Preventing Link-Based Penalties - Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

howas fans welcome to another edition of whiteboard Friday uh today we're talking about preventing link-based penalties so a lot of you have likely experienced uh the the kind of thing that I'm talking about whether you're a consultant or you're inhouse uh you're working at an AG gency or you're just kind of tuning on your own site you've seen this problem of the temptation to build buy borrow beg steal lots of links that are questionable in quality and value and I want to share with you a quick story before we get started here so the blog SEO optimize wrote a great piece about a an experience they had in building these types of links so they they started with a a traffic graph of what had happened with their site so they put put the new site on the web right it's relatively new site and they were growing sort of slowly and steadily the spikes were a little bit lower than the valleys every week they're sort of growing and growing and then they decide you know what why don't we buy build 10,000 uh dodgy links I love the British because they use much better hi hi everyone in London uh they use much better language right so they go to these dodging neighborhoods uh maybe the East End isn't that that's where it's dodgy right uh and and they build some links they built 10,000 of these links that's that's a lot right I think I think they should put a wo there let's put a wo so they build 10,000 dodgy links in this period and what happens to their Google traffic shoots up right skyrockets look at that insane growth they in fact uh more than 5x their Google traffic at least according to the graph that I was looking at on their blog post and you could see that it actually stayed like that for a few weeks right so Google clearly not catching these links and I love the description that the blog post has what he says is just as I was beginning to worry that Google couldn't recognize this kind of crap pow right look at it just drops down and it dropped down to a level so low that it was below the prior level of traffic and essentially all they were getting here is branded terms right so people literally searching for that website itself they're not ranking for any of their old keywords right now these links aren't just not helping them they're actively hurting them and preventing them from ranking and it's been going on like that so the moral of this story is uh invest in lowquality links and temporarily you may see some benefit but for the long term it can be quite harmful you might be thinking to yourself wait a minute if this is the profile of how Google operates couldn't I just build 10,000 Dody links to all my competitors let's go back up in time and remember that this is a new site right so this this is a new domain and they're likely looking at the profile of the site and saying hey they haven't built up a reputable important powerful brand yet so it's much more likely that links can hurt them dramatically than it is a site that's been around a little while that being said there's likely many of you possibly some of you been watching this video uh who have sites like this or have friends with sites like this clients with sites like this and so you're wondering how can prevent this kind of potential right if I've seen that oh they they did acquire some dodgey links or I did maybe acquire some dodgey links or I'm considering it or I'm worried that my client did I'm worried that the past the previous SEO did right remember the case study with JC Penney losing all their rankings because of the you know ins and outs of of how Google measured them uh you might want to be thinking boy I'm in this period right now maybe I'm in that that Grace area how can I prevent this from happening to me so the first thing that I want to ask you to do is to ask yourself why not not why are you're going to get penalized why do you deserve to be ranking number one why do you deserve to be in the top few sites for these particular queries is it that you have the best product out there do you have uh the most Innovative UI the most usable format for it do you have the best the highest quantity of information are your uh user reviews the best that they could be is it the fact that you have access to data that no one else has right there has to be a unique value proposition for any given business and that includes a web-based business model if you don't have this then yeah you your only option to get links to get references is to go to those dodgy neighborhoods because no one's going to organically want to link to You editorial and say I endorse and recommend this particular business once you've answered that question I need you to focus on content well I don't need it you need it you need you to focus on content because content is where those links are going to come from in in the absence of a uh a reason apart from money or uh manipulation or some type of a personal relationship the only way to get good reference links good editorial links on the web is to be the best resource for that particular query and being that resource means content I don't just mean text I mean everything I mean images and video I mean other forms of content like user generated material I mean things like the interface that you're putting on it right the the UI that surrounds it I even mean things like the humans the people in the real world that are associated with creating that content right having the authority and The credibility that comes from a big name in your particular field which could be a very small field and a very unknown person to most of the rest of us still matters quite a bit the third thing that I would do is go look at those the top link sources to Brands so where where a lot of seos get into trouble is that you go and you look at the links that are pointing to the people who are ranking number one number two number three maybe top 10 and a lot of them might be in this neighborhood right they might be the type of people who have built links for the short term and they're ranking in the short term and Google's eventually going to catch up with them which is why I encourage you to go find the brand right those particular sites pages that have built up Authority not just in the search results through links but in the equity that's built through mind share through branding through knowledge of that that website uh and those Brands will often have references to them that come from very good places if you look at their top links using open site Explorer using something like the link intersect Tool uh if it's a local site you could use Ono white Sparks uh link finder which I think is a great tool as well even doing searches like you know if you if I do a search query you know let's say that I see a brand like um O'Neal who makes uh uh surf boards and surf equipment that kind of stuff right so I might do a search like uh where is oops O'Neal minus sitecon oil.com and what I'm doing here when I'm searching Google like this is I say show me all the places where this brand is mentioned that not on their website and that'll show you a bunch of places that are talking about that brand and those types of mentions often lead to Links often lead to references build that Brand's uh uh Equity build that Brand's awareness and knowledge those are probably really good places to get links and then number four finally and this this one might even be a priority depending on on how nervous you are that this is about to happen uh you want to clear out the worst links so this means digging into your link profile and identifying anything that looks especially manipulative sometimes those huge long lists of reciprocal link pages right where you're pointing to everybody else and they're all pointing to you that might be a good thing to clear out you might want to email your link partners and say hey guys uh sorry but I think Google might really jump on us about this I'm going to get rid of those uh you might want to go and dig through any link Brokers or buyers that either you've engaged with or the client previously engaged with or who knows whoever was working on the site before you engage with your evil Alter Ego Fight Club style Tyler Duran worked on you know guy gets in the middle of the night never know what he's going to do finding those links clearing them out getting rid of the ones that you can don't panic right bad links aren't always going to hurt you and everyone on the web has some bad links L pointing to them right scrapers oh yeah back in college I built some bad links you know when it was late at night that happens to everyone it's okay but if you can find the worst of those you're going to prevent some of these penalties and if you can find those really good ones you build up profile that protects yourself from some of this negative stuff all right everyone I hope you've enjoyed this edition of whiteboard Friday and hope we'll see you again next week take care