Four Innocent-Looking SEO Mistakes That Could Penalise Your Website Severely

|

honest-seo-mistakes

No one wants a site penalty on purpose. Sometimes it happens through carelessness, black-hat techniques, even through honest SEO practices.

There are people who have tried to follow SEO best practices, but they were penalised. If you find any points of connection between your site and the examples, don’t panic. Just because you share a commonality does not mean that you will get the same penalty. We will start the first ‘honest’ mistake with:

1. Link-Leveraged Business Relationships

Many businesses create relationships with other businesses. As a way of cementing the relationship, the businesses offer to create links to one another in order to enhance SEO and click-through traffic. Sometimes, however, these good intentions end up hurting one or both of the sites.

In this case, the solution would be to have the partner site remove the footer link. If one of them have been penalised, they will now have to deal with the fallout. However, one of the best ways to swiftly and conclusively deal with it is to have an actual link removal rather than a simple domain disavowal.

2. Affiliate Programs

Affiliate linking is similar to a double-edged sword: it can either help SEO or it can kill it. It depends on how you implement it. Rand Fishkin from The Moz once called affiliate links as “a nasty gray area and a frustrating one for many SEOs/webmasters/sites over the years.” It’s true as it leaves many SEO practitioners scratching their heads to how exactly to deal with affiliate links.

Online affiliate relationships are big business. For the most part, they’re spam free. Companies can engage in affiliate relationships without fear of penalisation. However, if a company goes halfway into affiliate linking, they can get bit.

The safest way to conduct affiliate linking is through the following methods:

  • Use a trusted affiliate relationship provider to conduct 100% of the affiliate program rollout. This option is best if you or your development team do not have the skill or experience required to create an affiliate program from scratch.
  • Create a dedicated landing page for large affiliate providers. If you have relationships with major organisations, go ahead and created a dedicated landing page for them specifically. This helps them while also protecting your site.
  • Test all affiliate links from time to time. To maintain site integrity, it’s best to go through each affiliate link and make sure it’s functioning properly. If you find any broken links, be sure to create a permanent redirect.

3. Influencer Outreach

Influencer outreach is a powerful SEO strategy, and many times it works just fine. Basically, you find the major influencers in a given niche, reach out to them with a request, get link juice, audience exposure, and other major benefits. Even after we have been rocked by several search engine algorithm updates, influencer outreach still benefits the receiving sites.

Influencer outreach is great. But yes, the silver lining is fronted by a cumulonimbus cloud. If the influencer outreach targets a low-authority niche, the backlinks could compromise the site. Although the influencers are “influential,” the link value from their sites will not enhance your site’s SEO. On the contrary, it could ruin it.

If you have caught in this problem, you had a lot of cleanup to do. You can ended up quietly disavowing the links from all the blogs that you had pitched. If you run an influencer outreach campaign, pick your targets carefully. If you have no choice but to pitch a niche that is characteristically low-authority and spammy, then I recommend the following:

  • Ask influencers to use nofollow links. Provide the code for them to copy/paste into their blog articles for this purpose.
  • Create a specific landing page for the influencer outreach. Use a service such as Unbounce to direct users to a specific page that is designed for the outreach campaign. The upside of this is that you can customise the landing page to the niche, and even conduct A/B testing to boot.

4. Guest Blogging Niche

When done in the right way, guest blogging can be awesome. However, it brings its own dangers. One of the dangers might not be what you expect. Like point three above, this danger involves the niche in which you guest blog, not simply the fact that you are guest blogging. Earlier this year, the SEO world shocked when Matt Cutts, the head of Google Webspam announced that guest blogging was largely “done” as a link building tactic, explaining that it had become increasingly spammy over the years.

He didn’t outright condemn the practice, however, noting that there “are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging” and that he wasn’t referring to “high-quality multi-author blogs.” And so, many content marketers all stood back up and went on guest blogging with purpose and caution. They became selective with their guest blogging opportunities, limiting ourselves to high authority sites that would provide some benefit beyond a link for SEO (e.g. traffic, brand exposure, etc.).

Unfortunately, some of us didn’t realise that it wasn’t just about the sites themselves – it was also about the niche we were guest blogging in.

Obviously, the general solution is to be careful where you guest blog. Although guest blogging lives on and still carries SEO value, it does have sharp edges. The most dangerous side effect of guest blogging has to do with the partners in which you do your guest blogging. If you choose your partnership carefully and wisely, you shouldn’t have a problem.

Conclusion

Now it’s a moment of reflection. Did you mismanage your SEO strategy with these mhonest mistakes? You need to move on. It’s impossible to persuade Google to lift their penalty with sad stories. You’ve actually got to do penance. You need to do the hard and time-consuming work of a penalty recovery process.

No one goes in hoping for a penalty. By staying aware of these honest mistakes, you can avoid the plight of a penalty and keep your SEO held high.