If you have been doing some search engine optimization for your site and watching its rankings for a particular keyword, or set of keywords for some time, you may be alarmed someday to discover that you have lost rankings.
Naturally your first fear is that a Google penalty is at work.
Before you freak out, calm down and evaluate the facts taking it one step at a time. The following will hopefully help you in determining whether or not you have suffered a penalty from the search engines.
Step 1: Do you actually have a penalty?
Google and Bing webmaster tools is indispensable. Every website owner should set this up so that they are aware of any issues their site has according to the search engines. If your site does have a penalty it will almost invariably be recorded in your webmaster account. The reasons for the penalty will be revealed and you can remedy accordingly.
However, this is not always the case, which is good news. However, you still have work to do to ascertain whether or not this is a real penalty or not.
Check to see that your site is still indexed. I would suggest doing this in two ways to be certain that your site is de-indexed. First, take a snippet of unique text from the page or pages you believe has suffered the penalty or lost rankings.
Do a quoted string search for it in Google. This is probably more important, because one page often is affected based on any number of factors.Copy text and surround the phrase with quotes. Does your site show up in the results?
If it does then that page is indexed and you need not test any further. Secondly, if you get no results, then do a full domain check to see if the whole site has been de-indexed.
Open Google and type: site:http://www.thenameofyourwebsite.com
If you don’t get any results then your site may have been de-indexed.
Step 2: Did You Just Lose Rank?
In most cases its just a matter of lost rank (you are checking your rank from time to time, right?), and you need to determine whether or not some action on your part has caused this. It’s time to evaluate the degree at which your page/pages or your site has been penalized.
A while back in 2011, Feb. 24, 2011 to be exact Google released the Panda update which was its attempt at remedying the abuse of content farms that gained high rank in the search engines despite having low/poor quality content.
So it was an attack at the spammers at large. However, many other sites were affected as a result. Since then Panda has gone through a multitude of tweaks and updates and now more than ever before, we have to care what and how we implement some seo tactics and methods.
Let’s consider your actions:
1. Have you avoided the obvious old school covert methods of tricking the search engines? I think this one as old as it is, is still being practiced today by unsuspecting and the ill-informed. If so, stop it! What I am talking about here are stuff like: hiding mass amounts of keywords in the page (white text on white background), excessive keywords stuffing, ect.
2. Have you purchased any links lately? Most of the services that sell links do so by practices that you cannot always control and is very dangerous. I would reverse it if possible or if not, stop doing it, going forward. It goes against Google’s TOS(terms of service) to buy links with the intention of passing link juice because this defeats the natural occurrence of links that indicate an honest reflection of valuable content.
3. Have you engaged in cloaking? This is when you serve a different version of your pages to search engine spiders than what is seen by regular visitors. This comes with a very severe ban and is frowned upon by the search engines.
4. Link spamming is another really terribly thing to do. Some wanna-be SEOs call this search engine optimization and can actually hurt your site rather than help it. What I am referring to here is basically going on forums, blogs or doings some form of automated link posting to attempt to gain rank. This type of practice gives honest white hat SEOs a bad name and reputation.
But I am not doing any of these?
Well, sometimes with newly created sites, there is a period of evaluation where Google is attempting to determine the position of the site. As a result, you may see the fluctuating rankings known as the “Google dance”. Your ranking is all over the place and then additionally it may disappear from the rankings it once held. I would say that if your site is just a few months old it may fall into this category.
Step 3: Deeper Evaluation of your Rankings
The age of your domain as mentioned earlier may play a part in lost rank or low rank as well. However, don’t mistake an old domain for an mature site. You can have a domain name that was purchased 10 years ago but no one ever put up an active page and so now, 1 month ago you decided to create a web site using this old domain.
Well, Google effectively starts evaluating a site from the moment it first gets indexed and does an evaluation on the site and the number of links pointing to it. You want to keep the number of links to a site in proportion to its age and what seems natural. For a brand spanking new site, don’t go creating 1000’s of link’s overnight to the site, because, unless you’re someone famous or a large corporation it probably won’t look very natural.
Take a look at the extent to which the pages have been affected. Are you seeing this across all keywords or just for one or a particular group of keywords? Certainly, you should be tracking your efforts over time and log your progress so that you know what you have done that may have attributed to the penalty.
Look at the sites where links are coming from and determine if either of them may have suffered from lost rank due to poor quality, or just have been re-evaluated by the search engines and have been found lacking. A reduction in their quality will certainly affect the performance of pages that have been linked to.
Step 4: Have you Lost links?
I have seen this all too many times. Someone fears that they have been penalized by Google or Bing because their rankings have plummeted for a specific page. Consider the fact that at least as of this writing, that links still play a major part in the ranking of sites.
A site may have deleted a link to you or removed some content from their site, maybe moved to a subdomain where the link value has been reduced. This opens a whole new can of worms.
Backlinks analysis, or as some call it: SEO Intelligence. If you run an in-depth analysis on your site you can determine where most of the valuable links are coming from, which ones are still active, their attributed value etc.. Get your SEO intel report here.
Step 5: Quality of your site
According to the terms of service for many search engines, site authors must pass a level of quality control to be trusted by them. Since this is an ever evolving practice and is not perfect by any means, we as humans have to pay careful attention to creating high quality web sites.
Amit Singhal put together a very insightful list of guidelines that every site owner should pay attention to.
It’s actually very logical and if you live by these rules, you will hardly ever have to read an article like this 🙂
Here is a break down of the list of things you should make sure that your site adheres to.
1. As a human, do you trust the info in that article and does it read like it’s been written by someone who has expert knowledge on the subject?
2. Is there a level of carelessness in the creation of the content (i.e.: poor grammar/spelling, fluffy content with no real depth or information?
3. Will you buy something from the site and furnish them with your credit card details?
4. Does it contain a lot of duplicate content? Copy and pasted content from other sources with nothing original?
5. How does the web page stack up against other sites with similar subject matter?
6. Does the site get mentioned by others as an authority figure on a specific subject and does it give deeper insight other than what is obvious?
7. Is there much thought given to the structure of the content or does it appear to have been slapped together hastily?
8. Would you share this page with someone or bookmark it?
9. Are there too many ads in your face?
10. Do you think you could see this article in printed material, like a newspaper or magazine?
I am a proponent of creation content for your readers. This was a topic I have been asked before to speak about, so naturally it’s intended audience is you, the reader. When you create content that people want to read, the natural course of action is that they would share or link to you.
Don’t always go after creating content that you think the search engines would love. Search engines aren’t your customers, people are. Serve well, and people will return the favor.
I hope this article helped some of you out there understand search engine penalties a little better and have some peace of mind if you were concerned before. Please share this article with those whom you feel it might benefit and I will be very grateful.