Category: SEO | Page 3

22/12/201920/08/2020

10 Frequently Asked Questions About SEO

SEO or search engine optimisation is one of the least understood topics in the world of digital marketing.

Most marketers and business owners wrongly assume that they need to have a technical background to grasp SEO fully.

Nothing can be further from the truth as with a little bit of effort even a non-technical person with no prior experience of coding can understand SEO and use his knowledge to get higher rank for his website on search engine results page.

It’s quite natural that most beginners will have some doubts and questions about SEO especially if they lack any prior experience in this field.

So, in this article, we will discuss 10 most common FAQs about SEO which most people have.

1) What is SEO?

SEO refers to the process of optimising your website and webpages to get a higher rank on search engine results pages or SERPs.

Overall the medium is focused on several techniques and best practices which are essential for getting a higher position in organic search results on Google.

SEO often includes creating search optimised content using appropriate keywords, backlinking, and on-site SEO.

Search engines use algorithms to deliver the most relevant results to the searchers. SEO aims to optimise a website or webpage so that the site in question can rank higher for its main keywords.

2) What is the difference between SEO, PPC, and SEM?

SEO, PPC, and SEM are related concepts which are often confused for one another.

We’ve explained SEO above and would like to add that SEO is mostly free of cost as a person is not required to spend anything, although it needs a good amount of time and effort as an SEO campaign can take months before you will start seeing the results of it.

PPC or pay per click advertising also allows you to get a ranking in SERPs, although you will have to pay for running your ads on SERPs as the name PPC itself suggests that it’s a paid form of advertising.

Google AdWords is the leading PPC platform which allows users to show their ads above organic search results on SERPs for keywords or queries of their choice.

PPC mainly uses a bidding model where an advertiser must bid for getting a place on SERPs and usually the person with the highest bid gets the top-most rank on SERPs.

It must be noted that PPC ads which are shown on SERPs mention the fact that they are advertisements and a user can easily differentiate between PPC ads and organic search results displayed on SERPs.

SEM refers to search engine marketing which includes both the SEO and PPC.

So, SEO+PPC are collectively referred to as SEM (Search Engine Marketing), although it’d not be correct to use SEO or PPC interchangeably with SEM as they are just 2 individual elements of SEM.

3) SEO vs PPC?

SEO vs PPC is perhaps the age-old debate in the world of search engine marketing and this question has been asked numerous times since the advent of search engines.

Many people wrongly assume that they can compare these two methods of marketing when comparing SEO with PPC is like comparing apples with oranges.

SEO and PPC are two different methods of search marketing which fulfil specific needs. SEO is aimed at getting free of cost, organic traffic from search engines, whereas PPC is a paid method of advertising.

SEO takes time to deliver return on your investment, where PPC can deliver instant results.

For a person running a website, it comes down to budget, timeframe, and needs as some business owners focus on both SEO and PPC for getting targeted traffic from search engines.

4) What is On-Page SEO?

On-Page SEO refers to the practice of optimising individual web-pages to get higher ranks in search engine results pages or SERPs.

This process is primarily focused on optimising the title tag using a keyword, subheadings using H1, H2, and H3 tags, outbound and inbound links, and SEO friendly webpage URLs.

5) How is SEO changing?

SEO has undergone several changes since its inception, as search engines update their search algorithms regularly.

Google introduced several changes in its algorithm with numerous updates during the past decade, and these algorithm updates have fundamentally changed SEO.

Google’s Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird updates can be considered as landmark changes in SEO. These updates impacted several websites both large and small as Google punished sites using duplicate content, or black-hat SEO tricks.

Another notable change in SEO is the increasing importance of social media signals as nowadays, almost every major search engine considers the popularity of a website on social media to calculate it’s rank on SERPs.

Check out our guide to the ‘How has SEO changed in the last few years?‘

6) What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research refers to the practice of identifying keywords relevant to a website as SEO and PPC both revolve around keywords.

Keywords are central to how a search engine works as anything for which a user searches using a search engine is a keyword.

SEO campaigns are constructed around keywords, so it’s essential to have a list of relevant keywords. Marketers use several tools such as the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool to research keywords.

During keyword research, you can also identify alternative or similar keywords which may have a low level of competition as often most valuable keywords have a high amount of competition which makes optimising your website for these keywords difficult.

Check out our guide to the ‘best SEO tools for keyword research‘

7) Is blogging beneficial for SEO?

