No matter how much you do research, and plan out your SEO, you will mistakes at some point. It happens, so you need to have a plan in place to recover quickly. Here’s how to fix any mistakes you make, and bounce back as quickly as possible.
The Mistakes You Can Make With SEO
There are several ways you can make mistakes when you use SEO on your site. These range from unintentional issues to less than savory tactics.
For example, you may just have got over enthusiastic with your tactics, or done things that aren’t well regarded by Google because you didn’t know about their policies. You may also have used spammy tactics to improve your SEO, and that’s backfired on you.
There are two ways you will find out you’ve got a problem. The first way you’ll see a problem is when you see a huge drop in your website traffic. That’s a sure fire sign that something has happened with your SEO. You may also get a message within Google Search Console, telling you to fix it.
SEO Penalties
When there’s an issue with your SEO, you’ll be penalised for it. Again, these penalties will take different forms.
If you get a message in the Search Console, that’s considered a manual penalty. ‘Someone at Google has assessed your site and found an SEO issue’ says Peter Yates, a business blogger from Paper writing websites reviewed. ‘You’ll need to put this right as soon as possible.’
They will apply a penalty to your site, which could be site wide link penalties, partial link penalties, or thin content penalties. Once you see this happen, you’ll need to make corrections and then submit a reconsideration request to Google to have the penalty removed.
You’ll also get algorithmic penalties, as a result of Google algorithms that identify poor SEO. For example, their Panda algorithm looks for poor quality content, while the Penguin algorithm looks for poor quality links.
If those algorithms identify problems with your site, then they’ll affect your search rankings and you’ll see your traffic drop considerably. You’ll need to identify what the problem is, and correct it.
Fixing Your SEO Issues
Now you’ve seen that you have SEO issues, you’ll need to correct them quickly so you can start improving your site traffic numbers again. How you fix the issue will depend on what you’ve penalised for.
Link issues: This is a common problem that sites come across, so if you’re having link issues you need to first identify where the problem lies. Typically, Google wants you to have good links, that are editorial in nature. As such, they’ll penalize paid for links, or links given for reasons other than relevancy.
Analyse the links you have, and then remove as many problematic links as possible. You may need to reach out to other sites, to have your links removed from their sites too. If you can’t, you can use Google’s Disavow Tool to disavow those links.
Content issues: Google doesn’t like some forms of content, such as thin content, curated content and scraped content. If you have any of these on your site, they will be hurting your search rankings. Your site needs to offer unique value, and you won’t get that when you’re writing thin content, or scraping it from other sites.
You’ll need to put real focus on your content, creating content that’s unique and of use to your audience. Creating how to guides is a good way to improve content, as well as interactive content, data driven studies, and user created reviews of your products.
Other issues: There are lots of other issues that Google could be penalising you for. For example, keyword stuffing is a common one, so you’ll need to re-examine your keyword usage. Also, if there’s user generated spam, that’s a sign that you need to moderate the site more closely.
This is a quick guide to the common SEO issues you may be penalised for, and how you can fix them. It’s important to check where the issues are coming from, and correct them as quickly as possible.
This guest post was written by Emily Henry, a business analyst and writer.
