SEO has changed in the last 5 years, and has dramatically changed in the last 15. Is SEO dead? No, but it is different and it would be ignorant to pretend otherwise. The In Front team have a combined 20+ years’ experience in the SEO world so over the years we have watched as once effective techniques have been deemed ineffective and potentially damaging to your websites performance in organic search. To this day there are still malicious black hat companies who offer black hat SEO which promise you fast first page rankings for low prices, these malicious activities can cause you to get slapped with a huge Google Penalty and fall out of the search results completely as Google will deem your site untrustworthy and spammy. There have been cases, especially after Google rolled out a series of algorithms to keep the search engines only ranking high quality sites, which some sites have never been able to get back in the search results and have had to fork out thousands on a new site and SEO strategy in order to recover.
Afraid you’ve been hit with a Google Penalty? We offer a Google Penalty Recovery service to help you get back in the search results. We have a 100% Google penalty recovery success rate so you can trust us to get you up and running knowing you’re in safe hands!
When hiring an SEO agency it is important to look at their reviews not only on their website but on Google and other external sites to see if they are trustworthy. Things to look out for:
- They offer large amounts of backlinks per month for a very low cost
- They don’t explain what they have done
- They still focus on PageRank
- They promise super-fast results and first position rankings
Black hat SEO techniques:
- Keyword stuffing: The process of stuffing so many keywords into your content that it no longer makes sense when read aloud. The keywords you want to target should naturally occur in your content, overusing them will lessen the value of the page and make it appear spammy. Keywords should be used when necessary in titles, body text and Meta data.
- Hidden text: in the early days of SEO webmasters would try to disguise bulk text riddled with keywords by making the text the same colour as the background, so that Google would crawl the page and find the keywords but the user wouldn’t even know it’s there. All content on your pages should be there with the intention to be read.
- Spammy directories: There are high quality directories that we recommend you do submit your site to in order to build citations and improve your local presence. However, there are a vast amount of directories online that will list any site (likely for a cost) to ‘improve your backlink profile’. These directories actually damage your authority and can kill your rankings. We recommend only submitting your site to trustworthy directories related to your industry. Black hat SEO firms often submit your site to directories that then publish your URL to hundreds of other low quality directories, this will guarantee you a penalty and will require extensive link auditing work to recover.
- Duplicate content: Copying content from another website is not only illegal but can also cause duplicate content issues which will damage your sites organic rankings. Google will see that the content first occurred elsewhere and that your content is not original, therefore down go your rankings! Internal duplication can also be problematic for rankings which is why we highly recommend 301 redirecting your URL’s when getting a new site on the same domain so there are no duplicate URL’s that contain the same content.
- Comment spam: A technique still used today is the process of spamming blogs with comments purely to add links to your site. Many bloggers have turned to monitoring their comments due to this. If you have comments, constructive critism or a resource you think would be of interest to the author then by all means leave a comment but do not comment purely to get a link back to your site.
Signs you may need Google Penalty Recovery
- Your rankings have fallen
- You’re no longer appearing in the search results after a Google algorithm
- Your site wasn’t built with SEO in mind
- You fear your previous SEO firm used black hat techniques
- You’ve noticed an increasing number of spammy backlinks pointing to your site
If you’ve noticed unexplained drops in your rankings and organic traffic, get in touch with us using this form and we can discuss how we can help you get your results back!