When it comes to SEO (search engine optimization), it’s not always the obvious things you can see that can potentially harm your rankings or websites’ reputation.

Check Your Site for Off Page SEO Penalties

With the primary emphasis for most webmasters focused on On Page SEO such as which keywords to use, how to use meta tags, the best way to internally link your content and how to build the best site architecture, have you considered which Off Page SEO factors are impacting your website?

For example:

1.       Getting an excessive amount of links with the same anchor text from other websites can be detrimental.

2.       Choosing the wrong hosting environment has consequences that can potentially impact your rankings is a website on a shared IP or hosting environment is penalized.

3.       Linking to bad neighborhoods (as opposed to them linking to you) is another way to lower your relevance score or trust with search engines, but what else should you look at if a ranking penalty is tripped by your website.

Looking at the first tip above; just be careful when building links, however, in regard to 2 and 3, here are a few websites you can use to determine which websites are sharing your hosting environment or are considered part of your extended link profile.

On same host –  http://onsamehost.com/ – allows you to find out which websites are part of your shared hosting environment (in the event that you do not have dedicated hosting or a dedicated IP address).

Tagfetcher – http://www.tagfetcher.com/ – allows you to see link and tag based relationships between a website’s taxonomy as well as if a website is part of a larger network of site (with insights gleaned from hosting data).

SEO Penalty – http://www.seopenalty.com/ – great tool that uses a proprietary algorithm to determine if your website has been hit with an SEO penalty and reports it to you based on a scale of 1-10. Naturally, above that a website is banned/ deindexed from the Google Index.

And last but not least, one of the oldest tools on the block…

The bad neighborhood text link tool – http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm – allows you to see if websites linking to you are above board or on shady ground.

Since knowledge is power this is a step in the right direction which will aid you in making informed decisions about Off Page SEO and how and which penalties can impact your website.

Related posts:

1. Protect Your Rankings from SEO Penalties
2. Niche Site or Authority Site, Which is Better?
3. Creating Synergy with your Content, On Page & Off Page SEO
4. The SEO Darth Vaders of the Dark Site vs. Derek Powazek
5. Web Site Marketing or Website Marketing – Optimizing Multiple Keywords