So you are chugging along, your Plumbing companies website is on the first page of Google. You are averaging about 80 calls per month and everything in the world seems great. You're ready to bring on a few new employees, expand into another city, business is good.
Then one day Google changes something and you are gone. The phone stops ringing, business slows down and you are now in panic mode. What Now?
First don't panic, and understand that Google makes changes to their algorithm quite often with the goal of cleaning things up. See the whole concept of Google search results is to deliver the best results for the searcher, in your case a plumbing customer. What Google wants to avoid is companies that try and game the system. Bad SEO practices are referred to as black hat SEO tactics. You get a fast result with a short term gain.
On April 24 2012 Google released what is called the Google Penguin update. A lot of business websites were affected by this, however, it's a smaller percentage than one might think. In any event, if you find that your website is gone from Google it's a good chance you were hit with the update. Because Google does not publicly share what changes they make to their algorithm some ideas are going around as to what's wrong with your website that caused this penalty. Poor spammy content, links from bad websites and paid links from link farms.
Here is a list of Google Penquin recovery tips:
- Increase quality links to pages on your site
- Be certain your link anchor text is not spammy and reads in a natural way
- Remove links from blogrolls
- Cut down on the internal link anchor text
- Add more social elements like Google+ and Facebook sharing
- Write good content
- Avoid content spinning and remove it if you have it
- Practice white hat SEO
- Think long term, not short term
- In worst case scenarios move site to a new domain
- Hire an experienced SEO firm with knowledge in your industry to help you
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