Friday 26 April 2013

The great misconception of a "bad backlink"

A topic that seems to be coming up for discussion more and more are bad back links and their impact on a websites google ranking. In this article I want to offer some clarity on what we are seeing across our existing 2,500 clients and what we also hear every day from potential new clients.

Firstly, I want to clear up the misconception.

There's no such thing as a back link that will move you down the Google rankings, there are just links that will not be recognised by the search engines. So bad links will never move you down the rankings they just won’t move you up!


So why, I hear you ask, did some websites rankings drop when Google made their latest penguin update?

Simple, this is because lots of back links were suddenly not being recognised and therefore some websites rankings dropped as a result. To further clarify this is the fact that backlinks are out of a webmasters control. For example, anyone could build a backlink to www.clicksubmit.co.uk. So, if bad links can move a websites ranking lower then everyone would be building bad links to their competitor’s sites.

Our belief at Click Submit is that a slow and careful link building strategy is the order of the day. We will request around 300 links to be built to your site over a 3 month period with the aim of getting around 150 to 200 recognised by the search engines. When you combine this with the crucial on-site changes that we recommend after sign up, in order to make your website 100% relevant to your search terms, we are seeing great results. Our numbers speak for themselves. We have over 2,500 clients and not one contract. Our Clients only continue to subscribe to our service because our strategy more often than not works!

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Thanks for reading!

Wednesday 10 April 2013

Google's latest update and why we're one step ahead

Only recently, Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts explained that there will be a massive update to Penguin sometime this year. The word ‘Penguin’ is likely to be a familiar term to a number of you and also something many will be concerned about or have previously been affected by.

How can an update named after such a cute creature have the potential to bring chaos and detrimental destruction to my websites ranking, I hear you say. Well, the purpose of the Penguin update is to 'demote sites that violate Google’s webmaster guidelines' such as sites that use negative manipulative ‘black hat’ techniques to improve their rankings. These would include unnatural links, links from automated link content, links created using duplicate content and so forth. However, the great news is that here at ClickSubmit we have never, ever.... ever had one of our clients blacklisted by the search engines and are confident that this will remain the case for the next update because of our White Hat guarantee.


Image by birdsinhats.blogspot.com

For every enquiry we receive the question ‘how long will it take before I reach page one of Google?’ is usually asked. It is for this reason that many companies often feel under pressure to apply black hat techniques in order to get certain sites to the top of Google as quickly as possible. But these techniques will not keep you near the top for long. SEO takes time and the only way to get to the top is by helping the search engines, not cheating them.

We develop a mixed portfolio of links that are placed across the right sites at the right pace in order to maximize the benefits of SEO without any chance of blacklisting. Google’s goal is to give the best possible search results and we are simply co-operating and assisting their aim to help people find what they’re looking for. As Cutts himself said, ‘There are many, many valid ways that people can make the world better with SEO.’ The key is to find a trustworthy and transparent company, which is why we at ClickSubmit developed our control panel and write quarterly reports so that our clients can see exactly what links are being built to their site whenever they like.



Matt Cutts
explaining that white hat SEO can be of great benefit

There is reason to believe that the major penguin update will either expand beyond spam, or broaden the definition of it in order to improve search quality. So to all who may come across this blog make sure that the links you are building indicate ‘popularity, shareability and authority’. Make sure the techniques you are using are white hat, or sign up with us to ensure that your link building is done productively, positively and correctly.

See our 3 step SEO strategy.