Blogging helps in improving a website’s SERP ranking in the long run due to several reasons.

Search engine loves fresh content and blogging allows you to create keyword rich, and relevant content regularly which is then indexed by search engines.

Blogging also allows you to get high-quality backlinks from relevant sites within your industry as having a high number of useful and engaging webpages automatically increases your chances of getting backlinks from other high-quality sites.

Blogging also keeps people longer on your site and increases the average duration of a visit which is considered a positive signal by Google and other search engines.

You can also target long-tail keywords with your blog and can incorporate long-tail keywords within your blog posts to increase your chances of getting a higher SERP ranking.

Check out our guides to ‘Evergreen blog content‘ and ‘Blogging as a Travel Businesses – Why it is Essential for Growth!‘

8) Are meta tags still important for SEO?

There was a time when meta tags were the craze in the world of SEO, and almost all webmasters were busy adding meta tags to their webpages.

Then, in 2009, Google announced that they no longer use meta tags for ranking webpages in their search engine results pages or SERPs. This changed the perception of meta tags in the eyes of SEO practitioners, and their use declined dramatically.

Many webmasters and SEO professionals still consider them essential for SEO, although no search engine apart from Yandex uses meta tags for ranking websites on SERPs.

Although, it’s still a good idea to use meta tags as these tags influence how your site is displayed in search results and may also affect the number of visitors which you can get from SERPs.

You can consider using Title, Description, and Keywords meta tags as these 3 are the most commonly used meta tags. It’s okay even if you don’t use meta tags as they are no longer used for ranking webpages. So, they only serve an aesthetic purpose.

9) What are backlinks and how they are important for SEO?

Backlinks are links from other websites which point towards your site.

Backlinks are quite crucial for SEO as the internet is built using external links and they remain crucial to understanding the relationship between websites and pages.

We browse sites after clicking a backlink which we may find in our social media stream, any other website or blog or at any other source.

Search engines give higher ranks in SERPs to websites which have a large number of quality backlinks from relevant sites in their industry. Backlinks are also important for search engine indexing as search spiders use these links to index your site in their database.

Backlinks are essential for the reputation and credibility of your website, and they also remain the most potent method of driving traffic to your site.

A single backlink from a reputed website which has a high userbase can give a new lease of life to your site as there are cases when a website got thousands and hundreds of thousands of visitors from a single backlink from a widely read website such as BBC or NYtimes.com.

It’s also important to note here that search engines frown on paid links and you must not pay to get a backlink to your website.

If Google finds out that you’ve bought backlinks for your website, then your site may be penalised by Google and may lose it’s ranking on SERPs along with a significant amount of traffic.

So, you must always earn backlinks instead of buying them from link marketplaces as such tactics no longer work, and often cause more harm than good.

Check out our guide to ‘the importance of links for travel businesses‘

10) What is Link Equity or Link Juice?

Search engines use backlinks to gather information about websites, and it’s assumed that certain types of links pass value and authority from one page to another.

The concept of Link Equity is closely linked with PageRank, which was the first and original algorithm used by Google to rank websites on their search engine results pages.

Google considers several factors when calculating the link equity such as the type of link, the authority of the linking site, relevancy of the link, following status of the link (do-follow link), the total number of outgoing links from a webpage, https status of the linked page etc.

Link equity can be controlled by using a do-follow or no-follow link. A webmaster may also choose to tell search engine’s crawler to ignore a link by using a robots.txt file and in this case also no link equity will be passed to the linked page.

27/12/201929/01/2020

How Can Small Businesses Compete With Big Brands Online in 2020?

We live in a digital age, where having an online presence is everything.

Billboards, flyers, magazine adverts and alike are extremely pricey and generally ineffective.

More than 90% of consumers do some sort of online research before making a purchase, be it looking at a brand’s website, looking at product reviews or following a company on social media.

57% of the purchase decision is already complete before the customer even calls the supplier.

A weak online profile or inability to get discovered in a customer search will bear a significant impact on sales and margins.

As a result, new and existing businesses must establish and rapidly expand their online presence, and keep digital efforts at the forefront (or at least a focal point) in their growth and sales strategies.

But sometimes it can seem like an impossible task.

Either you’re not sure where to begin in terms of gaining visibility and building brand engagement online, or you’re a small tour operator and you’re up against all the big companies that have dedicated digital teams and lots of money to invest into ads and SEO.

We’re here to deliver the good news that all is not lost.

