Like a lot of folks in the SEO world, I’ve been analyzing, dissecting, and pondering the significant changes that Google made in April 2012 – from Panda to Penguin and a lot of little things in between.
Leslie and I have the good fortune to work with hundreds of clients in our training and coaching programs, which provides us with access to detailed Analytics data on a large number of websites.
Within that group, we’ve now identified over two dozen cases of “confirmed” Penguin hits. The analysis of those sites has proven to be very interesting indeed.
While much of the Penguin reporting to date has focused on inbound links as a potential issue, we’ve struggled to find many cases within our customer base who fit the bill for “unnatural” linking – possibly because many of our clients don’t really do traditional “link building” at all.
We have, however, in *every* case, found significant on-site issues that could be contributing to issues with the Penguin update, which Google described as targeting “webspam.”
“In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.”
Source: Google Inside Search Blog
So how do you respond to this? Well, if you’ve gone nuts building unnatural links, I would encourage you to at least consider making some changes to your link building practices. However, if you are working with a site that has been affected by the Penguin update, now would be a very good time to look at potential on-site issues as well.
Take The “Red Pen” Test
Here’s a little exercise we’ve been having our clients do for a while. The purpose of the exercise is to identify potential “excessive” SEO on your website, and help you improve the site’s design to serve users better, convert better, and consistently rank better through algorithm changes in search engines.
What you will need:
- A couple of highlighters – I like to use green and yellow, but any two colors will do.
- A nice big fat red marker – the kind your mean old teachers used in school to grade papers.
- An open mind – you can lie to me, but don’t lie to yourself, because it’s bad for you.
Step 1: Print Out a Copy of Your Home Page
For many sites, you can simply print it out “as is” – but by doing so you may actually *miss* some things like hidden text, duplicated text, and links that are “concealed” by styling them to look exactly like the surrounding text. If you know how to disable CSS, you can print the page with all styles disabled, and get a pretty good printout to work with.
Most folks will find it just easier to use the text-only version of Google’s cached copy of the page. To find this, use the following procedure:
- From www.google.com or a Google search box in your browser, search for cache:URL or cache:www.domain.com
- For example, you can type cache:seomoz.org in a Google search box to get the cached copy of the SEOMoz home page.
- Click the little link that says “Text Only version” and print that out.
Not so pretty, is it? But this is a lot more like what your pages look like to spiders!
Step 2: Highlight the “SEO Keywords” on the Page
Okay – grab the printout, and pick up one of your highlighters. Start at the top of the page, and highlight every use of a “keyword” on the page, that isn’t absolutely required to let human visitors do one of three things:
- Figure Out Where They Are: Am I on the right web site? Where am I within the web site? (Keywords rarely help with this)
- Figure Out What To Do Next: Where do I click to find the women’s shoes? How do I sign up? (Keywords sometimes help)
- Whatever Else The Page Is For: Are there any other things the page is supposed to accomplish? (Aside from “rank #1 in Google”)
Now, before you finish this task, open your mind, and think. If you sell “pool supplies,” and it’s obvious to your visitors that this is all you do, would the links to the “pool chemicals” category page *really* need to say any more than “Chemicals” in the anchor text? No, they wouldn’t – so go back with your highlighter and finish the job.
The point here is to uncover how many times you’re using keywords for the benefit of both you and your users, and how many times they’re really just there to “check a box” for SEO purposes.
That doesn’t mean you won’t ever use keywords in your copy, if it’s the right word to persuade a user to take action. However, if you didn’t need to use a keyword to say it, you probably want to highlight it.
It can be helpful to have your website open in a browser while you do this exercise – it can be amazing how many times you discover that someone stuffed every keyword you have into the alt attribute of an image, for example.
Step 3: Highlight the Excess Links on the Page
For the next step, switch highlighters, and start at the bottom of the page. Highlight every link on the page, that fits the following criteria:
- Useless: Examples – a link to the designer’s site, to an “articles” section that people aren’t intended to read, etc. Does the link help your visitors accomplish one of the three obectives listed in step 2? If not, it had better be “required by law” or it gets highlighted.
- Redundant: Links that already exist somewhere higher on the page, or links to redundant categories/pages that only exist to cover extra keywords with the same content.
- Hidden/Concealed: You can see a blue underlined link on the “text only” printout, but you can’t actually see the link on the website in your browser.
If you use visitor analytics tools like CrazyEgg, you’ll find that a lot of the links you have highlighted during this step actually don’t get clicked at all.
Step 4: Time for the Red Pen Test (optional)
At this point you will have a page with, well, either a little bit of highlighter on it, or a lot. Scan, photograph, or copy the highlighted page for future reference… then grab the red marker, and run it over all of the highlighted text on the page. Stand back and admire your work.
Many of our clients have pointed out that this step is not strictly neccessary – with comments like “okay, I get it I get it” often occuring before they’ve even finished with the first highlighter – but there is a point to using the red pen.
Step 5: Analyzing Your Results
Of course, this exercise is probably worth repeating (at least mentally) with other pages on your site – maybe even all of them.
If you have more than a little bit of red ink on the page, there’s a very good chance that the following statements are true:
- You have been “doing SEO” on your site for a long time, and adding more keywords to more places helps you feel like you are “doing something” to rank better. You can find a lot of great tips and advice on SEO, different things that could help you rank better, but you’re not meant to do all of it – just enough to get the job done.
- Adding more keywords to more places is not actually helping you to rank better, and never has been. I’ve “owned” top positions in many markets for years, with a standing rule to never allow more than two exact occurences of a target keyword in on-page copy. In fact, I’ve got plenty of pages that have ranked for years with zero (0) occurences of the exact keyword in the copy, and no “unnatural” links either.
- You’ve been hit by Penguin, and/or Panda, and/or the new “keyword stuffing filters,” etc. – and you’re ready to make a change.
