Over the past 5 months a number of my personal niche websites have seen a dramatic decrease in search engine traffic. You may have seen a similar drop in traffic on your own website. As you are probably already aware, this is most likely a result of Google’s recent algorithmic “adjustments”.
There has been a ton of chatter online about Google’s “Panda” and “Penguin” updates and I have even done a few posts about them myself. However, much of what has been put out on the internet has been completely wrong, and although I am not an expert on the inner-workings of Google’s search algorithm, I can share with you what has had the most impact on getting the rankings of my “fallen” sites back (at least those I have had time to work on).
Building backlinks to my backlinks
After analyzing my websites that had taken a hit, I realized that the majority of links pointing to those sites were coming from article directories and low-quality blogs. This was because the only form of marketing I did for those sites was to write and submit articles. This was an ok strategy prior to Panda and Penguin, but Google now puts a lot more weight on the quality, and diversity of links. One way the links are analyzed by the big “G” is to see if those links have any authority. In other words, do the pages in which those links to your site are located have any links pointing to them.
It was interesting because none of my client’s sites dropped in rankings. In fact, a few of them saw increased rankings as a result of Google’s updates. I can only assume that it is because the linking strategies we have always used on client sites is multi-tiered.
It is still fine to have some of these low-quality links, but it is easy enough to boost your link quality by building links to your backlinks. You can try to go through all your current links and build links to those, but your time and effort would be better served leaving those alone and focusing on building more, higher quality link structures.
On our Link Building Services page there is an infographic that illustrates this strategy well. It is how we build links for our client’s sites, and it continues to be extremely effective. Whether you hire a service to do it for you, or you simply take the time to do it yourself, creating multi-tiered linking structures is the way to go.
As an added note… Another important factor to keep in mind when building links is to not over-weight any particular keyword anchor text. For example, you don’t want 100% of your links using “buy blue widgets” as the link back to your site. I could probably do an entire post on this topic alone, but a good rule to follow is 30% your main keyword, 30% other variation of your keyword, 30% naked links (this is where the anchor text is your URL “http://mysite.com” or “mysite.com”) and 10% natural signals (this would be words like “click here”, “visit site” or “more info”).
As long as you follow this “natural” link building pattern of getting links from diverse sources, building links to your links and varying your link anchor text, you should be good to go!
…And if you want to take all the guess-work out of your link building campaign and get you site ranked, we can do it for you.
