Samuel Edwards

You have a beautiful website, even a decent backlink profile, but no traffic, no leads and no revenue. If your website isn’t ranking at the top for key search terms – branded or unbranded – your business could stagnate or even fail. The longer you wait to fix the Google rankings problem, the more it’ll cost you in exposure, traffic, and conversions. You know the most valuable and cost-effective SEO exposure comes in the form of growing organic search engine traffic. Let’s explore some of the most common reasons websites don’t rank on Google and what can be done to fix the issues. 1. Your Website is Brand New When it comes to SEO, patience is a huge virtue. If your website is only a couple of months old, you can’t expect it to rank well for competitive search terms. Ranking #1 on Google takes time. In fact, what once took weeks and months, now takes years. You aren’t doing anything wrong – that’s just the way it is! SEO takes time. In order for your website to rank well, you need high quality content and lots of powerful backlinks. A site that’s only a few weeks old doesn’t have the robust foundation that’s required. Furthermore, Google seems to have an unofficial waiting period where new(ish) websites are suppressed until they can be thoroughly examined and evaluated. There’s even a name for it: The Google Sandbox. Experience suggests that a website will typically remain in the Google Sandbox for a period of three to six months. Though it can be considerably shorter or longer depending on the niche and quality of the website. Use this time to create quality content and flesh out a backlink strategy. The more competitive your niche, the more difficult it will be to play catch-up with incumbents. 2. Your Website (or Individual Website Pages) Is Not Indexed There is a big difference between being indexed and ranking on Google. A website must be indexed in order to appear in Google’s search results. Otherwise Google has no way of knowing your site exists. If your website isn’t indexed – or is improperly indexed, for that matter – you won’t appear in search results for any terms or keywords.  If you’ve never taken the time to research how Google indexing works and what needs to be done to encourage search engine crawlers to sift through your site, now’s a good time to learn. If you’ve already indexed your site, perhaps you accidently de-indexed it by mistake? Double-check to make sure this isn’t the case. You can also click here to check your Google website rankings.  3. Google Has Penalized Your Site Google doesn’t like when people try to hack their way to the top of the rankings using spammy tactics. They have specific rules and expectations for how websites are to be optimized and structured. It’s possible that you’ve inadvertently broken some of these rules and received either a manual or algorithmic Google penalty.  Google has something known as Manual Action penalties. If you previously ranked well – or feel like you should be ranking far better than you are – it could be that your site has a Google penalty attached to it. The best course of action is to check the Google Manual Actions report and correct any issues that are highlighted.   Google Manual Action reports are filed when a human reviewer within the company has determined that you have a hacked site, user-generated spam, spammy free host, structured data issues, unnatural links to your site, unnatural links from your site, thin content, cloaking and/or sneaky redirects, pure spam, cloaked images, hidden text and/or keyword stuffing, AMP content mismatch, or sneaky mobile redirects. Google offers clear instructions on how to correct each of these issues. 4. Your Target Keywords Are Too Competitive It’s entirely possible that you’re targeting keywords that are too competitive and broad. For example, a new pizzeria that tries to rank for the word “pizza” doesn’t stand a chance. The same goes for a mechanic that wants to achieve a first page ranking for the search term “auto repair shop.” These are search terms that take years of hard work to capitalize on. Your website is far more likely to rank if it targets long-tail or geo-specific keywords. Instead of going after the term “pizza,” try something like “best pizza restaurant in Boston.” Or rather than rank for “auto repair shop,” you could try “collision repair for Ford trucks.” Specificity tends to produce superior results. 5. Your Competition is Performing Negative SEO on Your Website You aren’t the only one optimizing your website in the hopes of ranking on page one of Google. Every one of your competitors is doing the exact same thing. And it’s possible that they’re doing more than you are. Most people view SEO as a battle against Google, when it’s really a competition against the other businesses in your industry or niche. If you want to rank higher, you have to outperform them. This means producing a higher quantity of quality content and generating more backlinks to your pages. Work harder and smarter – eventually it’ll yield the results you’re seeking. And, despite the talk of negative SEO, most competitors are nailing you simply be performing better than you: their on page SEO content is better and their links are better. They’re outperforming and outclassing you.  6. You Don’t Have Any (or Enough) Inbound Links The right content plus authoritative backlinks pointing to this content is what generates positive search rankings for your website. If you have a lot of quality content but no backlinks, you’re missing a key ingredient. (It’s also possible that you have backlinks from the wrong sources.) Using a tool like Ahrefs or Moz, take the time to study your backlink profile. Find out who is linking to you, which pages have good links, and where you need to improve your SEO. This will take time and manual effort, but it’s

