EP 6: When Everything in SEO Falls Apart

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill

In episode 4, I talked about the perfect storm of SEO and how great it was when everything came together and it was just perfect. Today, I want to talk about the exact opposite situation. I want to share a story of when everything fell horribly apart.

I was reminded of this today when I had a conversation with one of my SEO clients. My clients confessed that he was buying links from a third party source. I told him this could easily negate the months and months of work that we had done together and it was a really large slippery slope of everything falling apart. And I should know. I’ve had my own run-in with Google.

And today, I want to share that story with you. I want you to see that no matter how you can do things right, you can still have an opportunity where everything falls apart. And then I want to give you some guidelines on how to prevent this from happening.

So let me talk about my story. Like I said a couple of episode ago, I talked about my old company that I worked for and how everything worked perfectly and we increased revenue 400% in two years.

Well, that wasn’t the entire time of me working at the company because I did have a little bit of a snafu. One day, I came into the corporate office and the president of the company looked at me and said, “Hey, I was in Google today and I couldn’t quite find our company on there. I don’t know what’s going on but the website didn’t seem like it was there. Could you look for me and tell me what’s going on?”

So, I opened up the search engine for – the search box for Google and sure enough, we weren’t showing up for our keywords. In fact, our domain wasn’t showing up at all. Google had completely and utterly removed us from the index.

Now, this might not seem like it’s a big deal but if you put this into perspective of the internet and SEO producing about 80-90% of our leads and our sales, this was a huge issue. I as the VP of Marketing should have been fired. There’s just no question about it. I caused this. I should have been fired. I wasn’t. The owner of the company, it was a family-owned organization and he realized that my paycheck was feeding my child and he had pity on me and he didn’t fire me. He gave me the opportunity to fix it.

So let’s look at the backstory of this. Why was I removed from Google? Well, I had done all of the things that I should do and it was putting forth the tactics that I had learned in my education and my self-education of SEO. I was doing things right.

I was also doing some things wrong because I got cocky. I mean that’s just the bottom line. And when Google removed us, there were probably five things that I may have been doing that were not appropriate. And I wasn’t exactly sure which one got us removed because back then, this was 10, 15 years, we didn’t have the notifications from Google that we have today in Google Search Console. You’re just removed by then. There was no notification besides coming into your office and having your boss tells you that you no longer show up.

So some of the things that I could have been doing were having white text on, white background to the homepage and everybody did that but it was a way of trying to embed more keywords and getting that density up without actually having it appear to people. I think I had stopped that before but it was at one point on the website.

The bad thing I was doing was I had registered the domain names of our competitors in spelling errors. So, I would take Epicor for example. I would misspell it. I would register that domain and then I would reroute that domain over to our website. So when somebody would mistype it, it would automatically come over to us.

Well, Epicor is publicly-held company I think and so were many of the other vendors. And I suspect that one of their marketing people saw it and reported me to the search engines. And you know what? They should have. I was well outside the guidelines and unfortunately, I didn’t quite know it because I had been reading blog posts and information from various consultants on the web and I wasn’t well-seasoned enough at that point to be able to understand what was good and what was bad.

And unfortunately, I followed the bad. So what I had to do was I went and I contacted Google through some of their inquiry forms that they had back then and I basically just told them that I was a marketer who had literally taught myself SEO while sitting with my daughter watching Teletubbies and clearly, I had made mistakes but they weren’t intentional mistakes. I just was being stupid because I just didn’t know it. I didn’t have someone seasoned to train me on it or there weren’t courses like I produced today.

So, I gave them my story and eventually, they did let us back in the index. Unfortunately, when we came back, we lost a lot of our ranking and it was never going to come back and that is the reality. When Google gives you a manual penalty, it is very difficult to get it completely to go away and regain the heyday of your ranking.

What we had done was while we were awaiting for Google to reply, we registered a new domain and I started to rebuild the website on this new domain and I literally had to start my SEO from scratch. It was painful. It was long. And I will tell you, I worked so much over time back then. It was not even funny. And my overtime wasn’t paid. I was [0:06:01] [Indiscernible] nor would I have asked for payment because this was my fault. I created this issue.

I have always been thankful to my employer for not firing me and giving me an opportunity to be able to fix the mistakes that I had. And I tell you this story because I want you to take it to heart. I want you to know that the things that you do can cause extreme havoc on your marketing. They can literally shut down your website and they can get you in a long term trouble that you’re not going to be able to recover from.

And like my client today where he told me that he was buying those links. And I said, “Where are they putting the links?” And he goes, I don’t know. I go, “That’s the problem.” I’m like, “Jamie, you got some company that you don’t even know. You’re letting them buy links for you. You don’t know where they’re getting placed, what kind of links they are and this can completely get you in trouble. It’s a black hat tactic.”

And Google today came out and said, “Don’t buy links. It’s like throwing money out the window.” It was this week. But that was their comment because they know it doesn’t do any value. It doesn’t do good.

So that was my story. And that leads us to the difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO. And today, I just want to talk a little bit about both so I can educate you and I can help you not go through my same experience.

So first, let’s talk about white hat SEO and what is it. So being a white hat SEO means you keep up to date on search engine guidelines. You read their instructions for creating good content and strong SEO and you actually follow the best practices that they presented.