The truth is what it is: a lot of people have been going way, way, way, over the top with on page and on site SEO – even if they haven’t gone nuts with their link building. At this point, these practices are very likely to be hurting your rankings. If you’ve been able to rank in spite of these practices for a while, that’s great – but you knew it couldn’t last forever, right?
Consider the Following:
Panda, Penguin and the less-publicized “keyword stuffing” update from April are all based on document classifiers. Their job is to look at a document (your web page), and use a set of signals to determine whether it should, or should not, be identified as “low” or “high” quality, “webspam,” “stuffed with keywords,” etc.
The “red pen” test gives you some idea what the result is going to look like, and how they’re going to get there – because the job of these document classifiers, in a sense, is to simulate the outcome of a human being performing such an exercise.
If your home page came back covered in red ink, and you’ve been “slapped by Google,” now might be a really good time to turn the “on page SEO” all the way back to the bare minimum that is required for users, and work forward from there, with litttle changes that hint at ranking, instead of wholesale keyword stuffing on every page of your site.
If you have pages on your site – or entire sections of your content, that are solely devoted to stuffing in more internal keyword links for ranking purposes, now would be a good time – while you’re at “rock bottom” – to clean that mess up.
And if your business is going to survive, it might also be a good time to start thinking about redesigning your website from the ground up, with human uses and human intentions in mind. That’s another exercise (and another post…) for another day, but it starts with asking these questions about your visitors:
- Identity: Who are they? How would they identify themselves?
- Motivation: Why are they here? What do they care about right now?
- Framing: How did they get here? Where did they come from?
- Purpose: What specifically are they trying to accomplish?
The better each page of your site does at addressing these things, the better you’ll do in the long run. Let’s talk about that soon, okay?
Disclaimer: Author is not responsible for you ruining your pants or furniture due to leakage, seepage, or dripping of red ink from an ink-soaked printout of your home page. If your site is primarliy designed for keywords and not for humans, wear appropriate protective garb before performing this exercise.
Thanks for reading,
Dan
P.S. If you’re dealing with the Penguin, check my earlier posts on this for more detail, and don’t miss our Penguin “brain dump” webinar Wednesday, May 16, at 7pm US Eastern time:
In your course, you talked about most sites having enough authority to really capitalize on a consistent internal linking practice: pump out a handful of blog posts a day and link to a “money page” on the site with keyword link text. When you talk about removing internal keyword links are you suggesting changing or removing these links, or is that still an effective practice?
If you’re writing abstracts, those are intended to link to the content you’re writing about, so you wouldn’t want to be stuffing them with keyword links. A blog for your site will have some navigational links to the rest of the site; authority will flow through those.
Awesome post!
What do you recommend for a cut and dry process to ranking websites that isn’t “web-spam” or unethical? I’m tired of all the fiverr courses… what’s the best course in your opinion to get links?
To me, the best approach has always been to do marketing – you can turn a profit with marketing – and let the marketing generate links for you.
I hate to do the shameless plug, but we’ll be launching the 3rd version of my Link Liberation course soon. Our SEO Braintrust members are beginning the course on May 28th, and we’ll be releasing it publicly in June.
We call it a link building course, but it’s mainly about leveraging marketing campaigns to get the most natural linking benefit you can, and of course, how to execute those marketing campaigns.
You have to consider also that this test might not bring any results since Penguin update doesn’t take into account only on-page link correlations but mostly the off-page link profile on which marketers should focus on.
Yannis, off-page is almost certainly one factor, but perhaps not in the way that a lot of people are thinking of it. There are two reasons to create a “webspam classifier.” One would be to reduce the ranking of sites that are doing keyword-stuffing and keyword-link-stuffing, etc. A second reason would be to identify sites whose links should not be trusted.
With the cases I’ve looked at, off-page stuff isn’t even a concern in most of them. Our sample is obviously skewed away from “normal,” since “normal” for the past few years has involved using splog networks, forum profile spam, dubious “guest posting” networks, etc. which I have been warning people to stay away from forever.
I think you probably want to avoid keyword stuffing as a general rule anyway as it tends to create a rubbish user experience.
However there is a lot of junk at the top of the SERPs at the moment and some of it has this sort of keyword stuffing. – Is it just the case that the algorthim has not caught up with them yet?
There has been some suggestion that this sort of thing has caused sites to be picked up algorithmically and then sent to manual review. If your site is quality then would you expect to survive this process? – Although I guess it is better to avoid being looked at to start with!
We shouldn’t be thinking Penguin as a single-factor algorithm. It’s not. Think of it more like email spam classifiers. There are a bunch of things that are typical characteristics of email spam, some of them (like using HTML in the email) are also characteristics of normal email. Email spam classifiers add up a number of factors, and come up with a score that puts either the email in the spam folder, or the inbox.
Your blurred page example to show woes of those hit by penguin is quite funny, Dan!!
at first i thought it’s silly, really but i had to do it because i am desperate, and i was amazed of the result i had, half red 🙂 so i rewrite the full text, and changed almost all the links reducing the links to half.. thanks guys it really works
Hi Dan,
Been following your advice since your StomperNet days. My little 12 page, one year old site is holding the #7 spot on Google, and #3 to #5 spots on Yahoo and Bing for over 5 months now for my #1 keyword. And I’m doing it against sites that are a decade older, at least a thousand pages larger and have thousands of more inbound links. I’ve stayed away from keyword stuffing or spamming and have had no changes in position from the last two Google updates.
Keep the great advice coming!
Great Post, thanks.
Hi, “Gamsat Review.” I’m sure your parents (Mr. and Mrs. Review) are very proud of their little baby Gamsat. In spite of that, your link has been removed.
Just for the benefit of everyone, feel free to tell me “great post” and “awesome article” and whatever else, but the links here are already nofollowed, and I do not hesitate to remove the links you stick in.
You have a name. Feel free to use your name when you comment.
Stuffing keywords into blog comments is exactly the kind of stupid that got people into trouble in the first place. I know that bots like you don’t have a sense of irony or anything, Gamsat, but the rest of us are just laughing at you.
