What is site recovery and do I need it for SEO in 2017 2018?
I sometimes get approached by business owners looking for SEO services after they have sought “cheaper” alternatives elsewhere. Sure some outsourced and overseas vendors may have the right skill set and work ethic. But more often than not, these outsourced operations typically make use of automation tools which build thousands of links at a time. These bulk generated links are often detrimental to a site’s rankings in the long term, sure you may get a slight boost at the start. But Google eventually catches on and WHAM your site is hit with a penalty.
Determine what the cause was: Manual or Algorithmic penalty?
Now, this would take a bit of digging, pull up your Analytics tool and find out if the drop in rankings and traffic coincides with any significant algorithm change Google’s implemented. Panda, Penguin & Fred can give you a hint as to what lead to the drop in ranks. But take note that the impact can take days or weeks to take effect. Removing toxic links will do little if the penalty relates to a site not being mobile responsive when mobilegeddon rolled around. So as always, your mileage may vary.
If it’s bad links, find bad links
Here at WebworthSEO, we use four different backlink research tools (ahrefs – also headquartered in Singapore, Moz, majestic and linkresearchtools) to list and categorise the links currently pointing to your site. There are a lot of backlink analysis tools out there, and while they all try to catalogue every backlink, there are some who slip through the various bots. Clients who have potentially toxic link profiles will have them disavowed. We have clients who want to distance themselves as much as they can from activities which may be seen as spam.
What makes a link toxic, and how do I determine which links to disavow for site recovery?
The quick rundown of it is, it all comes down to the quality of the link. If the link is originating from a site which are flagged as potentially harmful, you can be pretty sure that it will count negatively to your rankings. Think of it this way, someone who shares the same name as you gets listed on the FBI most wanted or the no-fly list, wouldn’t you want to get ahead of that and inform the airlines/employers/friends that you had nothing to do with that?
& Disavow bad links in the Site Recovery Process
Sifting and sorting through the links is the most time-consuming task when it comes to site recovery. Think of it this way; these outsourced SEO services run a script 24/7 which generates 1,000s of dubious backlinks for your site. And as with any automated tools, research tools included, the results are hugely dependent on the algorithms which determine if a link is toxic or clean. Categorically disavowing all links could mean removing potentially useful links.