Have You Noticed a Drop in Your Search Engine Rankings? This Could be Why
Who’s ready for another Google update? We are! At Mint, we’ve always got our ears tuned in to anything that your business needs to know and that includes a lot of Google updates, including this one. Don’t worry though, we’ve not only summarised it all for you here, we’ve also spoken with our expert digital marketing team to let you in on all the between-the-lines information you need to know to keep your business running smoothly and successfully online.
This new core algorithm update, already released by Google on July 26, centres around “link spam”, which, depending on your current digital marketing strategy, may or may not affect you. If however, you’ve noticed a drop in your Google search rankings in the past few weeks or so, you will want to bring this up with your marketing team to determine if Google’s algorithm change is the culprit. Panic not if you’re a MINT client as we are always on the lookout for Google’s infamous updates and are constantly monitoring and implementing micro-marketing strategy changes to keep your search engine optimisation strategy optimised, so no further action required on your part!
Google’s Link Spam Update
Curious what’s going on behind the scenes at Google and in your SEO and SER marketing plan? In short, Google has made its search results pages better by lowering the ranking of business pages that use link spam. Link spam are backlinks within any page of your website that are unnatural: mostly defined as links that you are paid to include on your website or links that you provide on your website in exchange for someone else linking to yours. Links that are irrelevant to your business, your page or the immediately-surrounding content can also be flagged as link spam by Google’s algorithm and lowered in their search results page.
Exceptions to the New Rule
Most digital marketing strategies don’t rely heavily on paid advertising links -that would be detrimental to your online presence anyway, as your brand, not to mention your SEO, would suffer. There are some legitimate reasons to use sponsored products or paid advertising as one part of your digital marketing strategy however. In this core algorithm update, Google has accounted for the use of these affiliate links by allowing them to bypass the link spam filter if (and only if) they are clearly labelled in your HTML coding. If you don’t know website coding, all you need to know is this: if you pay for or get paid for linking to any other website, make sure you speak with your digital marketing team to ensure that they are following Google’s link qualifying requirements.
Taking Advantage of the Algorithm Update
If you’re already a Mint client with SEO maintenance contracted, all you need to do is sit back and relax: we’ve already taken care of this for you.
If however, you don’t yet have the Mint marketing experts on your side and are seeing a drop in your Google search engine rankings, no need to panic! Here’s a quick breakdown of what you can do to bring them back up:
Make sure all backlinks on your website are appropriately qualified in their HTML coding. This lets Google know you’re aware of their spam link filter and are legitimately working to improve your site. Google will reward this by not penalising your site and lowering its rankings.
Publish only high-quality content across any and all of your digital marketing platforms. Great content naturally produces a higher ranking on Google’s SER page because your banding and organic backlinks will stand out as best in class.
Use your social media marketing and email (newsletter) marketing to promote backlinks to your website instead of linking to your own website within another page of your website. This bypasses Google’s spam link filters completely and will naturally boost your search engine rankings.
Invest in paid advertisements that won’t bring your search engine results down on Google. These can be Google ads or social media ads, paying for placement in others’ newsletters, or using influencers to promote your business or brand (just make sure they’re doing it in a way that Google likes!)
Call the digital marketing team at Mint and we’ll take care of everything for you from start to finish, so all you have to do is sit back and watch your business grow bigger and better online!
In short, and as always with Google, the aim of the spam link core algorithm update is to provide a better search results page to Google’s users by offering relevant, interesting, organic results. So although keeping up to date with all the changes Google requires to keep your boast-worthy rank on their results page can be a daunting or seemingly endless task, your business is always better off for it.
At Mint, keeping up to date with all of Google’s algorithm changes is just one of the ways we make sure our clients are never left behind in the ever-changing online business world we’re in. We already work with local Gibraltar businesses, Spanish brands, and international companies from around the world in a range of public and private industries including banking, leisure and hospitality, manufacturing, finance and more to increase their local and international presence online, boost their business and drive sales through expert digital marketing strategy, branding, social media marketing, advertising and more.
We know the tried and tested strategies that work, but we also take a lot of pride in knowing when, where and how to use the most cutting edge strategies to bolster your business online. Get in touch with us today to find out all the ways we can help deliver the incredible results you’re looking for.
