SEO has lots of moving parts. Even if you manage to get one thing right, you could be compromising your site’s rankings by doing something else wrong. For instance, most digital marketers can make a site look rank-worthy on Google.
They can have keyword-optimized content, compelling meta descriptions, SEO-friendly page URLs, and everything else necessary for a top ranking site. However, when it comes to their off page activities, they could be tempting Google’s mighty ban hammer.
To avoid wasting your time and effort, be wary of these off page activities that can harm your search rankings:
1. Links from Suspicious Websites
Google’s search algorithm is all about links. If good links are between you and authoritative sites, then bad links are associated with suspicious and previously penalized sites. Make sure you do not associate yourself with black hat networks, porn sites, gambling and other sites filled with malware. Unless of course, if your site does belong in any of these niches. If not, then a link audit is in order if you suspect dubious networks connect to your site.
2. Broken Links
Another problem that can hurt your site’s rankings is the possibility of broken links pointing to your site. This could mean links pointing to a recently renamed or deleted page. Whatever the cause, it will surely return 404s to your audience and reflect poorly on your site’s reputation. Your priority is your best links from authoritative and high-traffic sites. Make sure to contact their webmasters and inform them whenever you make changes in your page URLs.
3. Links from Blog Networks
Running a Private Blog Network (PBN) is a borderline black hat strategy that Google sees as means for manipulating search results. The fact is that plenty of SEO “gurus” teach building your own PBN to artificially boost the backlink profile of the sites you want to rank. This, however, can and will raise Google’s suspicion. As the search engine evolves, it grows more capable of detecting PBNs and penalizing any site associated with them.
4. Sudden Increase of Inbound Links
Good links to your site are healthy. However, having a sudden influx of inbound links can once again raise Google’s suspicion. Remember that you need to have a slow and steady approach when building links. You cannot just build 10,000 links in 24 hours and expect to get away with it. Besides, it is not possible to reach that velocity if you only build quality links that can benefit your site.
5. Comment Spam
There is nothing wrong with using comments to create links, particularly as it can bring in relevant traffic. However, Google’s Matt Cutts himself stated that comment links should point to a person instead of a keyword-oriented phrase or brand name.
6. Overusing Similar Anchor Texts
Your site’s anchor text profile is one of the primary signals of niche relevancy. However, it is possible to over-optimize for the same anchor text and raise a red flag in Google’s radar. If more than half of your anchor texts are the same, then it is a strong indication that you paid for those links or built them artificially in some other way.
7. Extended Downtimes
Although short downtimes can’t really harm your site’s rankings, extended downtimes might. A site can be down for several days due to server-side problems, DDoS attacks, and problems with your site that you fail to resolve immediately. Broken internal links can also result in 404s that stop Googlebots dead in their tracks, so be sure you keep your site updated especially if you value the pages that are affected.
Conclusion
Damage control is one of the skills that you will learn in SEO. With the list above, you can remove the guesswork and get right to the fixes that count. So waste no time – you probably have a lot of work ahead of you!
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