Connor BrookeThe one thing which is absolutely frustrating is a so called SEO specialist still performing techniques which are years outdated and unfortunately this is the majority of our colleagues. Every person who has engaged such people had there business and there website on the guillotine, and then comes the two last updates earlier this year which shook up the SEO world and turned it on it’s head.
Over 30% of businesses online suffered major drops in both sales and traffic due to poor SEO techniques by the SEO companies they engaged
You may ask how this happened? It’s simple, over optimisation!
Over optimisation occurs when over 50% of your links have the exact same anchor text, the search engine with these updateswere able to identify that this looks unnatural and thus penalised these sites, the biggest hint i can provide anyone who needs SEO advice is that your website should be the most frequently used anchor text and not your keywords, these techniques are why people are still hurting.
Do not put all your eggs into one basket, a good SEO company will diversify your link profile by adding in all types of backlinks such as web 2.0 properties and social media links, the days are gone when you focused on just one word to get page one, you need to diversify your search engine optimisation strategy going forward.
Stop focusing on just one word and look to rank for the long tail keywords too, a colleague of mine had 80% of anchor text for the term SEO company, getting up to position 3, with recent updates they are now nowhere to be seen.
A good optimisation service will have an excellent track record keeping up to date, very few have not been hurt by the recent search engine changes, although i do reccommend to check out http://www.googlemapsguru.com.au
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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Hey John,
Completely agree with the points you raise, curious to know where you have come to the 50% anchor text figure?
Regards,
Mark.
Hey Mark
Once the intial Panda/Penguin roll outs happened we monitored the anchor text variation from many companies coming to us with penalized websites. Anything with over half the links being exact anchors, triggered the penalties and the email message in Webmaster Tools.
50% exact match anchor text links is an absolute obvious unnatural link profile. A lot of sites didnt get penalized this time around which have a high occurence of anchors but they need to be extra careful coming into 2013.