Google clearly states that they consider being best practice for websites and content. They give you these instructions. It’s up to you to read it or to follow people like me and like take my SEO course so that you know what is best practice and what is safe. So if you are trying to follow white hat SEO, you’re staying up to date on the information, you’re staying within the guidelines that search engine set, and you’re trying to do good.

And so, what are some white hat tactics? It’s having a well-planned, easy to navigate website.

It’s performing keyword research. It’s mapping those keywords to individual pieces of content so you can help the search engines find the right content for a given search phrase.

It’s writing high quality that’s unique and that benefits the reader.

It’s having accurate and unique meta titles and descriptions so that the search engines when they display your website and search results, it’s easy for the user to understand what that content is and encourages them to navigate over to it.

It’s using ALT tags and good describers for images and links.

It’s creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to the search engine so they have a full inventory list of your content.

It’s building off-page branding with high quality, industry-focused inbound links. But when you’re doing that, you’re doing it with traditional marketing. It’s like me showing up on a podcast or a conference to speak and giving freely of myself and that is returning new links. I’m not buying those links. I’m helping those around me and in turn, that goodwill is bringing me back links.

It’s creating a solid, robust file so that the search engines understand what to crawl and what you would like indexed and what you’d like them to ignore.

It’s things like watching bounce rates and trying to improve your content and the formatting so that you produced a really positive user experience. That’s white hat SEO and that’s what you need to focus on.

So now, let’s talk about black hat SEO. What is black hat SEO? So people that practice black hat SEO could care less about what the search engines want or need. They don’t care about best practice. They have one singular goal of manipulating the search engine results so that they can position their content at the top. And they do so regardless of the risk to them or their website. And it’s unfortunate because website owners do this as well as consultants.

So surprisingly enough, there’s still a lot of black hat SEO consultants out there. And many of them can pretend to be white hat SEO so you really don’t know the difference unless you educate yourself. You have to keep this in mind when you’re talking to potential SEO consultant or if you’ve already hired somebody and they’re acting for you.

It is a buyer beware environment. You need to make sure that you understand what your consultant is doing or what your future consultant will be doing on your behalf because shame on you if you don’t and they’re doing black hat, you’re the one that’s going to be penalized for that, not the consultant.

So while black hat tactics can help a website rise in search, it’s usually for the very short term. It does not last because the search engines catch up with them and they end up removing the website entirely from search or putting it underneath the manual penalty.

So let’s talk about what black hat is. What are people doing that’s black hat SEO? It’s creating thin content that doesn’t really provide value to the user. A lot of affiliate websites do that.

Now, I have affiliate links to my websites but they are used along with really high quality content and they’re not just think content that’s just fluff that’s just meant to kind of fill up space. That’s black hat SEO.

It’s keyword stuffing and using irrelevant words. It’s hiding texts like that white texts and white backgrounds. We used to do that in the early ‘90s and it was – we were in trouble for it back then.

It’s cloaking and redirecting. It’s publishing multiple pages or sub-domains or website with virtually the same content, all trying to clutter up that search engine results page and dominate it but was no value to the visitor.

It’s link farms and buying those inbound links in an effort to distort the search engines. And that was basically what my client was doing and they’re good people. That’s what breaks my heart about it. My client is a good person. I truly love interacting with them. But he is doing this black hat without even realizing he is doing black hat.

So, Google specifically describes what they consider to be black hat. It is in their documentation. It is easy to avoid if you just pay attention to what Google says and the education that they’re trying to give you.

Black hat techniques again can lead you to having your website completely removed. Some search engines, the index listing, it can have penalties either manual or the soft penalties where you’re just getting penalized and your pages are getting ranked down or brought down in rank. And you don’t even know it’s happening.

And that’s the problem, is you could be doing this or you could have a consultant be doing it and what you’re saying is, SEO is not working for you and you don’t know why. And you could be doing it to yourself.

So what’s your first line of defense with making sure that you adhere to the search engine’s guidelines? It’s education. The more that you jive into SEO and you educate yourself and you make sure that you are following people who have a good understanding of today’s SEO and what matters, it’s better off that you are.

I know that white hat and black hat SEO can be confusing to those new to SEO. But you know what? Don’t worry. There’s a really easy way to determine if you’re going to – what you’re doing is acceptable to Google. And here’s my way of doing that and I’ve said this at conferences and on podcasts. You just need to simply ask yourself if your actions are going to create a positive user experience and if these actions are ultimately good for those people who are going to be searching on Google.

If you cannot quickly state that your actions are 100% focused on helping the website visitor and creating a positive user experience, you have an issue. Just don’t do it. It will come back to bite you and it will bite you hard. I mean it. I’ve lived it and it isn’t worth it.

What you need to do is you need to stay focus on your website visitor. You need to help create a positive user experience, produce solutions to those website visitor’s problems. Give them information that makes their life better. When you focus on your user and you focus on doing good for your user in creating that positive user experience that makes them want to come back time and time again, that’s when you win at SEO, and you win every single time because you’re doing exactly what the search engines want you to.

Thanks for joining me today. I look forward to talking with you next week when we continue our SEO journey together.