Search engines are always in a battle with developers attempting to hack their algorithms using black-hat SEO techniques. This is especially true when it comes to getting backlinks to improve a website’s authority. Therefore, search engines are wise to a bunch of tactics and will penalize a site if they can tell that you are into building links through purchases and not including ads. vs through more organic means.
Remember – search engines are in the business of returning search results based on a searcher’s desire for information. If results appear in a query that are not relevant to the searcher’s intent, it looks bad for the search engine. Therefore, search engines like Google have adopted a series of practices to try to detect if the search results will be more relevant to the searcher’s desires through the use of determining if links appear to conform to the laws of more natural link usage.
Here are six things that you should avoid doing or risk tipping off search engines that your linking practice is not a natural one.
– Growing Links Too Fast
Many SEO companies say they will submit your site to 250 directories. When this happens, there is often a spike in links back to your site. While it is very possible that you just produced a piece of content that went viral, search engines often monitor this activity and may see that you are attempting to buy your ranking as opposed to earning it organically. To that end, many of these services offering to submit your business to various directories are now advertising that they will submit your site to these directories over an extended period of time, thereby attempting to avoid this activity being detection by search engines.
– All Links Contain Same Anchor Text
Another way that search engines detect that a link is not natural is if all of them use the same anchor text. Companies that offer to provide a number of backlinks will often just copy and paste the same text link over and over on different sites. Naturally occurring links will have varied anchor text.
– All Links Contain Your Keywords
When all of your links contain the keywords that you are trying to rank for, it looks to the search engine that links are placed in content just for the sake of ranking your content for the keywords. When some links do not contain a keyword you are ranking for, it looks more natural to the search engine.
– Too Many Links From The Same Types of Sites
When all the backlinks come from a single type of site such as directories, search engines may view this as negative. It is much more natural to have links coming in from a variety of different types of sites such as news sites, blogs, etc.
– Too Many Low-Value Sites
Since many companies that promise links operate hundreds of low authority sites with low trust scores, search engines look for a concentration of links from these types of sites and view them as unnatural.
A more natural occurrence is that there is more of a distribution of links from sites with both high and low authority. Here is a graph that shows the number and Domain Authority of sites linking to SteveBizBlog.
– Too Few No Follow Links
It is far more natural to have a distribution of links that include no follow links. When a site has very few no-follow links, it appears to the search engines that you are seeking an active linking campaign.
While there are six black-hat practices that many companies engage in that will expose you as a cheater and get your site penalized by search engines, there are also two white-hat practices that will improve the search engines opinion of your site.
+ Brand Query and SEO
Search engines place additional value on upwardly trending brands and place less value on downward trending brands. This is because the search engines know that businesses work very hard to preserve the quality of their brand in the eyes of their consumers. Therefore, when a search includes a keyword that a brand is ranking for, the trajectory of the brand’s interest will influence the search engine’s results when they calculate where they should place the brands content on the Search Engines Results Page (SERP).
For example, If I’m looking for a running shoe and I use the keyword “running shoe” in a search query, the search engines will look to see what brands are associated with running shoes and which ones are trending up or trending down, before providing its final results to the query.
If we use Google Trends to plot the interest in the brand Nike over time, we can see that Nike as a brand is slowly increasing.
Search engines would therefore give more authority to Nike, and would list pages with Nike higher on the page for search results involving “running shoes”.
Compare that to GoPro, the company that makes action cameras. If we use Google Trends to plot the interest in the brand, GoPro it is trending downward. Search engines would therefore remove some authority from GoPro as a brand and therefore list it lower on the page of search results involving “action cameras”
+ User Experience and SEO
User metrics are often forgotten in most discussions about SEO. Search engines also look at the user’s experience when ranking a website using user metrics. User metrics include things like:
Session Duration – the amount of time a user spends on the site.
Pages / Session – the number of pages the user viewed during a session.
Bounce Rate – the percentage of single-page visits.
While they are no absolute numbers, the search engines will look at all the other sites that rank for the same keyword and based on your user metrics compared to others, they will adjust the Page Authority. Even if you out-optimize the other sites ranking for the same keyword. you will be rewarded if you have better user metrics.
How can you use your understanding of how search engines rate your site to make your content rank higher?
