By Moshe Shimon, New York SEO Inc., June 16, 2012
Google Might Save You
If you’re a business owner with a website that has been hurt by bad backlinks, Google may finally come up with an out for you — Google may soon ignore any spam links you tell it to.1
In response to concerns about your competitor deliberately building spammy backlinks to your business website to destroy your site’s ranking and traffic (called “negative SEO”), Google may soon give you the option to tell it to ignore bad or spammy backlinks to your site when they calculate your domain authority (i.e., your site’s ranking power).
This, of course, will be a real godsend for business website owners who built on their own what turned out to be bad links and lost ranking and traffic because of it.
You’ll need to have your website registered with Google Webmaster Tools2 to take advantage of this new feature, when (and if) Google releases it.
This could cause one problem, albeit minor, however . . .
Open Site Explorer Made Inaccurate by Google Ignoring Backlinks
If you start telling Google to ignore some of your links and you also use a great tool like SEOMoz’s “Open Site Explorer”3 to estimate your site’s page and domain authority relative to your competitors, you’ll have inaccurate estimates because OSE won’t know about the links you told Google to ignore — OSE will still count them.
On the other hand, right now, with Google already not counting bad links, the page and domain authority of your competitors may be weaker than what OSE suggests if they have bad links.
In short, the accuracy of OSE depends on the assumption that all the sites under consideration have clean and valid link profiles. If you use a tool like OSE to measure your own home page and domain authority, you’ll need to remove your bad backlinks.
Have you suddenly loss traffic in 2012?
This could be due to recent changes in Google’s ranking and web spam detection algorithms.
The first step is to use Google Webmaster Tools and/or Google Analytics to make sure the cause is due to changes at Google and not something else.
If you’re not sure how to do this, contact us and we can help! Email or contact us Today!
References:
1. Google Will Soon Ignore The Backlinks You Tell It To. Chris Crum, WebProNews.com, June 13, 2012
2. Google Webmaster Tools
3. Open Site Explorer
Notes:
Official Google Announcement about their ‘over-optimization’ filter, ‘Penguin:’Another Step To Reward High-Quality Sites. Matt Cutts, Google Webmaster Blog, April 24, 2012.
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