Over the last few months many website owners have received unnatural links warnings from Google in their Webmaster Tools message sections. These messages aren’t, as some SEOs would have you believe, a symptom of Google ‘changing the rules’ or ‘moving the goalposts’ or any other clichés you may have heard – they are instead a result of Google simply getting better at detecting spam links.

Google’s recent updates, dubbed Penguin and Panda, don’t represent big sweeping changes to the way Google works, they just enable Google to improve its search results, making them better for the user, and get rid of the sites who use spam and paid links as their weapons – better for website owners and genuine white hat SEO companies.

However, one of the problems of Google doing this is that sites can be penalised for work done not today, not last week, not even last year – but potentially years ago. There are many SEO companies out their offering supposed ethical services but, sadly, many of these SEO companies actually engage in poor link practices and rented links. These strategies worked once. They worked very well. Yet they were always unethical and were always in direct violation of Google’s Terms of Service. Google has just become better and detecting them and dealing with the websites that use them. Consequently websites are being penalised for (more…)

Link building is an important part of any business’s search engine optimisation campaign but some online business owners are still going to link building farms in order to get the job done. Promises of thousands of links to your website in seconds can sound appealing but (more…)

Ever since Google first coined the phrase PageRank, and started to rank websites based on the number of links they had as opposed to the number of times a keyword was written on the page, people have sought to gain more links. With such a direct correlation between (more…)

Let me just say this: Icarus was an idiot. The boy who flew too close to the sun, ignoring the warnings of his inventor father, Daedalus, could have avoided tragedy if he had just been a little more prepared. Unfortunately, he neither inherited his dear old pater’s intelligence nor (more…)

The scenario: a growing website gets site-wide links from a more powerful site. With a link either in the footer or sidebar of the linking site, suddenly you’re getting a link from every single page, adding up to thousands of inbound links. The question: is this a good thing or a bad thing? (more…)