Calculating The Risk Of Search Engine Spam
Every year, I donate my time and expertise to a worthy cause. This year, my worthy cause was helping a small company get a Google spam penalty lifted from its website.
The reason I wanted to help? The Google penalty happened over a year ago. The small company cleaned up the spam mess that over three search engine optimization (SEO) firms created for it, including (but not limited to) a network of bad neighborhoods pointing to itswebsite.
Then I thought, What would I do if my website were hit with a spam penalty, and I lost qualified search engine traffic for over a year?
Thats a good question to ask, isnt it?
Professionally, I have witnessed some of the effects of lost search engine traffic due to spam penalties.
Some websites were online publishers. The majority of their online traffic came from search engines. The loss of that traffic resource resulted in decreased advertising revenue. Furthermore, because the only search engine visibility the sites could get wasfrom paid search engine advertising, there was an increase in ad spending.
Both of these items are quantifiable. How much decreased revenue would your site receive from losing all organic search engine traffic? How much would you have to increase your ad spend to maintain qualified search engine traffic? Just these two numbers alone might be enlightening.
I also ask clients about the impact of their online reputation on a scale of 1-10. Of course, this is a somewhat emotional number. Almost every client claims that his or her websites online reputation is very important.
In the case of the web publishers, being known as the premier online resource of topical information is critical to their success.
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Calculating The Risk Of Search Engine Spam