Diagnosing Your Site After A Manual Penalty

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Help!

Google has been getting some bad press lately surrounding their penalty notices. Their notices are notoriously vague, and this has come to the surface of the topic after the BBC received an “unnatural link” warning last month due to links pointing to a single page on the site, and Mozilla was notified of a “manual” penalty this week because Google identified a single page of spam on their site.

In both of those cases, the penalties were only applied on the individual pages in question, but that information wasn’t included in the notices, which makes for obvious concern. These cases also pinpoint one of the biggest issues with issuing notices without specifically identifying to problem for the site owners. With millions of pages of content, trying to identify the problem pages would be a needle-in-the-haystack situation.

Many have been concerned about the ambiguous notices, and Google has said they will work to improve their transparency, but what do you do if you get a notice that says you have been penalized but doesn’t tell you exactly where the problem is? Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, says you should start at Google’s webmaster help forum.

If help can’t be found in the webmaster help forums, Cutts says filing a reconsideration request could result in being given more information and possibly advice, though he concedes  “we don’t have the resources to have a one-on-one conversation with every single webmaster.”

This is notable, because many believed in the past that filing a reconsideration request after a penalty was a one-time attempt to restore your site’s name. Many speculated that Google would not be keen to reviewing repeated requests and to only file for reconsideration once the site master is sure they have solved the issues. According to Cutts, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Telling site owners to turn to a forum or file requests where they might be given extra information doesn’t seem like very consistent advice for trying to overcome a penalty. Luckily, there are some other solutions for investigating what part of your site is causing all the problems. Danny Sullivan works through some other ways you can try to diagnose your site at Search Engine Land.

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Who Is To Blame For A Failed SEO Campaign?

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When things go wrong with an SEO campaign, it puts everyone involved in a tricky position. The first step is obviously to figure out what happened and who is responsible in order to fix the problem, but pointing out who is responsible for failure can hurt egos and business relationships if not handled right.

The most problematic situation is when a client is at fault, which is indeed possible. The customer is always right may be a good philosophy to live by in many cases, but it isn’t actually all that true when it comes to implementation. This is especially true when you are working with someone not all that informed about SEO.

Some SEOs will try to cut out the client, but that hurts the campaign as well. Instead, the best option is making sure to educate clients about the process in order to avoid issues, though that obviously can’t keep all problems from popping up. If one does arise, it is your job to talk the issue through with your client. While it may be their fault for not following through on a responsibility, it is equally likely you are also responsible due to a failure of communication.

Amanda DiSilvestro suggested a few ways clients can end up bringing down an SEO campaign, as well as how Search Engines and SEOs themselves can derail your progress. The most common issues for clients include:

  • Failing to Change – Many times, SEOs will suggest changes to make onpage to optimize a website, and often it will mean tweaking content to include keywords or possibly editing a meta tag. Clients are often very protective of their content however, and sometimes ignore these suggestions. In this case, the SEO has done their job, but if the client isn’t willing to cooperate, there is little the expert can do.
  • Failing to Plan as a Group – When SEOs aren’t confident in their client’s understanding of optimization, they sometimes begin to ignore the client all together. But, even if a client doesn’t want to be very hands on with the campaign, they almost certainly had goals in mind when they hired the pros, and those goals should be included in the plan for optimization. If a client tries to avoid being a part of the SEO process, including reading the regular reports, there will be a schism between the SEO expert and the company, which will likely splinter the campaign and weaken it.
  • Giving Up Too Early – Too many potential clients come to SEO agencies wanting quick fixes. No matter how earnestly you try to explain that optimization is a slow process, if the client doesn’t comprehend how long it will actually take, they are likely to get frustrated and shut the whole thing down before they really had a chance to reap rewards. There is little SEOs can do here except try to really communicate about time estimates and benchmarks you expect to hit, or just refusing clients that refuse to understand there is no way to get to the number one spot on Google overnight.

Now, we all know clients aren’t always the problem. In fact, it is usually the professional that ends up torpedoing the whole campaign. SEO firms and experts have the power in the campaign, and it is a tough balancing act to get everything on a site working as well as it can to impress the search engines. There are endless reasons a campaign may not work, but unfortunately the most common all stem from just plain bad practices.

