In a recent online online discussion, a website owner complained that his site was no longer listed on Google for one of his most important keywords. The site had been ranked highly in the past.
At first glance the backlinks pointing to the website didn’t look suspicious and the other factors such as page content also looked okay. So why did the rankings of the website drop?
What exactly happened?
The webmaster of www.mamajeanius.co.uk wondered why his site was no longer listed for the keyword “materity jeans”. Another forum member where the discussion was raised analyzed the site and also found nothing unusual:
• The backlinks looked okay to the other forum member; he didn’t find any spammy backlinks.
• A ‘site search’ showed there were about 417 pages of the website indexed on Google UK.
Again it begged the question: Why did Google delist the website for that keyword?
Google’s John Mueller joined the discussion to explain why Google did not show the website for the keyword:
“It looks like your SEO Company (or previous SEO Company) may have tried to promote your site in a way that’s in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, I see a lot of unnatural links in low-quality articles as well as blog comments left by someone called ‘Maternity Jeans.’
Stopping these practices, cleaning up unnatural links like these, and using the disavow links tool in cases where you can’t clean them up, would be a good step in the right direction.
Over time (and this process can take months), as our algorithms re-crawl the affected URLs, reprocess the links found on the web, and update their data, they’ll be able to take the new state into account.”
In other words, the rankings dropped because the website was spamming Google with artificial links. What appear to be good quality links to you as a site owner may not be regarded in the same way by Google!
What does this mean for your website?
Google is serious about removing spam from the search results. If you want to get high rankings on Google, you should know that:
• Artificial backlinks (blog comments spam, low quality articles, forum spam, etc.) will get your website in trouble sooner rather than later.
• It can take months until your website recovers from bad backlinks (see John Mueller’s answer above).
Use an SEO Company that only uses ‘white-hat’ SEO methods to promote your website.
Yes, it takes longer to get high rankings with these tried and trusted methods but it’s also much safer. If you use white-hat methods to promote your site, your web pages will get high rankings that last. If you need help getting your web pages ranked high in the search engine results call us today on 01273 328877