4 Tips on How to Avoid Penalties in Penalty-stricken Industries

If you happen to operate in one, you have our sympathy. Nothing dampens the spirits of a business and people associated with it faster than a penalty, algorithmic or manual. Moreover, it makes people look at you in bad light, which is something no business wants, irrespective of the niche. Everybody has a preference; we are no one to judge. In fact, we work with more penalty-stricken industries than the ones that seem to be surprisingly unaffected by it. And we are here to help you avoid getting shot down by a penalty and facing that tremendous loss in terms of traffic, ranking, and revenue. Here we have compiled a list for you on 4 Tips on How to Avoid Penalties in Penalty-stricken Industries. Read on.

1. Choose Your Domain Wisely

It might sound incredibly appealing to choose a domain that has your target keyword in right in the middle, or at least part of it, but you need to be very, very careful with it. And you need to put some solid thought behind when choosing a domain name for your brand and avoid using danger words that might earn you penalty in the near future. Gone are those days when it used to fetch positive results. In today’s landscape, Google looks at the entirety of the brand and many other things than just the keywords. You too need to focus on the former and look to build a solid, all-round website rather than focusing too heavily on your brand name and its URL.

2. An Extensive Competitor Analysis Will Go a Long Way

It’s always a very good starting point. They have been here before you and have managed to secure a higher Google-space as well as mindspace within their customers. And that is exactly why it will benefit you greatly analysing what they did right and where they could have done better. Where they could have done better opens up a window or two for you to improve upon, assuming, naturally, that you operate in the same line of business within the same niche. All this becomes all the more relevant and kind of mandatory especially if you operate in a highly specialised and competitive industry such as online gambling or betting.

3. Don’t Build Anchor Text Links without Thought

Think of anchor texts as exits on a highway. If you guide the visitors to wherever they intend to reach, you benefit. However, if you lure them for your own benefit, without consent, so to speak, they are going to feel cheated and you are going to suffer. And Google takes it all very seriously. So should you. You should look for phrases instead of matching your anchor text to your target keyword. Do it far too often and you increase you will, sooner or later, earn a penalty for those actions. On principle, keep a balanced mix of anchor texts with exact match, partial match, branded, naked, generic, and image-based to maintain a healthy ratio and avoid getting penalised in future.

4. Build Links Very Cautiously

If you happen to operate in a penalty-ridden industry, say for example betting, gambling, or loans, or crypto currencies, you will need to extra careful when building backlinks for your website. Here, once again, competitor analysis becomes all the more important as it will help you strategise beforehand as to how they have split their backlinks within homepages, money-pages, guides, and so on. You also need to be cautious as to not indulge in link-farming as it is a sureshot way of getting a penalty regardless of the type of industry you operate in. Rather, look to build them naturally by socialising with websites who can benefit from linking back to you rather than the other way around. And this is where high-quality, original, and niche-relevant guest posts come into the picture.

While black-hat SEO techniques may seem attractive, they will end up doing you harm: algorithmic, financial, and reputational. On the other hand, legitimate white-hat tactics as above might take some time to sink in but in the long run, you are likely to benefit in a more sustained fashion.