Google Ads helps you attract high intent traffic to your business website which can, in turn, improve your revenue regardless of whether you’re an e-commerce brand, affiliate marketing company. The problem comes when those who are new to Google Adwords do not use this ad platform properly and as a result, lose money at a negative ROI (return on investment). Here is how you can avoid wasting money on Google Adwords. Avoid Common Pitfalls Many businesses lose money on Google Ads by making the same mistakes: Ignoring the search terms report and wasting money on irrelevant clicks Failing to optimize for mobile users Using overly broad match keywords Relying too heavily on automation without oversight Being proactive about these issues can save you thousands in wasted ad spend. Be Careful About Directing Adwords Back To Your Home Page This is a mistake because most Internet users do not have a lot of time to search for multiple webpages just to locate your items and you want your Google ads to go directly to the webpage that has what customers and regular Web visitors are looking for. For example, if you are selling your bridal wear at discount prices for the spring, the Google ad should lead customers to the webpage where they can shop for the discounted clothing. Have Discernment When Choosing Words From Google Adwords Keyword Generator When you sign up for Google Adwords you will receive a list of suggested keywords for use in the Google ads but it does not mean that it is necessary to include every one of those words as part of your ad. When you use Adwords that are too generic, it will be hard to attract the right visitors to your website. If your website offers marriage advice to interracial couples, you want to narrow your keywords so that mostly those couples will come to your site. Keyword Research: Check Out Your Competition Keywords are the backbone of any successful Google Ads campaign. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to discover relevant terms with strong commercial intent. Focus not just on high-volume keywords but also on long-tail keywords, which tend to have lower competition and higher conversion potential. Don’t forget to analyze your competitors’ strategies. Look for gaps you can exploit and opportunities they might be missing. You can avoid wasting money on Google Adwords by checking out your competition and seeing what kind of keywords they use to attract high traffic to their websites. You can do this by going to the Google keyword tool and then click on “site related keywords.” After you do this you would type in the name of the website you want to research and then you would look at the main keywords on the site. When you look at the competition it gives you the opportunity to improve your ads and website overall. Don’t Forget The Mobile Audience When you do not optimize the Google ads for mobile devices, you lose out on potential customers and money. Mobile device users are looking for quick information on businesses or certain topics, and when your mobile ads lead them to the results they want, they are more likely to make purchases or read your content. Work on Building A Good Landing Page A common mistake some people make with Google Adwords is the failure to create excellent landing pages that will keep customers interested in what you offer. The purpose of the landing/money page is to showcase your services and if you know the keywords they used in getting to your ads, you can customize the landing page to meet their needs. If you have a blog that features photos of vintage weddings from the early 20th century, you would have a landing page that have some of the photos and then you can include a message for them to download or save the photos to their computers. Use Your Keyword Matches Wisely You can target your audience better and save money by using your keyword matches wisely. A broad match lets you include a wide variation of your targeted keywords and this would include generic and specific keywords. For example, if you included “jazz albums” as your keyword in a broad match, you may also get variations such as “jazz albums 2014” or “jazz albums for beginners.” When you bid on words for a broad match, you could get traffic that is not related to your target customer. A phrase match would show ads for an exact phrase you chose