The world of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is getting more challenging to navigate. Updates to the Google search algorithms, Panda and Penguin, have sent those companies who rely on search engines to lead their customers to their business into a panic. SEO companies are scrambling after spending thousands of hours learning about, applying, and perfecting SEO practices to websites, only to find that Google is changing the game once again, making it difficult for companies to regain rankings that they have lost, or to compete for a decent new spot in the search engines.
As SEO companies realize that the SEO game has changed and their rankings are falling, they must turn away from the days of blog networks and article marketing as solid linking strategies and instead get creative. In a recent interview with Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, Google’s webspam team leader Matt Cutts said that link building and SEO will continue to get harder. Google is continuing to build more tools and enforce the use of “proper” links more, making link buying, or paid links, a bad strategy. He claims that Google has been warning against this for years, and it is only getting riskier from there. With the most recent update, Penguin, it is clear to see that some buying and selling of links can work in the short term, but in the long run it will not help your rankings on Google
Are you like many companies whose ranks have been affected by the Google algorithm changes, and now you do not know where to turn? We are here to help. Google is giving us some tips on how to boost SEO rankings back to where they were – for example, a possible “disavow this link” tool which will allow webmasters to “disavow” any questionable links back to their site which could be having a negative effect on their SEO. Matt Cutts says to look at these changes as a mere change of the algorithms, and not necessarily as a “penalty”, saying “we’ve been more transparent about times when we take manual action…we send out alerts via Google Webmaster Tools”.
Between the manual penalties and algorithmic changes than can affect your website’s SEO, there could be drastic changes to your Google ranking over the next few months. SMT is dedicated to creating long lasting strategies to keep your rankings up in a way that fits with all of Google’s SEO changes and challenges. Contact us today for a free quote on how to better optimize your website for search engines!