SEO from Google’s Perspective

Introduction

Google’s aim is to give the search user the best possible experience by providing them with the most relevant results for their searched terms, hence all their algorithm updates are geared towards improving user experience.

The best way to get a site ranking on Google is to populate it with original, relevant content that adds value to the end user.

The game between Google and the SEO guys is getting more interesting with the Latest Google updates released from April last year, they are clamping down heavily on over optimization in terms of on-page content as well as links to your website.

What they are looking for is content that adds so much value to the end user that he shares your link with his friends and family out of his own, although this is easier said than done, the message from Google is that the days where you can sit the whole day and just build low quality links from forums and business directories are over, it is not a question of how many links you have pointing to your website, but rather how relevant the website is which is giving you the link to your industry. Is the link answering a question or adding value to the user that clicks the link?

Microsite Case Study

According to Microsite Masters (they are a rank tracker with ranking stats for thousands of websites) link over-optimization is one of the concepts that is thrown around the most in the SEO community. To prove their point they analysed the websites that maintained their rankings after the penguin update as well as the web sites that lost their rankings quite significantly.

Below is a graphical representation of their findings:

 

It is clear that the websites that had the majority of their anchor texts a direct match to their money keywords were hit the hardest and websites with a more equal spread of anchor texts weren’t really affected as it is more likely to be natural links attained from site users.

According to them, there are 5 methods that will help you rank long term:

1) Create Microsites

Microsites are smallish topic focused sites that provide useful content relative to your niche and cites your main website as the source. Google wants the internet to be filled with websites that provide the user with what they are looking for. By creating high quality smaller sites you get to send authoritative positive ranking signals towards your website.

2) High Quality Blog Networks

It is no longer enough to have private networks with small amounts of content, anchor text that is poorly placed within the context of the article, no (or very little) accountability in the area of content quality, and other gaping network-wide footprints and general low quality attributes.

A completely internalised blog network that is highly relevant to your niche and provides original high quality content is much more effective for providing your website with sustainable rankings.

3) Diversify Anchor Text

When building links you are faced with one of two options, spend time building links with the anchor text of “a term I want to rank for” or “a term that appears naturally but I’m not trying to rank for”. Although you are consciously aware that you need a natural mix of both, when faced with that decision you will tend to choose the first because it is no fun spending time and money building links that will probably not help you rank.

Make sure that 50% or more of your links contain anchor text that isn’t a keyword that you are trying to rank for. According to their research the websites that did not get affected by the Penguin update used the domain name and other more generic anchor texts that did not contain keywords that they tried to rank for.

4) Play Google’s Game

Get completely legitimate white hat links, the previous methods are ways to emulate a natural linking profile. Meaning ways to make your site appear white hat, despite possibly taking some shortcuts.

Write legitimate guest posts on niche sites, find ways to get media coverage relevant to your niche and last but certainly not least create something that goes viral as it will not only bring lots of visitors to your site, but a ton of legitimate link power.

5) Run your SEO Sites like a real business

One of the things that stood out from their research was that sites which portrayed themselves as real businesses fared a lot better than sites which viewed themselves as a way to obtain and leverage traffic from Google in order to monetize.

A key point here is to look at other sources of traffic apart from Google. Not only will this make you less reliant on Google, but those other traffic sources will almost certainly indirectly help your site rank better on Google.

Conclusion

The sites that got hurt the most by Google’s latest Penguin update had links with the following in common:

• Paid links using exact match anchor text
• Comment Spam
• Guest posts on questionable sites
•  Article marketing sites
• Links from dangerous sites

If we want to avoid getting penalized by Google updates going forward we will firstly have to create content that offers massive value to users, get them to share our content and establish our brands as thought leaders in our industries by blogging about interesting content that adds value and answers questions of the internet user.

Are you looking for improved rankings on Google? Contact one of the top SEO Companies in Johannesburg now on 076 592 1738 for a free quote!