while the exact match shows ads that only suit the keyword you chose. Look At The Google Ads Quality Score The quality score is essential to a successful Google Adwords campaign because if certain keywords have low quality scores, you waste money and you do not get a lot of traffic or conversions for your website. You should eliminate unprofitable keywords with the lowest scores and organize your best scoring keywords by theme for best results. Geo-Targeting & Audience Segmentation If you are a local business owner, then your best Google Adwords strategy would be to localize the ads so that mostly residents in your city will go to your website and buy from your website. While on Google Adwords’ website you would click om the “Campaigns” button and then you would go to the “Locations and languages” tab where you can choose the city you want to target the ads. Target specific locations based on business service area. Adjust bids by location, device, and audience demographics. Use remarketing audiences to re-engage previous visitors. Track The Conversions If you want to know how well your ads are performing, track the conversions of your website by going to the “Tools” section on Adwords’ website and then you will click on the “Conversions” tab. If you see a low amount of conversions from your website’s ads, make a few changes so that the conversions increase. Use Negative Keywords One of the most overlooked features

SEO hosting refers to a type of web hosting setup that is optimized to improve a website’s performance in search engine rankings. It’s not an official term recognized by Google or other search engines, but it’s commonly used in the SEO and digital marketing industry. SEO hosting typically includes features that support technical SEO best practices. Key Features of SEO Hosting: Multiple IP Addresses (Class C IPs)Some SEO hosting services offer multiple IP addresses, allowing users to host multiple websites on different Class C IPs. This is often used for link-building networks to make backlinks appear more natural. Fast Page Load SpeedsPage speed is a known ranking factor. SEO hosting often uses high-performance servers, SSDs, and optimized caching to reduce load times. Server Uptime and ReliabilityConsistent uptime is crucial. Downtime can negatively affect search engine crawling and indexing. Geolocation TargetingSome providers allow you to host your site on servers in different geographic locations, which can improve local SEO rankings. SSL CertificatesHTTPS is a Google ranking factor. Good SEO hosting plans often include free SSL certificates. Content Delivery Network (CDN) IntegrationCDNs reduce latency by serving your content from the closest server to the visitor, helping with speed and user experience. Scalability and Resource AllocationAs traffic grows, SEO hosting should accommodate increased resource demands without slowing down. Built-In SEO Tools (optional)Some SEO hosting providers include dashboards with analytics, keyword tracking, or integration with SEO tools. When Is SEO Hosting Useful? If you’re managing a large number of niche sites or PBNs (private blog networks), SEO hosting can help spread them across different IPs and C-blocks to avoid footprints. For agencies managing SEO for multiple clients, separate IPs and account isolation can help reduce risk. For international businesses, geolocated servers can help with ranking in different countries. Caveat: While SEO hosting can provide a technical edge, it’s not a silver bullet. Google’s algorithms are more sophisticated than simply rewarding separate IP addresses or hosting setups. Content quality, backlinks, UX, and on-page optimization matter far more. A Deeper Look There are plenty of regular web hosting companies. In fact, it’s very likely that there are too many hosting companies, which could be why the vast majority of these companies fade away. A lot of webmasters have probably noticed how many new SEO hosts have sprouted up recently. The sales pitch that these companies use entices webmasters because it mentions ranking high in the search engines. A typical sales pitch from such a company might also mention that SEO hosting is good for SEO. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what hosting company is used; a website can be ranked high in the SERPs on virtually any type of web host. Pure SEO At its core,  SEO is about optimizing content in a way that makes the content rank better in the major search engines. It’s true that content needs to be relevant, and core SEO consists of optimizing new or existing content and making it relevant to the search queries that you’re trying to rank for. An SEO web hosting company cannot control how any particular website will rank in the search engines, and for this to be possible, the company would actually need to write the content for the website because that is what search engines use to rank a website. When trying to sell their services to new customers, many SEO hosts add unrelated tips to their service page. For example, some companies talk about having unique content. They