Author: Dr. Manus Ward │Head of Digital Strategy and Data Protection │Hotelconsultant.com is a qualified and experienced former hotel manager, culinary Olympic team manager and hospitality Head of School who is passionate about passing on the knowledge he gained from one of the few hotel digital strategy doctorates in the world to you the hotelier. Bonus: If you have any problems with this contact me (100% free) at manus@hotelconsultant.com or 086 8185829 on this or any aspect of your hotel’s digital strategy.
Why do we need to do this
If you have been penalised by Google or have any anchor text that reduces your rankings you can disavow these links in order to remove the penalty and return your rankings in the search results.
What does this mean
Links are the second largest ranking factor in the Google algorithm after content. Google believes that the more high quality and relevant links that point at your hotel’s site the better. This has however created an industry that will sell links to your site that will allow you cheat or manipulate your rank. Google penalises sites that buy these links using their Penguin algorithm. If you engage in this practice, Google will probably catch you and penalise you resulting in your hotel falling significantly down the rankings and loosing a lot of revenue.
How do I check if I have been penalised: Ensured you are logged into your webmaster tools and click on https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/manual-action and then look for the following:
I don’t have access to my Google analytics, what do I do: Click on http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/ and do the following:
Penguin penalties show up in light blue.
How do I remove this penalty: Essentially you disavow the penalised links to your site. This is not something you should do, unless you know exactly what you are doing. You will be removing links you have built up over time and there is no magic site that will tell you which links are the penalised links. The page in Google you need to go to is https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main but I advise you email me at manus@hotelconsultant.com and I will tell you what to do. A disavow request takes 1 – 3 weeks once submitted along with the time it takes to complete the clean up work. The effects are permanent and irreversible. Google will not tell you which links were bad and you will also lose credit for the good links you disavowed in error. If you miss even 1 or 2 bad links you may not have your reconciliation request accepted so don’t take shortcuts on this. But mostly just don’t get your hotel penalised in the first place.
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