In the beginning of the SEO era, webmasters and site owners would “keyword stuff” their websites in order to get the attention of the search engines. This tricked the bots that crawled the website into believing that the site was the perfect destination for consumers in search for the product or service that matched the repetitive word. Visitors were frequently disappointed with their search results. In an attempt to do away with these so-called black hat tactics, Google has updated its algorithm to fight this form of spam. The most radical change was the Panda update a few years ago.
The next tactic that was employed was in the form of backlinks. You see the search engines look to see how many other sites are “pointing” to your website. This means they have you website domain listed somewhere on their site. This gives you a vote or point in the search engine’s eyes.
Again, the black hatters exploited the loopholes. They did this by the use of using various tools that created backlinks automatically and more. I won’t get into all the specifics here, just know this is not the way you want to get the attention of the search engines.
This is when Google Penguin was unleashed. This algorithm was designed specifically with the hunt for aggressive and unnaturally built backlinks in mind. Penguin quickly ousted websites that relied on paid links, link-building bots, and organized link exchanges.
So here’s the scenario, you or your marketing company built 1000’s of links thinking this was ok. And in all fairness, it was accepted way back when. Now you need to clean up your link profile. So what do you do?
One thing to note is that when Google starts doling out penalties, there is no shortage of info on the Internet about how to fix things to get in their good graces again. The first thing you need to do is identify the bad links. You can do this by running your website through various backlink checking tools such as:
Ahrefs.com
MajesticSEO.com
Google Search Console
You may even want to use more than one. Now that you have as big a list as you can get, you need to go through the links one by one and see if they are good or bad. If you aren’t sure, just ask yourself, do I want to be associated with this website? Some sites should be obvious nixes. If you see pharmaceutical sites, adult sites, or site with gibberish content, these you definitely want to disavow. For more information on how to disavow a link, visit Google support.
So now of course we need to talk about acceptable links. Fret not as there are plenty of ways to get good backlinks.
- Local business listings and industry directories. The listing on the local chamber of commerce website is legitimate as well as the citations we spoke of in a previous post. You can read that again here.
- Social media. The links from your business’s Facebook page or other social media profile sites are legitimate. When friends or followers share your posts, which contain backlinks, or memes, this is organic link creation.
- Social bookmarking. Tread lightly here. If you are a member of a bookmarking site, actively engage with other users, and share plenty of content from other sources, nobody will fault you for also sharing your content with backlinks. If however, sharing your material is all you do and there are no interactions, there is a good chance that your efforts will not be successful.
- Online activity. Issue legitimate press releases that discuss a newsworthy event. When they are posted to press release sites, your link makes the rounds in a legitimate manner. Guest blogging, too, can be an excellent way of approaching a new niche of consumers. Video content submissions and image sharing on infographic sites are both genuine means of creating backlinks. There are a few other ways to get links but this is a good list to get you started.
Make sure you have a healthy backlink profile. One last tip here. When you buy a new domain name, you also want to be sure that the domain does not have a bunch of spammy backlinks pointing to it. You could be fighting an uphill battle right out of the gate.
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