In fact, there’s a number of factors that you can play to your advantage.

What the big brands have got…

There are certainly some advantages that the big brands like Expedia will have.

The first is domain authority, a search engine ranking measuring the power of a domain name based on age, popularity and size.

The second is trustworthiness and brand association in the space built up over time through advertising, scale and reputation which creates a consumer and search engine bias.

Quantity and diversity of back links (other sites that are linking to them) are also likely to be higher and this is something to bear in mind as you move forward – the more sites, blogs (etc) that you can have linking back to your site, the higher search engines will rank you as it shows that your site clearly has something to say that is relevant in your sphere.

Finally, and perhaps most obviously, is their financial resources and ability to invest.

International tour operators have millions of pounds funnelled into their web marketing and SEO efforts, designated digital teams and enough cash flow to try out a variety of different techniques and tactics all day long.

However, these are all things that can be worked on over time as your business develops and grows.

In the meantime, you can capitalise on the advantages of being a small business or website – something that these mega corporations simply cannot do.

Perks of being a small brand online…

Being a smaller business allows you to be nimble, reacting quickly to consumer demands, market trends and changing your priorities overnight.

Big companies lack this agility and are tied up in rules, processes and approvals from different departments – often with HQs or international marketing teams in different time zones around the world.

Small teams get remarkable amounts done versus larger teams that work in silos.

If a topic, location or tour are hot right now, smaller tour operators can quickly turn content around, create visuals, take to social media and give the customer what they want.

They can get creative without being confined by rigid guidelines and tone of voice. Another benefit is the ability to focus on what works in terms of web marketing – whether that be SEO, email campaigns or PPC.

You are able to concentrate your immediate efforts where opportunity lies and park other duties temporarily. This focus carries over in to what topics and destinations you want to focus on.

Small tour operators can have a niche appeal by choosing a small slice of the travel sector and working on being the authority in this space. This provides numerous advantages that we will go on to discuss below.

The final advantage is your brand authenticity.

Ultimately, travel is still an emotional experience and people want a personal touch and knowing that they’re dealing with humans, rather than a corporate machine.

A smaller brand can build strong positive associations, and although this may be with a smaller audience, you can build your brand appeal within a chosen niche and monetise them well.

So where do you begin?

To build a real digital presence and compete with the big brands online, there are four key areas to look at.

Choose your niche

Go for a specific niche in the market and work on targeting that particular segment and audience.

Rather than covering every country, flight, hotel and activity on offer, become a specialist in a few areas.

Over time you can build this out to a greater repertoire but a key benefit of being a small tour operator is being able to focus on city-specific itineraries or ranking travel destinations that bigger agencies aren’t in a position to do.

Use targeted keywords

By choosing a niche, you’ll be able to make your SEO efforts much more focused, rather than trying to rank for every word in the travel dictionary.

Carry out detailed keyword research and then draw up a list of the targeted keywords that you will focus on. This could be in a simple spreadsheet and you can chop and change them as needed. As tempting as it may be, using a scatter gun approach for SEO never works – trust us.

Google’s Keyword Planner is a great place to start and is useful for searching target word volumes and competitiveness, even if you don’t want to follow through to paying for adverts.

Start by searching words or phrases related to your products (trips, activities, etc) and services. Keyword Planner will then find the keywords most relevant to your business.

From here, you can incorporate these into your site, or pay for Google’s service by bidding for certain words and monitoring keyword trends to see how their search volume changes over time.

Choosing words with lower competition will cost you significantly less and allow you to rank higher when those specific terms are searched for by your customers.

Target keywords that big operators would be unwilling or unable to compete on.

For example, they’re often unlikely to drill down into anything more specific than a country or city – so why not consider looking at things like ‘Best hikes and trails in Cusco Peru’, or ‘Best lakes for water-skiing in Southwest London’.

These long-tail keywords help to reach the niche audiences we discussed above.

Another option is comparison keywords, which the giants don’t do as they can’t go after competitor brand names, but as a small tour operator – you can.

That’s a prime advantage that a small website is going to have over a larger one.

On a similar note, due to business relationships with hotels and suppliers, they’re unlikely to create rankings or lists of options in a particular locale as it could reflect badly on them, but small operators can, and this can be a powerful way of showing up in relevant customer searches.

Break down keyword bidding by localisation

A geo-report allows you to adjust bids based on a shopper’s location.

