Who, What & Where
Brolga & Swan is a small company based in Sydney providing SEO services to our clients. We're quietly proud of our achievements in this area, our clients enjoy great success with their sites' search results.
Our clients are almost exclusively local and most of our business comes via recommendation - yes, it is somewhat ironic. We use our small size to our clients' advantage by providing hands-on, high quality, personalised service.
If it's related to SEO then it's likely we'll have looked at it. Many people treat SEO as either black magic requiring luck and a lot of faith, or an exact science with precise cause & effect. In our experience the reality is somewhere in between. A lot of the way search engines behave has to be treated as a black box (nothing visible from outside) because they are very protective of their algorithms. There is certainly cause & effect. There is also trial & error and sometimes long periods before the results can be seen - so a certain amount of faith based belief is required.
For example, in 2012 Google changed their view on inbound links. One aspect of a complex set of rules was this: if, say, an article on someone else's site included a link to your site and that link was presented as text rather than the actual URL, and that site wasn't considered very highly (not bad, just not great) in Google's opinion, and in Google's view that text was a keyword phrase (something people search for) then your site was heavily penalised - not the site with the article. So if your site sells widgets that wobble and lots of people search for this then widgets that wobble becomes a keyword phrase. If an article on another site included the following:
"Every child loves widgets that wobble and they're really easy to buy."
Where the link pointed to your site then you got penalised.
Whereas the rather clunky form below was regarded as perfectly acceptable and (probably) increased your site's rankings because inbound links are (generally) regarded as an indication of respect in the market place:
"Every child loves widgets that wobble and they're really easy to buy at https://your_site_URL."
My tuppence worth:
- Was this announced to the world at large? Not really.
- Is it completely against one of the whole purposes of the <a ...> link? Yes, definitely.
- Is it fair that someone else, with good intentions, can harm your search engine ranking? Not one bit, it's ludicrous. [ahem] No comment.
- Will getting annoyed about it help? No, but feel free to write to your political representative or your favourite newspaper - neither will get you anywhere.
The point with this is simply that search engine requirements change with time and what appears to work well today may not next week. The changes are not always obvious and figuring out the new parameters of cause & effect is what we do.