Google Penguin Update Killed Your Real Estate Website? FIX IT
So by now many of you have discovered that when you search in Google for "Your town + real estate" some of the top search engine results have drastically changed. Many of the most popular and top ranking real estate websites have now dropped a long way down the list of results. If your real estate website was hit, you are probably at your wits end wondering How? and Why? and more importantly, what can you do to fix it.
How? Let me Explain....
This spring Google has been making an amazing number of updates and changes to the rankings. The month of March was the busiest in history. For people who make a living online this has presented huge challenges as just when they think they have things figured out, they change again. The prior update to Google, which was called the Panda Update, was devestating to many. The most recent update, called Penguin, was even worse.
The one thing that these updates focused upon was detecting and devaluating spammy or low quality backlinks to your website. If you have a website that got to the top of the rankings because of lots of really really badly written articles or spammed links in blog comments, you probably got smacked hard. The truth is that those links are really really crappy. We all know it, but it had become almost standard practice to seek them out. In fact, many 'seo gurus' only real strategy for helping your website rank was building thousands of those low quality links. If your site dropped like a rock and you paid someone for SEO work, chances are good that all they did for you was build you tons of those worthless links.
Why? Think about this...
Penguin update searched out those bad links. If you have a large number of links to your website and they all come in using the same anchor text, you will have discovered that Google automatically devalued those links. So if you had 10,000 links that all used the words "Lethbridge real estate" and pointed at your site, you will find that you no longer rank well for those words. You might still rank well for other searches, such as "houses for sale in Lethbridge" or "find a Lethbridge REALTOR", but the ones that dominated your link building efforts will be the ones that got hit.
And, chances are if you engaged in spammy link building, the diversity of your anchor text in your backlinks is probably low. That is what Google assumes, and it is true in the majority of cases.
What Now? Can I Fix Penguin Update damage?
The short answer is YES!
Fixing websites that were hit hard by Google Penquin is not the quickest and easiest thing to do, but it is definitely much easier than starting from scratch! Unforunately, it is not something that most individuals will be able to do on their own, and not something that most "SEO experts" even have a clue how to do. If your website lost ranking because of Penguin, then obviously you need some real help.
http://www.Silverleafmarketing.com has a program and will fix your site for you, or you can scour the internet for resources that teach you to do it yourself. Whatever you do, do not hire the same guy or company that was responsible for your site getting penalized in the first place!
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