When the dimensions tab in AdWords is used, you can choose geo’s which are worth biding.

Larger names may use one entire area as a target, this can be used to your advantage. You can target regions based on your site, customers, and goals you’ve set.

If you know your niche audience mentioned in step one is based in a few certain areas, target them!

If you’ve not got the immediate funds to put money behind your keywords, you can still reap the rewards by using them carefully within your content.

This ranges from scattering your targeted keywords and related phrases throughout your webpages, article and blog copy, image descriptions and metadata.

Remember that content is King

Dive deep into relevant topics and always offer valuable content.

Your website, ads and emails should not be sales pitch after sales pitch with claims of why you are the best.

Customers won’t come to your site based purely on sales tactics.

Yes, the price of what you’re offering will play a part, but you also need to incorporate some degree of content marketing – both for SEO purposes and to engage your visitors which will ultimately reduce the bounce rates from your website and help you out with rankings too.

Create thought leadership pieces, cover travel trends and where might be an upcoming destination, as well as news items and generally get creative.

Small operators can invest more in a single piece of content than a big brand ever could. Take your small niche and decide that it is your focus and the search intent is a priority.

You can create 10 times as much content around it and be a go-to resource for that subject or destination, and as people stay on the page longer and share it with others, you will reap the rewards.

Hero images (the big shiny ones that make you really want to visit a destination or sign up for an activity) will be the cherry on top and should be used thoughtfully to draw readers in and really get them excited about a destination.

Build relationships

As well as trying to build relationships with your audience, work on creating solid relationships with local agencies and suppliers in target areas.

Big travel and tour operators have PR and marketing teams that manage relationships and conversations in a mundane and routine way, but you have the power to deal with those people directly.

Forging relationships will allow you to further improve the quality of your content by gaining expert local knowledge, will lead to SEO back-linking as they link to your from their own site which will help your SEO massively, gain further exposure on supplier websites, create genuine conversations on social media and reinforce your authenticity and appeal.

This advantage mustn’t be overlooked as it amplifies the reach of your content and visibility on your targeted keywords that your competitors don’t have access to.

An added bonus here is that these sorts of relationships are likely to help you secure good rates and create a two-way business flow.

Big companies need to do all of these things at scale, and as multinational companies, they often can’t narrow down their focus in the same way, which is where your small website advantages come in to play.

It doesn’t end there either, there are plenty of other small actions you can take to put yourself on the map.

Expand your digital presence and reach your customers

Harness your competitor’s strengths and previous efforts

As mentioned above, big brands have the time and funds to invest into research and have teams dedicated to monitoring changes in the market and consumer demand.

So why not tap into this? Sign up to their newsletters and alerts, allowing you to stay on top of market trends and also take inspiration from what they’re doing well (or not so well) and utilising the best bits for your own site, content and outreach efforts.

It can also be useful to use an SEO tool such as SEM Rush or Ahrefs to see the links they have to their website and see whether there are any you could approach for a link to your website.

Engage with your audience

Be responsive on social media, listen to what your customers want and react accordingly.

Being small and agile means you can respond to customers with honest conversation, travel tips, feedback and rapid customer service, without being tied up in corporate red tape.

Keep your tone of voice friendly with a hint of humour and make sure you share videos and images regularly.

Keep your website simple

Create a website that is clean, clear, easy to use, and makes it obvious what you are selling.

Customers would rather have a site that is user-friendly, rather than full of slow-loading pictures, fancy features and hundreds of links and drop down options.

Web pages should have no less than 500 words to be favoured by search engines, but users also don’t want to be scrolling for hours just to get to the crux of the article or tour description. And don’t forget to make it mobile-friendly, so they can research and book trips on the move!

Keep up with SEO trends

This is always easier said than done as search engine algorithms change weekly, and there are no definitive rules or hints released by Google or anyone else.

Sign up to one or two SEO and SEM newsletters to make sure you’re staying on top of major changes in metadata, metatags, etc.

Also, keep an eye on well-respected SEO blogs, such as Moz.

Advertise on different platforms

Paying for ads will help you to gain visibility across different platforms and forums, but will require a budget and this will vary massively depending on what targeted keywords you have chosen.

When advertising on different platforms like Bing or Facebook you may be able to get cheaper keywords and you can target not most but all users.

You may also consider using ad extensions. When using ad extensions a person is given more info about your business and this can increase your click rate and attract a future customer.

