03 Mar How to Manage Your Google Link Profile
From the desk of Paul Barrs
It’s real simple – Google wants you to manage your backlink profile like a professional, not an idiot. If you havn’t already been hit with the Penguin SLAP, then this post & video is urgent viewing for you!
Good morning. Good afternoon. Perhaps, I could even say good evening. Whatever time it is wherever you are in the world, hello. Welcome.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s update. Now, I’m either going to bore you to absolute death or I’m going to raise a shitstorm today and get people engaged in conversation because we’re talking about, the topic of the day, the topic of the week, certainly the month, might be the year. All right, I’m going overboard.
But we’re talking “Link Building.”
That’s that dangerous thing that you engage in, link building and creating backlinks, that the Google Penguin is going to come along and slap you senseless. Pretty much. So why do people still do it?
Well, here’s the thing. Google themselves have done test research and created a search index, just in-house, and evaluated different things within their algorithm with and without external links to various websites within the search results.
And this is something I came across last year. Here’s what they realized and it makes perfect sense to me.
That when they put together a demo database of search results, not factoring external links, the results were crap, because it’s just too easy for people to game the system just with the things that are on-page. And of course just because this looks good mathematically within the algorithm, it doesn’t mean it looks good to a customer. Does that make sense?
Now when we come into things like customers and Google search, one of the most important things is how important is this content to the customer. That’s what Google wants to know. Now here’s the thing. If it’s good, if it’s great value, if it’s in-depth, if it’s relevant, or if it’s just crazy, furry cats and kittens, it’s going to get a lot of shares. And this is the thing that Google is looking for when it comes to understanding and building depth within their search results. So what are we as business owners need to take home from this?
Number one, we need to understand that links from other websites back to ours are still incredibly important.
Number two, if you’ve done any reading or heard anything about updates in recent times, particularly Panda and then Penguin as well with external link spam, you know that this is what Google loves to do, “I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it.” This is what Google loves to do with people who link-spam. Oh yeah. They just love that stuff. They’re going to slap you senseless. They’re going to call you Susan. And they’re going to bump you back down off the database completely.
So, what do we then as business owners need to do with our own link profiles? Now there’s an interesting phrase. I came upon that one just recently. Well, I’ve been following the reading for some time and going through things with my own customers and this is what brought it up for me this week.
I’ve just taken on a new client from an SEO point of view and I’ve done a good look-over, all their on-page and it’s pretty good. We’ve got some tightening to do. We need to rework the content, get a bit of crap out of there.
But what we also need to do is look at their link profile. So I jumped into Google Webmaster Tools and I had a good look around at the external link and I found, this is interesting.
They’ve got these links coming from all over the place from completely irrelevant websites, completely irrelevant social media profiles, completely irrelevant blogs.
It means one thing only. Someone in that company or someone working for that company has been building crappy links.
So it hasn’t happened to them yet and, hey, we see it. It hasn’t happened yet. But some time soon, without a doubt, Google is going to come along and Google, if you’re watching, I’m not telling you who it is and they’re going to spank these people and they’re going to put them in the penalty box for who knows however long.
And then that business is going to have to go through the long arduous process of reviewing their link profile and contacting these poor spammy link website owners and saying, “Please remove my link from your website.” Now most of them is going to get a “We don’t give a damn.” And, hey, they could be so old, they’re even un-monitored, in which case, they’re going to go through the even longer, more arduous process of contacting Google and doing a whole thing and disavowing those links.
Oh what a pain in the ass. No two ways to say it. So, here’s what my advice to this customer was this week, which I’m now doing, and here’s my advice to you. You need to get in there, in the Webmaster Tools, and look at your external link profile. And you need to start managing it proactively now. If you haven’t been spanked by Google yet, it’s a-coming, all right. They’re going to go all 50 Shades of Grey on you, tie you up, whip you senseless, and it’s not going to feel good.
So, take control of your link profile. That’s my message for today.Get in there right now.
And if you don’t know enough about this, then get someone to do it for you who understands it.
Very simply, this; If you run a website on let’s say solar panels, for example, and you sell solar panels, you don’t want links from a Russian panda bear porno site.
It’s as simple as that. If you only sell to people here in Australia, where I am, for example, there’s no value in you having links on sites over in China that are in China. It’s that no one has any idea what they’re about, except of course the people built them.
But here’s the thing, here’s how you determine good link, bad link, good link, bad link. If it’s a good link and, yes, there are good links, it’s very likely that one of your potential customers will actually come across it.
And they’ll look at it and they go, “That looks like what I’m looking for.”
And then they click it, come through to your website, and that’s a good link. That’s what Google’s looking for; good quality links. And we need them folks, we need them.
Last week’s topic about re-purposing content and getting it out there so people can share and post and talk about and build those good quality links for you. So that’s my word for today.
You have a fantastic week and this is Paul Barrs signing off. I’ll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.
