Are businesses still hiring SEO that use strategies that could lead to a Google penalty?
-
Is anyone worried that businesses know so little about SEO that they are continuing to hire SEO consultants that use strategies that could land the website with a Google penalty? I ask because we did some research with businesses and found the results worrying: blog farms, over optimised anchor text. We will be releasing the data later this week, but wondered if it something for the SEO community to worry about and what can be done about it.
-
Thanks for the answer Marie. That is true about the SEO in the middle who can talk the talk and can get away sounding like a pro. It's also true that many small businesses, especially those online, have little budget but have the desire, if not the need, to rank and just can't afford big budgets, so they are at the mercy of the cheaper SEOs.
-
At my office we have two people working almost 40 hours each per week on content and one person filling the sales. That, in my opinion, is what is required to produce rain when you don't have a big brand name generating automatic traffic. (We also make a little money from ads.) Most business are not willing to spend that kind of time on content. The only SEO that we do is on-site.
-
Yes.
A few years ago there was a massive pool of people who called themselves SEOs who could generally accomplish decent rankings by using techniques that are not in line with the quality guidelines. Now, that pool has gotten a lot smaller. In my opinion the "good SEOs" are those who are extremely knowledgable about on-site SEO and know how to properly create content and promote that content.
Those are skills, however that take years to learn. Gone are the days where someone can take a quick course, buy a few links, slap up some spammy microsites and rank. Yet, some people are still trying because that's all they knew. And sadly, business owners are still buying this crap.
What bothers me the most though is the type of SEO provider who is borderline. They promise that they are "white hat" and don't make spammy links, but they'll happily post links on their private blog network and submit guest posts to hundreds of sites that will publish them. The business owner often hears "white hat" and is easily convinced that this stuff is going to work.
I had a client recently contact me to ask me my opinion on the new SEO work they were getting done. I had removed a link penalty for them a couple of years ago and thought I had educated them well on what type of SEO is acceptable. They interviewed several people for an in house SEO job and had me sit in on the interviews so that I could ask them questions to make sure that they were within Google's guidelines. They didn't have one candidate whom I felt understood Google's guidelines. They all wanted to guest post, but just do it on "authoritative sites". A little bit of guest posting is ok...but if that's your main SEO strategy, that's not good. I lost touch with this client until they just recently contacted me. They had hired a great guy who had "white hat" strategies and asked if I could review 150 links he built for them. That's a red flag, isn't it? Any time you can build 150 links you're probably crossing into unnatural territory. Well, these links were all comment spam and forum profile spam. I couldn't believe it.
I think though that the main problem is cost. Anyone who thoroughly understands the technical aspects of SEO and can legitimately build a site's traffic is going to cost $3000+ a month (perhaps less, depending on the niche). So, if I'm a small time small business and can't afford $3000+ a month, I'm going to be looking for the $500 a month type of package...and sadly, this is usually not going to move the needle much.
-
The problem with many websites is a lack of content.
The business owner doesn't want to write the content (can't write, doesn't have time, can't afford, etc.). The SEO has a hard time finding someone to write content that fits the business and satisfies the owner.
So, the SEO is left trying to promote and optimize a turd.
This is what creates demand for low quality SEO and links that are bought or provided but never earned.
Are businesses still hiring SEO that use strategies that could lead to a Google penalty?
Yes, as explained above.
-
Yes. Serious SEOs have the analytics to show business their worth, showing that SEO is more than just keyword research etc etc. However, many there has been a rise in small online business opening with little budget. Online start ups can be up and running with little budget. They are creating the demand for low quality SEO providing links but not earning them.
-
There is nothing to be done about it, but stay the course. Unfortunately their are no credentials for SEO as such. So anyone can claim to be an expert. Ironically it would be difficult to create a course as there are so many potential solutions given most sites have unique criteria.
All that said the new Search Analytics has given me hope in setting identifiable dashboards for clients - ie simply clicks per page. We are introducing that. Measurable and identifiable tangible results.
On worried - not at all, though some give SEO a bad name, good quality work leads to more work from word of mouth than is almost achievable...
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Surely this cannot be a good SEO technique?