Information such as locations, reviews, phone numbers and more can be included. When you’re on a tight budget, they can be a real help.

Summary

Building an online presence is not a quick and easy process or an overnight fix. You need to invest time, effort and a small amount of money into SEO and SEM to really reap the benefits.

Changes you make across your content and web pages may not take effect for weeks or even months, but you will slowly start to see your website climb through the Google rankings.

Work on your website, build customer relationships on social media and win consumer loyalty and you’ll be on a path to success.

The big brands have staff, resources and budgets that small tour operators may only dream of in their early stages, but utilise the basic steps and top tips mentioned above and you will begin to level the playing field.

26/12/201926/12/2019

How Has SEO Changed in the last few years?

SEO has changed beyond recognition without any doubt over the past few years.

Indeed, today’s SEO bears no resemblance to what we used to call SEO just a decade ago.

Earlier it was possible for experienced SEO experts to manipulate the rankings of a search engine page result by knowing what to tweak on their website.

But this approach no longer works, and as a result, several of old-fashioned SEO agencies have ceased trading, or needed to drastically change their approach.

In this post, we will examine the main changes which the search engine optimisation process has undergone over the last couple of years and discuss each major change in detail.

Rise of Semantics

Semantics used to play only a marginal role in search engine algorithms just a few years ago.

All this has changed with the improvement of search engine algorithms and artificial intelligence on which search engines are increasingly reliant.

Nowadays, semantics play probably one of the most important roles in search engine results in pages and are largely responsible for the placement of a website/webpage on SERPs.

Earlier ‘Dentist London’ could have generated converting traffic from organic SEO, but today ‘affordable dentist in London’ will probably give you better quality traffic which will convert at a higher rate.

Google started changing its algorithm drastically with its Panda and Penguin updates in 2011 and 2012. But semantics rose to prominence after the Hummingbird update in 2013.

Content

In the earlier days of SEO, many people were sceptical of the claim that “Content is the King”.

However content has become increasingly important over the last few years and is an element which can make or break your SEO strategy.

Google and other search engines have repeatedly emphasised the importance of good quality, original content. In fact, Google has also punished several websites for having duplicate or copied content via its several algorithmic updates.

We can safely say that good-quality, original content is the backbone of any well-planned SEO campaign as without having the original content you can’t go far in the world of SEO.

Link Building

Link building is an area which has perhaps changed beyond recognition over the last decade along with the SEO itself.

Gone are the days when just a few high-quality links could have got you ranked on SERPs, indeed today you will need much better links from relevant, high-quality sites to even think about a place on SERPs.

Earlier on you could have got your website ranked on SERPs with paid links, non-contextual links from forum posts, or spammy blog comments.

But in today’s changed scenario such practices often get a Google penalty and thus you must avoid anything which even remotely bears a resemblance to black hat link building tactics when it comes to link building as any such practice will do more harm than good.

Search engines have changed their focus on the quality and context of links and nowadays earned links from relevant, high-quality sites almost always beat links from non-relevant sites.

SEO veterans will remember that Google started this crackdown over shady link building practices with its Penguin update in 2012.

Rise of Social Media

Social Media didn’t even have a fraction of the influence it has today just a decade ago.

In pre-2010 days search engines rarely took the popularity of a website or a webpage on social media into account when calculating it’s rank on their result pages.

Things have changed dramatically since then as nowadays social media signals are incorporated in every major search engine’s algorithm and play a crucial role in establishing your SERP rankings.

Indeed, many businesses have started focusing more on social media channels and platforms as compared to search engine optimisation as if you can gain a foothold in social media then sooner or later search engines are going to rank your website for relevant searches.

Downfall of Link Schemes

Just a few years ago many people assumed that buying backlinks or participating in link schemes was all you need to do to rank on a search engine results page.

Google has conducted a crackdown on such tactics, and entire sites have vanished from SERPs due to poor quality or paid backlinks.

Since at least 2012, link schemes have been falling out of favour, and google penalties coupled with other factors have sounded the death bell for these tactics.

Today, using a link scheme is the perfect way to get your website penalised by search engines as they strongly disapprove of such schemes and your site may end up in the sandbox if Google discovers that you got your backlinks via shady practices.

PageRank

PageRank is perhaps the most famous algorithm used ever by Google as it was the first algorithm which was largely responsible for displaying results on search engine results pages.

Much has changed over the last few years, as PageRank is no longer the sole factor which can make or break your site rankings on SERPs.

