Outreach Best Practices: Spotting Penalty Issues

Our Lifestyle Outreach team incorporates and implements several crucial website domain metric checks. These checks are applied through a variety of online tools, enabling us to ensure the outreach is of quality, professional and safe.

‘Lifestyle’ is a broad term known as a ‘way of living’ however in Digital Marketing, it covers the spectrum of an industry niche, whether that be Sports, Technology, Retail, Fashion and so on.

When working on outreach, our Lifestyle team looks for the most suitable domains for the relevant industry the client is situated in.

Getting to the nub of things though, this article will explore some helpful tips we always look out for, when checking to see if a certain domain has previously or very recently, received a penalty from Google.

It’s important to note that our Lifestyle Outreach team is looking for basic trends and checks when exploring a website’s history. Technical issues are reviewed by our Technical Account Managers.

Traffic

Day to day outreach methods always consist of the most obvious and important metric requirements we look for when conducting our outreach. Traffic is one of the most important signs to look out for when checking to see if a particular domain has had a penalty or not.

Penalties aren’t necessarily visible through digital marketing platforms such as SEMrush, as there is no specific icon used to highlight that penalty. However, there are certain ways our Outreach team can spot important changes in traffic levels.

We’re going to use a good example from the ‘Fashion Industry’. As a reader of this article, you might either be working with a client within the Fashion world, or be a fashion client yourself. You might well own your own website and probably wonder, “How is my website performing, if I tend to link out to many other Fashion blogs all of the time?” Well, traffic levels depend much on the content you’re posting on your website, and how many pages your website is ranking for. The more pages with good content posted regularly, the better! Here below, is an example of a website with barely any ranking keywords, yet had a small level of traffic appear for just one month.

You can see from this graph above, that from November 16’, through to February 17’, four months in total, the website registered just two traffic users, then swiftly returned to the website having no traffic. This doesn’t show the website received a penalty, but it reflects the kind of website we look to avoid. Without any real traffic levels, your website doesn’t have great SEO visibility.

Poor Quality Links

As SEMrush so very smartly suggests, low-quality link building can get you penalised without even realising. Working towards building your website in a natural way, will go a lot further for your website’s historic score rating in years to come.

Weak, Unconcise Content

The Lifestyle Outreach team looks for ways to creatively build content for our clients, and that very much includes content collaboratively written with bloggers in the Lifestyle industry. In February 2011, Google updated its algorithm, named ‘Panda’. The main change was content focused where Google decided that rich, concise content was valued more so than ‘weak’ content. The websites that put the effort into developing rich, deep levels of content, started to receive better rankings based on relevancy.

So, if you are currently writing weak content which includes a heavy amount of do-followed outbound links, be sure to start considering the quality of your onsite content or again, Google could penalise you.

Negative Ranking Keywords

It’s good to regularly check what your website is ranking for, and if your website is making simple mistakes such as having too many adverts above the page fold with your content using too many overused optimised anchor texts, you might very well receive a penalty from Google.

Negative ranking keywords occur when your website has been hacked, infiltrated by another bot or user looking to sell their product which is negatively conceived, or simply a way of spamming you from the weak content you have published, so be careful to publish quality and not just quantity!

Big Sites Can Lose Big Business

We have been some big sites over the years that have lost some BIG business because of one single penalty. It would be rude to label the brands, but due to breaking advertisement rules, one business back in January 2013, went from having 285,705 traffic in one month to just 1,965!

Now, you might be thinking, they could have changed their website? They might have re-optimised their domain? Nope! This penalty occurred and the website in discussion was deindexed by Google for 24 hours as a warning to the rest of the industry, to obey the rules of advertisements. In simple business terms, this brand couldn’t take any online orders for a whole 24-hour period, a big price to pay.

If you believe your business would benefit from SEO services, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

For any questions you might have concerning a penalty you believe you might have received on your website, get in touch with our team here.