Posts by Gemma

Thousands of websites get hacked everyday; from big corporate sites right down to personal web blogs. It is a massive problem, but an even bigger issue can be in recognising that your site has been hacked. All too often websites can dramatically drop in rankings or slip out of Google’s index altogether. One of the common reasons for this is due to the website being hacked, where spammy content is presented to the search engines, and consequently your site is penalised.

Some hacks are very clever and to look at the site you would not recognise that anything was wrong. This is typically because the spammy content being generated on your site by the hack is hidden and can only be viewed in the source code (which is what the search engines crawl).

To help with this problem Google have now announced that they will be providing “Message Center Notifications” to inform you of any hacking or abuse to your site. These messages will be provided through Google Webmaster Tools and the type of issues you will be notified of are:

• Spammy content being generated by the site
• Abused or spammy forum pages
• Any suspected hacking issues

Obviously you cannot resolve a hacking issue if you don’t realise that your site has one in the first place, so this additional content provided by Google Webmaster Tools is a great way for website owners to monitor their site and quickly action and resolve any issues found on their site.

Gemma Neesham
Project Manager

Links make the internet world go round and are a major part of any Search Engine Optimisation campaign. The number of links pointing to a site will typically increase gradually over time, and if this was plotted on a line graph you would generally see something like that shown below:

This example shows a very natural progression over the year. Link spikes, however, would look very different. So what is a link spike? Well, it is exactly what the name suggests; a large increase in the number of backlinks over a short period of time, which would be represented by a spike on a line graph as shown in the example below:

Link spikes draw the search engines attention to your site which can often serve as a red flag if the cause of the link spike is seen to be unnatural.

An unnatural link spike would occur, for instance, where a site which might sell grass seeds, suddenly sees a big increase in its backlinks over a relatively short period of time. This link spike will typically not be representative of current search trends as I’m sure that grass seeds are not the hot topic for gossip in today’s press! If a site is seen to have an unnatural link spike it can be penalised by the search engines resulting in a drop in rankings or even worse, a ban from the search engine’s index.

Something more topical however, such as the death of Michael Jackson in June last year, would have caused a massive link spike for those sites which broke the news. This will have corresponded to search trends for Michael Jackson and will therefore have been seen as natural. This would have a positive effect on the site and help boost its rankings.

Link spikes, or not, as long as the links to your site appear as natural to the search engines then your SEO campaign can progress effectively.

Gemma Neesham
Project Manager