All this hoopla about Google sending notifications to web masters about unnatural links and warnings about removing them from their link profile is just like a teenager being caught with wrong friends and is warned by his parents to stop hanging out with them else he would be grounded and all allowances and perks shall be withdrawn.
Last Year the crux of my YouMoz post - “tation-of-the-seo-industry-12060" target="_blank">The Question About The Reputation Of The SEO Industry” was :
The reputation of the SEO industry is getting tarnished because of two main reasons:
.False promises by people who want to make a fast buck by calling them SEOs
·Very high expectations of website owners
If you see both are inter-connected if SEOs give realistic perspective about the whole SEO process then the expectations of the website owners would also be realistic. On the other hand if the website owners do not have false notions about the SEO results and they do not put pressure for quick results then the scene would be much different.
The article http://www.seobook.com/curious-case-small-business-and-seo also clearly points out how the business owner, the SEO Company, Google and the SEO community is directly and indirectly responsible for tarnishing the much needed SEO service by all businesses.
I totally agree that people falling under these 4 categories are sometimes jointly and sometimes individually guilty and responsible for such a situation of ultimate penalty to arise.
Many times due to lack of knowledge and at times due to impatience and greed the business owners join hands with SEOs who guarantee them 1000s of links and show them a quick short cut method for page 1 rankings.
We have been advocating natural links and vouching for on page SEO with a focus on content since we started working on SEO services in early 2000. I remember losing out on many SEO projects due to our non-compliance to offer them link building via mass submissions .
We have even got many "Thumbs Down" on our comments and views for our opinion on links for example http://www.seomoz.org/blog/dont-ask-sites-for-links-find-people-and-connect#jtc142513 but have never deterred from that view point despite all the discouragement.
When we told business owners about our natural link building methods, Google WMT , Google Analytics and focus on content strategies we were not taken seriously and they thought that the other SEO companies who went on a link building spree were the ones who worked hard .
But today when we see them coming back to us asking us to help them undo those links , we can sense the repentance and the lesson learnt in their discussions.
This is not a matter of unnatural links only this is infact a matter of attitude towards your work and a simple law of life that there is no short cut to success and no substitute for hard work.
This same situation will reflect in case of social media signals and stuffed content in future.
Fraudulent webmasters in the past have been involved in Keyword stuffing earlier then went ahead with the link spam methods and now I am sure people having that temperament and attitude will go ahead with the social media scams and content stuffing until Google gets more equipped with detecting it and starts penalizing sites for it.
The business owners have to be savvy in adopting the right approach and not go for quick results. They also have to accept that SEO is a continuous process which keeps on increasing the potential and probability of improving the search presence of the site on an ongoing basis. This onus of making the website owners develop the right approach is to a great extent on the SEO company.
If your SEO company is working on the following aspects and offers you reports regarding them then it is going on the right track.
- Increased targeted traffic
- Increase in the keywords with which actual searches take place (increase In The Search Queries)
- Increased no. of impressions
- Stable rankings
- Increased visibility in more no. of Google geographic domains
- Rankings and search presence not being drastically and adversely affected by changes in the algorithm
- More and more pages becoming landing pages
- Increased indexation
And
Constantly upgrading and educating you with the latest updates at Google so that you are aware of the changing search scenario .
All this can be easily monitored via Google WMT and Google analytics.