Hi Dan,
Thanks fothe tip. Eagerly await your webinar next week. My site has been savaged by Pengiun, traffic down 70% ! in terms of keyword stuffing I thought I was safe. I built my site with a service that has a checking tool to tell me the right number of keywords to have on a page. That being said I have pages on my site that had NO backlinks at all, were ranking in page1 that have fallen back to page 3-5. I guess my big concern now is whether I can approach my solution page by page ? I have a site with 400 pages but 80% of my traffic came from 10 pages, if I can focus on them things would be a lot better for me.
By the way, I have several other sites built with WordPress. One of them I only built links using RSS Bomber. It has tanked in the SERPs.
I’d certainly focus on the pages that were targeted to rank, and those formerly ranking, but a few of sites I’ve looked at are just hairy, scary, and ugly when it comes to keyword-stuffing – where every page has a War and Peace length novel of keywords and keyword links on it. I don’t know what “RSS Bomber” is but it doesn’t sound like a great way to build links.
Hey Dan. FYI, your facebook page link is being directed to 404.
SEE: “So push it, and when you’re done reading stuff on the site here, pop on over to our
FACEBOOK LINK… <——— Yeah That one! and leave us a message. You know, something like "okay, I did all the fun activities, did I win anything?
😉
Wow, that’s weird – fixed. Thanks Todd!
It’s at http://www.facebook.com/seobraintrust if anyone was just dying to go over there.
I got a site that I think has suffered losses for keywords we were targeting in anchor text. How can this be verified or fixed?
You can verify that you have lost traffic with your analytics, including which keywords rose or fell. You can’t verify the specific cause. In the case of Penguin, you might not want to wait around and see what happens if you make little changes one at a time, because it could take forever:
http://seobraintrust.com/penguin-updates-may-11-2012/
Traffic has remained about the same for the site but the keywords (money phrases) that we were building backlinks for completely lost rank. Money phrases/keywords were on anywhere from page 2 to page 7 in Google for the homepage of the site. The URL is about 2 years old. and 2e started putting content on the site and building links about 1 year ago. Since these phrases did not rank well yet, were so far back in the Google index, they only got minimal traffic. The majority of these phrases targeted the home page and a few internal pages. Now they are nowhere to be found and the home page which is a PR4 cannot be found for any keyword phrases in a Google search.
I believe this site is suffering from negative SEO or backlink reputation over optimization as only our money keywords are suffering. Is there any way to fix off page optimization? I realize this last Google Update is algorithmic so maybe we just need to start building backlinks that do not target money phrases in an effort to diversify our backlink anchor text and to dilute the amount of backlinks that go after targeted phrases.
I will do the “red pen test” and make all necessary on site changes but I suspect this is an off page issue that I have no control over.
Any additional thoughts? I can send you the URL that has been hit.
Michael, please do send me the URL.
It’s possible that inbound links which were helping you before, are no longer helping. Are you suggesting that you had nothing to do with putting those links out there? Either way – yes, doing real marketing to generate natural links would be a good idea.
Where or how should I send the URL to you? We have done some link building to the site but have not all of the link building. We did have footer links coming from one of our sites that was niche related. We removed those last week since getting hit. The site that has lost rankings is an affiliate site that has all unique content on it.
I applied the red pen test to the home page today. I am glad I did. The site is better because of it for end users. I still have other money pages to fix.
Michael, send it to support at seobraintrust dot com. Subject should say “Dan asked for this.” Put the URL of this post, and your URL, into the email. They’ll get it to me.
Email Sent. Thanks do much.
Dan – Any progress on checking out my site? I have not heard anything back yet.
I sent you an email reply on May 17, Michael.
Hi Dan,
RSS Bomber allows you to generate a new RSS feed for each post on your WP BLog. You can then send that feed to RSS aggregators. I’m not sure this fits into unnatural anchor text on links nor keyword stuffing ?
Greg
Greg, that’s pretty nutty. For one thing, there’s already an RSS feed for every post’s comments, if you just enable it. But the core idea seems to be “manufacture a bunch of duplicate content.” Maybe they missed the memo on Panda. Maybe they don’t care, because some people will sell any old crap to make a buck. Some of the splog networks are still selling, including at least one that appears to have been completely de-indexed.
Gidday from Aus Dan,
Thanks for sending me this information. I remember the first times I began watching Link Liberation webinars and I am referring to some 2 years back or there about’s. The lessons I learned which were many , but the most prominent was the matter of social interaction with visitors to a website or blog. Was it 2009 late or 2010 early not sure now however I for one at that time did not think anything special of Facebook, look at it today big difference..even the Big G is now playing up to the tune of the “Messiah of Social”. Social SEO is giving the power of the people to decide what a link is worth as I understand. What my point is Dan and sorry for the ramble , you guys were teaching social conversions a long time ago. Yes Penguin and Panda hit the scene however, people interaction on a website wins . Facebook being a example. Writing and talking seem the same thing when it comes to blogging, if people are interested in what you say then keywords can only say so much. Robots cannot understand peoples conversations but it doesn’t have too, the fact that upteen million retweets or multitudes of social votes says it all.
Dan,
I was badly hit by Penguin (an average of 1,000 daily queries before April 24 immediately dropped to approximately 150 queries on April 24 … and has continued at about 150 queries per day since).
Thank you very much for your “Red Pen Test.” (It showed me two keyword-stuffed images – which I have already fixed).
My home page is
On that page I discuss Wills and offer a free program called Will Masterform which allows the visitor to create a personalized Last Will & Testament.
I went thru a printout of my home page searching for “SEO keywords” and discovered that my home pages contains:
Keyword No of times on page
Will Masterform 22 times (2 of which are links and 4 of which are in testimonials)
Last Will & Testament 9 times
Will Forms or Will form 10 times
Last Will 7 times
Wills 5 times
I understand that Google might consider used of these word excessive, but I don’t know how to tell my story without using them as I do. Can you give me some guidance?
