Member Article

Unethical linking practices - bad SEO

With the news on Friday 24th January that Google appear to have de-listed law firm, Irwin Mitchell from its natural listings due to unethical linking practices, it has never been more important for companies to ensure they use ethical SEO techniques or employ an ethical SEO agency when trying to increase their position in Google.

It appears that Google have hit Irwin Mitchell with this penalty due to linking that involves using numerous blogs and forums posts to gain irrelevant and poor quality links. The change to Irwins Mitchell’s Google listings first came to light when a tweet appeared saying: “Did Google just wipe out UK law firm Irwin Mitchell with a link penalty?”

Irwin Mitchell are one of the UK’s largest and most respected law firms, employing more than 2,200 people in nine UK offices, so this news will come as a huge blow to their marketing strategy. It will take an awful lot of time and energy to remove all the bad links and work with Google to be re-indexed in the search results. In the meantime, new sales leads will be lost or will have to come from more expensive routes such as PPC marketing, where companies in this industry are paying anything up to £50 per click.

Here we’ll take a look at some of the key elements to ensure your SEO approach is ethical.

• When someone searches for “Injury Solicitor in Burnley” for example, the search engines narrow down the results to only the webpages that are about those words – this happens in milliseconds. Search engines look for every word on the web when they are crawling. Don’t try to hide or stuff keywords on your website, this has a negative effect in the search engine rankings.

• Each page on a website has a page title. The “page title” is in the meta data or code of your website and it is important for your search engine position. Search engines pay a lot of attention to page titles because they often summarise the page for the user, you’ll see the page title in the search engine results. You don’t want to spam your page title with keywords, stick to what the page is actually about.

• When one website links to another, it’s seen as a recommendation indicating “this site has good, interesting information I think you’ll find helpful or entertaining”. A website with lots of links coming from quality, relevant sites makes your site interesting to the search engines, the key here is quality links, not spammy links from irrelevant sites, blogs and forums.

Don’t try to trick the search engines by creating or buying links that point to your website. Search engines will detect when a site has a lot of these, this will have a negative effect on search positions and you could find yourself de-listed.

Search engines care about reputation and authority. Websites that offer their users regular, fresh and engaging content that can be shared on other websites and social media will do well in the search rankings.

These are just the basics and the algorithms are refined and changed all the time. Truly excellent SEO is about making sure your website has great content, great links and is an authority online.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Michelle Hughes - Miromedia.co.uk .