Google has itself considered that they consider more than 200 attributes before generating a SERP for a query.

With the rise of artificial intelligence algorithms such as RankBrain, PageRank has lost its importance although it can’t be said that it’s no longer important.

User Experience

Search engines have been trying to serve relevant and good quality results to their users since the advent of the Internet. User experience has been a primary metric which has been in use for several years.

Users type their queries in search boxes to find an answer to their question and search engines satisfy this thirst for knowledge by delivering relevant answers to user’s queries in the form of search results.

User experience has been closely monitored by search engines since at least a decade, and Google has started paying even closer attention to metrics which tell about the user experience of a website or a webpage such as Bounce rate.

Google’s artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithm RankBrain takes into consideration the time spent on a site and page layout into consideration when displaying SERPs. So, it’s important to keep an eye on UX if you want to rank your site high on SERPs.

Death of Anchor Text

Anchor Text was the silver bullet of SEO just a few years ago.

But semantics and AI have changed it completely. Google dislikes the use of anchor text beyond a certain limit, and its algorithm can easily identify overuse of anchor text within a website’s backlinks.

Webmasters misusing anchor text for gaining high rankings in search engine result pages often wake up to discover that their sites have been penalised by Google and they have lost a majority of their traffic within an eyeblink.

Local SEO

Local SEO was just taking off a few years ago, but nowadays with almost every conceivable business listed on the internet, local SEO has become much more important.

Google and other search engines exist to fulfil a need of their users, and most often consumers use search engines to discover local shops, supermarkets, services and other businesses.

It just makes sense from the perspective of a search engine to show relevant results to users based on their reported location.

Google’s dominance in digital map space with it’s Google Maps makes it easy for Google to incorporate local businesses into relevant search engine results.

Mobile users have played a significant role in this transformation as mobile searches often report a user’s location which then allows Google to serve relevant local results to them for their query.

Google Updates and Penalties

A decade ago people were not even aware of what a Google update or penalty meant.

Things started to change after 2010 as Google released at least one major update each year starting with Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Pigeon etc.

The SEO community was surprised by the massive changes with which webmasters had to deal with after each major algorithmic update from Google.

These updates were mainly responsible for the changing landscape of SEO as after every single update millions of websites using outdated or spammy tactics were penalised, and it took years for them to recover their prior rankings on search engine result pages.

Decreasing Relevance of Keywords

Keywords were the frame of SEO in good old days which is no longer true.

Previously, SEO strategy was framed around Keywords and this started to change with the rise of semantics and artificial intelligence after the Hummingbird update in 2013.

Nowadays, Google’s artificial intelligence algorithm utilises the semantics and linguistics to deliver relevant results to a searcher.

Keywords are still important from the perspective of SEO, but they no longer enjoy the importance which they used to have just a few years ago.

Today, Google tries to decipher user intent behind a query and uses its artificial intelligence algorithms like RankBrain to serve results based on what AI thinks to be the intent or need behind a query.

Mobile Experience

There are billions of mobile devices connected to the internet today, and mobile searches officially surpassed desktop queries in 2015 in Google search.

Earlier on mobile SEO was seen just as an additional part of the wider SEO strategy, but nowadays it has become an outright necessity.

You will miss out on a lot of opportunity to reach mobile customers if you don’t optimise your site for mobile SEO.

With the rise of the mobile web, mobile experience has a completely new meaning.

In some developing countries, people use a mobile device such as a cheap smartphone as their only link to the Internet.

Google released its mobile-friendly update in 2015, which forced webmasters to consider mobile-friendliness of their site when planning their future SEO strategy.

Google further rolled out its mobile-first index which places an even greater emphasis on mobile experience and mobile friendliness of a site.

You can simply no longer overlook mobile users as mobile experience pretty much impacts your SERP rankings in a huge way.

Pictures (no copyright infringement is intended)

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blissitsolutions.com

22/12/201922/12/2019

The Importance of Links & How to Disavow a Link

It has become quite common to come across obituaries for backlinks which repeatedly proclaim that backlinks are no longer important for SEO due to several algorithm updates and changes in search engine optimization.

Nothing can be further from the truth as contrary to public perception, link building is alive and thriving.

Backlinks remain important for search engine optimization and are still one of the most important factors which play a decisive role in SERP rankings.

Importance of Links for Travel SEO

Travel businesses rely on SEO for a large chunk of their traffic and backlinks remain as important for travel businesses as they used to be.

