Are you Being Punished for Bad SEO – Here’s how you Find Out!
Search engine optimization is a game you don’t want to lose at. Unknowingly putting bad SEO strategies into play could mean very negative consequences for your website. If you suspect you’re being penalized for bad SEO and/or you want to fight off any negative outcomes, here’s what we recommend.
There may be several reasons why one would suspect they have bad SEO practices on their site. If their website has experienced a sudden decline in Google rankings, it may be because of unknowing sabotage. There’s no reason to worry though! If you’re able to diagnose where the problems lay, you can fix them and in time, you may be able to re-assert your rankings. Declines in search engine rankings are not always due to bad SEO though. Sometimes, it may just be a competitor is doing better optimizations than you. Then again, sometimes it’s as easy as accidentally no-indexing your index.
The first step towards diagnosing bad SEO on your website is checking in with Google. Input your domain in the formatting ‘site:domain.tld’ into the Google search bar. This query should return to you a list of the most important pages hosted on your domain. Note if there are any key pages missing, if your index page is not in the top spot, and if there are pages there you don’t recognize or wouldn’t expect to see included.
From there, you want to check your raw weblogs. Access IPs recorded on each of the pages visited on your site. Examine them to see if the same group of IPs are probing your site, if there are any IPs which may be attempting to pull down your content, or if there are server response issues. If this all sounds a little too advanced, another way to check if you have bad SEO is through Google Analytics. Jump onto your account and examine numbers such as bounce rate, session duration, traffic channels, traffic referrals, search console and landing pages, and site loading speed. There may be evidence here to suggest something has broken down along the way in your search engine optimization strategies.
Also, if you work with an SEO marketing company, they may be able to help in examining your SEO by using a link analysis tool. Link analysis tools can generally check things like organic keywords and related trends, the presence of new backlinks and new domains, referring IPs, any backlinks or domains that have been lost, broken backlinks, anchors, and outgoing links. A search engine optimization expert may also wish to use a crawling and technical analysis tool to examine indexation status by depth, redirects, crawl mapping, and other technical factors.
If all of this has failed to turn up anything, one of the final things you may wish to check is whether your content is still considered unique in the eyes of Google. Use a plagiarism tool, such as Copyscape. Such a tool can verify that there is no internal duplication and/or see if someone else has purposefully duplicated content from your site. Check every page. In the competitive world of search engine ranking and digital marketing, it’s possible someone may be trying to purposefully harm you.
For more information on what to do if your SEO is being attacked or if you’ve done something accidentally to penalize your site, contact Unlimited Exposure today. We would be happy to review your website’s contents and to diagnose the issue. After negative SEO has been identified, we can begin the rebuilding phase, helping your website to re-rank itself high and healthy!
