Spotting if links really are the problem
This is crucial and could save you a lot of time and effort. Quite often, SEOs will automatically blame links if they get hit by a penalty. However your first point of call should be to check your site for problems. Particularly as we are living in the Panda era where updates are happening pretty much every month. So have a really good look through your site first before jumping to conclusions about the cause of the penalty. Here are a few posts to help you with this: https://transcriberry.com/data-transcription-service/
If you do all of this and you still feel that links are the problem, you can do some additional checks which are link specific:
- Check for evidence of paid links / link networks (use the steps above)
- Is the penalty keyword type specific? If so, check your link profile for links with this keyword as the anchor text
- Is the penalty page / category specific? For example has a certain section of your site seen a drop or is it the entire site? If its the former, checkout links which are specifically pointing to that section of your site.
I worked with a client last year who had this very problem and the penalty was to a specific section of their site which had a number of (what Google thought) bad links pointing to it.
Also checkout this fast transcription service specifically on link based penalties.
Conclusion
Hopefully this article has helped you understand what I believe to be some of the fundamentals of link building. There are more things (which I’ll post in the future) but I think this is a good start.
The big takeaway really is to question what you read online and test for yourself. Read all you can online but you only get better by doing and becoming more experienced with doing this stuff day in day out.
Read: https://transcriberry.com/how-do-i-become-an-online-transcriptionist/
I promise that if you get hands on with all the stuff above, you’ll be able to spot a paid link a mile away and instinctively know if your link profile isn’t up to par.
As always, I’d love you hear your feedback in the comments.