So this first case study is going to be about a well-performing blog that got ruined because of the owner’s mishandling of the situation. Let’s dive right into it and discuss what went wrong.
Taking OBL Sky High
High OBL (Outbound Link(s)) means that Google will definitely suspect that the website is involved in artificially inflating the authority of other sites.
High OBL happens when the website owner starts publishing guest posts left, right, and center and is also involved in promoting shady niches like CBD with his/ her blog.
Accepting guest posts is not something bad and every webmaster has to do it in order to make sure that the expenses of maintaining the site are covered but then overdoing it results in the site getting penalized.
In my experience, one should keep the ratio of guest posts to informational posts at 1:10.
Building Too Many Backlinks
Building spammy backlinks is another way to ruin a blog’s credibility in the eyes of search engines like Google.
Have a look at these traffic stats.
This blog at its peak was fetching 35,000 visitors per month as per Ahrefs. But now it is at 421 visitors per month. We will discuss more things related to what went wrong with it.
Using AI-Generated Content
While no tool can decide with 100% surety regarding a piece of content that is AI generated, confidence levels or probability of a piece of content being AI-generated can always be calculated.
And trying to spam one of the world’s best search engines with AI content seldom goes unpunished.
Not Editing Older Already Ranking Articles
Google loves it when webmasters pay heed to their older articles too. After all, except for topics like history, informational articles ought to be updated every once in a while.
This boosts the overall traffic of the site as it sends a positive signal to big G. If you want me to cover more points related to this topic, do let me know and I will definitely expand this case study.
An SEO expert who likes to help hobby bloggers and small businesses grow their digital presence on search engines like Google.
I have worked for a variety of companies and most prominent of them being an Australian tech startup called Simple Technology Corporation.