Nobody is thrilled to check their site and search metrics one day, only to find out that their SEO prowess has suddenly taken a hit. Whether you are facing fewer page views or lower overall rankings in search, this can be a shell-shocking experience for webmasters who work so hard to maintain their good standing with Google and others. After scouring your website for potential problems, you may have discovered absolutely nothing that would indicate what is happening should happen. If it is not due to your own actions and not part of a broader algorithm hit, then where could the problems be originating? Below, we’ll talk about potential off-site issues that may be causing problems for your SEO efforts.

Your Anchor Text Distribution

Bidding on keywords and phrases as part of a greater PPC effort is vital to your long-term success. When pinging servers in order to rank in these niches, however, you must be careful in how your anchor text is distributed. If the number of keyword-specific terms vastly outnumber the number of brand-related terms you are targeting, then this can cause Google to act negatively against your site’s efforts. Even with paid efforts, there are potential negative repercussions if you try to exert too much influence in keyword stuffing that does not relate directly to your brand. In order to fix this problem, make sure that your branded PPC efforts outweigh the non-branded ones.

NoFollow Links

If you haven’t been using the concepts of NoFollow links and DoFollow links, then you are bound to have a problem sooner or later. The appropriate balance of the two is essential in ensuring that search engines do not view your website as either a spam factory or one that is trying to game the system by producing content for ranking purposes. If more than ninety percent of your links are DoFollow links, then you will sooner or later have issues. In order to rectify this, add NoFollow tags to links that are not relevant to your overall search engine rankings. By keeping the number of DoFollow links below eighty percent, you’ll never have an issue with this variable.

IP Distribution

How diverse are the links coming from your website? If they are mostly or all coming from one domain or a series of domains on the same broader network, then Google will act to reduce your overall exposure in search. Why is this? Because Google views websites that pump out links from similar IPs as link farms or evidence of link networks. An organic website should have links to and from websites that cover the full spectrum of potential IPs. If you are only linking to one site or a series of sites hosted from the same server(s), then you’ll no doubt encounter negative SEO repercussions when Google and others start pinging servers on your site.

Conclusion

By ensuring that your DoFollow/NoFollow links are balanced appropriately, that IPs to links coming and going from your site are diverse, and that your anchor text distribution is diversified, you’ll avoid many of the most common reasons for negative off-site SEO penalties.