might even talk about getting links to a website. However, these tips are not related to the service that the hosting company is selling. The Unique IP Address Feature While trying to attract new customers, many SEO web hosts talk about a unique IP address. They say that it’s crucial to put your website on a unique IP address. This is a generic statement, and it’s used by countless SEO hosts. Put simply, the way that these web hosts try to sell their services to new customers is a bit deceptive. There is no doubt that a unique IP address is useful but not in the way that SEO web hosts advertise it to be. The Patterns The major search engines use algorithms, and it’s easy to think of these algorithms as robots. They’re really just software programs that constantly crawl through the Internet while indexing new pages. The algorithms that search engines use looks for distinct patterns, and it’s these patterns that are used to decide where a website should rank in the search engine results. There is no doubt that search engines look at the IP address a website is hosted on. The most well-known search engine of them all actually got a patent for the technology that looks at the IP address that a website is hosted on, which is why there is no doubt that a unique IP address can be useful. While scouring the web and looking for patterns, search engines look for websites that have malware, and they also look at websites that are known for sending out or linking to spam sites. Although it’s quite rare, search engines have actually blocked entire IP blocks from their index because of the activity of the websites hosted on those IP blocks. The IP blocks that contain these shady websites are called bad neighborhoods. However, as mentioned earlier, the search engines rarely block an entire IP block, but it does happen. When SEO Hosting Is Useful A webmaster can host his or her website on a regular web host, and the potential to rank high in the major search engines is the same as it would be on an SEO host. If a webmaster wants to host a single website and try to rank it in the search engines, a unique IP address is not really helpful. As long as the other websites on the same IP block are not engaging in shady activities, there is really nothing to worry about, and a website

If you build it, [they] will come. – Field of Dreams. This quote gets recycled a lot to suppose a specific premise: that if you do something well enough, it will naturally attract people. This is one of the key components of a proper search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. If you create an amazing ice cream stand, people will flock to buy your ice cream. If you build a baseball diamond with ghosts of great players, I bet you’ll have plenty of people buying tickets. And if you create content that’s truly valuable, you should naturally attract links, especially those juicy, high-quality backlinks from reputable and relevant sites. That’s the concept behind link earning, but the mechanics are a bit more nuanced. Let’s explore them. The Pros and Cons of Link Earning Like any marketing approach, link earning is imperfect. Link earning has a few qualities that make it a valuable addition to your SEO strategy: Safe. If you don’t have any hand in constructing new links, you can’t possibly be held accountable for conducting a link scheme.In other words, link earning is safe.If you’re especially concerned about the possibilities of a Google penalty, or if you just want to build your SEO dominance as safely as possible, link earning could be the approach for you. Convenient. You should be writing good content no matter what. It’s a brilliant marketing strategy by itself, and it’s necessary if you want to strengthen your onsite authority and optimize for keywords.In some ways, it’s possible to use link earning as an incidental strategy. If you keep focusing on content quality, with some extra attention to promotion, the links should come rolling in. Hands-off. You’re not the one making citations, writing offsite content, or planning a long-term approach. Accordingly, link building is a hands-off strategy.You can get away with not paying anyone and spending less time building links if your strategy relies on link earning. Referral Traffic. High quality backlinks from relevant sites in your niche can help you build more referral traffic. Link juice from authoritative websites is one thing, but relevant traffic from contextual links in content actual humans read is the holy grail of search engine optimization strategies. But there are also some weaknesses you should know about: Inconsistent. Even the best link earning strategies have inconsistent returns.With one article, you might earn dozens of new links.With the next, you might earn none. Even with consistent quality, it’s a bit of a crapshoot. This makes it hard to account for as the cornerstone of your SEO strategy. Unpredictable. You’d be amazed what some people will link to. And what some people won’t link to.I’ve had great posts that didn’t get any attention, and half-assed posts that got