I have a client whose competitor has great positions in Google, and a quick look at the meta data revealed this (I removed the company name): I'd love some opinions on this. My gut feel tells me this is spammy. But all my client sees is that this site is on page 1! ~Caro
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Caro-O0 -
Reputable SEO companies
I am looking for a reputable SEO company to assist in link building. I have done many searches and find that there are many sites that have a "top 10." However I am finding they are listed there due to paying large amounts of money. Any recommendations on companies that can show real results and are not charging extreme amounts of money while using minimum wage interns to do all the work with crappy results. I had a few people suggest "internet marketing ninjas" if anyone has used, chime in. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nchachula0 -
Trying to escape from Google algorithm ranking drop
in 2010 our website was ranking number 1 for many keywords. we suddenly saw a crash in this a few years ago. we have since identified we have been hit by many shades of Panda and penguin updates. Mainly due to low quality back-links and poor content (some duplicates). since then we have done a major overhaul of our backlink profile. We have saved rankings that went from number 1 for many keywords to number 60 -70. We are now placed at around 11 to 18 rankings. We have also looked at our duplicate content issues, and removed all duplicate content, introduced a blog for fresh bi daily updates in an attempt to gain traffic. We also amalgamated many small low quality pages to larger higher quality content pages. we are now mobile friendly with a dynamic site, and our site speed is good (around 80). we have switched to https, and also upgraded our website for better conversions. we have looked at the technical issues of the site and don't have many major issues, although we do have 404's coming up in the google webmaster tools for old pages we removed due to duplicate content. we are link building at a pace of around 40 mentions a month. some are no follow, some do follow and some no links. We are diversifying links to include branding in addition to target keywords. We have pretty much exhausted every avenue we can think of now, but we cannot jump over to page 1 for any significant keywords we are targeting. Our competitor websites are not that powerful, and metrics are similar to ours if not lower. 1. please can you advise anything else you can think of that we should look at. 2. we are even considering going to a new domain and 301'ing all pages to this domain in an attempt to shake off the algorithm filter (penalties). has anyone done this? how long can we expect to get at least the same ranking for the new domain if 301 all urls to it? do you think its worth it? we know the risk of doing this, and so wanted to seek some advice. 3. we have on the other hand considered the fact that we have disavowed so many links (70%) that this could be a cause of the page two problem, however we are link building according to moz metric standards and majestic standards with no benefit.. do you think we should increase link building? Advice is appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
More pages is good for SEO? Is this true?
Hi Guys I have a question, I was told the more pages I have the better for SEO, Is this true?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Why does expired domains still work for SEO?
Hi everyone I’ve been doing an experiment during more than 1 year to try to see if its possible to buy expired domains. I know its considered black hat, but like I said, I wanted to experiment, that is what SEO is about. What I did was to buy domains that just expired, immediately added content on a WP setup, filled it with relevant content to the expired domain and then started building links to other relevant sites from these domains.( Here is a pretty good post on how to do, and I did it in a similar way. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2297718/How-to-Build-Links-Using-Expired-Domains ) This is nothing new and SEO:s has been doing it for along time. There is a lot of rumors around the SEO world that the domains becomes worthless after they expire. But after trying it out during more than 1 year and with about 50 different expired domains I can conclude that it DOES work, 100% of the time. Some of the domains are of course better than others, but I cannot see any signs of the expired domains or the sites i link to has been punished by Google. The sites im liking to ranks great ONLY with those links 🙂 So to the question: WHY does Google allow this? They should be able to see that a domain has been expired right? And if its expired, why dont they just “delete” all the links to that domain after the expiry date? Google is well aware of this problem so what is stopping them? Is there any one here that know how this works technically?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sir0 -
Negative SEO and when to use to Dissavow tool?
Hi guys I was hoping someone could help me on a problem that has arisen on the site I look after. This is my first SEO job and I’ve had it about 6 months now. I think I’ve been doing the right things so far building quality links from reputable sites with good DA and working with bloggers to push our products as well as only signing up to directories in our niche. So our backlink profile is very specific with few spammy links. Over the last week however we have received a huge increase in backlinks which has almost doubled our linking domains total. I’ve checked the links out from webmaster tools and they are mainly directories or webstat websites like the ones below | siteinfo.org.uk deperu.com alestat.com domaintools.com detroitwebdirectory.com ukdata.com stuffgate.com | We’ve also just launched a new initiative where we will be producing totally new and good quality content 4-5 times a week and many of these new links are pointing to that page which looks very suspicious to me. Does this look like negative Seo to anyone? I’ve read a lot about the disavow tool and it seems people’s opinions are split on when to use it so I was wondering if anyone had any advice on whether to use it or not? It’s easy for me to identify what these new links are, yet some of them have decent DA so will they do any harm anyway? I’ve also checked the referring anchors on Ahrefs and now over 50% of my anchor term cloud are totally unrelated terms to my site and this has happened over the last week which also worries me. I haven’t seen any negative impact on rankings yet but if this carries on it will destroy my link profile. So would it be wise to disavow all these links as they come through or wait to see if they actually have an impact? It should be obvious to Google that there has been a huge spike in links so then the question is would they be ignored or will I be penalised. Any ideas? Thanks in advance Richard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rich_9950 -
Google 'most successful online businesses'
how come this guy has all but 1 of the top ten results? (UK results - I'm guessing same in USA?) - with thin content on a spammed keyword on multi-sub domains? How can we 'white hat' guys compete if stuff like this is winning?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheInternetWorks0