A couple of weeks back my blog homepage was not appearing in Google search results for primarily branded keywords like “All Tech Buzz” “Alltechbuzz” or even “Alltechbuzz.net”.
This was quite shocking, and I was astonished to see such thing happening. Other than this everything was quite normal. I didn’t find any notification on Google Webmaster nor my traffic decreased. This has raised several questions in my mind like.
Negative SEO:
Intentionally or Unintentionally, I have built quite a good number of haters online, and these people help me in building backlinks since the time I stopped working on it. I don’t build link anymore, but various other people do link building for my sites to drop my rankings.
To be very honest negative SEO doesn’t hurt your rankings in most of the cases. But there are cases when negative SEO affects your blog/website. So, you must keep an eye on the rankings and links that are pointing to your website. I do use premium tools to monitor my backlinks and rankings. I also keep on disavowing the links that I feel are suspicious and irrelevant. I do this once for every two months. But after investigating more into the issue, I found that it was not negative SEO that has lead to deindexing of the homepage.
What was the root cause?
After I had dug deep into my backlinks and Google Webmasters link report, I found that many sites were linking to my homepage with the anchor text “All Tech Buzz”. More than a year back I have designed a couple of templates especially the popular ATB Blogger Template, which has got quite a good response from Bloggers and was used by many newbies/experts as it was having many built-in features with easy editing feasibility.
After all the major Google Updates in the past two years, the way Google looks at backlinks has completely changed. Links are good but too many of them is bad. So, I had too many of them which had a negative impact.
As soon as I noticed the issue, I collected all the websites that are pointing to my homepage with footer link credits. I placed them in a text file and disavowed them. In some cases, I directly contacted the webmaster to remove it and some were kind to do the same. If you want to know more about Disavowing links, then you should check out my article on Negative SEO.
Additionally:
As I didn’t have any notification on Google Webmaster, there was no chance of re-appeal. That means there was no manual action and it was entirely algorithmic.
I also decided to remove site-wide links that were pointing to my other websites from the homepage of All Tech Buzz as a precaution.
Increased the frequency of Articles for a better indexing.
Results:
Within no time, the homepage started popping up on Google Search results for the branded keywords like “All Tech Buzz” , “Alltechbuzz” etc. This is probably my best new year gift and this again proved that if you are not following any unethical ways to build your website/blog then the chances of you getting penalised by Google either manual or algorithmic is probably “0”. You can see the blog showing up clearly in search results below.
Let me know if you have any similar experience in your comments below. You can also directly hit me a mail to admin@alltechmedia.org if you need any help in SEO.
