How to Find Out if Your SEO Is Setting You Up For Disaster
What to do to figure out if Black Hat SEO is being done on your site
There were a lot of Hawaii businesses suddenly panicking. Their Google rankings were tanking. Fast. And they weren’t getting clear answers from their SEO.
It all finally came out after a lot of angry phone calls and emails. The SEO, who had one of the best reputations in Hawaii for results, was using Black Hat techniques and spamming.
The businesses had gotten burned and there was little they could do about it. And Google wasn’t completely sympathetic to the argument of ‘My SEO did it, not me.’ Those SEO clients had gotten hit hard and there was little they could do about it.
What Can You Do About Black Hat SEO?
This raises the Big Questions Was there anything these businesses could have done to protect themselves before this happened? Could they have identified this SEO as Black Hat early and avoided hiring him in the first place? Short Answer: Yes!
Here’s how you can easily protect your business from falling into this same trap.
We can’t explain how to detect every Black Hat SEO out there. That’s not necessarily possible and it would take a series of articles to fully explore this area. However, the techniques used by this Hawaii SEO could have been identified quickly and easily. And they could have been figured out before those businesses hired him.
Like a lot of less honest search engine optimization companies, this man depended on spamming to get rankings. He would post comments on blogs all over the Web, adding links to his client’s business in the post.
This can bring short-term results, but those links decline in value over time and even lose their value completely sometimes. Google doesn’t look kindly on it either. At best, it’s building your SEO house on sand, instead of rock.
How To Detect Link Spamming Quickly & Easily
If you suspect a problem with your SEO right now, all you have to do is check the backlinks your site has currently. If you’re in the position of checking out an SEO before hiring them, you can check backlinks for some of their current clients. Here’s what you do:
1. Go to a backlink checker like this one: http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
2. Enter the URL of your site or site of client of SEO you’re considering
3. Check out the sites they have links from.
4. If a lot of them are from blog comments or forum posts, that’s a big Red Flag. Especially if the blog(s) or forums’ subject isn’t related to the subject of your website. You might want to even click thru and check out the link to confirm a possible problem.
This isn’t going to catch every bad SEO out there, but it will give you a very valuable way to safeguard your business from many of them. If those Hawaii businesses had done this they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief. The saddest thing about this case?
The SEO who caused all those problems is still in business. I feel sorry for his clients, but I’m sure those short-term rankings look very good right now. Don’t let it happen to you.
Contact us today about your SEO needs so we can get your rankings moving now. Or you can find out more about our Hawaii SEO Services for local businesses like yours.
Article written by Jonathan Cook
