Is Your SEO Provider Putting YOUR Site At Risk?

• Posted by Jordan
• 24 April 2012
• SEO

The want to obtain a number one positioning within the search engines can be so great that often you are so hungry to achieve that fate that you can actually hurt your site from the moment that you begin to build links into your web property or as it is better known, your website.

Very recently we were asked to look at a site that has been using an SEO agency to increase their online visibility in a fairly competitive niche market and were shocked at not only the quality of work that the client was receiving but also the fact that the rankings that they were being returned for their monthly investment were simply so low, mostly do to the fact that the building of links into the site was in a pre-historic format that will now mean that their site is only a matter of time away from being handed one of those dreaded Google ‘Unnatural Link’ warnings that are being discussed throughout the online community over recent weeks.

I can’t stress enough the importance of competence that is needed in order to offer an SEO service that is not only going to achieve results but also do so within a manner that is not carrying such a high risk of being penalised by search engines like Google, who have really stepped up their game to punish site owners that are looking to manipulate their rankings within the SERPs.

With the recent alterations to the way in which Google view sites and the links that hold them within the placements that they hold, there has never been such a huge requirement to ensure that all elements related to your website are finely tuned and within line with the guidelines that Google have laid out, including your link building activities.

Although I have pointed out that the link building aspect of your development should be approached with grace and caution, there is clear evidence that on-page SEO is still a large flaw within a number of websites that are live on the internet today and as Google continue to fight towards offering users the best possible search results, more and more sites will see that their site will begin to drop through the positions in the search engines as sites with better optimisation on-page make their way forward.

While speaking to one SEO the other day, he simply summed up the whole development process in one comment, saying “You wouldn’t put petrol in a car that had no engine, so why put links into a site that has no substance?”.

Reading between the lines of that comment draws out the conclusion that to be able to rank for keywords that are your main focus, you need to ensure that your site is created right, geared towards the keywords that you are chasing and optimised to the best possible standard, only then are you ready to compete with competitors.

This is clearly something that not all SEO companies, agencies or individuals follow and this means that their working practice is likely to cause issues for your site rather than show positive progression that is going to last longer than the two weeks grace period that Google allow new sites before taking a look through their make up.

Now I am not saying that no SEO companies, agency or individuals out there do exercise this mentality, I mean the one that I work for have a very strict requirement that we uphold in order to offer the best service that we can to the clients, but there are others out there that are self-taught and out of touch with the way in which the market has now turned and commands to be conducted.

Although the agency that were doing the SEO for the person who made contact we me have clearly worked to bring the on-page elements of the site into line with where they need to be, their link building execution is risky to say the least.

They have adopted a link building mentality that was upheld within the early years of the Google search engine that showed that links and more links was the way to be able to obtain strong rankings within the search engine results, however advancements within the way in which Google and their spiders operate have now changed tenfold since those early days and now your actions within the development of your site are punished should you step far enough outside of the guidelines that are set.

The links that were coming into the site were not only unrelated, placed on sites that were clearly selling links and obviously there to offer PageRank, a metric that Google have introduced but deny that it effects rankings, so these links are in my professional opinion, very high risk and I believe that the site is bordering on penalisation.

I will be looking to offer a more in-depth insight into what you need to do in order to make sure that you are finding the right links for your site and I will briefly touch on the on-page elements that you need to be looking at in order to steer you in the right direction.

If you can’t wait or feel that you could be having SEO done on your site that may place your site at risk, then don’t hesitate to contact us for a chat and we will see what we can do for you.