Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.yourwebsite.com

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.yourwebsite.com/,

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

If you have received a similar email then we suggest you act very quickly but don’t panic.  Some sites received this warning without penalties, and some sites were penalized immediately. In either case, the links need to be taken down to retain or regain rankings.

The email is the result of a regular Google search update known as Panda [webspam] and has already been sent to many websites so you are not alone.  This latest update penalizes websites based on the link strategy they are using and has already caused major problems for the impacted websites with large drop in rankings, thus visitors sent from Google and ultimately revenue.

The reason not to panic is that Google finds it very hard to know if your links are actually bad links, some are obvious because Google knows the website is bad but by you panic removing a whole lot of links just tells Google their guess was correct.

Your first step after not panicking is to examine all of the links that point to your website and evaluate if they are ‘bad links’ or not. You are looking for links that come from link farms, blog networks or bad sites, these are often identified by 100′s of links per page and no real content, often provided by cheap SEO services from outside of the UK.  Also Google becomes suspicious if all the Anchor Text [the text the person clicks on] is the same on all your links, this just indicates the links are not natural.

Any bad links need to be removed or Google will penalize your site, sending it down the rankings and significantly impacting your website visitors numbers.

Once you have removed all offending links you can ask Google to reconsider your website but when you send your request you need to be honest and provide details of the links you removed, you have to show that you’ve made an effort to sort your website out.

If all of this is giving you a headache then give Praeparo a call and we will explain, in plain English, just how you can avoid the penalties of Google.

It is now more than ever all about building a balanced and natural Internet Marketing Strategy.

This release was really about website owners or there SEO companies Over Optimising!

So what is over optimising?

Over Optimising, also known as webspam, is where a website owner tries too hard to get a website page to the top of Google results to the cost of the visitor. Sometimes when you look at a website page it looks confusing and seems to repeat, this basically indicates the page has been written to keyword stuff to help rankings but at the cost of visitor experience. This also includes techniques used external to the website to help rankings, for example the purchasing of links on other websites to point at your own website.

At Praeparo we are strong believers that if you research your keywords well and then create unique content aimed at the website visitor and not the search engines then your website will get to the top of Google, you don’t need these techniques.

If your website has a problem or think you have been impacted then please contact us for a chat.

So what do we mean by split testing?

• For every keyword targeted we will create two ads with slightly different content.
• These are then monitored daily by our marketing professionals and we will identify a winner. A winner is where we get the best click rate that converts to a buyer, we have to get the click that converts as this tells us the content of the landing page (product or service) is what the person expected when they clicked.
• For the ad that didn’t win we adjust the text and then start to monitor the two new ads.
• This is repeated continually until we have constant dead heats, or we have an excellent acceptable conversion rate.

When we have finally settled on this winning ad we can then start to execute standard search engine optimisation on the landing page against the winning ads keywords, this can’t be done until we have a stable winning ad. Then as the click through rate increases in organic search results we can reduce our spend on the PPC campaign and re-focus the spending to new areas.

This strategy is often not used as it takes time, but at Praeparo we have the people and tools set-up to handle 100′s and potentially 1000′s of ads per customer based on a split test per keyword, where a campaign can have many keywords. See our Pay Per Click Services page for more information.

Too often website owners believe Page Rank is SEO. Well it is not, with over 200 factors that Google uses Page Rank is only one.

Praeparo believes you need to get your own website in order first! Make sure your URL, page title & description, content headers and actual content should all be good and be targetted at what the user wants and expects on the topic concerned.

Once content on an individual page is good then make sure it is a good fit into the overall website through internal linking with appropriate anchor text.

Now with good content it will start to return results from Google SERPS. To get better results we need people to find it and start talking about the page, viral marketing is the best where other people like the content and so will talk about it on blogs or sites like Twitter and facebook.

In summary don’t spend too much time on getting external links and monitoring your Page Rank until you get your website in order!

Praeparo thinks this is a good idea as we all should be creating a good user experience. Page load time is critical in a user experience as if we can’t convince the user the site is good in a few seconds they will just bounce.

The only area of concern is that some sites to create a good user experience are rich in content that slows the page down. This is acknowledged and accepted by the users BUT how will Google handle this? In this case we should just accept that these pages will not rank so high and thus create other more focused landing pages that then direct to the slower pages for more information.

Very important for all website owners to evaluate page speed and create an action plan to rectify any pain points. This does not have to be expensive, we suggest find the quick wins and make any changes as part of your usual maintenance or content refresh processes.

But remember DON’T PANIC as content is still the leading factor. Page speed is only a very small element of the overall ranking algorithms.

If you have concerns please get in touch with Praeparo and we can quickly help you find out if you have a problem or not.

Getting Google Analytics working on your website is the first thing in any digital marketing strategy. To get started, simply open an account with Google and get your web design team to insert a few lines of JavaScript code on all your pages.

Once it is installed and gathering data it needs to be linked into your overall marketing strategy.

Features include:

• Detailed SEM reports
• Internal Site Search analysis
• Geo-location reporting
• AdWords Integration
• Event Tracking
• Path Analysis
• E-Commerce Tracking and Analysis
• Trend Reporting

Visit the Google Analytics site for more information