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Google Rankings Dropped

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Google Rankings Dropped

Google is one of the most powerful companies that we are aware of. They can make or break a business overnight. This is why your company should take them seriously and ensure that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is taken seriously.
It is important for every business to have an online presence in the technological age we are living in. This creates trust between the brand and the user, and also acts as another platform from which to market and sell your goods and/or services. But what good is it to have a website that nobody can find? This is why Google rankings are important.

As Google is the most popular search engine of choice for the majority of Internet users, it is important that you get to and remain on the first page of results for your given keywords to help ensure that people will be vising your website.

A lot of companies are already aware of the need for SEO, and partake in it by employing an SEO company to do the work, or attempting it themselves. SEO is not an exact science, especially due to the fact that Google keeps making changes to improve its service for users, therefore Google rankings are prone to fluctuation.

However, if your Google ranking has dropped significantly over a short period of time, this could be an indication of negative SEO practices which may cause problems for your online presence. One of the most common counter-productive SEO practices is the building of unnatural backlinks. Websites need links to other trustworthy sites to add power and ensure search engines that they are reliable; these links take time to build up. To cut corners and save time, some SEO companies purchase large amounts of unreliable backlinks in bulk orders. Whilst this was an acceptable form of SEO in the past, it is now not-acceptable in the eyes of Google after their Penguin and Panda updates which were done to improve the quality of their search results. As a result, unnatural backlink creation is heavily penalised by Google, resulting in your website dropping out of the search engine results.

Some companies believe that once they have gained positions in search engine results that SEO is no longer needed; this is not the case. SEO is an on-going process; just because you are top one day does not mean you will be forever. It would be devastating to put a lot of time and effort into SEO, only then to stop once you reach the top, and then see your Google rankings dropped.

Significant drops in Google rankings can be avoided by ensuring that your SEO company only uses white hat methods and you continue to practice SEO continuously. If you have been penalised by Google for use of black hat methods, look for a SEO company that can rectify the mistakes and get your Internet marketing campaign back online.

Get SEO Advice from Chameleon, simply contact us.

SEO Consultancy

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SEO Consultancy

An SEO consultancy’s main role is to assess the current state of your website in terms of how optimised it is to appear in search engine results pages. There are a number of elements of a website that can be manipulated to improve user experience and the ease at which search engine spiders can crawl your site for it to be indexed. SEO consultants will review these practises in terms of if and how they are applied to your website, analyse them, and suggest ways to further improve.

SEO consultancies can have varied roles from start to finish. They can simply be asked to analyse SEO on your site and suggest improvements, give general SEO advice, or analyse and improve SEO on your site directly – the full SEO service.

One of the most important factors to consider when choosing an SEO consultancy to work with is reliability and reputation. Ultimately, your online success will rest upon the changes and decisions they make regarding the optimisation of your website. There are both ethical and unethical methods of SEO; ensure that the company that you work with use only ethical white hat methods; otherwise your website could be removed from Google completely.

Google Disavow Links Tool

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On Tuesday 16th October 2012, Google announced the launch of its new Disavow Links Tool. This new tool is intended for the use of experienced webmasters who are well-informed of aggressive SEO techniques. The tool aims to help solve the problem of “unnatural links” pointing to your site due to manual spam action.

Disavow links

Building lots of low quality backlinks to your website is not good SEO practise and can be interpreted as black hat SEO. As it has a negative effect upon your page ranking, creating “unnatural links” is sometimes done as a means of attack from competitor sites. The Google Disavow Links tool aims to give website owners a chance to have these links discounted by their spiders.
The tools states “If you believe your site’s ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site.”

If you website contains links to unreliable sites, you will be notified of this by Google via email. The email will detail some of the types of links that are considered unnatural up to a maximum of three. These emails will not detail all of the bad links that you have associated with your website however; it is up to you to investigate them yourself.

It is important to note that the vast majority of people should not need to use this tool as they will not have a large number of unnatural links. The process takes weeks to be completed from the time your list of disavowed links is submitted to the time they are ignored by Google as your site will have to be crawled and indexed again, which takes time. You also need to be aware that reinstating a link that has been disavowed takes even longer than disavowing it in the first place; therefore please ensure that it is definitely the right decision to make before you disavow a link. The tool is designed to be used by experienced webmasters who have a good working knowledge of aggressive SEO techniques.

This statement is clear that Google are trying assist people with problems relating to a large volume of low quality links:-

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

Disavow links

The Google Disavow Tool is to be used as a last resort to stop your website being associated with unnatural links. Removing the link completely from the web is the most effective way of improving your page ranking; this is done by contacting the person responsible for the other page and having the link removed manually. There will always be a small amount of people that are unreachable and this is why the disavow tool has been introduced. This tool does not remove the link, rather suggests that Google ignore it.

If you believe your website ranking has being harmed by low-quality links that you do not control then you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site rankings.

For more information about this go to:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.htm

Why SEO

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Why SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the backbone of most Internet marketing campaigns and can be the difference between online success and failure.

You many have a fantastic website which is user friendly and looks great, but what use is this if nobody knows that it exists? The vast majority of Internet users use search engines to locate the web page that best fits their query, therefore in order to stand a chance of capitalising on this traffic source, you need to appear in the search engine results associated with your website and business sector.

In order to do this, you need SEO. This is because only the best sites are displayed in the highest search engine rankings and receive the most traffic. To climb the rankings, your site needs to be optimised for both the user and also search engine spiders to be able to crawl it easily and index the pages.

SEO is not a simple task; it requires understanding of how search engines work and employing the best strategies to ensure that the experience for the user is positive as well as the site being easy to crawl by the Google spider.

Using an SEO company is generally the best way in which to pursue SEO as they have expert skills, knowledge and experience of the current Google updates which may affect the strategies to be used.

EMD Update – Exact Match Domain

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Matt Cutts gave us another SEO weather warning or should we say a warning about another update. This time it is the EMD update which is designed to remove low-quality and exact match domains from the Google search results.

How important is it to have keywords in a domain name?

The idea is to prevent people coming up with perfect domain names that match the keywords that they are going to be buying. Matt Cutts wants people to be a domain name that works for people.

If your website has suddenly disappeared from Google in October and the domain name is an exact match of keywords then you are likely to have been hit with the EMD update. Remember Search Engine Optimisation is a complicated process and Google are always working to improve search results for the positive of the users using Google.