Howard
Hi Howard,
I promised myself I wouldn’t rewrite your copy, but I like you, so I’m going to try to get you started.
There is a section on your home page that may illustrate how things can be changed. You have a list of six bullets, all of which start out with “Will for” – you could remove “Will for” from all of them. Requires a little copy change above.
The headline can say – What does it do – how can it help me? (something like that, you can probably do much better)
(followed by something like)
My free software will let you create six different kinds of will documents:
bullet
bullet
bullet
etc.
Is it possible to sometimes just say “will” or “wills” sometimes, instead of Last Will and Testament? Is is ever called a Final Will and Testament anywhere? Is it really necessary to say “will form” when the whole site is about wills, or could you sometimes say “form” or “forms?” Since Will Masterform is your own branded product name, I wouldn’t worry about that one as much.
The “double hits” (when I use green and yellow, they show up as blue – that’s why I use those colors) can almost always be changed to not use keywords.
Hope that helps.
Dan,
With your reply to the website on “wills” example, I’m a little confused:
You advised him to take out the word “will” several times… but if the page is optimized for that word, why not use it? I know you shouldn’t keyword STUFF, but you do need to put the keyword in an appropriate number of times so Google knows what the page is about, right? There’s a balance.
I use an analyzing tool on my site that tells me if I’ve used the kw too many times, or not enough times, and I adjust accordingly before publishing. Are you saying that I should take out some uses of my kw on each page (after doing the red pen test), even though the analyzing tool says it’s fine? How do I know which one is correct?
Also, you said “Is it possible to sometimes just say “will” or “wills” sometimes, instead of Last Will and Testament? Is is ever called a Final Will and Testament anywhere?”
Your suggestion of using “Final Will and Testament” also contains the word “will,” so how is that any different in Google’s eyes than using the kw “will,” “wills,” or “Last Will and Testament,” (since they all contain the word “will” in them somewhere?)
Thanks so much for your help,
~Corinna
Corrina, I’ve been writing copy for 25 years, and that thing is stuffed with unnecessary keywords.
If you want to dig into why variations might be useful, think n-grams:
http://www.limsi.fr/Individu/yvon/publications/sources/Lavergne08detecting.pdf
http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/webis/research/events/pan-08/pan08-talks/lavergne08-talk-detecting-fake-content-with-relative-entropy-scoring.pdf
Bill Slawski has some nice discussion on patents at SEO By The Sea:
http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/02/document-level-classifiers-and-google-spam-identification/
Bottom line, you don’t need to hunt for places to stuff a keyword in; if the page is about that, it’ll be there enough. Write naturally, because you can’t reverse engineer the algorithm, and the algorithm is a moving target anyway. Writing naturally is as close as you’re going to get.
Hi Dan,
My SERP for “widgets” suffered, but the did not suffer for “widget.” My home page does say “widgets” a lot. Have you seen results differ by variation of keywords like this? Do you think Google is penalizing specific pages for individual search queries by delivering different SERPs ? Or penalizing sites more generally? Do you think this is an algorithm change? Or have the humans gotten involved?
Charter Member Link Liberation
Hey Tim! – good to see ya!
I see that kind of variation a lot with Penguin, or I should say, with Penguin and whatever else they may have rolled out behind it. One invididual lost ~2000 visits a month with a keyword that dropped to page 2, and picked up ~1000 visits from a keyword that shot up all the way to #2 on page 1, with a net increase in profit, because the second term is much more specific and relevant to their business.
We saw the same kind of issues with Panda too, and had a lot of “losers” (in terms of traffic) who were “winners” (in terms of revenue and profit).
Thank you for sharing your insights.
I need to ask a self-serving question, since I am a web designer. Why you begin by classifying a web designer’s link as being useless? In many cases, I have done work for a reduced rate in exchange for this link. Now that you are overtly telling people to remove those links, it stands to harm my business. Web designers don’t get paid enough as it is, most times.
The real information is that we should limit links to around 100 per page and that the link flow should be higher than 50%. I believe people will gain more benefit from removing category and tag widgets, which are totally redundant to navigation and post meta data anyway.
I don’t want to take on the ‘top guns” of SEO but you’ve given soundbites here that casual readers who aren’t “tuned into” this on-going discussion will take to heart. This whole aura of paranoia about what is Google “thinking” and what does Google “want” has nearly driven me off the cliff. Now you are instructing people to remove hard earned links from their pages.
Tell me how I can stop those DNS harvesting sites from reporting mis-information about my site and adding links that I don’t want, for instance.
Tell me why I have a site which I’ve done no link building on (not my business site) has high traffic every day through organic referrals and tons of activity at the site with no recognition or recent content.
This whole thing makes no sense. Yes, I’m frustrated.
What about those irritating popups?
Marj, I like you already.
It’s a good question, and you’re right, I didn’t elaborate much on the issue of designers adding links. If you want to put a link on a client’s site, because you’re picking up referrals from it, then put a rel=nofollow on it. If you don’t you are taking an unnecessary risk.
Google has been pretty clear what they think about designers, SEOs etc. sticking links on clients sites. They don’t want those links to pass any juice. I’m pretty sure Bing would tell you the same.
I call “designed by” links useless because unless I am on your client’s site looking for a designer, it’s not there for my benefit as a visitor, and it’s not there for the benefit of your client. It’s only there for your benefit. That doesn’t make it unethical, if it’s part of your compensation, but protect yourself by sticking a nofollow on it.
You mentioned several other things there – some of them might be good post topics. All I can do here is quick hits, so…
1) DNS harvesting sites? You mean like the evil updowner.com? They suck. You can DMCA Google if you find your content has been stolen and used on another site. The rest of them? They suck. They link to everybody. Worry about something else.
2) I have business sites that have done no “link building,” that are also doing great.
3) I hate popups, but I also know that they actually do “work” in some circumstances. Popups that actually attempt to open a new browser window are hated by all, including (we would hope) search engines.
