GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 14 - October 2010

olation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s rank- ing in search results.” That said, no amount of “quality con- tent” will gain enough back links to get you anywhere near page one for “Ca- sino,” “Poker” or “Bingo” unless you’re a global brand and you don’t mind wait- ing for Google to issue a “these guys play nicely and deserve to be on page one bo- nus,” which appeared to happen around the Vince update in 2009. The most common leak of this information comes from disgruntled ex-employees. TIP Operate on a need-to-know basis. Inherited historic link profile Imagine the scenario . . . You’ve just landed your dream in- house SEO job. Let’s say you’re now the “Global Head of SEO” at www.somelargeigamingbrand.com. You’re low to mid page 1 for all your major keywords in 22 territories. TheU.K. is your biggest revenue generator. Your predecessor exceeded expectation and smashed his budgeted targets. • • • • Imagine it’s now March 2010, Google has been developing a link spam filter designed to target the activity which was deployed by your U.K. agency 13 months ago, and this activity is propping up your U.K. page 1 rank- ings. The positional filter is due to be rolled out in the next two weeks. What do you do now? This scenario happened earlier this year. Not even the largest brands were safe. As the new Global Head of SEO, it’s your re- sponsibility to ensure that you know your domain’s off-site history. Then ask your- self if this history is acceptable or likely to be targeted by Google. TIP Check your site’s history – get a his- toric forensic SEO report. I could go on . . . I could mention hidden text. It’s an ob- vious one, but I still see webmasters who FIGURE A FIGURE B 31 SEO strategies that may get you penalized