  • Going Black Hat – It seems everyone writing about SEO knows how blatantly terrible an idea black hat practices are, but yet there is are never-ending “optimization” services available that use keyword stuffing, duplicate content, cloaking, shady link building  and several other bad practices that Google already knows to look out for. Sure these services might get a site good rankings initially, but it won’t be long at all before they sink under the weight of penalties.
  • Poor Communication – Just as it was said above, even when the client is at fault, the SEO is sometimes responsible for not explaining the process or keeping the client in the loop. SEO work is a partnership, no matter how independent you may be. The client relies on you to inform them about this unique field and help them make informed decisions. If you aren’t communicating and they make a mistake it is your fault. Similarly, if you make a decision without consulting the company you are working with and they don’t like it, you have no excuse.
  • Laziness – When it all comes down to it, a lot of SEO is maintaining and tweaking things to make a site the most efficient possible at signaling to search engines. Experts can get lazy too, but when a site starts under-performing because you haven’t been paying it the attention it deserves, there is no one to blame but yourself. The solution to this one is obvious. Drink a coffee, get up, and do the work clients are expecting of you.

While these categories cover many mistakes made in SEO, there are also innocent problems like misreading a market, and simply putting your faith in the wrong type of campaign.

No one likes having the finger pointed at them when things fall apart, but it is important to honestly assess who is responsible for the faults.

A bruised ego may sting for a little, but if you are the client can put that aside and focus on the good of the site, you can use the understandings gained about what went wrong to repair SEO mistakes and bad habits. With those lessons under your wing, soon you’re site will be performing as you would like it to.

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How To Avoid A Penalty From The New Penguin Update

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Image Courtesy of Martin Pettitt

Image Courtesy of Martin Pettitt

The entire SEO community is bracing themselves. A new Google Penguin update should be here any time, and it is looking like it will be quite a big deal. Supposedly it will be much more brutal than the already merciless update that came last April.

Judging from what we already know about Penguin, there are some ways to prepare yourself and all of your sites to make sure you don’t get hit by the first wave of penalties. Plus, if you follow these suggestions from Marcela De Vivo, you’ll be improving your SEO all around.

  1. Monthly Link Audits – Knowledge is power, and audits give you a lot of knowledge. Start with the backlinks and get a baseline. Find out how may high quality and low quality links you have. Who are these links connecting to? If there are spammy links, work to have them removed. You can choose from a huge selection of audit tools to make the process easy, and you will always know how your link profile is doing.
  2. Anchor Density – A popular way to try to cheat search engines is cranking up anchor density for money terms, and Penguin already penalizes those that do it too much. There is a good chance they will get stricter on their anchor density guidelines, so it is important to keep an eye out. You want to be under 15% for the money term. Any higher is risking penalties when the new Penguin update arrives.
  3. Link Ratios – Links are all about finding the right balance. Google talks about Earned vs. Unearned links, and when they do that they mean Images vs Mentions or Text, Sitewide Ratios, Deep Link Profiles, etc. De Vivo breaks down the categories a little more, but the main idea is to keep a good balance between them all.
  4. Use Your Webmaster Tools – For every siteowner who thinks this is obvious is another siteowner who doesn’t know what Webmaster Tools is or how to monitor it. This is the best line between you and Google, and watching the links Google displays in your account can help identify problematic links as well as keeping you informed as to how they are effecting your rankings. There are numerous problems that Webmaster Tools can inform you of, you just have to look.
  5. Don’t Do Spammy Link Building – This one is the most obvious out of all of these, but it seems no amount of telling site owners to keep away from this practice will ever stop the problem. If something sounds too good to be true in SEO, IT IS. If you can’t identify spammy links, don’t do the work yourself. Google will penalize you if it hasn’t already, and the money you spent on those links wil be wasted.

Google Penguin isn’t the bad guy, nor is it the authoritarian figure not letting anyone have fun. Google’s spam fighting efforts are keeping our browsing running smoothly, and the “innocent” people affected by these changes are participating in questionable tactics. Read Google’s best practices, and follow them. If you are taking proper care of your site and following Google’s rules, the new Penguin update won’t feel near as scary.

