Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Buying backlinks

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Buying backlinks Wordpress SEO Experta.k.a. Why it’s best to follow my advice. 🙂

I talk a lot about the importance of doing SEO properly, and not trying to cheat the search engines.

Of all the tricks out there, the most tempting by far is buying backlinks.

Google wants lots of sites to link to us, right? So let’s just get some and get moving up those rankings!

Terrible, terrible idea.

A client of mine bought some from a seller claiming to be Google safe, Panda safe, Penguin safe, PR10, quality links.

But you can’t be Google-safe. All that will ever mean is they haven’t caught you (or the system being used to generate your links) yet. But they’ve been promising for a decade that they will, and more often than not, they do.

The image above is a bit small, but I’m sure you can pinpoint when they bought the so-called “safe” links.

Their sales fell proportionately.

A plea

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I explained my services and pricing to a potential US-based client recently. He came back with a list of things another firm over in the States had offered him, and asked if I could match their list, and name my price to do so.

Here’s my reply. In short, I said I couldn’t match their list because it was a dishonest, shoddy practice.

My service is as described, at the price I gave. The service is that way for some very important reasons, not the least of which is that I offer a service ideologically matched to what search engines what us to do–anything else is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

I would suggest considering what I’m about to tell you before choosing any SEO consultant. Here’s a quote from the firm you’re considering retaining:
“Therefore we conduct our campaigns in a white-hat manner to ensure our campaigns look natural and organic in order not to leave any footprints for Google to detect.”

That is NOT white hat. Trying to conceal the way you are buying links (which is what you’d be doing) is decidedly against Google’s ethos and terms of service.

Before their Panda update I saw many people make the same claim as the above, and then what do you know, Google worked out how the links we being built (Google has said they will always work to stamp out this behaviour) and all those sites got slammed.

True white-hat, and I strongly believe the best approach, is to actually build organic content and links, not to try to trick a company who has enough computing power to detect if God Himself shifts his weight to his other butt cheek on his giant chair in the sky.

Also, on the content front, I believe the best person to write content about your service, is you. I will guide and direct, and share ideas, but ultimately any SEO company you hire to write copy for you doesn’t understand what you do; not like you do.

If you write regular, on topic content, of course it will help SEO. It will be filled with all manner of useful search terms.

But most of all, it will be USEFUL to a reader.

SEO firms write content for one purpose only–keyword stuffing. And it might well help with positions on Google. But SEO is worthless if the visitors you do get are going to be put off because the articles and posts don’t appear to show any actually insight.

Anyway, that’s just my two cents.

Lies Cold-Callers Told Me

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At some stage in the last six months, every one of my clients has received an email or cold call from a company telling them they’re losing business because their SEO isn’t up to snuff.

Heck, I get these calls regularly myself. I enjoy challenging the people on the other end of the line, and very quickly one thing becomes clear.

They’ve no idea what they’re talking about.

SEO, sadly, isn’t a regulated industry, and because of the level of investment people put into their online presences it’s very easy to frighten them with bogus information.

The people emailing and calling are sales people; often for firms that with a bit of digging, you can find myriad horror stories about online.

My favourite examples of their spiel include, “Your site doesn’t have keyword tags” (search engines don’t actually use them) and “Your site isn’t W3 compliant” (Google has made it clear this has no effect on a site’s ranking).

The latter is particularly nefarious, because although a W3 compliant site is certainly best practice–very few sites do tick all the boxes.

It’s scaremongering at its worst.

Remember, when you get a call out of the blue, or emails that by rights should go straight to your spam folder, always check with a known professional, someone you trust. And if you are considering working with a new company, ask how many sales people they have compared to actual SEO experts on staff.

Do some checking, to make sure what they’re telling you is true.

Blocking the Wayback Machine – Internet Archive

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Have you come across the Wayback Machine?

It’s been around for some years, and aims to be an archive of the internet—forever.

I do enjoy having a brose and seeing how far some sites have come, as well as looking back at sites I made years ago.

However, just because it’s fun to browse doesn’t mean you always want your site on it. Now, once a cached version is there there’s not a lot to be done, however you can stop it indexing your site in the first place.

Just add this to your site’s robots.txt file:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

That tells the Internet Archive to ignore your site when it’s indexing the internet.

Easy!

Taking my own advice

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As you’d expect for someone obsessed with SEO I regularly check my own ranking on Google and the other major search engines.

But when I did my regular search today on Google I found myself in number two. 2! I’ve been first for months, and now there’s a pesky LinkedIn directory above me.

My first thought was, “But I haven’t changed anything!” and of course, that’s the problem.

I’ve only blogged a few times in the past four months. I used to keep a regular schedule of three times a week, and Google loved me for it. It got their SEO juices flowing. But now, I’m falling – and it’s totally because I’m not generating enough content.

Content really is king for SEO. Yes there are all sorts of things you can do behind the scenes (and as a WordPress SEO expert – those are my specialty) but ultimately SEO is about reinforcing your core content; key messages, what you’re all about – that sort of thing.

After the sort of work I do the next most important thing to keep Google, Bing – all the search engines happy -is to have regular, topical, original content on your site. And there’s almost no better way to achieve that than blogging. It doesn’t need to be called a blog of course – you can call that section Update, or News – whatever creates an area in your site where you’ll be posting regularly.

It’s ironic in one way (and not in the Alanis sense, but something that actually fits the definition of irony) in that I write to at least two clients a day extolling the virtues of blogging. I’ve been so busy preaching the blogging gospel that I haven’t had the time to do it myself.

Well, all that changes today. Thrice a week, you’ll see me writing. And you’ll see me back at number one as a result of those efforts.

And I won’t feel like such a hypocrite when delivering my SEO sermons.

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