Did you wake up one day to find your web pages no longer ranking for your target keywords? Countless other webmasters have found themselves in the exact same situation, particularly after an update to the Panda algorithm. Everybody knows that link building services play an important role in boosting a website’s organic rankings. Google, however, dislikes it when the process of acquiring links doesn’t align with their quality guidelines. Link penalties can make or break your business, so if you found your website penalized, take these 4 simple steps to get it ranking on the index once again.
Perform a Link Audit
Whether you’re dealing with an algorithmic or manual penalty, your first step should be to perform a link audit. This involves looking at all the backlinks pointing to your website. This can be done using the Google Search Console or a backlink checker. Your goal should be to spot what links are good and what links are spammy.
In general, you don’t want links coming from the same IP, low-quality websites, and non-contextual links. Note that there is no tool out there that can do this perfectly. You have to dig in manually to perform the process correctly.
Check Your Anchor Text Profile
In some cases, you don’t have any spammy links pointing to your website. However, the problem may lie in your anchor text profile. You don’t want a huge portion of your profile to contain your exact match keyword. Instead, a diverse anchor text profile appears more natural, thus making your website safer from any penalties.
Link building services often use a backlink checker to see whether you have an enormous percentage of exact match anchor text. You can try to create more links to dilute this percentage or begin removing the bad links.
Clean Up Your Link Portfolio
This is where the real challenge begins. Getting rid of backlinks can mean reaching out to webmasters and asking them to remove the link to your website. In most cases, you can expect a reply from them. It’s possible to tell Google not to consider certain links pointing to your website. This is achieved using the disavow tool. However, make sure that these links provide no value or you may end up hurting your rankings.
Stay Patient
It can take a long time before link penalties get lifted. For this reason, it’s best to remain patient and continue building high-quality links to your website. Staying consistent with your link outreach strategy to gain authoritative and relevant backlinks can go a long way in removing any penalties imposed on your site. You may also want to look into other options of generating traffic. This way, you can still expose your website to your target audience while waiting for it to reappear in the search index.
Link building services are as popular as ever, but using them to cheat the search engine algorithms will only hurt your website in the long run. Stick to strategies that have been proven effective over the years so you can steer clear of any Google penalties.