4) Hell yes it’s frustrating. The “secret” is to work on marketing, not SEO, and let the search engines come to you. A little bit of SEO prep on the site, then it’s all marketing all the time.
Ok here’ s a concept for you and Google – no follow is purely an SEO technique and any links with no follow are by definition over optimized. Normal people do not build pages with no follow anywhere on their site.
Normal people use nofollow on links all the time. Every WordPress blog adds nofollow to links in the comments, by default.
“If you want to put a link on a client’s site, because you’re picking up referrals from it, then put a rel=nofollow on it. If you don’t you are taking an unnecessary risk.
Google has been pretty clear what they think about designers, SEOs etc. sticking links on clients sites. They don’t want those links to pass any juice. I’m pretty sure Bing would tell you the same.”
I am beginning to get lost on the role of a nofollow link. We are now building a worldwide web full of “I don’t trust this site” links. Almost everything must be a nofollow.
Why does the word ‘ludicrous’ come to mind.
I suspect that “ludicrous” comes to mind because it’s an apt description of what Google did with nofollow.
However, the designer sites that have actually been part of the “Penguin” cases I’ve worked weren’t using those links to get referrals, because the links were barely visible, and stuffed with keywords.
If you consider the overall principle that the web should be designed for humans, not search engines, what Google is doing has a certain logic to it. The implementation in algorithms, as usual, is pretty damned weird.
This article is very enlightening and points out the inconsistencies in this ‘new world’.
http://www.webpronews.com/the-blurry-lines-of-googles-paid-links-policy-2012-05
I happen to know more than a few things about the history of BOTW. 🙂
From Google’s perspective, a directory that focuses 100% of its marketing toward selling “links to boost ranking” and 0% of it’s marketing toward attracting human users who want to find stuff… well, how is that not just another linking scheme?
In the same vein, how are “guest posting networks” that let anyone post anything about anything and link to anything, different from the splog networks? Trying the same scheme with a different name isn’t going to work out any better.
I sponsor an organization and they put up a graphic for each of their sponsors that displays on every page of their site – tcjga.com. The graphic links to my site and the site is related to my content. Would having them remove the link from those 233 pages be more likely to help or hurt me?
According to Webmaster Tools, Updowner.com has by far the most links to my site and tcjga.com has the second most. Is there any reason to request that updowner.com remove the links?
Thanks for all your great information.
Google’s official position on sponsored links is that they should be nofollowed. Removing those links, or having them add nofollow, might hurt in the short term, but it’s a better bet in the long run.
In my opinion, Updowner is a parasite. I’d suggest a DMCA notice to Google first, for every updowner page in Google’s index that contains your content.
Hey Dan,
I’m hitting road block when attempting to submit a DMCA notice to Google regarding 181 links from updowner.com pointing to my site. In step one, I selected Web Search. Step two, I selected the option about violating company’s trademark rights. I then received this message:
“Google is a provider of information, not a mediator. We bring you different webpages that relate to your search request, but we don’t make any claims about the content of these pages. For more information, please see our Terms of Service. In matters involving trademark, it is best to directly address the webmaster of the page in question. Once the webmaster has altered the page in question, Google’s search results will automatically reflect this change after we crawl the site.”
There is no option to proceed and report the pages. Is there a technique that I am missing here?
Hi Dan,
What is your take on ‘matching’ meta keywords on a client site with categories in their google places listing? Would that sort of practice be frowned upon? If it is relevancy that is important then I would hope that sort of thing, also kml files and other meta data will still be valuable or else I will have to trash all my WP plugins I have invested so much time and effort in!
I think the whole ‘Local Buisness’ marketing thing will be safe in the sense that we are helping Google and the others provide relevant and useful info, I will go and check my ‘Designed by’ links however as I do see your ‘rel=nofollow’ suggestion as very important. I actually have anchor text links at the moment on alot of my client sites linking back to my site, my rankings don’t seem to have been affected but it is a bit scary…
Thanks for taking the time to offer such valuable insights!
Best wishes
Andy
Meta keywords? I never use them. Stopped using them in 2001 or so. I’d be surprised if it could hurt you, because I’d be surprised if they were even indexing that. I also couldn’t hurt to just get rid of them. If the “off site” thing works like I am beginning to suspect it does, the links on your client’s site could (at least in theory) be unaffected by this.
A lot of “designed by” links are styled with tiny text, dark gray on black, etc. – which, um… makes it hard to argue that it’s anything but search engine spam.
Dan,
Thanks very much for your response. That really does help.
One other question, please …
After I took Link Liberation 2, I began creating and posting abstracts. As of today I
have published 306 abstracts.
Each abstract contains a quote from the original article, some descriptive text and a link to the original article.
And each link is no-follow.
Do you think the fact that the links are no-follow might be a cause of my Penguin problem?
If so, I could remove all the no-follow links.
Howard
Awesome post and good steps to identify if your website has been penalize due to over optimization. However my blog is being penalize even though it does not have much keyword on the homepage as I target a “general keyword + blog”. Most of my post that are currently at the homepage does not contain that “general keyword” as each blog post is for different topic that is related to the “general keyword”. Any idea?
Given the stuff you’re promoting, should I even bother looking at your backlinks, Winson?
Good call.
I redirected my url from domain.com to domain.org and setup a 303 redirect. Seem that my new website is ranking again in Google. Also removed lots of redundant links and change the url structure from /categories/post to just /post. Do you think a 301 redirect can help to reduce the penalty from Google panda/penguin update?
Hey,
So I get a 404 error when I do the cache: request… what does that mean?
Dunno what you’re doing Sean. If you just do a site: search you can get the cached version from the search result page.
A home page cache search for one of my sites turned up a 404. The other turned up only the mobile version (WPTouch Pro plugin). I’ve now deactivated that plugin on both sites.
Ouch, Pam! Good catch.
