If your website was affected by the latest incarnation of the beast known as Google Panda, taking advantage of the SEO tips in this article series can help you to quickly recover your lost status. Part 1 of this series this included thoroughly reviewing Google's Webmaster Guidelines, and identifying and removing any paid or offensive links. In this final installment of the series we'll discuss link velocity, blog comments and anchor text variations as additional SEO recovery tactics.
SEO Recovery Tip #3: Set & maintain link velocity
When it comes to evaluating the backlinks that point to your website, there are a number of factors that Google's algorithm is theorized to measure:
The quality of the links
The quantity of the links
The velocity of link building
It is this last piece that is so critical – changes in link velocity can have dramatic effects on keyword rankings, and in some highly competitive markets a drop in link velocity is equivalent to a drop from page one of results.
However, it's not possible to give specific guidance in this regard. The link velocity of every site is necessarily different. For your site it might require hundreds of links per month to achieve or maintain your rankings, while for others it might be thousands. Whatever you do, be consistent. Sites that do things like build thousands of links every month for 6 months in a row then take a month off from link building activities will be in for an unpleasant surprise.
And ultimately, that's another lesson of SEO: it's a permanent, forever kind of process.
SEO Recovery Tip #4: Build contextually relevant blog comments
Contextually-relevant blog comments are widely thought to be one of the most valuable types of backlinks available. In order to build such links, you need to find blogs and websites related to yours who preferably are not your direct competitors. By reading posts and pages and leaving relevant, meaningful comments with a link back to your site, you'll be interacting in the online communities related to your business, building your brand power and generating powerful, contextually relevant backlinks that will help to bring your search rankings back up.
SEO Recovery Tip #5: Vary your site's anchor text
Too many webmasters and site owners build links with very little variance in the anchor text used. As one of the most important parts of the search ranking algorithm, when anchor text isn't varied it probably isn't natural and Google will index and rank it accordingly.
Try to think of ways that consumers and others would naturally link to your site. Assuming that your keyword is XYZ, you could try:
Best XYZ
These guys rule at XYZ
Awesome XYZ
Get XYZ here
Good place to buy XYZ
I really like the XYZ at ABC
Or any similar variants. Blog commenting is one effective way to build these links, as well as article marketing, press release syndication and other off-page efforts.
Unfortunately, it can require a significant amount of time, resources and money to recover from a serious loss in rankings, and few people can do it on their own. To get professional help right now, call the number at the top of your screen for a free consultation with an SEO services firm that can guide you back to the top of the search pages.
