SEO Penalties - The Dejan SEO Case

The SEO community is again a bit in turmoil since Dejan, a well-known member of the community, was recently hit by a manual penalty related to links. The situation has escalated even more when a couple of days ago a Google representative communicated him his strategy will probably just not work.

Google penalties are usually issued to websites which sadly got their fingers burnt hiring someone practising dodgy tactics to get links. Therefore, when someone not doing links at all got hit everyone got very surprised.

The thing is despite algorithmic penalties there is still the human factor of the Quality and Spam Raters, which are not machines but regular human beings reviewing websites for Google.

You could argue if any of the links he got was spammy or not, but since at some point despite you can prove a particular set of links is legit, and despite not being your fault it seems someone could still today build spam links to your website to negatively impact your business.

We will probably see very soon how all this ends, but the take away here I think is that putting in place a process to monitoring your links from external sources regularly is still a must.

If you are currently running an SEO campaign through an Agency or any other type of external provider you should always ask them what their approach to avoid this kind of issues (which consequences can be fatal for a business). They should run a scan looking for incoming links that haven't been build by their outreach team at least once a month, and see in anything suspicious has emerged in your link profile.

If you are unsure about your current link profile or if you have questions about how you can prevent this, you can contact me on LinkedIn or at [email protected] at any time.

And remember, when it comes to links "Better to be safe than sorry"