Do You Take Responsibility for Your Website’s Quality? Graywolf's SEO Blog |
| Do You Take Responsibility for Your Website’s Quality? Posted: 23 May 2011 04:18 AM PDT
The following is a sponsored post. The situation used to be: one day, your website enjoyed healthy traffic and profitable conversions; the next day, traffic was decimated – along with your ability to make money online. It took precious hours or days to work out what had happened, then work out why and then plan how to get your livelihood reinstated: your website had incurred a Google penalty, but no-one had informed you or explained why. Either in response to user pressure or as a natural development of customer service niceties, Google has begun to release more information to those who have flirted with the wrath of the algorithm and lost. There are two types of penalty: automated, where the search engine algorithm has detected Black Hat or quality issues, incurs a short, pre-determined penalty (for example, a 50-place drop for 30 days); a manual removal from the Google index for a more serious issue means that an issue has to be fixed and resubmitted before Google makes it visible for inclusion in search results. In both cases it takes time to recover previous rank positions for keywords. Until recently, there was no confirmation whether a penalty was automated or manual. Webmasters would frantically scour their websites for issues to fix, resubmit their sites, and wait. And wait. In the meantime, companies keen to maintain their traffic invest more money into Google AdWords. Ouch: unfortunately for Google, this gives wiggle-room to rumours it is purposefully cloaking the penalty issue in order to profit from it. However, the process has become more helpful: now, when a website incurs a manual penalty or ban, a message to webmasters indicate, loosely, why. It’s not much and it doesn’t help those with an automatic penalty (who still might have to hang around hitting the resubmit site button) but it is still potentially time-saving – it means webmasters can make an educated decision about how serious the penalty is and how to fix it so that the Google algorithm will accept it for re-indexing. Risk assessment You can avoid all this palaver if you accept responsibility for the calibre of your website: you play in Google’s ballpark so you should adhere to their quality guidelines, which are there for your benefit. There are a number of in which ways businesses risk getting a ban: naivety, intentionally using black hat techniques, or just sheer bad luck. Causes range from having a DIY website, falling prey to the tactics of rogue SEO companies, to having your content plagiarized by a phishing site or competitor. If your business relies upon its internet presence for a sizeable percentage of profit, you need to run a risk assessment to ensure you don’t fall into a costly and painful penalty trap. If you have a hands-on role with the online side of your business, acquaint yourself with Google’s webmaster and AdWords guidelines; you should also take an interest in the help forums. Google is trying to create a useful, intuitive environment for internet users by raising the bar on quality, especially with its Panda/Farmer update earlier this year: the user experience is vital to its ethos. Therefore, your website should enhance the user experience – it should look good, have clarity, be original, navigate and load well. It should not use any techniques to trick either the user or the search engine – such as keyword stuffing, invisible text or secret (doorway) pages. The best way to achieve website quality – avoiding penalties, enhancing user experience – is to hire an online marketing company. The accessibility of the internet lulls people into a state of over-confidence but ask yourself if you would tackle your troublesome plumbing, electrics, plastering, loose roof tiles or gas leaks. A good agency is like an insurance policy – risk of a penalty is minimal, while their expertise will give you a much better return on your investment. The ideal agency will be transparent about its services, will offer regular reports, have a portfolio available for perusal, will not tie you into a long-term contract and you will own all the work they undertake on your behalf. Small business owners can read more internet marketing tips and do a risk assessment on their vulnerability on the Adrac Ltd blog. Adrac Ltd is a full service internet marketing agency specializing in search engine optimization (SEO),pay per click, link building, web design, branding, public relations, copywriting and back end design. The preceding has been a sponsored post. Find out more information about sponsored posts.  Related posts:
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. |
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