I happen to know that their SEO company have a very professional looking website and seem, at first glance, to be a reputable company; that is until you search for “<company name> complaints”. In fact, I didn’t actually search for that term – it simply came up as a suggestion in Google so clearly plenty of other people are searching for it even though the company is working hard to suppress the complaints with positive press.

But all of this got me thinking more about how many large companies there are who actually don’t know what their link profile looks like and, worse, maybe don’t undestand what their SEO’s are doing to improve their rankings. I always provide my clients with a list of places where links are being generated on a monthly basis and if this had happened for the banned website they would probably have seen a suspicious pattern emerging.

I was discussing the banned website with a marketing exec from a different industry but from a company comparable in size and reputation to the company banned/penalised by Google and she “felt sure” their SEO company were not engaging in any un-ethical SEO tactics because they are a reputable company. But so, apparently, were the SEOs for the banned site and she had no evidence to back up her assumptions.

At the other end of the scale from a mega 31,000 links campaign, I have also this week been looking at a much smaller company Tetbury Garden Services who only had their brand new website go live a couple of weeks ago but already they are on page one for their most preferred search term “tetbury garden services” – and, guess what? They only have 3 links! I know that the search term is not very competitive and that the website is extremely well optimised so got off to a better start than many large expensive websites that focus purely on design and only consider SEO when they realise they have very few visitors, but this is still a success story for a small local company.

Just take a look at the leap in rankings over a fews days below…

If you remember the days when the number of links were all that mattered for high Google rankings this is a perfect example of what white hat SEOs have been saying for several years – it is not the quantity of links that is important but the quality. I will issue the proviso that quantity does also matter if, for instance, competitors have lots of good quality links but small website owners everywhere take heart that just a few good links can get you to Page 1 of Google for certain keywords.

There are plenty of factors that contribute to a site being high-quality – some of them are:

• Google Page Rank (even though this can be out of date)
• Page Authority / Domain Authority (from Moz)
• Number of incoming links
• Number of outgoing links
• Total number of links
• Alexa Traffic Rank
• Domain Age

And these are all well-worth checking – this can be done manually (if you are a masochist) but is quicker and easier to do with one of the many useful SEO tools out there such as SEO Spyglass. But even checking these will not tell you the whole story.

Statistics are no substitute for actually taking a good look at the site and making a human assessment of it. SEO is, after all, simply a form of marketing and if you were involved in traditional marketing or advertising wouldn’t you want to check out any magazine or other publication that you were thinking of advertising in. Even if you could have an ad, review, recommendation or content included for free you would still want to know that the publication was reputable and would not damage a client’s reputation. For paid ads it would be even more important to know exactly what type of magazine the advert was appearing in. So it shouldn’t be any different on the internet, but somehow internet marketing has evolved so far using a very different approach.

Maybe because SEO is still a relatively new field, some clients (and many of these are large companies) only seem interested in their results and not in the long term effect on their reputation. Maybe, because not all clients understand SEO, they are not interested in the details. But if a website has links from predominantly low-quality directories then this will eventually lead to down-valuing of those links and a consequent fall in rankings. A website may not be actually penalised by the search engines as such but the effect of the down-grading of a majority of links will have an equivalent effect.

So, whether you are doing SEO for your own company or for a client, always check out any site from which you plan to obtain a link and make sure it is high-quality. Don’t rely only on the statistics you can obtain from an SEO tool and definitely don’t use only Page Rank as the deciding factor. Instead review potential sites for the quality of the writing, design, frequency of updates, inter-action with others on social media etc.

Another very quick way of determining site quality is to search for a standard term and then check the validity of the results:

• In business directories check whether the results of your search are accurate, relevant and don’t contain duplicates

• In article directories read a few articles in different categories and check whether they are well-written and actually tell you something of value

• On blogs check out the quality of the writing and also how frequently the blog is updated.

And remember that the harder it is to get a directory listing, article inclusion, or a guest blog posted, the more likely it is that the quality of the site is high and any link obtained will be worth the effort.

By Michelle Symonds

Maybe 2012 will be the year when Google finally do penalise sites with masses of poor-quality links but I’m not holding my breath…

Instead I’m just doing what I always do – steadily and consistently building high-quality links for my clients – putting in the effort to write really good and useful content and seeking out opportunities for guest writing. I firmly believe that this is the best long-term strategy and with some additional focus this year on a variety of content type: videos, podcasts and more images (of course, with their alt tags properly optimised) and focussing on partial keyword matches in my anchor text I expect to continue the great ranking improvements we have all seen over the past year.

I even plan to start doing some of my own videos and getting my own website up to scratch, but don’t hold your breath for that…

By Michelle Symonds