strategies before they do.

7. Website modifications

A decrease in rankings can also be caused by changes made on your website like a new design or updates in the code, layout, plug-ins, and other components. Make sure that all key persons involved in your internet marketing efforts are in the loop with these changes, so that you can avoid any implication on other areas of SEO and on your placement on the SERPs.

8. Changes in user behavior

User behavior is one of the reasons why SEO is dynamic and ever-changing. If your strategies are not connected with how users behave, you can experience a drop in rankings.

There are cases when the way users input queries changes, which happens when they demand for fresher results. This occurs when a particular subject becomes trending. As a result, news and more up to date pieces about the topic dominate the top of the SERPs and evergreen content are pushed down. Since that is the case, it pays to be abreast in your industry, so that you’re always in the forefront of delivering quality and up to date content to your target audience.

9. Changes in click-through rates

If your click-through rate has dropped, it could be the reason why your rankings experienced a decline. Remember that Google is all about user experience and generating results that they think is the most relevant to search queries. If you proved that your CTR is to blame for the drop in your rankings, you can work on improving your listing on the SERPs.

10. Poor content

Even if it sounds like a cliché, content is king when it comes to SEO. Poor content can drive your rankings down or worst, take you out of the SERPs altogether. Devote time in developing quality posts that your target audience would be compelled to share and cite as source. If you master the art of content marketing, traffic, links, good reputation, and high rankings will follow suit.

Link building is one of the ways that can increase brand awareness, elevate ranking, generate leads, increase conversions, and ultimately, drive success to your business.

Just like Google’s algorithm, good link building practices also evolved through time, and landing links that adds up to your ranking can be trickier now. Today, it’s not just about link volume. It’s about quality and relevance.

To help you navigate this part of Internet marketing and SEO, here are ten ways to build good quality links that will help you break through your target market and the rest of the web.

1. Use relevant terms as anchor texts.

Even if you want to rank for a particular keyword, it’s still not advisable to use as anchor text if it doesn’t make sense with the rest of the body of your content. Regardless if it has a high number of searches, it still wouldn’t add plus points for you if it’s not cohesive with the content surrounding it.

When using an anchor text, always see to it that it’s a relevant word or phrase to the page that you’re linking to and it meshes well with the rest of the sentence.

Tip: If you have a target keyword, you can use different variations of it to help drive your point across and make it appear more natural and not manipulative.

2. Know when to acquire a dofollow or nofollow link.

A dofollow link will help increase the ranking of your website, but don’t focus too much on acquiring it. It’s better to earn one nofollow link from an authoritative website like Wikipedia than five websites that are not so popular in your target niche.

Remember, you shouldn’t just go after the number of links. You should also consider the amount of traffic that a link can lead to your website.

3. Have a broader understanding of relevance.

It’s common link building knowledge that you put links on websites and content relevant to your niche. However, don’t close your doors with other brands that seem to be on the other side of the business spectrum.

For instance, your brand is about insurance. Obviously, you would want to get your links on websites or domains about finance, business, and estate planning. However, don’t disregard the possibility that tech, health, or pet-oriented websites can also link back to you.

Remember, Google doesn’t simply look at the relevance of the domain where your link is posted; it also looks at the content on that page. Sometimes, even if a link is featured on a niche that’s dissimilar to yours, as long as there is relevance in the content where it’s placed on, it can still be a quality link. Let’s say you get a link from a news website in one of its publications relevant to your industry.

4. Pay attention to overall authority.

A good way to measure a domain’s authority is through tools like Moz Domain Authority metrics. But aside from that, you should also consider different factors when trying to gauge the authority of a particular site.

Aside from how competitive it is in terms of Google’s rankings, consider the trustworthiness of a site. Does it have a wide reach? Does it feature good content? Will a link on this website increase your exposure and engagement?

5. Determine the location of your link and the volume of other links on the page.

If a link is placed on the footer, side bar, or somewhere near the ads section, Google may perceive the link as an advertising link. If it’s a followed link that appears too promotional, it can be to your disadvantage.

Meanwhile, the volume of external links on a particular page may also affect authority and engagement on your end. It’s advisable to go for pages with external links that are not more than 10.

Getting editorial links or links placed in the body of a content is very valuable. Because if an author cited it within an article or content, it is considered an important link and will help boost your ranking.

6. Check the spam score of a page.

The last place you would want to put a link on is a spammy domain, so check the spam score of a potential website before you exert any form of effort of building a link on it.