results. Your guess is as good as mine why this is the case, but some combination of timing, luck, and other impossible-to-measure qualities will have an influence on your bottom-line results. Reliant on others. Okay, so you don’t have to pay anyone to earn links—but you’re also putting your fate in their hands.If you aren’t getting momentum from link earning and performing website owner outreach, you might be able to write better content or shift your approach, but there’s a limit to how much you can do. 10 Tips for Earning Links It’s one thing to recognize the value of organic backlinks – but how do you actually begin earning them? Well, let’s take a look: 1. Create Link-Worthy Content You aren’t going to generate backlinks – earned or otherwise – if you don’t have link-worthy content attached to your brand. So it’s only natural to start by revamping your content strategy and creating content that others will find appealing enough to cite or reference. Link-worthy content typically comes in four forms: informational, inspirational, educational, or entertaining. In order to attract links to your content from other websites, you’ll need to offer something that’s unique. Original data and research is one of the best options. Interviews with leading experts can also help you gain some traction. Compelling visuals like infographics tend to be effective as well. 2. Work With Influencers It can be helpful to tap your own professional network. If you know any influencers who’ve had success with link building and have large audiences of their own, this is a natural starting point. You could produce a piece of content in tandem with them – leveraging their audience to your advantage – or interview them to create your own piece of original content. 3. Perform Blogger Outreach While there’s something to be said for creating quality content and sitting back and waiting for site links, patience will only get you so far in this industry. You’re much better off going on the offensive and proactively tracking down opportunities. One option is to contact bloggers that have audiences that intersect with your own. Offer to write a guest blog post and provide an accompanying pitch that’s a natural fit for their site. In return, you can usually slip in a couple of your own links. 4. Write an Endorsement or Review Sometimes the best link building strategy is to work in reverse. Instead of trying to get others to directly feature your brand, you can feature them on your site or blog. This could look like writing an endorsement post of their products and services or mentioning the company’s founder in a positive light. Most brands have alerts set up that tip them off when they’ve been mentioned elsewhere. And its only smart business practice for them to acknowledge or link back to the endorsement you’ve provided. Thus, in a sense, you cleverly coax them into giving you an earned backlink without coming across as aggressive or pushy. 5. Comment on Posts Visibility is obviously important in the realm of digital marketing. If you want to consistently earn backlinks from reputable bloggers and brands, it’s important that you make yourself known. One way to do this is by regularly interacting with them online. This

Black-hat SEO (search engine optimization) tactics just don’t cut it anymore. Using old black-hat SEO strategies will not just guarantee that you get heavily penalized; you will also be wasting your precious time and resources. But just in case some online marketers started out post Panda and Penguin and are wondering, what were these ancient black-hat SEO tricks? It might be good to remind not just newbie Internet marketers, but everyone else, that the following can spell doom for your business. Buying Backlinks or Using Link Farms What it is: Purchasing backlinks or participating in networks designed solely to pass link juice. Why it’s risky: Google sees this as a clear violation of its search engine guidelines. Sites can get manual penalties or algorithmic suppression. Example:You pay $50 for 500 backlinks from random blogs with no relevance to your niche. They may appear overnight, but your search rankings quickly drop when Google catches on. As the name implies, link buying helps you rank your site by paying for links. A significant part of SEO is establishing link popularity to measure the credibility and authority of the site. By linking from authoritative and highly credible sites, newer ones would see increases in authority and search engine rankings. Because linking from big sites such as Mashable, Inc.com, WSJ.com, etc., could be very hard to accomplish, enterprising individuals devised a way to offer smaller sites a fighting chance by getting linked from tons of sites to boost rankings and organic search traffic. Major search engines tried to weed out this kind of cheating even before Google Penguin waddled on the scene. But because Google and other search engines had been lenient in the past, a lot of people got caught engaging in this unethical online practice. If you ever come across a site that offers link-building