I’ve learned that I need to minimize the number of plugins. Most likely that’s a conflict with the theme, but it’s a pain to troubleshoot these things, and fixing it today doesn’t mean that it can’t break the next time something gets updated.
I think we’ll see a day very soon, when everyone just expects themes to include a mobile version, and handle it properly.
Amen to that. It is frustrating (although understandable) that yesterday’s good advice on plugins can become today’s headaches when they no longer work correctly or no longer meet Google’s standards.
Very thought-provoking and interesting Dan.
I can see how some of the things that I’ve done can be considered too much but at the same time, Google needs clear indications if it is trying to deliver the best and most relevant information to searchers.
It seems to me that Penguin has narrowed the effective SEO tightrope – too much concentration on keywords and you’ll be penalised for over-optimisation. Too little and you’ll fail the relevancy test because it’s not clear what your page is about.
I’m not sure I’m ready to jump to that conclusion, Paul. I know that I look at a lot of sites that don’t need to stuff all those keywords in. Page titles give a pretty good indication what a page is about. It’s never been necessary to stuff keywords in all over the place.
What about Bread Crumbs links?
Breadcrumbs are a good thing for users, no? Normally they link to categories with the category name. Not exactly keyword stuffing.
Hi Dan. Will you be completing the Plan B course, days 7-12 at anytime soon? I have really enjoyed what I have learned so far. Thank you.
I am never ceased to be amazed by the great quality content by SEO Brain Trust. Yes indeed there was a lot of great content. I loved the action steps. Very clearly organized.
Thanks,
Dan Tetreault.
Victoria, BC
Dan, I use an ecommerce platform and in many cases things like alt tags and link title tags get generated automatically. I noticed that a lot of my links auto generate a link title tag to be the same as the title of the target page. Often the title of the target page can contain a few keywords. Above you talked about stuffing keywords alt tags (which obviously I wouldn’t intentionally do). I’m wondering if the same is true for these link title tags?
Linking to a product page using the name of the product makes sense. It also makes sense if the TITLE on the product page is the product name.
If you’re talking about adding title=”whatever” attributes to anchor tags, that’s something I’d try to eliminate because it doesn’t help with *anything*. The title attribute is a “tool tip” when the mouse is hovered over a link, and nobody needs a tool tip that says the same thing that the link already says.
Thanks Dan. I’m referring to the latter situation. I’m going to remove all those titles attributes in my anchor tag. I’ll let you know if it makes any difference. Cheers.
Hi Dan,
Thank you for the tips on evaluating websites for excessive SEO. Very Helpful!
After evaluating my website it seems that I have way too many internal links. A lot of those appear in the navigation. If I remove some of the navigation links does that have an effect on the pages that those links lead to?
Since my business is primarily in one City………..would having the city name mentioned too many times not be a good idea? It seems hard to not include the city when writing content since my business is all about austin commercial real estate…….office space, retail space, etc….
Also I have read that having a contact form at the top of a website is now seen by Google as spammy. My contact form is at the top but is nicely integrated as part of the website design. What are your thoughts?
Nathan,
I would never remove anything from a website that was required for the website to do its job. You’ve got a lot of stuff on there that isn’t doing that. Having worked with similar sites, from concept to launch and beyond, I know a little something about what works for humans, and your home page is jam packed with stuff that’s not going to help you connect people with the information they seek.
I am going to need some examples / case studies to use for the follow-up post, and this one would be super awesome to use. Let me know if you’re interested in talking about it.
As I say at the end of this post, you want to start by thinking about the people who are visiting. Who are they? Why are they on your site? What do they want to accomplish? As you map out the different audience segments, some of them will jump out as requiring special attention, or as necessary elements of navigation.
You have 4 basic types of commercial space, if you look at medical offices as a special case vs. normal office space. People will be there in one of 4 situations: new business, existing business moving, existing business expanding, existing business nearing end of lease.
That probably makes two rows of 4 callout boxes on the home page. Each one addresses what specifically you can do to help – to add value. Each one tells people what to do next – there may be multiple options in each case, so help them figure out what to do.
It’s not unusual to see a 3-4x improvement in conversion when you redesign to address visitors this way. The keywords will fall in where they make sense, and it won’t make sense very often.
“I am going to need some examples / case studies to use for the follow-up post, and this one would be super awesome to use. Let me know if you’re interested in talking about it.”
Hi Dan, I’m def interested in talking about doing a case study. Let me know when you are available to discuss.
Thank you for the great info that you put out as well as the great steps to take.
I will clean up my site and focus on marketing to real people instead and I won’t have anything to do with Google anymore. No more link buildings, just putting out great content.
Dan,
Maybe I missed it, but what is your take on using keywords in the h1, h2 and h3 tags. It sounds like as long as you use it once or twice in the copy your good to go.
Thanks,
Tom
I don’t think H tags mean much either way, but most of the time, when I see keywords in a headline, they aren’t helping the site do its job with visitors.
Do keywords in titles and descritions help or hurt?
Meta descriptions shouldn’t matter. Logic and usability dictate that titles will contain some keywords.
“Too soaked w/ tears to read” — that’s hysterical!
Dan
Great write up. I’ll be sending over any of my students who have been Penguin smacked.
Really love #2 and will be using this on some of my stuff as well.
Hi Dan,
AMAZING article! It’s the best one that I’ve read yet, since the Panda/Penguin drama began.
I love that you’re taking comprehensive steps to help identify the problems.
My website is documentarystorm.com. It was on the 1st page of google for major terms like ‘documentaries’ and was getting 14,000 visits per day before being hit by a penalty on April 27th (which I think was a Panda update day).
I can’t figure out why we would be penalized and not other sites. We don’t do any malicious SEO tactics. Maybe you could have a look and let me know what you think? I’d be happy to pay for your services too, if you discover some things needing work.
Thanks for this great article!
Benjy
Benjy,
Your site has a relatively small number of backlinks. A significant number from a small handful of sites.
