Many of you may have seen this headline or similar over the past few days:
Websites to Google: ‘You’re killing our business!’
When you hire an SEO company to optimize your web site, build links, etc. make sure they are doing it right. The only way to build links is to do it by seeking out quality sites to link to and by developing quality content that other sites, blogs, etc. WANT to link to.
I often tell my clients that we could get better results if we used tactics that, while they might not be black hat, they are somewhere in that “gray area”. These tactics may work in the short run but sooner or later Google tweaks their algorithm in order to deliver higher quality results and when they do, sites benefiting from those tactics drop off the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) like flies. One of these questionable tactics is utilizing links farms to build incoming links to sites. This is the kind of link building service you often see advertised in spam emails from offshore vendors who offer hundreds of links from high PR (Page Rank) sites for a very low cost. As I said, it may have worked for a while but now the party’s over.
We strive to follow Google’s guidelines to a tee and we use common sense. It’s Google’s job to deliver the most relevant results for a users search query. We try to think like a search engine when we optimize web sites. We ask ourselves what would search engines look for to deliver a highly relevant site to a user. This approach has served us well over the long run. Many companies are reporting a drop of up to 40% in their site traffic which can devastate an ecommerce web site. I am happy to report that the recent change in Google’s algorithm has not affected any of Über Web’s clients in the least. In fact, we benefit because when the cheater’s sites fall off the SERPs it allows our clients to move up.
It always pays to do things right in the long run.