In SEO, it is always suggested to use only white hat techniques and do not ever move towards Black or Gray hat techniques. Yeah! It’s true, not to gaze up with the flashy techniques that commits quick rankings as they have some cons too.
But to be in the game you should learn these techniques to decide the demarcation between the White, Black and Gray techniques of SEO. Especially for the SEO’s who are new to the technology and are still learning the dynamics of SEO they should first read about these colors. And do not accidentally fall using any of the illegitimate techniques that may lead website to get penalty from the giant.
However, there are few Smart people in the society who try to ditch the Google with some “SMART” work and feel victorious.
Google is very smart search engine and it is getting smarter day by day that catches the invalid activities that is against their system.
“Use Google Way or Go Away”
Not always any website has gotten penalized by using and illegal activities or techniques, but also that end up by getting caught by the system while preaching others on – How to be smart to manipulate the system?
Below case study is quite similar to the situation, I just mentioned above, so read it carefully and learn from it – it totally depends on you whether you’ll use it or not, nor SEOsurfer is motivating you to use these techniques as well.
Last year Google decided to target me, I was hit with several “Pure Spam” penalties, had my Blogger & Adwords accounts banned and saw my SEO Blog go from having thousands of organic visitors a month to being completely deindexed from the SERPs:
I asked a number of the worlds leading penalty experts for their advice, I followed it all, submitted a few reconsideration requests but ultimately, they tanıtım filmi all said I wasn’t going to get past the pearly gates of Google. According to the penalty experts, it wasn’t a penalty like you’d normally see, it was a penalty hitting me because of what I was preaching, and not what I was doing:
At first, I decided to not do anything about the penalty, and I even made a video of how I managed to recover ALL of my traffic within just a few weeks using methods outside of SEO:
This was actually super popular, and it got a ton of engagement, people loved the idea of having an SEO Blog with no SEO traffic.
In this post, I’ll show you how I recovered ALL of my organic traffic, on the exact same website, without ever removing the penalty itself:
In the analytics print screen above, you’ll see the drop off between May & September 2014, where I made 0 effort to re-gain my organic traffic and tanıtım filmi çekimi a drop off towards the end of 2014 in which my site went down for a few days as I moved host. Any other dips are either where my site has been temporarily down for maintenance or security. As you can see, for a site that’s supposed to be deindexed.. It’s still doing some nice organic traffic.
Step 1) The Move
The entire premise of this “Technique” is to move the original domain to an extremely similar domain without Google clocking on to the fact you’ve ever moved in the first place, but still looking as if there’s a new site ranking.
My original domain was: GodOfSEO.Co – I changed this domain, to the very similar sounding: GodOfSEO.Ca – Just one letter difference.
Step 1.1 – Moving the Entire Site
There is a lot of different ways for you to move a WordPress blog to a new host, but in my example, all I did was use the manual method that WPExplorer uses in their tutorial here.
Step 1.2 – Forwarding the old Domain
Now, as the .co domain is penalized, I don’t tanıtım videosu want it to be 301’ing to the new domain, as it’ll be passing the penalty over.
Instead, I go into my cPanel that host’s the old .co domain and look up the “domains” section –
I then go to the “Redirects” section, and fill out a new redirect like so –
Make sure to click the “Wildcard Redirect” check box, this means if someone visits an inner page on .co, they’ll be forwarded to the same URL String as on the .ca site – Example: godofseo.co/example/ would 302 to godofseo.ca/example/
It’s important that you use a 302 and not a 301, as it means your visitors get sent over to the new site, but the penalty Google inflicted on you doesn’t.
You can also use this .htaccess method if you don’t use cPanel – Just change the “301” in the code, to “302”.
Step 1.3 – Double Check Your Site
If you’re using WordPress or any other CMS, a lot of plugins etc.. Will be set to your old domain, just make sure you have moved everything over correctly. For example, I had to change my Disqus settings to the new domain.
If you’re just using a non-CMS site, just coded in HTML & CSS, then you shouldn’t need to make any changes.
Step 2) Re-Gaining Authority
If your site has been gaining links for the past X amount of {years|months|weeks} before it got hit, then you won’t be gaining your positions back if you don’t move over the authority from your old domain to your new one.
There’s several ways I quickly get my authority back, and here’s the methods that I used to get my rankings (and in turn my traffic) back in under 30 days!
Step 2.1 – Replacing Old Links
As I’d done a lot of guest posting, interviews and that kind of thing.. I simply got people I knew had placed links to the old domain and contacted them to update the link. I had a lot of these people on Skype, so I just messaged the ones that I could directly contact – In total, spent about 25 minutes Skype’ing people, and updated over 15 links.