There are several tools such as Moz’s Spam Score to help you assess the spam level of a particular website. Meanwhile, you can also use your own judgment and instinct. See some of the external links posted on it. Do the links lead to sketchy or suspicious domains? Does the site accept submissions without filtering them? If so, you need to veer away from it because it will not be good for your rankings and credibility.

7. Aspire to build links in high-engagement websites.

Having a link on a website that has a high traffic and user participation can do wonders for your brand. Strive on building a link on a site with content that gets shared a lot, because they can be advantageous for your exposure. Yes, it may take a lot of hard work, but it’s going to be worth it.

8. Figure out a website’s topic authority.

If you search for related topics under a particular niche and a website is constantly in the top ten search results of Google, it’s indicative of the website’s topical authority. You can also check with SEMrush for the keywords it ranks for. If it has a high ranking for keywords relating to your niche, then that’s a good place to build a link.

9. Get experts to cite or link back to you.

Just like penetrating high-engagement sites, this entails a lot of effort as well. However, the payoff will be good for your credibility and exposure. When an influential person or entity mentioned you, most people will be compelled to check your website because it was endorsed by a trusted expert.

10. Create quality content.

Before you go all out on your link building efforts, focus on creating quality content first, because this will be the core of what makes your brand and website strong. These days, SEO is all about quality, and Google’s algorithm favors marketing campaigns that are relevant and not manipulative.

READ: SEO Practices of the past that You Need to Stop Doing Today

So give your audience good content and provide the solutions they’re looking for. When you’re successful in doing that, they will naturally draw to you and be compelled to share your content with others.

Even if some SEO techniques are obsolete, some people are still practicing them. Others are simply not aware of how Google’s current algorithm works, while others are still hoping that those traditional strategies will still work today. That’s why we decided to shed light on the subject and created a list of techniques that have been effective in the past, but are no longer beneficial today.

ON-PAGE

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the practice of putting the same set of keywords on the page title, meta title, meta description, alt text of images, and in the body of the content. Back in the day, SEO specialists do this technique to help their website rank on the first page of Google’s search results for their target keyword. Unfortunately, that’s not the case today. Because Google is constantly updating their Panda algorithm, filling your content with keywords will not cut it if you want your website to rank. True enough, manipulative SEO will not fly in Google’s environment today. If keyword stuffing is still part of your strategy, you better start scratching it off your plan.

Instead of using the same keywords, you can use different variations of them or other synonymous terms. Let’s say you want a page to rank for the keyword “Laundromats in Phoenix, AZ”. You can still achieve your goal without having to mention the same keywords to the point that it affects the clarity of your content. What you can do to is use related keywords such as “self-service laundry in Phoenix, Arizona”, “dry cleaners in Phoenix”, or “Laundromat in Phoenix”.

Use free keyword tools to know related terms and phrases to your target keyword such as Google Keyword Planner. Meanwhile, you can simply search for your target keyword and see what’s listed on the Related Searches section at the bottom of the search results page.

Thin Low-Quality Content

Are you still publishing blog posts that are low in word count and depth just so you can say that you’re “updating your site regularly”? If so, consider creating longer, more interesting, and more comprehensive content, typically 800+ words long.

When you have engaging content, readers will tend to stay on your site and read your posts until the end. As a result, your website’s bounce rate will definitely decrease, which means that you have greater chances of getting a higher placement on Google search results page (SERPS). More so, high quality content is more likely to be share-worthy. Who knows? Maybe that 1000-word article you lost sleep over will be viral in the coming weeks.

Additional tip: High-quality content will all be for nothing if it only reaches a small audience. That’s why you need to promote it to other platforms like social media sites. You can also ask bloggers who are in the same niche to feature your content in their future posts.

Irrelevant or Illogical links within a page

Are you still using irrelevant terms when linking from an internal blog post or web page to your landing pages? If so, you need to stop doing that now.

Always remember that each time you publish an article or blog post, your goal should be to improve your website’s user experience and increase engagement. It would be confusing for visitors if they click on a hyperlinked anchor text in the body of your article only to be directed to an irrelevant page.

Use internal linking in a strategic way if you want visitors to stay longer on your website. You can add click to action links within the body of the content to offer additional and relevant information to your readers.

OFF-PAGE:

Spammy blog comments

A blog comment is spammy if:

• It has a keyword or key phrase that is hyperlinked going to one of your website’s pages.
• It doesn’t add value to the page or conversation. Example: “Thanks for sharing this post! (link)”
• It is placed in a heavily spammed page.
• The commenter’s identity is shady, or appears like he or she is not a real person.

