Search Engine Optimization: The Changing Face of SEO
I have been doing SEO since 1998. In all that time I have never lost a client. Using best SEO practices and building positive linking along with additional server technologies has never failed me. Everything changed on December 7th. I suppose Google understands the irony of picking that day to unleash a major filter. Instead of Google getting “bombed” they did the bombing. I have one client that has a site which has been in the index for 8 years, their primary keyword is their domain. In one day 10,000 of their pages went into supplemental results. They were OUT of the index.
After close scrutiny of their operations I found that they had over 200 domains that were interlinking off of only 5 separate class C’s. They didn’t even know these sites existed, but even worse, they are all clones of the primary domain! Well “past management” certainly screwed them.
The first thing I did was 301 redirect all those clone sites to a new site I created which is a WordPress blog. My plan is to build up the blog and send traffic and link authority back to the primary domain. Once the cross linking was gone, Google was then informed about the site through the use of an xml sitemap. This laid out for Google the pages we WANT them to spider. We moved database driven URL’s into a subfolder and disallowed the folder using a robots.txt file. You might want be asking yourself why disallow all those pages? If Google gets caught in a directory where a database will continue to generate URL’s on the fly, you will get caught in the CGI filter. This is a filter set Google uses to stop Googlebot from getting wrapped up in a loop.
Now when we go into the Google Webmaster Center, it is showing thousands of unreachable pages and even more restricted by robots.txt. This is anticipated behavior.
Within 2 weeks we were back into Google! I was asked “what can we do to keep this from happening again?” The answer is simple:
Don’t put all your eggs into the SEO basket!
This might seem a strange statement coming from an SEO expert who make a living getting websites found on the Internet, but after all these years it is the only answer. Aside from Pay Per Click and affilate or banner exchange Search Engine Marketing, what are you to do?
Traditional SEO is dead, everyone that knows anything will tell you that Google prefers sites that it considers to be “news” sites. Get Found Now employs WordPress as it’s social network marketing platform of choice. By building up the blog in Google’s eyes the site is made fresh and relevant. The whole key to this is content. If you don’t have the ability to create unique content check out Get Found Now’s content creation writing services.
Having a blog isn’t the complete answer, it still needs to be promoted. Through the power of RSS syndication, Get Found Now can reach out and touch thousands of news outlets EVERY time your blog is updated. Through our powerful services, Google is updated by the minute! Check out this screenshot that shows a blog post IN Google 4 minutes after it was posted:
Nothing is more important than keeping your site fresh in the eyes of the search engines. Stay tuned as I lay out the many ways to utilize RSS to build link authority.
