Everyone SEO recently feels as if they have there heads on a Google Guillotine after updates to search engine rankings this year.
Maps Gurus SEO have recently provided reports about the repercussions of SEO methods which have hurt many businesses in Australia.
With Google recently announcing that it will be implementing further Google Penguin updates fear has struck the hearts of those who know they are guilty of some spammy and illegal SEO techniques and have yet to be caught out.
I have decided to provide readers with SEO techniques they should never use, to prevent them from every being hit by the almighty Google penalty filter.
Stop Over Using Keyword Rich Anchor Text For Backlinks
It wont hurt your rankings if you start to mix up and diversify your anchor texts for backlinks, for example your brand name or a variation of your keywords, the main reason why people have been penalised with Google updates is because a large percentage of their anchor texts where the same keyword eg- Real Estate Agent Melbourne, if 60% of your backlinks have this as anchor text, it is without doubt an unnatural looking link profile, which is waiting to be deindexed.
A natural link profile looks something like this (each portion of the pie represents a different anchor text) –
Whilst a website affected by Google Penguin updates looks like this.
Creating Content Which Is Not Valuable To The Reader
User experience with your website is more important now than ever. Landing pages on your website purely for SEO purposes and to rank on page one of Google will in the long run hurt your website, it is important to provide all visitors to your website with useful and valuable content so they can be engaged to stay on your website for longer.
A majority of search engine optimisation factors will one day be determined by the user experience that the user gets from visiting your website says Nick Grinberg from SEO company Maps Gurus.
I hope the following information is valuable to all who are do it yourself SEO’s, it is important that these two factors are considered with any sort of SEO work you undertake.
14 Comments
Nick
Technically no SEO techniques are illegal. Politicians don’t care nor do the police. 😛
However if you annoy Google then they aren’t exactly going to like you.
John Vlasakakis
I have seen some SEO techniques which sent a company to court,
they had landing pages about there competition created backlinks using the competitions brand name, so they can rank page one underneath them,
within the industry it was illegal and cost them a fair pit of money 🙂
Nick
Thats more a trademark thing rather than a SEO thing.
Peter Watson
No offense, but diversifying anchors and creating valuable content doesn’t sound like anything new to me.
Also, you have two different anchors in your post above which are pointing to your home page. One is ‘Maps Gurus SEO ‘ and the other is ‘SEO’.
If I were you I’d point the anchor ‘SEO’ to your deeper page on your site. Also, be careful of using Exact Match Anchor Text in general as this is one factor ‘Penguin’ is targeting.
Exact match anchors can hurt!
John Vlasakakis
Thanks for the feedback peter, to you it may not be news but to others it could be valuable, many are still unaware of link profiles and why they need to appear natural.
exact match does not hurt your website, it will only hurt if over used which is something our company watches carefully.
Peter Watson
I think %’s are a thing of the past thanks to ‘Penguin’.
Monitoring anchor text %’s worked well for SEO in general for the last 5 years or so, but I believe exact match anchors now trigger a spot light on the link and page in question. Even if the link exist on a related, trusted page with high page rank, exact match anchors simply don’t look natural.
If I can use your post above as an example, I would replace the anchor text ‘SEO’ with:
‘Nick Grinberg from SEO company Maps Gurus’
This looks much more natural to Google and the user. This is how I am using anchors atm and things are looking good.
Just my 2 cents based on my own observations…..
John Vlasakakis
once again i would have to disagree, SEO is an informational search an exact match anchor wont put the spot light on you.
If you diversify your anchor text (as per my diagram) exact match anchor text will do you no harm
If my anchor text was SEO Melbourne, this looks natural, SEO in Melbourne does appear more natural.
Most location based keywords got hit by Penguin based on unnatural looking anchor text.
“SEO Services Melbourne” was a keyword a colleague of mine got penalised for, not one mention on SEO Services in Melbourne anchor text to his site!
Peter Watson
“SEO Services Melbourne” was a keyword a colleague of mine got penalised for, not one mention on SEO Services in Melbourne anchor text to his site!
Then I must assume he had inorganic/unnatural links using this term pointing as anchor text pointing to his site. Penguin is not only about anchors, but about inbound links too.
John Vlasakakis
Certainly was, looking for the quick win with software, golden rule, if you cut corners then you will get caught out
Peter Watson
Say hello to negatie SEO………Hurry up and release the disavow tool Google! Its working a treat over at Bing!
Glenn Batten
John,
The audience here are mostly real estate agents. Your post does not focus on how a real estate agent can use this information and provide links back to their businesses that will avoid a penalty from Google.
The only examples you give are links back to your own business about services you provide!!
I am sure those links back to you in the article are not there by accident?? The big no no is writing articles for your own self interest and without it’s relevance to the industry you are writing for and links back to your own business it starts to come across that way.
Can you expand on your article to how a typical real estate agent would use this information?
Most business directories and links will obviously have their business name as the anchor text. I cant see Google ever penalising this can you? What sort of anchor text do you believe an agent might have created that will cause them problems? What can they do about it if they do have lots of offending backlinks?
John Vlasakakis
Hi Glenn
the information for SEO is generic and to be applied to thos who have a better understanding yet i will be happy to provide real estate agents advice on how to adopt an seo strategy for themselves, how they should link to there website and what to do if they have bad backlinks.
Peter Watson
This is obviously an article about SEO. I was also confused as to why it was posted here. Not the contributors issue, more the moderators.
Jack
The real issue which i see in post penguin world is Over optimization.The over use of exact match anchor text definitely manipulates white hat seo techniques..