For the third time in as many weeks, Google is penalizing websites with "link spam." Google recently updated their algorithm in order to stop spam, and this affects almost everyone. For many people, this means that they receive fewer Google organic traffic. These changes affect both large sites and small ones, but there are steps that you can take to ensure your site is not affected. If you feel like you're losing traffic from Google after the update, make sure to read the guidelines for spammers below and take a look at how your site should be changing if it's not getting penalized by being put on a "Penguin" or "Stamp" list.
Google regularly receive reports of websites and blogs which publish excessive outbound links in an attempt at generating traffic or monetizing their content, without fully annotating those links appropriately for quality purposes. These websites might be adding outbound backlinks not just from their own homepage pages but also from other related webpages, such as article pages or product descriptions.
If you own a website, you need to make sure that you fully understand what SEO is and how it can work for you!
Here's a few things you need to know about this new algorithm update
1. Highly vet every single link, do not feel scared to ask for a backlink to be removed if you feel they are harming your ranking.
Links are one of the many ways that Google is able to understand why page or blog post is important enough to rank on their search engines. I always get so excited when a backlink pops up for my website or my client's posts. By highly monitoring backlinks, my client's are immune to the new algorithm update. If you do not have a good SEO consultant you will want to learn the best practices to finding high quality links.
2. Qualify your outbound links with Google
You can do all of the heavy lifting for Google when it comes down to your internal linking and outbound links. By adding tags to the url, you will show Google what kind of relationship your website has with that specific link.
Affiliate Marketing
I ALWAYS recommend affiliate marketing to all of my clients. In fact, most bloggers only use affiliate marketing! Google doesn't really care much after affiliate marketing links unless the links send people to spam, hackers or anything else that would case harm to someone who clicked on the link.
Affiliate links on pages such as product reviews or shopping guides are a common way for blogs and publishers to monetize thei
r traffic. In general, using affiliate links to monetize a website is fine. Google asks sites participating in affiliate programs to qualify these links with rel="sponsored", regardless of whether these links were created manually or dynamically.
Sponsored and guest posts
This is another way you can make money at home. Perhaps you have a pretty established blog about home decor and Home Depot reaches out to you to write a number of sponsored posts on your website.
It's a win win for both parties.
In the past, Google observed campaigns of low quality sponsored and guest posts primarily intended to gain links.
Google is getting better at catching all of the links but they are not perfect. To ensure you are assisting Google (and also yourself), you will need qualify your links like affiliate marketing.
Last Google Algorithm: Page Experience
Google updated another aspect of their algorithm that is negatively impacting 90% of all websites. It was slowly releasing over the summer of 2021, now it is in full force and a lot of business owners are panicking. Check out the list of the Page Experience Google Algorithm to see if your website is part of the 10%.
