How To Be Safe In Your Ranking Activities

In the SEO realm, people often ask,  “are you doing anything gray or black hat? When I ask what they consider as a gray or black hat? My prospective customers tell me things like linking out to a bad neighborhood or buying links.

According to Google TOS, anything you purchase in an effort to gain higher ranking is black hat.  However, Google search engines are all about links.  Their entire database and ranking methodology are link-oriented.

Think of it this way, even with the newest technology such as rank brain where it’s scanning your articles and deciding where to position you, based on your content, linking will decide if it is worthy to put you on top of everyone else.  Google has never fully disclosed its ranking criteria and to make it worse, it keeps changing after every 4-5 years. 

So as a business owner you do want to be on the top 3 positions of Google. What do you have to do to protect yourself?

What I have found is somewhat amazing … and interesting …

Posting great content consistently builds your ranking with time. Ranking a website is no longer a one month job.  it seems the search engine giant needs at least 5 to 6 months worth of data to really know who and what you are about?

In addition to posting content on your website, Google needs to see you active on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked in and Google my business.  [Click here to get a free social cover from our design department].

You also need links.

When you link out to authority websites you gain authority as well.  The websites you link to must have great metrics such as high trust scores or domain authority. And your anchor text should not have an exact match. *** I put a *** here as a caution.  Google is always trying to steer you in an opposite direction from what you should do to win – hence it penalizes you if it finds an exact match … so if you do exact match be very clever about it and probably use them sparingly and use them in web 2.0 type of links. You should also pay attention to how you do internal linking.  You should create content that linking up to the home page.

I also would like to bring out something of a misconception about duplicate content.  From my experience it is OK to duplicate content within your own site- I mean if you are going to do pages for different businesses in different cities – I have not seen any problem with it.

However, the problem arises when the Panda algorithm notices similar content in your business rival’s website.

How to be safe in your ranking activities

So here is my advice to you.  The safest action you must take is … you must always check for duplicate content at all time. You would be horrified to find out that even lawyers steal content.  I mean they may not do it but people who work for them may.  And you are screwed if their sites have more authority than yours.  Another solution is whenever you have new content you want to make sure Google index it first.  

If you are doing all of the above you will rank and stay ranking.  More SEO topics here.