SEO services are all geared towards increasing your business’ ranking with search engines. Essentially, your online presence is being optimized to gain the most possible credibility with search engine algorithms (whose requirements and qualifications are constantly changing!) Credibility is practically a currency when it comes to your online presence, and as you might expect, there are entities out there working to try to steal it from you! First, we will cover a very effective and established SEO strategy: backlinking. A backlink describes when a website features a link to another website for one reason or another. Essentially, a backlink tells search engines that other websites find your website valuable to them. The more websites that are linking to your own website, the more proof search engines have that your website is active and worth looking at. This means it will increase your site’s ranking, bringing it closer to the top of the results provided to users. To put it plainly, the greater amount of backlinks to your site, the higher your site ranking grows, and the larger your search visibility becomes. So, how could someone go about interrupting this exchange of value to get something for themselves, you ask? Here are a couple of strategies designed to capitalize on your hard-earned reputation with consequences that could leave your credibility stranded:

1. Link Farming

Search engines have become very keen on inauthentic methods being used to obtain credibility over the years. This works to keep their own reputation in the green, since people using the search engines want relevant results and will likely stop searching if the information they receive is useless or off base. A link farm refers to a website or collection of websites that were created only to increase a secondary website’s page rank. Not intending to offer quality content, a link farm site links to a secondary website from many different pages within its own site, hence the name link farm. Naturally, Google prohibits this kind of action for generating credibility with their search engine. This can lead to a deindexing of the site or sites and a reduction in any rank that was achieved. This can also mean penalties for any other sites associated with this practice (yes, this means the websites that are unknowingly being linked to!). 2. Private Blog Networks A little more complex than a link farm, a Private Blog Network branches out into many different websites. These sites build the links that generate authority and pass that authority to a single site designed to receive the benefit. They can also link back to one another to spread the authority, however, either way, search engines also refuse this practice as legitimate. Some media sites are structured out through multiple websites, and indeed link back to one another, but have separate link profiles and a purpose that sets them apart as credible. This is not the case with a PBN. Fortunately, with a professional online reputation management service like us here at Online Capital Group, you can know when there is a strategy being put to use to gain your credibility. Our tools and SEO services detect shady business being done with your name and give us the ability to correct it. We can also boost your reputation using credible methods that search engines reward highly. Give us a call today at (904) 600-3600 or visit our website to learn more today.