How to Avoid Search Engine Ostracization

I had a difficult conversation with a potential client this week, regarding their SEO performance. They've put years of effort into generating results only to find their traffic slowly declining and their leads drying up. Pulling up SEMRush, I quickly diagnosed their problem - Search Engine Ostracization - the exact opposite of Search Engine Optimization.

Since 2020 their overall traffic sank, while the keywords they ranked for were reduced. Digging deeper, most of the keywords and traffic they were ranking for were "branded" traffic - meaning customers who have heard of them through other means. Meaning their SEO was driving zero results.

Search engines, Google in particular, are constantly tuning their algorithm, so what worked a few years ago may not work now. When I see a dashboard that looks like this I typically find a few clues as to what's wrong. The biggest one is the number of backlinks. In this case they have way more backlinks then their authority score would dictate they should have, and far less traffic than would be expected.

The Backlink Farm Trap

When I see this it's usually because the client has paid someone to generate backlinks. And what I've seen being used the last few years are links on previously highly ranked domains that have been repurposed as backlink farms. This is a strategy that while popular, is doomed to fail in the long run.

Initially the authority of the domains sends a signal to Google that the target site is credible, so it sends traffic. But in these cases, the content strategy is not there to support a positive user experience. So the traffic that arrives, leaves quickly.

Google learns from that, and decides to send less traffic in the future. So you see this initial growing wave of traffic and keywords, and then it drops off. Google eventually only sends the branded traffic. Google has ostracized you.

How to avoid it?

Content. Content. Content. Google's algorithm is smart enough today to ensure that it's sending their clients to the best search results, and it's going to direct customers to content that performs. It's the only way to win the game in the long run. I'll prove it in a future post.

Have some thoughts about this? Share it in the comments.