Some months ago, the Head of Google’s Webspam Team Matt Cutts (i.e. the guy who knows about as good as anyone how to literally rank your website at #1 on search engines) helped introduced Google’s ‘Disavow Tool’, which may actually be extremely important for your SEO goals.
Here’s the skinny: old school SEO focused on websites getting links from other websites that had a lot of links. If you had the best website in the world for salmon fishing, and all the salmon fisherman in the world went to it daily, and you earned a link from that website to yours focused on, for example, personal injury law, you’d get a huge bonus to your SEO. Why? It’s a link from a popular website. Crucially, the content of the website linking to you didn’t matter as long as it had strong PageRank (i.e. it was popular and had lots of links to it, therefore Google liked it more).
Now, the rules have changed, per Google’s ‘Penguin’ update to its algorithm. Basically, now the content of the websites linking to you matters, and it’s not enough to have popular websites linking to you. You need the correct and topically relevant popular websites linking to you. So, your personal injury law website should be linked to from other sites related to personal injury law or at least law in general.
What’s this mean for you?
First, your webmaster should ask website managers/owners linking to you that aren’t relevant to you to remove their links.
Second, any website that’s ever featured information about your business on a page relevant to your business should have a link going back to you.
Third, use Google’s ‘Disavow’ tool in your Google Webmaster Tools to disconnect yourself from the irrelevant websites.
