Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
As time goes on, it’s become evident that Google is coming out with more and more ways to penalize websites. While it may seem like that; the reality is that Google keeps pumping out new ways to penalize bad sites.
However, no matter how amazing your site; you’re still prone to Google updates, penalties and the notorious Google sandbox.
While it’s possible to repair the damage incurred by a penalty; it’s not easy and ultimately you’ll save yourself a lot of money, time and stress by simply avoiding the following penalty causes:
1. Link Exchanges
Link exchanges were the first thing I tried in the very beginning. Man was that a long time ago. I hadn’t a clue about online marketing and the whole thing was totally alien to me. To me, it made complete sense to do link exchanges and it was the only form of link building I knew of.
So I spent all day every day for quite some time finding link exchange partners. I’d setup a page on my site for “link partners”, I’d link to their sites and they’d reciprocate. Back in the hay days of SEO it worked well; but now it’s a sure-fire to get yourself penalized.
2. Buying Cheap Spammy Links
Almost everyone has done this at some point in their SEO career. Most newbies don’t realize the whole quality over quantity equation or even understand it. So they look to buy the cheapest and most links possible.
You know the kind of services that offer 50,000 links for $25…
Generally those services consist of profile, comment and spammy guestbook links. In other words, complete and utter spam on any web page they can find. These links will no longer help you, not now and not in the long run. The only use they have are for turbo charging your 2nd or 3rd tier backlinks that point to your site.
3. High Page Rank Links
SEO’s have been purchasing and selling high PR links since the inception of Page Rank.
I still think buying high PR links is the fastest way to dominate Google, but it can just as easily be the fastest way to receive a penalty. If a site is selling high PR links, the chances are your link will be on the same page as dozens or even hundreds of other customers. Ultimately meaning high risk of exposure and penalty.
4. Blog Networks
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →In 2011; blog networks were everything. They were the best sure-fire way to rank for any keyword on Google. Internet Marketers made the most of them, getting traffic was so easy and almost instantaneous.
Unfortunately there was a huge crack down on blog networks, all of the blogs were removed from Google’s index and the users were given penalties. Blog networks are extremely effective, but hardly undetectable.
The best and only way to use blog networks is to build your own! (Not easy with a small budget, but guaranteed effectiveness)
5. Crazy High Use Of Exact Anchor Text
Anchor text is a metric that Google pays a lot of attention to. The text you use to link to your site in all your SEO activity. Obviously whatever you use as anchor text; Google will rank you for. Google knows this, but Google also knows that naturally a website or page won’t receive more than 10-20% of its total links with the same exact anchor text.
So if you use the exact keyword you want to rank for as anchor text more than 10-20%, Google may well give you a penalty. Yes, sites get away with using a lot more exact anchor text, but it’s better to stay on the safe side. By using more variety in your anchor text; you’ll also rank for more keywords.
Let’s face it; we don’t always get the most traffic from the keywords we target.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Curtman40, January 16 2013, 22:40
This was a very informative post, never knew about the High PR or Exact Anchor text, I will be mindful of that going forward. Thanks.
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Boiling this down: one, reciprocal link pages. Two, cheap bulk link packages. Three, buying high-PR placements shared with other buyers. Four, blog networks. Five, over-using exact match anchor text. Four of the five are really the same underlying mistake, buying visibility instead of earning it, dressed up as different tactics. The one that’s genuinely different is anchor text ratio, which isn’t about buying anything, just about how you phrase your own links. The post buries that distinction instead of flagging it.
Meera’s four-into-one point is the useful bit. Between shifts I can’t evaluate five separate risks, but I can ask myself one question: am I buying visibility instead of earning it.
Cass’s one-question filter is good, but worth adding the median outcome here: most small sites that get caught on this weren’t running some elaborate blog network, they bought the cheapest bulk link package because it was the only line item they could afford. Rare that anyone plans to get penalized. Common that the cheap option was the only option on the budget they had.
Cheapest option being the only option on the budget doesn’t make Google any more forgiving.
The anchor text figures, presented as the natural ceiling, are stated as fact with no source. Natural relative to what corpus? Sites in what niche, what age, what backlink volume? Without knowing where that number comes from, it’s not clear whether it’s a real threshold or a rule of thumb that got repeated until it sounded authoritative.
Raj is asking the right question and not getting an answer anywhere in the post, which is the actual pattern worth noticing here. Every one of these five ‘penalties’ is stated with total confidence and zero methodology behind it, no sample size, no timeframe, no mention of how anyone would distinguish a penalty from an unrelated ranking drop that happened the same week. Fine as a list of things to be cautious about. Not fine as the diagnostic tool it’s presented as, because nothing in it tells you how you’d actually know which of the five hit your specific site versus something else entirely that had nothing to do with backlinks.
I think what’s being missed in Raj’s fair question about the anchor text source is that even an approximate rule of thumb is still useful direction when the alternative is doing nothing at all. Nobody claims the figure is peer-reviewed. But if your anchor text is mostly exact match right now, you don’t need a citation to know that’s worth fixing before you need a citation to prove exactly where the safe line sits.
Checked my own anchor text profile after reading the ratio numbers here. Out of roughly 40 backlinks built over two years, several used my exact target keyword — right at the upper edge of the range the post gives. Didn’t realize I was that close to the line until I actually counted them, which the post doesn’t really push you to do, it just states the percentages and moves on.