Example:“I am having a hard time getting links for my website. This is the reason why I always comment on other blog posts to promote my website. Here is my website [URL]”

On the other hand, a blog comment will not be considered spam if:

• You interact with the author of the content through sharing your views about the topic. Dropping links are still possible. Just make sure that it doesn’t sound too promotional and make sure that it’s relevant to where you’re placing your comment.
• It is placed on high-quality and relevant content. Check the link profile of the site using the Spam Scoring System of Open Site Explorer to make sure that it is safe to link from that particular page.
• The name of a person who’s representing your website was used. This will help establish online reputation and build brand awareness for the website you’re promoting. Don’t just comment once just to increase the number of root domains linking to your site. Continue interacting with them on future posts so that you can build relationships with content authors. More than that, this can also help you gain citations from their future publications and other websites in the same niche.
• Keywords are not placed on the field designated for the name of the commenter. That field is for the name of a person, and that’s what you need to put in that section. More so, if there’s a provided field for your website, use it to link back to your site.

Forum signature with spammy anchor text links

Don’t even bother putting keywords on your forum signature and linking it going to your website. This technique is a thing of the past and it wouldn’t work today. It would be more acceptable if you use the name of the owner of the website or the authorized person representing it.

Participating in forums is an effective tactic if you know how to do it right. Make sure that you only join high-quality and relevant forums, and see to it that you provide useful and helpful information to the community. Forums related to your target niche can drive highly-targeted traffic to your website.

Social bookmarking

Because a lot of social bookmarking sites are heavily spammed, links coming from them may have little to no worth at all. Most of the time, it’s the latter. However, this can still work if you promote content on high-quality sites like Reddit. Just don’t rely on this strategy too much and use it at a minimal level.

Link directory submission

When you submit your sites to free directories that easily approve submissions, you are screwed. Directories that are low in value and don’t filter user submissions can cause danger to your site. But this doesn’t mean that link directory submission should be avoided. Just make sure to get your site listed on human-curated directories like DMOZ.com.

Article submission

In this video, Matt Cutts mentioned that you shouldn’t use article directories to build links, because this tactic has been abused and is continually being exploited. As a result, Google no longer puts value on links coming from them. Instead of this, you can do guest blogging as long as you can comply with quality guidelines.

Sitewide Links

The worth of a web page is not determined by the number of total links, but on the volume of root domains linking to it. That’s why, you’d rather have 100 domains linking back to you, rather than 1000 links coming from one just one domain.

Google is continuously improving their algorithm, and this means that you should learn how to adjust and comply with their rules so that you can stay off their radar. Prioritizing human users is the key. So just keep on striving hard, because if you keep on doing things right, all your efforts will eventually pay off.

There is a sea of competitors in the web that are targeting the same people. Without any definitive strategy, businesses are bound to stay unnoticed, even if they have an outstanding website. One of the best ways businesses can stay one step ahead of the competition is through search engine optimization.

Ask any  SEO company in Arizona and they would tell you just how important SEO is, that optimizing a website is not a luxury anymore but an absolute necessity. Although many website owners know this already, there are people who, in the eagerness to compete with other businesses in their industry, use aggressive online marketing strategies that are actually common SEO mistakes.

Here is a list of these common blunders and how they are going to negatively affect a website’s ranking:

1.    Over-Optimizing Your Website With Keywords – While keyword research and usage is crucial to ranking for search engines, too much can affect your site’s credibility. Also known as “keyword stuffing,” over-optimization is one of the practices that search engines like Google are discouraging business owners to use.

Stuffing your websites with the keywords you want to rank for your website is no longer an acceptable method and could backfire if Google and other search engines find the insertions to be unnatural.

2.    Not Publishing Enough Content – Recent Google algorithm updates all have one thing they favor, and that is unique, high-quality content. Content is surely king, as SEO is practically useless without website content. Search engine spiders crawl webpages and analyze the content. Search engines usually look at a page and mark those with little or without any content as a low quality page, which affects its ranking and makes it less visible to web searchers.

So what can you do instead? Write relevant, informative, and original content. Publish frequent articles that have high quality images, videos, and infographics that encourages higher engagement with readers. Google favors content that people love, and they give it a high ranking. The goal is to be consistent and to write often. Keep an active blog and update the contents of your website.

3.    You are Guilty of Duplicate Content – While content is undoubtedly important for many businesses, duplicate content is one of the grave SEO mistakes that a website owner can commit. Content has always been king, and it still is today. A good Arizona SEO campaign would be paralyzed without outstanding content. Not only does it help boost a site’s ranking, it has a plethora of benefits to businesses, from increasing customers to building the brand name.

