Google Mums Effect
“The Google Mums Effect” is the latest buzz in the SEO world. I’ve heard it called the death of SEO, or even the death of the SEO industry itself. What is this thing? It’s a term coined by Matt Cutts, who is an SEO expert and one of the main contributors to the Google Panda update. If you’ve read anything about the search engine ranking system, you know how important your website’s on-page optimization is. In particular, Google loves link popularity, and the more links pointing to your site, the more popular your site will be.
What’s the problem with that? Well, Google wants websites that have as many links pointing at them as possible. The Google Mums effect is essentially the search engines punishing those sites that are dishonest about their links. This has been a long standing SEO practice, and it is still in play. That being said, if you want to benefit from the Google Mums effect, you can do so by having as many inbound links as possible pointing at your site.
Does this mean you should lie about your links? No way – the search engines have seen too much dishonesty in the past, and they will not punish you for being dishonest. However, there are certain tactics you can use to increase your link popularity. First, there are the usual SEO tricks like adding lots of keywords in your URL (this is called ‘branding’) and cramming your site with internal or external links. These can be effective, but generally limit you to a few well-established links, and the number of these usually decreases with the volume of links.
How the Google Mums Effect Can Benefit You
The other way is to get links from high PageRank sites. These links are harder to get and can take months to show any significant results. The other downside is that they have to come from high PageRank sites – this means that most pages you want to rank high are going to be artificially pushed down the rankings because of their links to your site. This can take months before any noticeable change happens, and if you are getting a lot of links from a high PageRank site, this can be frustrating.
There is one more approach that you may want to consider. Have you ever heard of forums? They can have a huge impact on your ranking, and have nothing to do with the Google Mums Effect. The reason is that search engines like to see active discussions – if your topic is regularly discussed, it means that there are people looking to answer questions and spread information. If the search engines see this as a good thing, it can push you up in rankings.
There is a method called SEO blogs, and they are becoming quite popular. SEO blogs are posts containing backlinks to your site and can have an enormous effect on your ranking. To start with, just find a company that offers SEO blogging services and sign up for a free account. The best of these companies will place content on your blog for you on a regular basis, with links back to your site. As long as the content on the blogs outshines your competitors, you’ll increase traffic to your site. And if the SEO blogs contain a link to your site, this can send even more traffic.
