You may own a company and have a website, or you may be in charge of one as part of your job. If you’re concerned about SEO Orange County, then you’re probably familiar with how important things like links can be for your Google ranking. What some site administrators fail to comprehend is that links can be as harmful to your ranking as they can be beneficial. In this article we’ll examine the nature of the relationship between links and search engines, and we’ll talk about “good” links and “bad” links.
Why Links Matter
Links are probably always going to be valued to some extent by the Google algorithm, and by those of similar search engines. While it is important to have links, some of them are not worth having, because they link to sites with a bad online reputation. If that happens, then Google is going to view your site unfavorably, through no fault of your own. You want a portfolio of “good” links. But how can you get them? The best way is to have a site that is full of useful articles, blogs, and high-quality content. That is content that entertains, that informs, or otherwise occupies a person who has come to your site in search of it. If you do that, then your articles, blogs, etc., are going to get noticed, and reputable sites should link to them. If you’re lucky, some of your content will even attract the attention of people with a significant social media presence and lots of followers.
Negative SEO Attacks
There is another way that links can be harmful to you. Sometimes hackers can target your website and infuse it with malicious code, and it can happen entirely at random. Alternatively, they might scrape your blog and repurpose your content, or they could build many links from your sites to others with bad reputations. These are considered to be “negative SEO attacks,” and when they happen, try not to take them personally, because they usually aren’t intended that way. There are just some hackers out there who like to perpetrate malicious mischief for their amusement.
If these sorts of things ever happen to you, Google is usually able to figure it out for itself. However, if your site was ranking well and it suddenly just disappeared from the search results altogether, then you can access a Google Manual Action Report, and see if your site shows up with any issues attached to it. If it does, it means that a human reviewer has figured out that your site is not complying with Google’s guidelines. Once you see why Google is penalizing you, you can take steps to correct whatever the problems are.
As you can see, links, either good or bad, can make a lot of difference as it relates to your site. Try to keep track of who’s linking to you. Cultivate the useful links, and sever the bad ones that are causing you problems. By doing so, you’ll be taking significant steps toward optimization.