Step 2.2 – New Content on the New Site
As my site was already big, I already had a newsletter in place with thousands of signups and ways to easily gain social shares and links – I went on a content rampage, pushing out 2-3 blog posts every week, gaining me a lot of new social shares and links.
I called this “The viral factor” – As my site was quickly gaining new links and new social shares naturally, Google saw it as a new, viral site and under Google’s freshness algorithm, pushed my site higher up the rankings.
Step 2.3 – Quick Authority
Though I didn’t do this specifically for GoS, as Google more than likely heavily monitor my link profile.. I have done this with other sites to quickly gain trust signals to the site, it’s black hat, it works, but I don’t do any black hat techniques directly to the GoS Blog. This is irrelevant to this case study, but I wanted to try and pack in as much information as possible, and if you replicate this case study, then I advise using this step.
This is simply gaining highly authoritative links, quickly. Which in turn, installs trust into a new domain, or as I like to call it, “the viral ranking factor” – Something not enough black hat’s are looking at.
Step 2.3.1 – Wikipedia Links
For a more in-depth tutorial, you can follow my guide on gaining Wikipedia links here.
If you’re in the SEO world, you will of seen a LOT of people offering Wikipedia link services recently, but here’s how I carry out gaining Wikipedia links in about an hour, and they stick!
First, find your niches category within Wikipedia. I found the “Internet Search Algorithms” category here. I looked through the various pages they had relating to this category, and found this page on a search engine called Zeerch, which had only ever been updated once, and that was a LONG time ago.
I did some research into the topic, a few Google searches led me to find a lot of information about the Zeerch search engine that wasn’t on the Wikipedia page, so I created a blog post on one of my SEO Sites, I properly credited the sources I was referring to, as Wikipedia requires the information not be unique, but have sources & references – This means if a moderator reviews the edit of the page, and goes to check out the link I placed, he or she won’t just find a niche relevant homepage link randomly inserted.. They’ll will find a link that is acceptable to Wikipedia’s standards.
Step 2.3.2 – Buying Authoritah
Some people say you can’t buy authority, well I say that’s a load of crap. I’ve managed to buy links to make my sites authoritative for under $1,000 budget, not per link. I’ll show you a few methods of how you can buy legitimate authority.
BOTW.org – This is the world’s biggest web directory and has an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 63! You can buy a permanent link within your sites category for just $300 permanently or $150 a year, as an example I bought a link for the site I built my Wikipedia link to here – http://botw.org/top/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Promotion/Search_Engine_Optimization_Firms/S/
Though this specific URL has no Backlinks, it has about 45 OBL, which is pretty high for BOTW due to the letter “S” matching the name of the industry I’m targeting.
Charity Backlinks – This is a strategy that was actually covered in the first post in my popular sneaky link building tips series. For example, if you donate on JustGiving (which has a Domain Rating of 76) you can build out a profile page like this, and get a dofollow link back, with as many OBL as you like – In this profiles case, just ONE OBL, making this link extremely powerful.
There’s a number of other sites that will swap a charitable donation for a link, for example I did a quick Google query using operators to search for places that I could find places to donate too, that had a list of contributors and that had the word “seo” on the page –
I quickly found a few that some of my own competitors are using to get links from:
- http://keepass.info/donate.html – URL Rating 27 / Domain Rating 67
- http://winscp.net/eng/donate.php – URL Rating 33 / Domain Rating 69, Minimum $19 Donation for a Link
You can use even more advanced search operators to find sites with lower OBL & even more niche relevance to your business.
Step 2.3.3 – Tier 2, Upgrading Your Authority
I can now go and power up these inner URL pages on big sites with blog network posts, web 2.0s or even high quality spam, though I personally would recommend only using a private blog network to power up your links, though you can use link networks like SAPE as well. This keeps your black hat tactics at your Tier 2, protecting your site from any penalties that may come through as a result of this.
The Results
Right at the start of this article, I showed you this screenshot of my organic traffic:
My organic traffic came back for the first few months, but in October 2014 I had legal issues and couldn’t update or do anything to my blog temporarily for around 10 months. This resulted in my site speed going down due to not updating plugins, and a number of other factors which affected rankings & traffic.
If I’d continued adding new content to my blog, like I am back to now, my organic traffic would of gone up, and it has done so since I got back to blogging, further proving my method:
Conclusion
Yes, before all the white hat folks start screaming the place down that I’m using black hat tactics again.. This is a black hat tactic itself, though realistically it poses little to no risk.
Google actively watch me, and I changed my domain name over a year ago now – Yet I’ve still had NO repercussions what so ever by doing this, and it’s obvious that Google watch me, or they wouldn’t of systematically targeted sites and accounts all at the same time.
So, if your business has been hit by a penalty like this, and you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars (if not more) hiring someone to help your site recover from it, then why not try out my tactic and recover your rankings in under 30 days?
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