services, be sure to investigate what sort of link building they do. Do this instead: Build backlinks by publishing high-quality content, digital PR, or personalized outreach to relevant sites. Over-Optimized Anchor Text What it is: Overusing exact-match anchor text (e.g., “best SEO services”) in backlinks or internal links, particularly when done in unnatural ways. Example:If every single inbound link to your site uses the anchor “cheap SEO services,” that’s a red flag. It looks manipulative, not organic. Why it’s risky: Google’s Penguin update targeted this specific issue. Over-optimized anchor text patterns are often associated with link spam and can result in devaluation of your backlink profile. What to do instead:Diversify your anchor text. Use branded anchors, naked URLs, and natural-sounding phrases. The goal is to make links appear editorial and helpful—not forced. Cloaking & Sneaky Redirects What it is: Showing one version of a page to search engines and a different one to users, or redirecting users deceptively. Why it’s risky: It’s a form of deception. Google calls this out specifically and penalizes sites accordingly. Example:You build a page optimized for “free email templates” and show that to Google, but users are redirected to a sales page for unrelated software. When a webmaster serves different content to a visitor from what the search engines see, that is known as cloaking. It should be obvious to anyone that this is downright deceitful. How does someone do this? Simple. The webmaster can direct his web server to provide information based on who requests it. Different information is provided to requests that come from web browsers as opposed to those from search engines. Pretty neat . . . but extremely dangerous. The intent of cloaking is to hide the real purpose of a page from the search engines, obviously. The page could actually turn out to be a spammy sales site that offers very little value after pretending to be a text-based version for the benefit of search engine spiders. But they discover the truth eventually. Do this instead: Be transparent with your redirects and user experience. Always serve the same content to both users and bots. Keyword Stuffing What it is: Repeating the same keyword unnaturally throughout a page. Why it’s risky: It creates a poor user experience and signals manipulation to search engines. Google may demote your rankings or deindex the page entirely. Example: “Looking for the best dog food for dogs? Our dog food is the best dog food because our dog food is made for dogs that need dog food.” This is an age-old spam tactic that even the oblivious newbie may fall for. By keyword stuffing, black hatters cram the page with keywords to make it look very relevant to the eyes of the search engine spiders. The goal of keyword stuffing is to place as many exact-match keywords as possible throughout the content to make it look very relevant to search. Search engines are becoming smarter by transitioning into latent semantic indexing (LSI), which is making keyword stuffing largely irrelevant. Plus, to the discriminating reader, keyword-stuffed pages are hard to read and often just annoying. While keyword-optimizing a content is still crucial, webmasters and SEOs should observe best practices for post algo-update SEO. Above all, remember to write for the reader, not for the search engines, and traffic will flow naturally to your site. Do this instead: Focus on writing naturally. Use variations of your keyword and answer user intent. Hiding Text via GIPHY For the newbie, the only way for search engine spiders to determine what a page is all about is by reading texts. Got that? The search engine spiders are programmed to read texts, but not to determine visuals. We’re not sure how long it will be before search engines come up with a technology that enables spiders to recognize images. But it’s probably in the works. At least until recently, it was quite easy to trick the spiders by hiding texts within images. This fooled them into recognizing an image based on the underlying texts. One of the more common black hat SEO tactics was to hide the texts completely from readers by using font colors that matched the

Negative SEO (aka “Google Bowling”) was once a huge threat to websites and webmasters. As Google has expanded into natural language processing, negative SEO is less of a threat than it once was. Google typically ignores irrelevant and low quality links. But don’t let that make you complacent! While successful negative SEO attacks are VERY rare, they can still have a massive negative impact on your site and traffic. If you feel you’ve been the victim of a negative SEO attack, you are not alone. We’ve been hit with multiple. Here is one fairly recent example: What are Negative SEO Attacks When someone attacks your site with negative SEO, they are employing unethical black hat SEO strategies to manipulate your rankings and bring you down in search engine results. There are a number of ways this is done: Thousands of overtly spammy backlinks to your site (e.g. link farms and link