Social media signals play an increasingly important role in travel SEO, but SERP rankings are still affected by number and quality of backlinks.

Travel is one industry which has been disrupted by the advent of the Internet.

It has undergone significant change in the last 2 decades with the rise of Online Travel Agencies such as TripAdvisor and Expedia.

According to one estimate, TripAdvisor alone accounts for 45% of the total organic traffic for travel-related searches and can be seen on top of most search results.

Learn more about the importance of Trip Advisor for Travel Businesses

High-quality backlinks have been integral to SEO strategy as no matter how good your content, you can’t get a high SERP rank for your keyword without several high-quality links linking to it.

Good and relevant links from highly ranked domains can pass of link juice to your website and get you a higher rank on SERPs.

Alternatively, poor quality links from spammy sites can also get you a penalty from Google.

After the Penguin update several websites saw their organic search traffic disappear overnight largely due to poor quality links.

Panda targeted duplicate content, whereas Penguin punished websites with bad links. Google Disavow tool was introduced in 2012 and few noticed its importance after the launch.

This changed with the Penguin update which was rolled out in 2013 and punished websites for bad links.

In earlier days of SEO, Google and other search engines frowned upon bad links, but it was rare for a website to lose its rankings due to bad links.

Penguin changed this as now websites are routinely removed from SERPs if they have bad links. So, let’s discuss how you can disavow a link/site using the Google Disavow tool and save your website from a penalty.

Before discussing how to disavow a link it’s important to discuss which types of links you need to disavow and why.

Good Links

It’s quite difficult to define a good backlink as there is no one size fits all approach when it comes to link building.

If you are selling sports equipment online via your e-commerce store, then a link from a respected sports blog is a good one for your site.

Whereas a link from a construction equipment maker will not be considered as the one from a relevant source.

You must keep the scarcity principle in mind when building backlinks.

A good link is almost always quite difficult to get and rare links from high-quality websites such as the BBC, Daily Mail, or Government sites, for example, are almost impossible to get for small websites.

Links which you can get with little effort are rarely considered to be of high quality such as those which you can get in forums.

It’s quite easy to register a profile on a forum and you can leave a link to your website in any thread. Forum links are no longer considered as high-quality ones by search engines.

Bad Links

Successive algorithm updates have also highlighted the issue of bad links from other sites which can often lead to a penalty from Google.

Webmasters are facing this issue since Panda and Penguin updates which were rolled out by Google a few years ago.

Bad links are often those from unrelated sites although paid links, low-quality links from sites with no domain authority or spammy links are also considered bad links which negatively affect the position of your webpage on SERPs.

In the earlier days of SEO, many webmasters relied on paid links which could be easily bought, but Google has been heavily penalizing sites which use paid links for SEO.

Exact match anchor text is also frowned upon by Google nowadays as using too many links with exact match anchor text can also get you a penalty from Google.

Relevance equals trust in the eyes of Google and you must always try to get backlinks from sites relevant to your business. If you are selling furniture, then a backlink from an automaker is not relevant to your business and will do you more harm than good.

Backlinks from sites which have been penalized by Google are also classified as bad links by veteran SEO practitioners as your site can be penalized in the future for these links.

Google wants natural links and any link which may appear to be unnatural can get you a penalty.

How to Disavow a Link

You can use Google disavow tool in Google Search Console to disavow any bad link from a toxic site which you think is negatively affecting your SERP rankings.

If left unchecked, these links can also lead to severe penalties from Google.

You must be extremely careful when using Google’s disavow tool as it’s been designed to be used by experts who understand SEO.

If used by a non-expert, this tool may do more harm than good as the person may end up disavowing good links instead of the spammy ones.

Google’s disavow tool allows webmasters to identify toxic links from unrelated sites which are affecting the SERP rankings of their site.

With disavow tool you can instruct Google to not follow the links and instead assign no follow tag to these spammy links which will be no longer used to calculate the ranking of your website on search engine results pages.

So, let’s see how you can disavow a link using Google’s disavow tool.

Backlink Analysis

Before even starting the disavow process, you must thoroughly examine all the backlinks which your website has and create a backlink profile of your website which will ideally include all the backlinks which are pointing from other sites towards your website.

You can easily create a backlink profile using several online tools some of which are free of cost.

You can use the following services to create a detailed backlink profile:

Majestic.com

You can get a detailed list of all your backlinks for free from Majestic if you verify your site with them. Verifying your site will not take long and it’s worth the effort.

