Assessing Link Risks: Link Risk Management is Crucial for Businesses of All Sizes

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Link Risks: Safeguarding, defending, and growing your brand or business are at the heart of our strategy to avoid Google penalties. Since September 2016, the risk of devaluation for a website, an entire domain, specific folders, or content for a particular keyword has significantly increased. A penalty or "visibility loss" can happen at any time.

 

Google refers to this as the Realtime Algorithm or Penguin 4.0.

 

Examples of Negative SEO demonstrate that this is a lucrative business for Black Hat SEOs, as they can quickly topple a brand for its most important keywords.

 

The importance of strategic link risk management for businesses of all sizes is highlighted by the following examples.

Penalty by the Google Penguin Algorithm

The visibility drop with the Google Penguin Update is clearly noticeable. The domain never fully recovered:

 

The example above demonstrates how poor-quality links can threaten a company's visibility – and ultimately put jobs at risk.

 

The domain baby-markt.de never fully recovered either. In the fall of 2015, the company completely deprecated the old domain and has since been operating with the new domain babymarkt.de, achieving significantly improved visibility:

 

At Baby-Markt, the only option left to improve visibility was to switch to a new domain. Link spam issues had a massive impact here.

Even Small Businesses Suffer from Bad Links

Our case study on link spam for small businesses demonstrates the importance of Link Risk Management even for small and medium-sized enterprises.

 

A copy shop in Stuttgart has a handful of regular customers and plenty of clients who visit whenever they need services: printing and binding theses, birthday cards, photocopies, and so on. How do these customers find the business? They search on Google for a copy shop in their area. Therefore, it is crucial to be found on Google Maps and in Google’s local search results when queries like “Copyshop Stuttgart”, “photocopies”, “photocopies in Stuttgart” and other very local searches on Google.de and Google.de (Stuttgart) are made.

 

If suddenly the Google search results point to a website in Ukraine with sweepstakes and Google penalties cause the copy shop’s website to disappear, the impact on the small business is dramatic: no phone calls, no email inquiries, and in the worst case, even regular customers can't find the shop.

 

Find out how we saved the business here.

How Link Risk Management Protects You

With the real-time Google update, there are several scenarios that not only involve old link sins but also stem from economic crime (CyberCrime). Since links can be placed on your websites by anyone at any time, it is practically impossible to keep an overview of your link profile without regular analysis.

  • You receive backlinks from a site that has since been penalized by Google. The previously good links are now considered bad links and can massively threaten your position on Google.
  • A competitor places bad links on important areas of your website. Your site plummets in search results or does not move forward despite optimization – you don’t notice because you are unaware of the links. The bad links ensure that an important section of your offerings is no longer found on Google.
  • A competitor over-optimizes your key services. They place a massive number of links to a keyword group that is important to you. Your pages drop in ranking despite on-page optimization. Since not the entire domain is penalized by Google Penguin, but only individual keywords, you don’t notice.

With Link Risk Management from SEYBOLD, you are prepared.