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The Difference Between Penguin and Unnatural Links Penalties

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Image Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

With all of the different ways Google can penalize you these days, it is easy to get confused about what you need to do to fix your mistakes. Between Penguin, Panda, Unnatural Link Penalties, and Manual Penalties, there are more ways to get in trouble than ever.

Google’s increasing strictness is far from a bad thing, but it is also getting increasingly complex which makes for confusion when trying to bounce back from a mistake.

Marie Haynes knows just how confusing it can be. She has been working in SEO and writing for SEOMoz for years, but even she got confused when trying to help someone with what she thought was a Penguin-related penalty. She then saw another respected writer make the same mistake in a recent article but confusing unnatural links penalties with Panda.

It seems we need to go to the root of these issues and break down what each of these different penalties are and how they are different from each other.

The Penguin Algorithm came about last April as a algorithm change aimed at fighting webspam, which explains the initial title “The Webspam Algorithm” and it mainly targeted sites participating in link schemes and other questionable linking practices, though it also looked for indications of keyword stuffing.

The Penguin Algorithm isn’t to be confused with an Unnatural Link Penalty. The main difference is that Unnatural Links Penalties are manually taken against you rather than by an automated algorithm. They mainly place these algorithms when they believe a site is attempting to manipulate search engine results through the creation of links. The real question is what causes Google to investigate your site.

It is widely believed that filing a spam report will flag a site for manual review, but others have guessed that Google monitors more cutthroat niches such as “payday loans” or casino sites and consistently manually checks for unnatural links. Thanks to Google’s secrecy, we may never know exactly what makes Google personally examine a site.

So what is the main difference between Penguin and Unnatural Links Penalties? It really all comes down to the different way algorithms act compared to penalties taken by a living breathing person. Algorithms view all sites the same and is effective almost immediately. All sites hit by an algorithmic penalty will see the damage within the day of the algorithm update. Manual penalties on the other hand are being placed against sites at all times, and can be appealed more easily than an algorithmic penalty.

You can always recover from any of these penalties with effort, as Marie Haynes shows in her article, but you have to clean up your page and your methods. SEOs can’t get away with participating in link schemes or engaging other black hat techniques anymore, and there is no way to cheat the search engines anymore.

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Knowing What SEO Risks Are Worth Taking

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Every successful business or person has had to take risks to get where they are, but they normally downplay the stress and preparation that are involved in taking those leaps. It is natural to be worried, but with the proper forethought and preparation taking risks doesn’t have to be so scary.

The very nature of taking risks is not knowing if it will pay off, but if you listen for the patterns in others’ stories, you can see what risks are more likely to work out well. There are risks worth taking, and risks not worth taking. While you can plan all you want, sometimes it is best to just take a leap and see how it works out, while minimizing losses if it all goes belly up.

Amanda DiSilvestro has enough history in SEO to be able to make some pretty good guesses on what type of risks will benefit you and which are more likely to burn you. Saying yes to smart risks is the only way to get where you want to be.

One smart risk that worries many is hiring a writer with no SEO experience. Our field is so complex that it is easy to assume a writer without any experience would be able to learn fast enough to be a competent voice in SEO, let alone a writer that can take SEO principles and write about other topics accordingly. While writing for SEO is quite different from journalism or creative writing there is a good chance that any good writer you hire will be able to learn the basics of SEO fast enough to help you out.

Another common hiring fear many have is hiring a social media expert because it is so new, and so many people think they are a social media “expert” because they have a Facebook, and tweet all the time. This doesn’t mean hiring a social media expert is bad for your business, it just means your hiring process will have to take some extra effort to vet out the unqualified applicants. If your applicant doesn’t understand how social media and business function together, they aren’t an “expert” and they are more likely to cause a scandal than promote your brand’s image.

There is no path to success that doesn’t involve risks, but it shouldn’t feel like you are gambling. You should be informed enough to avoid the huge obvious problems, and the small bumps are fixable. Maybe one strategy won’t work, but every company has setbacks.

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Stop Doing These Things, Seriously

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SEO experts are always happy to tell you how to improve your website, and maybe get some more conversions while your at it, but you don’t tend to hear much about what people are doing wrong. Maybe the SEO community is more positive than I’ve ever noticed, but we tend to prefer telling you what you can do better to telling you how you’re messing up.