Opensiteexplorer.org

This is another backlink analysis tool on our list which is a part of Moz and is considered a premier tool for webmasters.

It’s not considered as effective as Majestic, but it will give you some links which may not show up in other tools.

Ahrefs.com

This is a paid option which is worth the investment as Ahrefs is on par with Majestic and Open Site Explorer when it comes to backlink analysis.

Reviewing Your Links

After getting the list of all backlinks, you will need to create a spreadsheet in MS Excel or Google Docs to further break down these links.

Now you need to do a Link Audit of all the backlinks which your site has. This allows you to identify any areas of concern…

Link Audit is without any doubt the most difficult part of the disavow process as it can consume a lot of time.

It’s not uncommon to spend days and weeks on link audit if the site has thousands of backlinks as you will have to sort out each link in your backlink profile.

You can also use several online tools for automating the process of link audit such as Link Detox which can also be connected to your Google Search Console account. Link Detox aggregates data from 25 different sources to create a detailed backlink profile.

You can also download a list of your links from Google Search Console which will also show problematic links as identified by the Google search crawlers and will help you in identifying spammy links which are negatively affecting your search rankings.

Link Removal

The second step in the disavow process is the manual removal of the links.

By now you will have a detailed list of links which you need to remove and must contact the webmasters of the sites from where these links originate and ask them to remove the links.

In cases where your requests are unanswered, you will need to submit a reconsideration request to Google asking them to disavow these links.

According to Google, it’s important that you contact webmasters of the concerned site before submitting a reconsideration request (as Google will ask you if you’ve already tried to remove these links manually and you must have proof that you tried but were unsuccessful).

Hint: It’s not really necessary! Just saying you tried to make contact with the webmaster is enough

Your email messages to these webmasters and their replies or lack of a reply will serve as proof for Google that you already tried to remove the links and are submitting a reconsideration request after exhausting all other options.

Submitting Disavow File

Now you will need to create a disavow file which will include all the links which you were unable to remove manually as reconsideration request is for few links, but if you need to disavow a large number of links then Google asks you to create and submit a disavow file which includes all the spammy links.

A disavow file is a simple text file in a .txt format which can be created using a text editor such as Text Pad. It contains every link which you need to disavow.

This disavow file must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII and you must use only one link per line to be disavowed. It will instruct Google to ignore these links when calculating your SERP rankings.

Here is an example of how you must create a disavow file:

http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html

http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html

Domain: blackhatseo.com

Notice the “Domain: blackhatseo.com” at the end of this file, this domain: tag tells Google to ignore every link from this domain and must be used with extreme caution.

There is a chance that few links from this domain must be useful for your SERP rank and it’s only for extreme situations when you are sure that all the links from a specific domain are spammy.

Once your disavow file is ready all you need to do is to upload this file to the Google Disavow Tool.

Google will assign an invisible nofollow tag to the links specified in disavow file and these links will no longer count for calculating your SERP rankings. It may take some time and you will need to submit a reconsideration request if you have already been penalized by Google for spammy links.

You will receive a reply from Google for your reconsideration request within 2 to 4 weeks although your site will only recover slowly from the penalties imposed on it due to bad links. Your recovery will largely depend on the quality of your remaining links.

You don’t need to include links with nofollow tag in the disavow file as these links are not counted towards your SERP rankings. Disavowed links will still be visible in your link profile within the Google Search Console, but as mentioned above they will not be counted for calculating your website’s rank on Google’s search engine results pages or SERPs.

Bing also has a similar procedure for disavowing links and you can submit the same disavow file to Bing without making any change.

Conclusion

Disavowing a link is a natural part of link building process as it allows webmasters greater control on the type of links which are pointing to your domain. Essentially it allows you to own your link profile.

People rarely used Google’s disavow tool until the advent of Penguin and its later versions, but severe penalties from Google forced many webmasters to disavow bad and spammy links which initially lead to these penalties.

You can improve the image of your website in Google’s eye by disavowing spammy links as they may have worked a decade ago, but now paid links, or those from poor-quality sites will do you no good.

Over the years Google has adopted an increasingly harsh approach towards spammy link building tactics and you must avoid bad links at any cost as even a few such links can destroy your hard work of several years by getting your website penalized.

We have tried to cover the disavow process in detail in this article and hope that this will help our readers in disavowing spammy links without much effort.