#1 Google Penalty To Avoid
There are a few experts out there who would like to scare you to death about depending on Google for search engine traffic to your site. While I don’t recommend depending on only one marketing strategy, I do highly recommend implementing good search engine optimization practices to maximize all the real, organic traffic you can attract to your site. Why?
1. It’s free and that’s always great.
2. It’s typically a highly qualified prospect who finds you via a Google search.
3. It’s simple to implement.
So while I think I have covered a lot of fabulous things about grabbing Google traffic as well as the recent Google algorithm updates that have changed the game for some site owners, I thought it was important to give you another side of the coin. Some of the pitfalls (Google penalties) that you can fall into when writing content for the search engines and how to avoid them.
While I could talk about this topic for days, I selected one major Google penalty that you want to avoid for today’s article, because I see it happening so much. Especially by new marketers or frustrated solopreneurs.
Aggressive Link Building
It is no secret that in today’s society we all are looking for a way to do things faster, better, easier, quicker, etc. This is no different with entrepreneurs on the web. Even with all the lightening fast progress that we’ve seen on the web, people still want faster. Even with the great amounts of money you can make online with minimal effort — people still want to make more money by doing less.
In that spirit, a lot of entrepreneurs are trying to artificially build up the ranking and importance of their sites by acquiring links a.k.a. back links to their sites with lightening speed. Unfortunately, this is probably the #1 way for a site owner to suffer a Google penalty and see your site fall in the oh-so-awful Google sandbox. Why? Well, understand the logic…
Google started assessing a site’s importance based on the number of backlinks it had and the quality of those backlinks years ago. Originally the intent made sense, because if you owned a site which was accruing a regular amount of inbound links from reputable sites – it is thought that your site hosted relevant content to the niche you are ranking in. Thus making you relevant and important as well.
Of course Google didn’t count on the fact that marketers were going to figure out a way to put that process on steroids and get hundreds of links to a brand new website in one day, for multiple days! When they saw that happening, they realized that that wasn’t natural inbound linking. And of course Google was not going to reward sites that did this by giving them great ranking – so they began penalizing sites that did this type of unnatural link building and they still do this to this day.
So please be aware of this major link building blunder as you seek inbound links to your site. Do not build links to your site aggressively. If you did nothing and just allow other sites to find your content and link to you naturally there is absolutely no way you will ever have to worry about this penalty. BUT the sit back and wait method is not something I necessarily recommend, especially for folks looking to see immediate results. So in that case, do not actively and aggressively build links to your site by:
1. Joining a large link farm. The quantity and quality of links from this type of source is dubious and Google will penalize you for it.
2. Buying large amounts of links. Google does not want you to buy any links, but if you do, know that you should buy relevant ones and a few at a time.
3. Publishing hundreds of articles at one time. Many people do this because they’ve bought some sort of submission software as a shortcut, but it’s important that you know that you should not publish hundreds of articles at one time. You should trickle the publishing dates so that you do not have too many new links pointing to your site at one time.
In fact, I recommend that you build new links to your site at a rate of 10-15% or less than your existing link totals per month. For example, if you have a site with 100 current links, that means you can safely build in another 10-20 links without drawing any undue notice. Of course, the larger your site, the more links you can safely build on a monthly basis.
Want more writing for Google tips like this? I’ll be talking about a lot more very soon. Stay tuned! In the meantime, take a look at these related articles:
Did Google Give Article Marketing A Slap?
Also if you have any questions about writing content for Google, feel free to leave them in the comments section below and I’ll answer them.
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