The site which links to you the most (a blogroll link) is mostly hiding the blogroll links, e.g. http://madsenblog.dk/wordpress/2012/05/12/10-ways-to-use-a-usb-flash-drive/
You’re also either getting scraped like crazy, or the content isn’t entirely original. Just take a handful of articles/posts from your site, grab a sentence from it, put that in quotes and do a phrase search on Google.
If you’re creating original content, use rel=author to identify yourself as the author of the content. There are other steps you can take to protect yourself:
http://seobraintrust.com/2011-in-review-and-a-plan-for-2012/
Very helpful article. I’ll be making a number of copy changes as a result. Thanks!
But you raised a question in my mind about the alt attribute for images. We have a regional website promoting local hotels, restaurants, etc. For the images for hotels we use an alt tag that reads “Comfort Inn – City, State” (for example) to differentiate one Comfort Inn from another. But this format also means that we could repeat that city name in the alt tags for 25 hotels located in that same city. I’m guessing you’re not gonna like that idea. But I’m not sure how to differentiate them without repeating the city each time.
So if i am linking my pharmacy website in this comment , will it be considered as a “unnatural link”, even if it is no-follow ??
Beats me, but never fear, I’m not going to link to your pharmacy website anyway.
Hi Dan
We manufacture leather belts, wallets and horse tack. The foal of our site is to sell our products. We do PPC and have paid for SEO they work some but nothing has really worked. You say that the best thing to do is marketing. I am not sure how to do marking on a e commerce site like ours. We make a great product and people love it. Could you explain how do do marketing for a site like ours?
People love your product, so let’s start with “what kind of people love your product?” Then “what else are they interested in?”
People that love the products are people that see it and use it. I don’t know what else the people are interested in, and I am not sure how I would find that out.
Come on man, that’s no kind of answer. You don’t know anything about the people who buy your stuff, except that they buy it?
Hi Dan,
Thanks for the great article. I have been a member on SEOBraintrust since day one. I must say, you really are my only go to guy. I really like all your teaching since they are all about long term and is really for the business not just SEO. Awesome stuff.
Our site is pretty established (9 yrs). Before this Penguin update, we have been ranking really well for years on lot of our target keywords. We often rank 2 or even 3 positions for a keyword not only on long tail but also on our money phrase plus our videos often rank on first page too. We weren’t affected by
any of the previous Panda updates at all.
So here are my questions:
1. How come we got hit so hard this time but yet so random? Most of our money phrase drop from position 1 & 2 to position 5-6 positions. Some only have 1 ranking left. However, some of our long tail is completely gone. But yet some still have multiple top ranking like 1 and 2 plus our video.
2. I did the red pen exercise and find that we could get rid of a few things on the navigation and the footer. But would this sudden on site change going to hurt us more? Because we are talking about eliminating 10 plus extra keyword / footer links.
3. About the alt and title tag on image, we use the product name for both of them. Plus the anchor link is also the product name. On the text-only version, it looks very excessive. Is that mean we should leave the alt and title tag blank?
Thank you so much for your help.
Joe
Hi Joe.
1) It is the nature of the beast. This is not a penalty, it’s an algorithm change.
2. You aren’t seriously hit, so I’d move slowly.
3. Yes, I’d leave them blank in that situation, which is common within ecommerce stores. You’ve got an image followed by a text link. There’s no reason to add alt text to the image, when it’s the same as the text link which immediately follows.
We have a number of sites that are NOT “on page over optimized”. http://www.plasticsurgerycoupons.com for example dropped from #2 to not in the top 100. What we are seeing is more older domains rank even if the site content is way out of date and content not related. We cannot find any logic with want Google wanted and the real search results.
You’ve also got a new site that doesn’t have much in the way of links from the rest of the web.
There’s logic to what Google did, but you’re right – what’s on a lot of search results right now doesn’t look like any part of it.
Good job, Dan. I realize that my main business website uses too many keywords. Panda and Penguin both helped me for my primary keyword (aloe) which has yet to hit page 1, but that just means that more of the people in front of me were abusing SEO worse than myself!
OK. Dan. I like the idea about printing out the pages, because it shows us about how to move the businesses offline to avoid all the newer competition going around on the Internet.
Jack, you are as strange as ever, but whatever.
I have a blogger blog that has been hit pretty crazily because of lack of frequent content updation (I think). Around Jan, I was getting 500 unique hits (because in Dec, I had put up many posts). Then I did not update the site for about 4-5 months (I didn’t have time). I see the stats now, and they average about 50 uniques per day?
I see the stats gradually drop. But is ‘frequent posting’ even taken as a metric for search engines to rank individual pages/sites? Or, am I doing something else wrong? There are a few backlinks I built from related posts from my other blog. I used to get good number of hits from those pages, but now the traffic is totally down! I am confused and I have decided to quit any kind of half-hearted SEO attempts by myself!
Raj,
We don’t know what the exact mechanism is, but we’ve seen HUGE gains for sites that simply start blogging regularly, and the effect has increased post-Penguin. There’s a long list of cases at this point, and it’s just too big to ignore.
I would worry less about “link building” and think more about audience building. Sharing useful links/stories via Twitter, Facebook, etc. and mixing your own posts into that stream. Using social sharing buttons on the blog to help add the visitors you get to the social circles, etc. If you do that, the links take care of themselves after a little while, and the audience grows by itself as you create and share content.
So, start creating content. Write brief summaries of the stories that you’re sharing on Twitter etc. supplemented by your own full-length posts. It works. It’s been working for years, and it’s only getting better.
Thank you! This confirms that what we have been doing all along (audience building) is the right step! (with sermons) We will continue to press onward and upward. Much appreciated.
Thanks for your reply Dan. I’ll start focusing on the social factors shortly. I didn’t put up the links for SEO. Actually, related content was getting a lot of hits on my other blog and hence I wanted some of those visitors to come here (as this is a newer but niche blog). A lot of people did come. Anyways, I have decided to update this blog regularly from now and I am sure I will see a growth in traffic soon.
