Your website better be link worthy if you’re looking to rank well in the search engines.
Link worthy status is vitally important to any successful SEO campaign and especially for ranking longevity. This is for a few different reasons, but we’ll dive into the main one.
Why does this top the list?
Simple, a Google manual penalty has the ability to completely wipe out revenue for either you, or your client – it’s just not worth it.
The image above is the standard notification given for a manual penalty. Fortunately, myself nor any of our clients have ever received one. (Scratch that) For good reason, we nor any of our clients have ever received one. Why? Among other quality practices and industry leading strategies, we are all most definitely link worthy.
So, how do you get one? What does it take for someone at Google to manually review your webpage and slap you with a manual penalty?
There are many reasons (black hat) a webpage will get flagged for a Google manual review. However, since we don’t practice any of those strategies, we will talk about the one flag that we are concerned about the most: Free traffic threshold
Free Traffic Threshold: When a webpage hits a certain threshold of free traffic (NON PPC) from Google, this will sometimes result in a Google manual review (depending on industry and competitiveness). They want to make sure the top ranking sites are deserving of this extremely valuable free traffic.
This flag is our main concern since our clients are receiving a lot of free traffic from Google – a lot.
Let’s look at what would cause this flag.
This particular client receives over $110,000 in free traffic from Google. This is taken from SEMrush, the world’s leading competitive research service for online marketing.
When you’re receiving this type of free traffic from Google, you better believe they will be doing their due diligence. They don’t just hand over their traffic to any “Joe Shmoe” (never thought that would come in handy).
Enter, eagle eye.
When manually reviewed, a human being from Google will dive deep inside who, what and why websites are linking to you; and guess what?
You better be link worthy.
When this human being is going through your backlink profile with a fine tooth comb, they will need to see that your website is link worthy.
What do we mean by link worthy?
Link worthy is being able to justify why websites are linking to yours.