Duplicate content should, at any costs, be avoided. An experienced Arizona SEO company would tell you that even the most interesting blog posts mean nothing to search engines if they are copied from another website. Copying content is not only unethical, but also downright illegal. It is, after all, the intellectual property of that particular website. Even if they are royalty-free, any content that has been published in another website is not for you to use. Stick to writing unique, informative content that readers will love and hopefully, share.

4.    Using Unnatural Link Building Techniques – Never, ever buy links. Contrary to what you hear from other business owners, buying links would not boost your ranking in search engine results. Remember that Google, Yahoo!, and Bing consider both the quantity and quality of inbound links, but if you are using unnatural links to help your website, think again. You will get penalized.

Stick to natural guest blogging, participating in forums, or taking advantage of your existing blogs and promoting them through social media. Also make sure you create link-worthy content, something that readers can positively react to and other bloggers can link back to.

5.    You Still Don’t Have a Social Media Account – Some would consider it a crime for businesses to not have social media accounts for their businesses, as consumers go to their social media accounts for information when they are not relying on search engines. Almost everyone has their Facebook account, so if your business is non-existent in Facebook universe, then you are missing out on a big opportunity to connect to potential customers.

Once you have established your presence on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, it would make sense to have these accounts link back to your website. This can be done either by placing your URL in the About section or promoting it through a post. You can even do both just to be sure. Also do not forget to link or promote these social media accounts on your website.

Stay tuned for the continuation of this list of SEO mistakes in the next article. Meanwhile, try to avoid committing these blunders to achieve a high ranking website.

The Year That Was: 2013 and Google Algorithms

January – Google started the year (January 24, 2013) with a 24th Panda refresh. Google’s Panda, which was launched in February 2011, was created to reinforce the importance of quality website content in achieving high rankings in Google search results. According to Google the refresh affected 1.2% of English queries but did not specify as to how exactly it’s going to affect the searches. A Googler on Twitter posted this link as a background on the said refresh, which basically talks about helping users find high-quality sites and lowering the rankings of those with poor content.

March – After a one month hiatus, Google rolls out a 25th Panda refresh, which again reiterates the increasing necessity of quality content. In a business perspective, it is important for entrepreneurs and online marketing firms to distance themselves from back using automated backlinking tools. Not only is it essential for to be fresh, original and original, but it is also great to create them on a regular basis.

Google also penalized a major link network called SAPE Links, which resulted in a tremendous downgrade in terms of rankings. This applies also to websites that are connected or are clients of this link network. Google have continuously warned businesses that use paid links that they can get penalized for doing so.

It was also during this month that Google announced their plan to integrate the Panda algorithm to their overall algorithm updates. This means that the refreshes will be applied real-time as opposed to being updated manually, and will be not be as noticeable to website owners and SEO companies as it will be gradually rolled out instead.

May – After another one-month break from updates, Google gives webmasters with a one-two punch by releasing the Phantom and Penguin 2.0 update. Branded by some as Panteguin, and affected websites that had questionable link profiles that have too many paid links. What makes Penguin 2.0 much complex and destructive to those with unnatural links is that Penguin 1.0 only considers the homepage links, while the 2.0 goes deeper into the site and checks any, if not all, pages.

It is heavily link-focused, while Phantom was more concerned about content and resembled the Panda algorithm more than Penguin. Those that were affected had similar issues, which ranged from having affiliate content, duplicate content, and low-quality content. Some also relied on heavy cross-linking with the exact anchor text. What’s interesting is that Panda also targeted websites with the aforementioned characteristics.

June – Webmasters and SEO companies prepare for the Panda Dance, which meant that updates will be pushed out monthly, but in a span of ten days or so. The term Panda dance stems from the old Google Dance, wherein the search engine results “danced” around monthly whenever Google came out with the changes in their algorithm.

August – This marks the release of the Hummingbird update, which is a major algorithmic shift in over a decade. It focused on making the searches friendly to conversational queries, as opposed to the traditional keyword search where users type in key phrases to find information that they need.

September – To make things even more aligned with the Hummingbird update, Google takes out any data that is still available in their Google Analytics. Anyone who tries to access those data would only be greeted with “not provided.”

October – Penguin update 2.1 hits the dancefloor by targeting a wide spectrum of websites. The most helpful solution to coping with the update was to remove any unnatural links and for those that cannot be manually disposed of had to be disavowed.