Well today we’re going to change that, with some help from Inessa Bokhan. Sometimes it is just easier to tell people what not to do, and quickly put an end to these bad practices. She chose 17 of the most common mistakes website owners have been making for years, and I’m highlighting the worst offenders here.

One of the worst crimes you can commit as a site manager or content creator is ignoring your readers. It is so common for blog posts to go up, and the author to just vanish afterwords having moved onto new ground, even when readers are asking questions in the comments. Why would you just leave them hanging?

Creating content isn’t the whole process. We create content because Google likes it, yes, but you should also just be trying to attract real people with interesting information and a great site. Once you have those people on your site, you should be trying to keep them around as much as possible, and the best way to do that is simply interacting with them. Answer their questions, cement your reputation, and help foster a dialogue.

Another “sin” which personally drives me crazy is the constant use of registration when it isn’t necessary. There are so many times I’ve tried to read a random article, look at a picture, or register in order to leave a comment. The ability to register through Facebook or Twitter eases this problem as it doesn’t feel like such an invasion of privacy, but why would any web owner expect me to give them my private information just to see their content?

Some website owners just can’t help but turn off their “sell” switch, and “hide” advertising throughout their content.This can come in many forms, such as misleading links making you think you are on your way to a nice concise article, only to end up being offered a webinar, e-book, or even paid consulting.

As Bokhan points out, misleading links won’t even help if you have a pay-per-click campaign. Your audience will just leave. There are also those that simply break up their content with ads for those types of resources. This is a better solution than misdirection, but it is a personal annoyance to me to be distracted or have my train of thought misdirected with irrelevant paragraphs with similar formatting suddenly selling me a product.

These all lead me to the biggest mistake any website can make: lying to their customers. On the web, your customers make you or break you. Google is refined enough now that they can even identify when you are lying to your customers, and they will too. The worst case scenario is customers see through your lies immediately, and you go nowhere. The worst case is you temporarily fool them, are found out, and your reputation is destroyed through social media and forums.

Every business should be putting their customers above all else, and this is especially true on the internet where one bad customer interaction can lead to a fiasco.

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What To Do After Your Manual Penalty Is Removed

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Here’s a theoretical scenario: You’ve been hit with a manual penalty from Google. You take all the time and effort it takes to complete a link audit and remove all the bad links you’ve accumulated, and made sure your link profile doesn’t look questionable to Google’s eyes. You resubmit, but even after weeks your website is still flat-lining. What the heck?

As it turns out, that link audit and resubmission process was only half the battle. Google does use over 200 different signals to determine ranking, but links are still the heavyweights in the arena. Now think back to all those unnatural links you just removed. Often, those “bad” links were some of the most powerful in your profile, and you don’t have anything healthy replacing them.

I have some bad news. If you got hit with a manual penalty, you most likely used questionable or downright spammy methods to climb the rankings before, and that doesn’t cut it anymore. There is a way to recover, but it takes basically restarting your SEO process to get your site back in the rankings, and this time you can’t take short cuts.

Search Engine Watch suggests a four step process to getting your sites ranking again, but if you loved the spammy old ways of the web, these steps may seem counter-intuitive or just boring and difficult. Unfortunately for you if you feel that way, there aren’t many other options, and there will be less the more refined Google gets. Chuck Price put it best when he said, “adhering to the webmaster guidelines is no longer a “suggested” course of action, it is required.”

The four-step process will help you clean house on all the remnants of less savory SEO methods, and make your site look as clean and reputable as it should. Don’t try to toe the line again or take advantage of any loophole you find. You only really get one chance to come back after a manual penalty. If you get hurt again, it will be nearly impossible to fix everything.

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Don’t Fear, Google Indexes (Almost) Everything

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rsz_john_muellerThere is a misconception amongst a small few that Google only wants the absolute best websites and they don’t index websites they think aren’t worth their time or space in their index. In reality, this is far from the truth.

Google is always indexing content and they index pretty much anything they can find. Supposedly, the only thing they don’t index is spam.

SEO Roundtable pointed out that Google’s John Mueller commented in a Google Webmaster Help thread recently saying “unless the content is primarily spam (eg spun / rewritten / scraped content), we’d try to at least have it indexed.”

He was responding to a question about a site bot being fully indexed over a prolonged period of time, which he believes is the result of a bug, though he didn’t have any definite answers until it is shown to the indexing team.

