At Joyer we are constantly bombarded with emails from "so-called" SEO experts telling us our own website has Google errors, has bad links, low search rankings and can be improved if we contact the company.
This style of email is widespread and we often get calls and emails from concerned clients querying the validity of these emails and what can we do to fix the errors.
What we have found is the vast majority of these emails are spam and are sent out to large email distribution lists with no understanding of the companies website, Google rankings or current SEO position.
Unfortunately there a number of businesses who take these emails at face value and contact the self proclaimed SEO experts and engage them to fix their website and improve their website search rankings.
This month we had a business engage Joyer to review their website SEO after they had engaged one such company and found that their website had in fact dropped significantly in Google rankings.
On review of the website’s keyword ranking history, volume and quality of incoming links and website content, it was clear that the SEO company had implemented out-dated and “black hat” SEO practises which had led to the business being penalised by Google.
A Google penalty can happen in several ways. Either automatically via Google’s search ranking algorithm (e.g. Google Panda update) or a manual review by Google.
In the case of our new client, the Google penalty was given automatically by Google’s search ranking algorithm. The reason for the penalty, on deeper review, was due to a large number of paid low quality links that the SEO company had purchased for the website in a short period of time. This was enough for the website to be flagged and penalised.
The client, aware of the impact, ceased working with the SEO company but the legacy they have left will have an ongoing impact unless a series of steps to distance the website from these links is undertaken.
Joyer has recommended a strategy to remove these incoming links based on Google’s recommended approach. This strategy involves
- Review the websites incoming links
- Rate and highlight links that needs addressing
- Contact the website(s) with the problem links asking them to remove the link(s)
- Document all correspondence and results
- Use Google’s disavow tool to ask Google to overlook the links you can’t get removed
A good explanation of the process and some further tips can be found in this article by search engine watch.
This process could take months to have any impact and there is no guarantee if and when Google will overlook the links not able to be removed by contacting the corresponding websites.
The big takeaway from our SEO review of the client’s website is the massive long-term impact engaging the wrong SEO company can have on a website.
Our advice to any business looking to engage an SEO firm is do your research and ask fundamental SEO strategy questions to gauge the expertise and ability of the SEO company to improve your search engine rankings and not destroy them.
If you would like to know more about Google penalties or website SEO, please contact Joyer.