There is another problem I have with this blog. Post formats are pretty much same (depending on the type of posts) and hence only the name of the songs and their descriptions change with each post. Not sure if the Big G is considering this as thin-content or something? But I will try to do some descriptive posts outside this format. Thanks for your suggestions. I like your SEO philosophy, when compared to others 🙂
Raj, using the same design template for the same kind of content only makes sense for users, so I can’t see why that would be a problem. I assume the descriptions are unique, and not just a few words long like, say:
“This is a song. It has music in it. It’s by some guy named Jay-Z.”
That would be very thin content indeed.
One other wee little note – links inside your site appear to open in new windows sometimes? (Like the most recent post). Not a good thing for users, and can’t help with search engines either.
By your definition, my site would definitely be guilty of keyword stuffing. This is something I have gone back and forth with for years, because of the nature of our product line. We sell dollhouses and everything that goes into them. Consequently, I don’t want to rank for “Furniture,” “Cabinets,” “Fireplaces,” etc. I want to rank for “Dollhouse Furniture,” “Dollhouse Cabinets,” etc. Aside from substituting the word “Miniature” for “Dollhouse,” what would be your suggestion?
Once people are on your site, don’t they get that it’s all for Dollhouses? So, do you really need to say that over and over?
I can’t write your copy for you but…
perfect little cabinets
dainty dinettes
miniature fireplaces
model cabinets
little tiny wee small cute adorable perfect pretty etc.
Hi Dan,
I wonder if other people are experiencing the same anomaly as I am. One of my sites took a big hit in ranking, and the date left me in no doubt that the cause is the Penguin update. However, my site map seems to be ranking for quite a few keywords, not really high in the serps or anything, but enough to get a few visitors. What confuses me is that my site map must be more keyword stuffed than any other page on my site, populated as it is with SEO orientated titles, along with short descriptions. Do you have any ideas what I could do to get the actual pages that are supposed to get the visitors to rank before my site map?
This is a little unusual, but not unheard of. Google’s doing some crazy stuff here. Look not just at keywords on the page – I’d wager the terms the site map ranks for aren’t “stuffed” on that page so much… but you also have to look at the keywords in links to the page. That’s an area where Google seems to be reacting badly to keyword “stuffing” – link text.
Hello Dan.., I want to tell every one that pinguin isn’t monster, because when we manage blog/web naturally, there is not serious problem after pinguin update. Thank you
Dan,
I had two sites on a related niche that ruled the 1st page of google for the past 5+ years and now all of a sudden after penguin they are completely gone! My income has disappeared and I am desperate. Is there still hope to bring them back or are they forever trapped in google hell? I’m already taking steps to clean up my onpage content. What else could I do?
Erik, the question comes down to what you were doing about building incoming links. If you were spamming like a madman (blog networks, forum profiles, paid links, spinning, etc.), then starting over might very well be the easier path.
I took the test and things look fine on my pages. Still i have been penalised from rank 1 to rank 10 on Google. Any suggestions how i can improve…..Thanks I have delinked from the websites that looked spamminy in my back links. What do you think should i give my website for reconsideration to Google. I am a bit scared to do that since do not know how Google moderators will react.
Hi Dan,
From the bottom of my heart, thank you very much! I used to have nav links like this… I thought I was helping the users but I think google saw it as spamming by continually re-mentioning “reviews” in my links (dropdown). I’ve followed your procedure and I’ll be monitoring any good effects.
Sometimes, there are things that small webmasters like me don’t know. It can get very depressing when you lose 50 to 80% of your daily visits. So assuming I’ve exhausted all the instructions you’ve given above, what’s the next step for “cleaning up”?
It was a beneficial workout for me to go through your webpage. It definitely stretches the limits with the mind when you go through very good info and make an effort to interpret it properly. I am going to glance up this web site usually on my PC. Thanks for sharing
Hi Dan,
Thanks for this illuminating post. I’ve been focused on fixing my backlinks, and forgot t consider on page fixes.
Suppose I have a page all about blue, rectangular widgets. It is an awesome, comprehensive review of these products, and I regularly get feedback saying so in the form of comments from potential buyers. I even went to the widget store and took multiple photos of these widgets, at multiple anges, to use throughout the review.
I named all of the alt tags with keywords. (This goes back a year or two ago.) Do you think I should remove those alt tags? I had humans in mind, for example, my alt tags say “safety of blue widgets’ and ‘side view of blue widgets’ and ‘the steel base of blue widgets’ etc.
Do you think it’s worth removing about 70% of my alt tags, so the photos do not have any text description? I mention my primary keyword ‘blue rectangular widgets’ throughout the post, as that what the review is all about – so my page would definitely be red with blood after this test!
Thanks,
Ellen Braun
I assume that it’s obvious to everyone “looking” at the page that it’s about blue widgets, so I don’t know why “side view” wouldn’t work as alt text, without adding “blue widget” to it. But we are speaking all hypothetically and stuff, so maybe that wouldn’t make sense. As for the rest of the copy, you could try mixing in a pronoun every now and then.
Interesting details you have mentioned, thank you for posting. Penguin is worse than Panda.
Hi Dan,
Beautifully done page! I have a question for you.
In un-SEOing my site http://www.accessible.org, I changed all the image alt tags to read “image of …” a clear description of what was in the image and almost never with a keyword. Now Google Webmaster tools is showing that the #1 keyword by a big margin is “image!” IN the top 10 are also instances of JPG and PNG.
I’ve since gone back and eliminated all instances of “Image of…” and I’m waiting for Google to refresh.
What do you make of this?
Hey Dan, may I send a URL to one of my latest articles for your evaluation? Most of my articles are 2000w+ and I really put a ton of hours into them to really engage the user and improve their experience with my blog. However, sometimes I fall into the trap of pushing keywords into the article and while it reads perfectly, I think it may be the reason why I lost a couple major positions on the SERPS.
Thanks!