wheels) Copying content from your site and posting it all over the web Creating social profiles and review sites that speak negatively of your business Removing your top backlinks Backlinking with irrelevant links like Viagra or online poker Hacking into a website, altering the code, taking down the site or adding malicious code Forums are one of the most notorious places where negative SEO exists. There are also SEO agencies that employ these negative SEO tactics by inserting spammy links in comments. Smaller/Newer Sites are Most Impacted by Negative SEO Attacks Large businesses with established, old websites will have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of incoming links already. A negative SEO attack adding a few hundred or a thousand spam links will hardly budge that site’s ranking. The percentage of bad links is simply too low. The site may experience a brief drop in rankings, but such a bump in the road is normal for large, established sites. Small businesses and new websites looking to build a following are most at risk. It’s one of the reasons that startup SEO & digital marketing can be so difficult. Small niches can be incredibly competitive, and black hat webmasters won’t think twice about using a negative SEO attack to nuke the competition. The typical story for a small business is this. Business A is new and looking to establish itself in a niche Business B is looking to establish itself in the same niche Business A is using Google best practices and following all the rules to build traffic organically Business B sees that they can’t compete and comes up with a negative SEO attack on Business A Business A suddenly finds their site removed from rankings and penalized for black hat SEO Business B takes advantage of the temporarily vacant niche to establish themselves as the number one resource, despite a better resource existing Business A has two options; clear up the negative SEO or fail Business A has very little recourse, and it all comes down to information and timing. Types of Links that Negatively Affect SEO A lot of webmasters are having extreme difficulty determining what backlinks are negatively affecting their rankings in the SERPs. However, there are a few major types of backlinks that have the potential to reduce visibility in the search engines. Purchased Links It’s important to understand that there is nothing wrong with buying links. Thousands of companies buy links on webpages because it’s a great way to reach more people. In fact, a lot of companies make a decent ROI through links that they’ve purchased on various webpages. However, webcrawlers want webmasters to label paid links with a no-follow tag, which means ranking power is not passed through the links. Webmasters need to avoid paying for links that are do-follow, which means the links pass ranking power. Although research shows that paid links do increase Google rankings, they can also cause ranking penalties, which have catastrophic effects on SEO rankings. Non-relevant Links Webmasters should also avoid getting irrelevant links to their website. The Google Penguin update changed the importance of various ranking factors. Basically, it greatly enhanced the importance of relevant links while decreasing the power of irrelevant links. The Penguin update made link relevance crucial. It only makes sense that a website about hotel would have relevant links from websites that are about hotels or similar. If an abundance of irrelevant backlinks aren’t already hurting your online exposure, then there is a good chance that they will in the future. Put simply, it’s best to avoid obtaining irrelevant backlinks. Broken and Dead Links It’s not unnatural for many of a website’s links to become broken over a long period of time. A few broken links will not cause too much harm to your rankings, but if a website loses a large percentage of its links, it can negatively impact SEO. Both external and internal links can reduce search rankings when broken, so it’s a good idea to keep track of both. Link Networks In the last couple of years, the Internet has witnessed a massive increase in link networks. A link network can be any network of web properties that are used for the sole purpose of building backlinks to a website. There are both public and private link networks. Search engine algorithms have been taking action against the largest link networks. Some link networks are made out of websites that have expired while others are created with hundreds of free-hosted blogs. There is no denying that link networks pass serious ranking power. If they didn’t, then Google wouldn’t be attacking such networks so aggressively. However, while the ranking power of link networks can be quite potent, they also come with a huge level of risk. Due to the very strict stance that search engines have taken against link networks, both public and private, any websites caught using such networks are at risk for being penalized. In a worst-case scenario, a website might even be kicked out of the search index, which would cause a total loss of search engine