Although the mobile-friendly update wasn’t the shakeup that most of us expected, I think that this was Google’s way of foreshadowing the shape of things to come. That being said, if you still haven’t made your site mobile-friendly, I would highly recommend making it a top priority.
In case you missed it, Google announced back in February that they plan to release a major algorithm update on Tuesday, April 21st. According to Google, the update will expand their use of mobile friendliness as a ranking signal and will be the most significant update they’ve ever released. To put things into perspective, Google Webmaster Trends analyst Zineb Ait Bahajji was quoted at SMX Munich, saying that the upcoming update would be a bigger upset than Panda and Penguin.
Link spam has been around for about as long as Google has been using links as a ranking signal. In the early days of Google, black hat SEOs would use blog comments to pass high PR links back to their sites. Then in 2005, Google introduced the “NoFollow” attribute. Any link tagged with a “NoFollow” would be essentially invisible to search engines. The link was still active, but the attribute would make it so the link juice didn’t flow from one site to another.
Back in 2012, Google rolled out the now infamous Penguin update, which targeted sites that were using manipulative link building tactics to boost search engine rankings. Prior to the Penguin update, link building was relatively easy to game. SEOs used a combination of paid links, link networks, guest blogging, broken link building, press releases and blog networks to push their sites to the top of search results. However since then, many SEOs have put link building on a back burner to avoid potential penalties.
Over the years Google’s stance shifted from “it’s not possible” to “it’s possible and we’re doing the best we can to prevent it.” So what does this mean for SEOs and business owners? Should we be worried? Is there anything we can do to safeguard our sites? The purpose of this article is to delve into the different types of negative SEO (that we know about) and discuss how to protect your site from a potential attack.
