Several months ago we released an all new feature called “Outbound Link Checking.”
You can read that post here: http://www.mastersitemanager.com/882/seo-monitor-outbound-link-tracking/
Now when we released this feature we strongly suggested how important this little number could be. Not know how many outbound links your site has is a disaster waiting to happen. And why paying attention to the Outbound Link Tracking feature of our SEO monitoring software is so important.
In a nutshell – If you see the number of outbound links on your site jump dramatically, (upwards of 200-300 over night) check the source code of your site ASAP!
It’s likely that a hacker has managed to get in and plant links to his porno / casino / sex drugs web sites.
What happens in cases like this is that at first Google will depress your rankings because your site is linking to “Bad Neighborhoods”.
Then after a period of time (Google won’t say how much – but we are thinking 60-90 days based on what we’ve seen) if you don’t correct the issue, Google will just de-index your site altogether. Ouch!
Here’s an example how bad the problem is with blogs like Word Press.
If this happens to you, it is correctable but it’s a huge pain in the you know what as you’ll have to go in an modify the WP database table. Restoring the blog/site from a backup won’t fix the problem in most cases.
But we found a very good explanation on how to clean your blog “IF” you’ve been hacked. Here’s another great WP hack prevention resource.
Now why would I say your account has been hacked? Good question…. The answer will surprise you.
We recently did a maintenance survey of the sites using MasterSiteManager.com for their SEO rank tracking and monitoring. And what we found was shocking even to us!
Almost 1 in 50 client sites that we monitor on MasterSiteManager shows that they have over 200 outbound links on them (in other words – they got hacked). 1 in 50! Wow!
But that’s also a pretty good indication of how wide spread and prevalent the issue is on blogs all over.
So I urge you to login in to your MasterSiteManager account right now and check the outbound links for each of your sites. After all, you can’t fix a problem you don’t know you have.
The KEY to SEO Success
If you are doing true SEO, then you are purposely targeting specific keywords and keyword phrases that you have tested and that you know convert.
The fact that no body wants to admit is this:
You can not effectively do SEO on more then 3-10 keywords or phrases at once.
If you are trying to, then you are really hurting your bottom line because it will take you forever to achieve the rankings you are looking for.
Having said that, sure you could have an entire team in the Philippines doing blog spam for you in order to try to get back links for dozens of keywords at once, but that’s just sloppy.
Honestly, the formula for SEO success is to focus on 3-5 keywords CONVERTING keywords or phrases ONLY at a time.
Once you achieve your desired rank (that should be #1 of course) then and only then should you start to focus on other keywords.
I am continually amazed when I see people trying to do SEO on dozens of keywords/phrases at once. This sort of SEO strategy will cause you to lose in the market place – every single time.
Because your competitors who understand the value of focus and targeting will start to capture the top spots for each of your chosen keywords/phrases one by one.
At the end of six months, you’ll be sitting there scratching your head wondering what happened, and where all your traffic went!
And the worse part is that you’ll have a devil of a time at that point playing catch up, and most likely you won’t ever catch up and here’s why.
Let’s say you spent the next 90 days trying to rank for 100 keyword or keyword phrases and you managed during this time to get 1000 new back links.
Not bad right? That’s 1,000 new links to your site! Wow! That’s sure to pump up your back link profile and give you some ranking juice, right!?
Well, not so fast. Yes, you did get 1,000 new back links, and that will help your domain gain some new authority overall, but because your efforts were divided between 100 different KWPs, you only managed to get 10 new anchor text back links per keyword phrase.
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