November – While there isn’t any formal announcement on an algorithm update, The Moz Blog did report in a post about experiencing a temperature spike on November 14 in their Mozcast which usually signifies an update. Key observations include the fact that (1) the said spike was a one-day change and that (2) those who usually get penalized are small, low quality sites whose rankings in SERPs are replaced by big brands that benefit from the update.

December – Yet again, Google denies a December 17 algorithm update despite the obvious changes shown in the various tracking tools online. There were some signs of serious changes in Google search results as shown by MozCast, SERP Metrics, Algoroo, SERPs.com, and more. Thankfully, there isn’t much buzz in discussion areas or any complaints about abrupt decrease in site traffic or shifts in ranking.

Perhaps the most defined changes for this month is the series of link networks (and smaller websites connected to them) that have gone down because of Google, including Anglo Rank and Backlinks.com. Businesses who have paid links need to either get rid of these bad links or keep a list of where you store or place them, so you can disavow them when needed.

The Round-Up: Was Google’s Algorithm Updates in 2013 Good or Bad for Businesses?

While 2012 seemed to have so much collateral damage on the part of websites, there seemed to be a continuation of Google’s fixes in 2013, but to a much lesser extent. They laid out the rules and applied them, and websites with poor content and paid links took a direct hit. In hindsight, Google is not making enemies of millions of businesses with online websites. In fact, their algorithms are just stressing out that websites need to focus on regularly creating unique, fresh content as well as to avoid using paid link services to retain or improve rankings on SERPs.

In terms of the Hummingbird Update, the use of natural language is in line with pushing their latest technologies forward. So businesses who want their sites to rank need to consult with SEO experts to find out the best web marketing strategies they need to take to keep up with the new update. This means less focus on keyword data and more time spent on looking at conversions and traffic.

If you are to observe Google’s way of doing things, it really does seem that they aren’t pushing out all these changes and updates to punish and hurt websites. Instead, they are doing their best to refine and improve the whole search process.

The SEO world is in topsy-turvy again when Google recently sent out tons of new link warnings to websites. This is what the email says:

“Dear site owner or webmaster of….We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

A recent peek at PrimeView’s analytics displayed a keyword string “what are the uses of offsite optimization” with a bounce rate of 100%.

Apparently, the visitor thought the site had content that answered his question, which obviously we don’t have at the moment.

Not until this post.

If you’re new to SEO, have a small business you’d like to implement a bit of DIY SEO, or perhaps you’re an expert who just needs a refresher on offsite optimization, you’ve come to the right place.

What is Offsite Optimization

If onsite optimization is optimizing your website (front and back end) for the search engines, then offsite optimization would be the techniques or strategies to help your site rank well in the search engine results. Basically, offsite techniques involve links that point to your site from other websites (otherwise known as the backlink).

Example:

Site A links to Site B. Which means Site B has one backlink from site A.

Many SEO Specialists would argue how much offsite optimization makes up your overall SEO factor. We say: a healthy balance between onsite and offsite should be implemented, as one cannot exist without the other. You may have a “perfectly” optimized site, and yet have no links pointing to your site – you effectively aren’t sending signals to Google about your “popularity”. On the other hand, you may have a thousand quality links but your site is spammy, your urls aren’t optimized, then what signal are you sending the search engines?

Uses of Offsite Optimization

Google counts your links – not by quantity, but by quality. The SEO industry has learned that the hard way – the recent Google updates have penalized websites with suspicious backlinks. These websites have backlinks from sites such as directories with the sole purpose of hosting a thousand links, providing no value to the search engines.

Incoming links or backlinks sends a signal to Google (especially if you have good quality backlinks coming from authority sites or sites relevant to your niche or industry) that your site is a trustworthy or reputable site.

Some Effective Offsite Optimization Techniques

Press Releases

Aside from getting backlinks, you also heighten the exposure of your company or business as most press releases when submitted to authority PR submission sites, are aggregated by other PR sites or blogs.

Blog Commenting

One way to gain exposure and build a network would be commenting on another blog. This isn’t just about commenting though – it’s about providing valuable commentary on another person’s blog so you won’t be accused of spamming their site and incurring the ire of a community. If you had a new friend, wouldn’t you be annoyed if they kept stating their opinion which is totally unrelated to the topic at hand?

Blog Guest Post

Aside from introducing yourself to the followers of the blog you guest post on, you’re also building a backlink towards your site as most guest posts have an author description or bio at the end of the article.

Offsite optimization is a big factor when it comes to ranking your site. The link building strategies stated above are only some of the techniques we implement here at PrimeView.