Before anyone gets up in arms, that statement is a little misleading on the aspect of spam. Everyone knows Google still indexes their fair share of spam, and in some cases they even get ranked. Mueller’s comments instead show how Google tries to avoid adding spam to their index, but we it is obvious that they don’t succeed in avoiding indexing all of the junk.

Getting indexed isn’t the same as ranking, but to have any chance of being ranked you have to be indexed.

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Matt Cutts Explains Gradual Ranking Changes

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Many website owners and SEOs have seen it happen. Your website is getting going, and Google is responding to your content with decent initial rankings. Everything seems fine, then gradually your ranking starts plummeting with no explanation.

You could time every day checking your rankings watching for this to happen  but that is a waste of time, as Search Engine Journal explains. Checking rankings isn’t an income generating activity, and your time is simply better spent elsewhere, like creating content or networking.

So then what is there to do about this mystery fall in the rankings? First, we have to understand what is happening, which Matt Cutts so helpfully explains in one of his latest YouTube videos.

Cutts uses an analogy of an earthquake to get to the heart of what is occurring. When an earthquake hits, the news about it is pretty broad. We know where it happened, but not many more details. Similarly, when content is posted, Google’s initial read of it is pretty wide. It is a best guess about where your content should rank.

As time goes by after an earthquake, we learn more and more. You will find out how much damage is caused, how many people died, how many aftershocks there were, and much more. As Google learns more about your content, it adjusts rankings. It contextualizes your content within the broader scope and repositions as needed.

So what can be done if you see your site drop in the ratings like this? Change up your practice. Most likely, your content is appearing to be quality at first, but Google is gradually peeling back the facade and seeing what your website really is, and it doesn’t like it.

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3 Steps to Take Before You Start Your Local SEO Strategy

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Years ago, all a local business had to do was build a lot of links and their business would show up on the first results page. SERPs have gotten much more competitive in that time, and Google has introduced a strict local algorithm, so now local SEO has become a unique sector that is often more difficult to implement than almost any other online marketing strategy.

You can always hire a company to take care of all of your SEO needs, but if you have a tight budget and are willing to get your hands dirty, there are steps you can take to try to get onto the coveted first page of local results, called the 7 Pack. You’ll recognize the 7 Pack as the listing of businesses directly under the map of the area. Search Engine Journal set out a five step plan to improve your local business rankings.

The first step is checking to see if your target keywords actually trigger the local algorithm. Usually simply including key phrase combinations such as the city and most important keyword should connect with the local search results, but sometimes this doesn’t work. If that is the case, then it would seem your SEO strategy should be less localized as Google doesn’t register your service as part of its local algorithm.

One of this biggest tricks for local businesses is knowing where to establish your company online. Google’s algorithm always gives preference to businesses located within the city limits searched for, often called the “centroid” bias. This means Google will rank businesses located closer to the heart of the city higher than those on the outskirts if all other factors are equal.

For businesses located in suburbs or just outside of city limits this is poses a big question. Most want to capitalize on the bigger market from the closest city than the small market in their local town, but trying to rank in a metropolitan area when you aren’t physically established within that boundary is a incredibly difficult task. You have to decide if you want to fight to get into the rankings for the city, and possibly only achieving the second or third page on the local listings, or you can aim to corner the market in your town and rank first every time for a smaller audience.

Deciding that move usually requires determining how competitive your niche is, and even businesses already well situated in a metropolitan market will be rewarded for investigating. The quickest way to find out how competitive your market is starts ith taking the #1 ranking in the 7 Pack and copying all of their information exactly as it is displayed in the search bar with quotation marks. This gives you an approximate estimate as to how many directories and citations you will need to outrank the top listing in the 7 Pack. You can do the same for the lowest ranking. Your results obviously have to outdo the lowest ranked business in the 7 Pack to overtake it, so exploring will give you an idea just how tall the SEO mountain you have to climb is.

Once you’ve done your research you can actually begin working on your local SEO, but the process will be much easier thanks to informed decisions only possible through understanding your local online market. Search Engine Journals last two steps can get you going on improving your local site’s ranking but nothing happens overnight. Local SEO is competitive and time consuming, but without it you are falling behind the times.

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