There are links that are not necessarily good for your website. Are the links solely to blame or are there other factors? We will never know unless you start doing audits. You need to evaluate your current website and do the following procedures.
- An SEO audit. This is to check if crawlers can scan your website, and if there are other technical issues, or any similar issues impacting the site.
- A content audit. This is to check the overall sate of the content of your website.
- A profile audit. This is to ensure that your website's profile contains accurate information.
Once you did these routine checks, you can continue and ask yourself these important questions.
- Did you receive a penalty notification?
- If you have breached the guidelines, Google will send a notification under Manual Actions report. So, check your Google Search Console dashboard. Google will definitely inform you if your website has been penalized.
- Did you downgrade your website?
- If there are changes in terms of algorithm, you will notice a decrease of around 35% to 50%. Web traffic decline may affect only specific web pages, but it could also be affecting the entire website. A thorough analysis is needed to find out what are causing this traffic downturn. It may point to different technical issues, or even content problems.
- Should you check the websites that link back to you?
- This could be a helpful step. Investigate all the website links that redirect back to your website if you can.
- If you notice a suspicious link, then, remove them immediately as it could affect the declining rankings. If it looks healthy and natural, then, you should definitely keep the link.
- What is a Negative SEO attack?
- A Negative SEO happens when Black Hat SEO techniques are applied in order for Google to penalize your website.
- Unlike actual hacking or sabotaging, you could actually tell something is fishy right away. However, for a Negative SEO attack, nothing seems different in terms of the website's appearance and interface.
- Suspicious links could point to your website and these links could attack you. In matter of time, Google will penalize you. I know, these bad links can get out of hand and it can go undetected. You can only notice it when your website's rankings decline and the web traffic seems to descend rapidly.
- What to do when it happens? You need to block all incoming traffic except for the ones coming from the top search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and Google. Disallow all your incoming links too until things begin to normalize.
To close this post, I would like to remind everyone to follow good link habits. Use naked URLS when you need to link, and be careful on what keywords to use as anchor texts. It could take months or even years to recover. That is why... I will only recommend going to a trusted company when you need immediate help. Contact Scottsdale Web Design straight away; you may also call their hotline (480) 900-6691 right this instant.