Google’s Unnatural Link Update reconfirms the value of GAMIT’s services
Obtaining good online rankings, especially in Google – the most popular search engine at the moment, can today be a hassle IF you are not taking the right approach on things. New and ever so bald periodic updates can affect any website whose owner has unknowingly “broken the rules” in the attempt to get more online visibility for his/her business. Google updates are designed to allocate search engine visibility to those particular websites which promote their business correctly and have useful, relevant content for their visitors. However, striving to reduce traffic to websites deemed as low quality by Google, the updates have affected the businesses of many hiring unprofessional SEO providers. Little knowledge in the field of online marketing, the intention of getting “quick” results and the eagerness to accomplish this by any means has lead to an unpleasant situation for many website owners. As GAMIT also provides link building services, many of our own clients have been left wondering whether our work can be categorized as “rule breaking”, especially with the latest update. To reassure that the Unnatural Link Update does not affect the websites using our link building strategy, we would like to provide insight into what Google penalizes through its last update and why our one way theme links are not subject to these changes. For SEO packages specially built to recover the rank drops after the Google Panda Update please check our monthly link building plans designed for this! What is the Unnatural Link Update? The new update operates somewhat different than previous ones. It seems to deal with websites based on the adopted link building strategy [4], but allows its targeted websites to make a change and take down their negative links before any penalties are applied. This is why many website owners have reported receiving an email notice prior to suffering penalties. The result of the update consists in “link devaluation”. The search engine basically detects unnatural links and affects the landing pages by decreasing their rankings on the keywords or keyphrases on which the links were anchored to. We will further discuss what is considered to be unnatural and why, in the following paragraph. Although this is how the update would be described by a majority of cases, there have been exceptions as well, in which no notice has been sent or the penalties have affected websites more severely. Because these are isolated cases and may have had differential treatment due to other reasons as well, it is best not to include them in the description of the major trend. What are unnatural links? & Has GAMIT’s work been influenced? Google has been identifying links which were not previously recommended either, but it is just doing it much better now. While before March many SEO providers were aware of the dos and don’ts of link building, they were still making use of unwanted methods just because they were not declared as black hat. Situated in a gray area, these link building strategies were adopted by many SEO companies pressured into selling such services or enthusiastic to have fast results.- The whole idea of natural link building is based on obtaining website connections and making your company’s name and services visible without doing so artificially. As a consequence commercial link networks are the first to be taken action against [4]. Not only are they intuitively negative because they represent a fake popularity, but they are also easy to identify by search engines. Link networks belong to SEO companies which own well promoted websites used in link building campaigns (with articles or blogs). These well-known systems have a reputation and they also associate their brand’s name with the links they provide, so they are easily recognizable as sort of “cheating” your way into the top. They are easily recognizable as “paid links” and should be avoided.
- Not only paid links are easy to spot due to the provider’s name being associated with them, but also links which appear suddenly and in large numbers pointing to your website. Promotion bombs with high number of links do not occur naturally, thus they will be detected immediately as counterfeited popularity. So taking things slow today, will result in money well spent and an insurance that your website will be growing steadily in position, instead of being penalized.
- Another issue which affects links as being unnatural is the one regarding which keywords are used as anchors for the links. Analysis points out that anchored text is not evaluated in the same way as before [4], and it is recommended to “build a more natural blend of anchor text incorporating brand” and “focus on natural signals including lots of variation” of the keywords [7].