Google to Obliterate Woolworths? Are You in Danger?
Remember when we told you on last week’s show that Google were going to begin penalising for ‘over-optimisation’?
The slaughter has already begun.
Since the start of the year, blog networks, article networks and other shady link exchanging services began dropping entirely out of Google. Even though all of those links you paid for over many years were now rendered worthless, most users weren’t too worried, as Google didn’t seem to be directly going after the webmasters employing these tactics on their sites.
That all changed this week when Google began sending out emails to Webmaster Tools accounts that essentially said: “You’re caughtâ€.
The emails explain that Google has detected unnatural links to the webmaster’s site and that they encourage them to make changes to the site so that it meets their quality guidelines. Webmasters must then submit their site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
The Fallout
We’re seeing rankings in free-fall across the board, with many affected webmasters reporting that their site has been entirely de-indexed by Google. Of course losing rankings is bad enough, but for businesses to get de-indexed is the kiss of death, especially if it was your SEO agency that did the dodgy linking work.
With this kind of cheap and spammy SEO, corners are cut at every opportunity. Rather than take the time to build quality, natural links, many cheaper SEO providers will opt to buy these worthless links that can now cause your website to get dropped by Google entirely. Just like anything in life, you get what you pay for.
Lucky for our clients, we’ve never engaged in the spammy variant of link building. Instead, our focus on crafting high quality, sharable content builds links that are far more valuable not only because they come from natural sources, but because they come from reputable people.
Authorship is definitely the new Page Rank
We all knew Google was transitioning away from Page Rank as the dominant ranking factor, but until now many didn’t realise the important role authorship plays in a world where paid links do more harm than good.
Authorship makes it easy for Google to separate good authors from junk, in turn cleaning up their SERPs and providing searchers with more relevant, useful websites.
How do you build great authorship? That’s a post for another day, but what you can get done now is set your authorship up. You can learn more about how to do it yourself on Google’s authorship support page, but feel free to give us a call or email us if you need any help with the process.
Did you find that dreaded email in your Webmaster Tools account? We can help! Reach us on our Facebook page and we’ll let you know the best course of action to get your website back on track.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
