B2B brands must ensure ‘white-hat’ SEO tactics if they’re to avoid being penalised by Google’s recent algorithm update, says Kelvin Newman, strategy director at SiteVisibility
Google is constantly making changes to its algorithms, and most are so small that people never even notice. However, one of the search giant’s latest and most significant updates is Google Penguin – a new update aimed at targeting web spam. Google has stated this update will target around three per cent of queries, and in a competitive B2B landscape you may have found your site’s search performance has been affected.
According to Google, Penguin is designed to, ‘decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.’ Although Google has always made an attempt to target web spam, this algorithm is a further improvement to reduce it and promote higher quality content.
This algorithm change will hit your site if you’re using strategies such as link schemes, deliberate duplicate content, keyword stuffing and any form of cloaking. Prior to Google Penguin, some marketers will have included these strategies in their SEO plans as they were predictable, easy to scale and in many cases a ‘cheap’ way to improve rankings.
However, Google will now penalise some of these tactics. It’s still early days but there are three main areas where Google appears to have cracked down.
Here’s what they are and what you can do about them.
1. Site wide links
Many sites initially adopted a ‘more the merrier’ approach when building links to their site. It was felt that a link from every page of a site was better than just one. Unfortunately, this type of link is also commonly used by spammers. As a consequence of Google Penguin, websites that have a large proportion of their links from every page of another site have now seen their rankings fall. If your company is part of a group of companies you may have this type of link. In the past, this may have helped your search efforts. Now it probably doesn’t.
There is no ideal number of site wide links and every site is different. See how you compare to other sites and try and make your back link portfolio similar.
2. Excessive anchor text
For a long time, one of the best ways to help Google understand what keywords you should rank for, was by ensuring people linked to you using your keywords rather than your brand name, i.e. link to you using the phrase ‘printing company’ rather than ‘Acme Solutions’. However, this resulted in websites only having links using keywords rather than their brand name, and this pattern was unfortunately also common to some of the sites Google didn’t want to rank highly.
Whenever you are building links, don’t worry too much about anchor text. Instead, allow people to link to you in whatever manner you like; sometimes with branded terms, sometimes with keywords, and sometimes with a combination of the two.
If you’ve been carrying out link building in the past, use a tool such as MajesticSEO or OpenSiteExplorer to understand how people are linking to you, and how that differs from the sites that are ranking highest for your target keywords.
3. Spun content
One of the easiest ways to get links has traditionally been to exchange content for a link. You provide a publisher with an article or blog post that contains a link back to your site. They get some free content to sell adverts against and you get a link in exchange for writing. However, this lead to people looking for cheaper ways to produce content they could swap for links, such as articles from people with English as a second or third language or ‘spun’ content. Spun content comes about where one original article is written and then some or all of the words are swapped around for synonyms.
If somebody building links on your behalf used this type of content, your site may have been affected by Penguin. If you’re concerned this may be harming your SEO, you can work to get these links removed. Be warned though, this can be time consuming and inefficient. However, if it’s holding back your site it may be your only option.
Top tips for successful SEO
- Concentrate on your users. Before you make any changes to your site or carry out any offsite link building, ask yourself: does this benefit my users, as well as the search engines? If the answer is no, it’s not a long-term strategy.
- Invest in content that builds its own links. The best ways for most B2B companies to build links is through valuable content that demonstrates their expertise, for example whitepapers or video. If you get these right and tell the correct people about them, you will get the links you’re after.
- Understand how your website is being promoted online and ask tough questions. Some unsuspecting companies have been caught out because they didn’t really understand what their teams or agencies were up to. Ask them about risk, and manage your campaign based on an assessment of risk and reward not just reward.
