Mixed Messages with Google's Rankings - Articles

A thread was recently started on the Google Webmaster Central forum where a user stated that they had lost all of their website’s traffic in the short space of a weekend and suspected the reason was that there was 1000’s of fake backlinks to their site.

The user then asked what they can do to make Google understand that the fake links had not been added by them.

Google’s Matt Cutts has recently hinted that Google may soon launch a tool which will let you tell Google to ignore certain links, this means that any fake links that have negatively affected your website’s search engine results could be ignored!

But the response (by Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller) to this forum post did not emphasise on the fake backlinks at all.

John said:

“From what I can tell, your site is still fairly new – with most of the content just a few months old, is that correct? In cases like that, it can take a bit of time for search engines to catch up with your content, and to learn to treat it appropriately. It’s one thing to have a fantastic website, but search engines generally need a bit more to be able to confirm that, and to rank your site – your content – appropriately.

That said, if you’re engaging in techniques like comment spam, forum profile link-dropping, dropping links in unrelated articles, or just placing it on random websites, then those would be things I’d strongly recommend stopping and cleaning up if you can.”

In recent years Google has been emphasising the importance of quality, relevant content saying that this is one of the most important factors to your website’s Google ranking, so it was a surprise to us to see Google saying how this is not always enough.

The below video from Google outlines 5 common mistakes in SEO: