80% of Web Site Owners are Wrong about SEO and Link Building

We receive thousands of phone calls and emails every year, about SEO and Link Building. Eighty percent or more of the people contacting us have terribly wrong ideas about what works and what is important for outstanding results in the major search engines. Below are details, samples, and history of people contacting us with their requirements. Hopefully, you will find useful SEO information that will help your company grow and increase your profits.

Many people phone our company saying, " I need low cost SEO, low quality backlinks, and tons of cheap links. "

I respond, "Why?".... They say, "I want to out rank my competitors."
They think it is a pure numbers game. All links are equal and you get more and you win.

They want fast outstanding results, they want to be #1 for competitive keyword phrases in 1-5 months.

I reply,  "You do not understand how search engine optimization works, you need to look at this as a long term investment that you will be making as long as you are in business.  Good ranking results take at least 6-12 months to achieve.  Highly competitive keywords may take several years of SEO work and high quality merit based link building.  Then you have to maintain all this work forever or you will lose the top rankings you worked so hard to achieve.  Please remember your competitors are also working hard on their SEO and want to outrank you."

More on Link Building
Someone with fewer backlinks , e.g. Site A has 300 high quality natural embedded text links from topic related authority sites can out rank Site B with 20,000 low quality text links. Google now gives thousands of web site owners penalties for these low quality backlinks.
Unfortunately Google also has penalized many websites unfairly. 
Your competitors can have your web site sabotaged via black hat SEO experts.

This includes all the webmasters that do article submission SPAM (duplicate content SPAM), excessive and only low quality link exchanges, these do not work because Google considers that all junk and SPAM. E.g. A PR0 site exchanging links with other PR0 sites, to Google this is just junk to junk SPAMMY stupid SEO methods.
Please watch this video by Matt Cutts of Google:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chuhSmwsL7s

Google turned Internet business owners on their heads in 2013, and really turned the screws on low quality SEO businesses, however they also increased the importance of sites that have higher editorial standards.
Also it is more important than ever to keep high quality long (many years) aged backlinks. If you lose our well-aged backlinks Google can really punish you and drop your rankings significantly and even worse you cannot replace these long aged backlinks, and you have to start all over again from the beginning.

The following article and video has useful information that I agree with about 85%.  I have ways of enhancing what this gentleman states in his outstanding video:
http://moz.com/blog/high-value-tactics-futureproof-link-building-whiteboard-friday

Cyrus Shepard - I feel your pain! It's difficult to convince inexperienced clients to invest in high value, future-proof link building - especially when they are spammed everyday with emails promising top 10 rankings for $49/month.

I have a tendency to give clients/prospects/employees/family the keen truth.  I know and fully understand this about myself and I accept who I am.
So below is some more truth about SEO.

Search engine optimization is not something you can turn on and off without Google not liking it.

Google sees all these SEO improvements we have done for you and when they see this stopping and going away Google marks your site as a "Devious website" that Google should not trust (suspicious unnatural activities) , and may filter and penalize you.
Then website owners hire a new SEO Company and this makes it even worse.  E.g. Google sees: up, down, up, down ... all these changes, unnatural activities, and lack of stability is detected by Google.  This is not our fault, as we cannot continue doing work for you for free.  This is a bad consequence of not staying with SEO long term.  Web site owners should choose one SEO Company and stay with them for many years to achieve the best results.

We see this over and over again and we warn clients that they are harming themselves with Google perhaps long term if they do not have a long term commitment to SEO .

Once Google marks your web site as a "Devious website" it is very difficult to recover, some web site owners never recover from this mistake of thinking you can turn SEO on and off without any negative consequences.

I have many people who phone me 1-2 years after I talk with them and say:

"Tom I wish I would have listened and followed your advice, and since I did not follow your SEO advice I have had terrible results."

Based on my results I am one of the top SEO experts in the world. I am also modest (lol), my resume is below.

http://www.htpcompany.com/gototom_tom_forrest.htm

It is funny to me that people hire us as SEO experts and then do not follow our advice. I feel like saying to them, why did you hire our company if you already know more about Search Engine Optimization than we do?
I will not even respect any other SEO expert unless they can prove to me that they have achieved top rankings for many years for tough competitive keyword phrases.  I often tell people that claim they are SEO experts to show me proof of their outstanding results.  Most people have no proof of any top ranking results on Google.

One of the most important reasons I have had such outstanding long term success for our clients is that I am a long term thinker.  We follow all Google guidelines and have had the same merit based backlinks in place for our clients for over ten years.  Google loves this.

SEO-Process-Overview

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process is an ongoing continuing process that we perform every day for our clients. It is possible to become very successful with top natural/organic SEO rankings, as most (68% to 90%) searchers skip the paid ads. This large range is highly keyword dependent, e.g. if someone is searching for "buy refrigerator" vs. "what is George Washington's birthday". People searching to buy a new refrigerator have a higher probability of clicking on a paid Google Ad, then someone searching for George Washington's birthday.
The other major benefit of natural or organic #1 rankings is you do not have to pay per click.  Google Adwords can run as high as $182+ per click for highly competitive keyword phrases.
It is very important to stay with SEO methodologies long term in order to achieve the desired results.  If you stop this process your web traffic and rankings will drop, and it may be difficult to recover previous top rankings.
Google is very complex and secret so no one can claim to be 100% accurate as to why Google makes the decisions it does.  However we do know that Google has many different types of penalties some of which are manual and some of which are automated via advanced software algorithms.
The quality of your backlinks and the longer your backlinks are aged, make up major factors in the Google software ranking algorithms.  Please remember if you lose important authoritative backlinks, then you must start the aging process over from the starting line.  Besides losing PageRank, this also brings suspicion from Google, and you do not want that to happen.  Google detects all these changes looking for unnatural suspicious activities.

I have been doing some new testing on Google.  The changes made to a web page are indexed and applied to Google search results days in advance of what Google shows when you use the "show Google cache command".  So the freshest indexed data is first applied to Google search results, then days later Google updates what they show as cached.  This makes sense as it is more important to Google to use the freshly indexed data then to report and update the data Google has stored about a web page.  For example the newest article I have written in this blog is showing up in the Google search results five days ago.  However when I look at the Google cache for this blog, it still does not show that Google even knows about the newest article.

The following are two good videos from Matt Cutts of Google that I suggest you watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGQRMkiIA2U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-UR7NETxrk

list-of-directory-submission-sites-that-google-likes

List of Directory Submission Sites.
List of Directories that Google Likes and that Follow Google Guidelines.

Over the last few years Google has cracked down on Web Directories that violate Google guidelines.

So I decided I should give people a list of Internet Directories that Google thinks are valid and that if you obtained a listing from these Directories it would help you with direct traffic generation and also as a "good" backlink as far as Google is concerned.

1.     http://www.Clasione.com
2.     http://vlib.org
3.     http://www.AllBusinessNow.com
4.     http://www.ipl.org
5.     http://www.seekon.info
6.     http://dir.yahoo.com
7.     http://www.JoeAnt.com
8.     http://www.dmoz.org
9.     http://botw.org
10.   http://www.SearchPure.org
11.   http://MedicalHealthSites.com
12.   http://www.HealthFitnessNutrition.org
13.   http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus
14.   http://www.pickNbuy.com

Comments from Matt Cutts of Google on what to consider when submitting to a Directory.

When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls?
If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory?
Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee?
For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url.
Matt Cutts, Google

Why webmasters should be very angry at Google

The following is an example of "free services" you should stay away from if you do not want to be penalized by Google.  These low quality free directories are considered spam by Google.
http://freedirectory-list.blurpalicious.com/

Unfortunately there are many other articles regarding Directories that are highly ranked by Google that give bad SEO advice which may cause you to be penalized by Google.  It seems odd to me that Google would not do more to take these articles with incorrect poor SEO Directory information out of Google.
I even emailed the CEO of HubSpot that one or more of their blog articles give terrible SEO advice about Directories.

* Interesting Yelp article to read.

Why Website Owners Should be Very Angry at Google

Google has caused a huge problem by creating a new industry called Negative SEO.
Most web site owners do not even know what a good backlink is, or what a bad backlink is, they have no idea whatsoever.  This is made even worse by the fact that Google is not very good at deciding what a natural link is and what is an unnatural link.  Google will penalize a website and not even tell web site owners which backlinks they do not like, Google asks the web site owner to guess.  Hello Google ... your policy is ridiculous and is just making the situation worse.
Frankly, we see Google make many mistakes penalizing innocent web sites and letting terrible spam web sites go free and clear.  Today Matt Cutts put out a video about how obvious most paid links are, so why can't Google do a better job then?  I could email Google all day long with obvious paid links and Google misses many thousands of them, yet they need to go and penalize innocent sites.  Perhaps if Matt could clone himself Google would do better, or better yet Dr. Cutts how about firing any Google employee that penalizes an innocent website?  This seems fair to me, Google's incompetent employee ruins an innocent website owner's life and you terminate that employee, you know an eye for and an eye.

Now many website owners are afraid to give out any links as they think Google will make a mistake and unfairly penalize them, or they are emailing other web site owners that gave them a merit based natural backlink that Google likes asking to have it removed.
This is very frustrating to the few people like me that really understand what is happening.  Most people are clueless and so confused by Google they do not know what to do.

I do not understand why website owners are not so angry at Google that they are not trying to start some protest activities against Google.

I have talked and emailed with many website owners who are victims of SEO Sabotage. Please understand that this can happen to anyone, all that has to occur is a competitor of yours hires a company like this:

http://www.negativeseo.biz

Furthermore Google is not doing anything to stop the evil spammers they should be going after, please click and read these links:

http://www.phplinkdirectory.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47171

http://www.phplinkdirectory.com/Google_PageRank_Hacked_by_Directory_Network.php

Please read this interesting screen shot below:
 

This is an outstanding article written by a top SEO expert:
http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/08/google-rank-modifying-spammers-patent/


What to do if Google Penalizes your Website?

1. Did you receive a message like below from Google?

 2.  If yes you did receive a message like above from Google, first you should try to ascertain if one or more of your competitors sabotaged your website.
If you suspect this I suggest you contact us to help you remove the penalty as it is unlikely you will be able to do this without experienced professional help.
We have successfully had Google remove penalties for several cases involving SEO sabotage so far, of course Google will not admit this is even possible (SEO Sabotage), however if you show the right evidence and write to the correct contacts at Google they will eventually remove the penalty without admitting any Google mistake.
Most webmasters and site owners do not realize how many mistakes Google makes and unfortunately it is Google's policy to never admit their mistakes and defects.
In an effort to try to show some fairness to Google, I have seen many more cases where ignorant website owners have hired the wrong SEO company to do link building for them, and this is what caused the Google penalty.

3.  The road to recovery?
It may be easier to just start a new website, however if you want to try to have Google remove your penalty please understand that the "Google Search Quality Team" can be incompetent and make mistakes penalizing innocent sites or penalize websites that have been a victim of SEO sabotage.  It seems to me that the Google Search Quality Team is poorly and inconsistently trained and if they make a mistake there is no formal appeal process, you are just screwed over with no real options.  So this is why you see so many innocent websites being penalized and many thousands of evil spam sites go unpunished by Google.
You will receive a wide range of answers from the Google Search Quality Team and it will take many months in some cases years to have a penalty removed even if it is a Google mistake.  The worst case I have seen is Google taking 2.5 years to take a penalty off an innocent website.
Yes I will show you the site:
http://www.ichatdev.com
This site never did anything wrong and the site owner refused to play games and kiss Google's ass when this was a Google mistake.  So after 2.5 years and zero changes to the site Google finally just took the penalty off themselves.  Nice work Google, 2.5 years to fix your mistake that you would never even admit.  If the site deserved a penalty in the first place why did Google finally take the penalty off?
A few years ago I started this blog on Blogger which Google owns, and there is a specific reason I did that.  Because I was afraid Google would not like hearing the truth from me and would penalize me.  Sure enough one of the "Google Search Quality Team" penalized my freedom of speech and took my article completely out of Google, GONE, then I complained to Matt Cutt's and he made them put it back into Google.  I have several witnesses, of course nothing was ever said and it was just fixed with no apology or anything.  It is a Google policy not to penalize for not liking articles that criticize Google; however you can not trust that all Google employees will do the right thing.  Furthermore as you can see I still will only write articles that criticize Google on this site, which Google owns. 

4.  Playing the silly Google Disavow game.  Yes you will need to do this, and it is totally ridiculous as as 90% of website owners do not even know a good link from a bad link.  So most people disavow many good links that Google likes and that are helping them in the search results.

5.  Then you need to play the Google Reconsideration Request game, and most of the time no matter what you do Google will write you via Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and say:
"We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines."  Google just does this to make the whole process more difficult for you and if you are a victim of SEO sabotage this just adds insult to injury.
After 1-5 rounds of this silly stupid game Google will remove the penalty.

Below is what a positive penalty removal looks like from Google.  Meaning after you complete the massive amount of work that Google is requiring and submit one or more Reconsideration Requests.

Below is a message sent out by Google.  This means Google is taking the penalty off of your web site. Even this message below is defective, the first time I saw it I did not even know what they meant.
Google are you being obtuse?

1. 

annoyingly insensitive or slow to understand.

"he wondered if Google was being deliberately obtuse"

I am supportive of the notion that Google should be very tough on really evil spammers, the problem is Google makes too many mistakes and then they end up tormenting innocent people, and as you can see by reading above Google is not doing a very good job of catching the really bad guys they should be focused on.

Article regarding Google Penalities and What to Do

Please click here to send comments to Tom Forrest, and let me know if it is okay to publish your comments, which I may or may not do. 

Google SEO Sabotage

By: Tom Forrest
Email: Tom.Forrest@HTPcompany.com

Hello Google Management,  (this is a copy of an email I sent to Google)

Google has created a new industry “SEO Sabotage”, I have seen several cases of this and it is easy to do.  You can now easily have your competitors penalized by Google and your competitors can also easily have you penalized by using bad link building methods and procedures that Google does not like.

This article is one of many real life examples.

http://blog.kevinfream.com/2012/09/01/seo-sabotage
Another good SEO Sabotage article to read.  
http://www.seobook.com/negative-seo
The author (Aaron Wall) is one of the best SEO experts in the world.  Many people are SEO pretenders and do not know what they are talking about.
I just found another good SEO Sabotage example and even though I do not know the author, when I read his article I can tell that he is an excellent SEO expert.
http://www.itstheroi.com/google/google-fail-victim-of-negative-seo-still-suffering 

This is Google's latest Disavow information:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html

This SEO Sabotage problem is not going away, it is becoming huge and many people are very angry at Google because of this terrible new Google policy that started in 2012.
Please look at what this web site is selling:
http://www.negativeseo.biz

It is common sense… webmasters can control who they link to, they can Not control who links to them.  There is no way around this basic fact and now it is leaking out and many people email my company asking if we can sabotage their competitors with “Bad Backlinks” that Google does not like.

Furthermore you are penalizing way too many innocent webmasters.

Just Google “Google SEO Sabotage”  there are many interesting stories to see.

I am just trying to help Google. This is the Worst problem Google has created in over five years.
I own Google stock, and as a long term shareholder I am very unhappy and many people knowledgeable about SEO are very unhappy and upset with Google over this ridiculous policy of penalizing web sites for something out of their control, and now the huge increase of SEO sabotage Google has caused.

Thank you in advance for your consideration on this issue.

HTP Company 5 Star Rating

HTP Company

 based on 15 reviews.

This company's business is Search Engine Optimization, Internet Advertising and Consulting Services.

Category:		Internet Search Engine Optimization Services
Address:		30961 Agoura Rd, Suite 215 Westlake Village, CA 91361 (800) 213-8530
Web Site:		http://www.htpcompany.com

Customer Reviews & Ratings

Wes R.       In summer of 2010 I began speaking with HTP Company regarding aSEO campaign. For years our website has struggled to gain a footing on search engines, partly due to a site design flaw and partly due to another SEO company's failure to live up to goals. I was interested to try HTP Company and found many great reviews of their service online. I can report that HTP Company was able to fix the design flaw in our site as well as create a fantastic SEO campaign to help us grow our business.  In a few months our site is now showing up near the top on all major search engines for our keywords. I would definitely recommend hiring HTP Company as they are experts in their field and easy to work with. Posted on 12/20/2012

Mike Georgia       The ranking results from HTP Company are outstanding.  HTP is one of the few company's that I have hired that can handle clients issues properly. They seem to know who I am when I phone them, and they are friendly with me. They understand that their business is technicial and doesn't lend it self to personal relationships, HTP Company really combats that feeling by always knowing who I am and handling any issues in a personal manner, and quickly.  » Bookmark  |  » Send a Message  |  Posted on 12/13/2012 Was this review...? Useful (1) Funny (0) Flag this Review

Everyone at HTP Company has been professional and very knowledgeable. Our website traffic has dramatically and steadily increased since we started working with HTP. I would highly recommend them to any business for SEO. Mich Keller V.P. Sales & Marketing MateStone International, Inc. Posted on 12/2/2012 Useful (2) Funny (0)