So your watching your page rank plummit, or your phone isn’t ringing as much, and now you are asking, “Why is my SEO not working?”
I’ve been optimizing sites for about five years now and I stay up with the trends and what new things are out there as this business evolves.
It’s possible you can put all your marketing, SEO, SEM, in the wrong place, or with some people, in many places. Be careful about over saturating the SERP’s with your stuff. What will happen is that Google will see this as “shady” and can actually hurt you, not help you achieve your online goals.
Consider the analogy below:
A subtle way to compete against yourself is to set up an online store (store.acme.com) with a paid search budget, and give the online store’s marketing team credit for all traffic to store.acme.com, but none of the traffic from www.acme.com. The store will typically focus the majority of its search advertising on branded terms, which have the highest conversion rates but pick up a lot of traffic that the company would have also received without paid search, e.g. via organic search results. Because it is competing for clicks against the rest of the corporation, very little of the store’s marketing is effective at building the corporate brand or bringing in additional customers.
– Source: http://www.covario.com
Links
So why is your SEO Not Working? I hear people all the time, “links, links links, we must have more links and link building!”
But Google penalizes you and the seller if you do this, watch the video from Google’s Matt Cutts:
So get links from actual people and not a seller. Google values links that are legit, there’s just no other explanation. I share your stuff on my blog, Facebook whatever, that’s legit. As long as I’m not selling links. So watch who is linking and sharing from you.
How Do I Protect Myself?
The Disavow tool is a Google Webmaster Tool that lets you ask Google to not consider links to your website that you think might be harming your site’s ranking. This tool has been around for a while, since about 2012 I believe. Yes, 1 year in the online world is a decade.
If you’ve ever purchased a link (bad, bad robot!) and you want to fix it before Google finds out and gives you a penalty, then use it now. However, if you’ve already been dinged, it doesn’t work retroactively.
So shame shame for doing it, now you have to lie in your bed, or start over and make a better one the right way. Not the news anyone wants to hear. But the online world can be pretty unforgiving.
