HOW TO DETECT PENALTIES AND WAYS OUT

Who am I?

• Since 2000 : freelance webmaster, researcher, teacher…

• 2006 – 2009: Google Search Quality and Google Analytics teams (Dublin, Ireland)

• Since 2009: SEO in France. Founder of the SEO Agency Woptimo

• 2011 : Co-founder of Search Quality Alliance

AND I AM NOT GOOGLE

GOOGLE’S MISSION

Back to basics : Google Mission

Let’s analyze this mission from a SEO point of view.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Useful information

Relationship between users and content is at the heart of Google’s approach.

What is a useful information ?

Google should judge it depending on:

- User’s feedback ( is it useful ? )

- What it brings to the table (is it a new information ?)

Accessible

In other words: Kill the middle man !

Accessible : what do they really mean?

Do not put any useless steps between actual information and Google

Organization

Google needs to know as much as possible about every domain.

And now, let’s organize all that…

Diversity = NO to SERP crowding

GOOGLE’S WEBSPAM ISSUES

Mafia wars

Big spammers with high velocity. Big network with porn & malware

Bad Javascript, Gibberish, strange spike of traffic…

Automated network

Satellite sites, automatic comment, automatic link exchange Often created by X-Rummer, Sick Submitter, LFE…

Quite easy to spot. Google spots one, and kill everything…

Protecting index integrity

Every technique not considered as « useful » for the user can be impacted:

Link buying, abusive crosslinking, abusive press release and directories, link exchange…

Manual review needed to avoid collateral damage

Infrastructure protection

Any type of penalty or anti-abuse process can cost millions in CPU costsGoogle’s velocity is crucial. Penalties should be applied at the right

moment (indexing, ranking, display …)Since Google Caffeine, Google seems to have much more freedom

NEW: Communication

Google is less and less secretive

Every webmaster alert is true but not always accurate and actionable

There is more good than evil out there !!!

TYPES OF PENALTY

Manual penalty

Usually, Google prefers automation. But user experience can’t be accurately measured with an algorithm.

Local and manual Quality Review to penalize websites

What is Search Quality Team looking for?

Some of these questions can be tricky. Any decision is reviewed by several persons before being pushed.

All the websites are under the radar.

• Is there any hidden text or cloaking? Or is it a legitimate technique?

• Is it pure affiliation? Or is there an added value?

• Is this link legitimate? or has it a SEO/spammy intent? Has it been bought?

Automatic Penalty

Based on traffic quality, indexing speed, targeted keywords, code snippets, neighbourhood…

May be really harsh or … quite harmless

Blacklist

Very rare nowadays. Used for parked domain or very very bad sites…

As a warning for bad behaviour such as hidden text, cloaking…

Nothing in site:

Semi-blacklist

You don’t rank for your « brand » name and domaintools sites are before you

Or you rank only for your domain name but not with your home page title

Up and Down

You suddenly lose 50% of traffic from one day to another

Some recovery sometimes with no apparent reason

Ranking slowly decrease

For a bunch of commercial keywords only

For all you keywords slowly

WHY ME?

Traffic quality

Do you have mostly syndicated content, ads or affiliation?

Do you actually care about user’s experience?

Inbound links quality

How did you create your links? An intern, an agency, a software, yourself?

What techniques did you use ? (yes, even 5 years ago! )

Why not other websites?

Are you sure you’re the only one?Are you sure you’re better than them? … Seriously?Anyway, their time will come… In the meantime, spam report, if you feel like it…

GOOGLE ZOO

Google Panda

This is a way to promote websites with good user experience

This is NOT:

- Duplicate content filter

- Overoptimization filter

- Cloaking filter

Google Panda

Don’t try to hide, don’t try to guess how Google knows…. But he knows…

Google has a lot of user data from:

• Internet Explorer toolbar?• Chrome?• Search history?• Internet Service Providers?• Search Quality Raters?

Google Panda

Websites that are between Google and the actual information.

Filter about user experience

Pushing down websites that don’t reach a certain standard

• Price comparison• Thin affiliate• News aggregation• Directories

Google Penguin

Several Penguins, at least 2 algorithms in 1 push

Could be automatic penalty, but better for communication

On-site Penguin

Quick Fix on pages can actually help really quickly.

Overoptimized pages:

• Not in any menu• Too many times the same keywords• Same keywords in title, H1, content, url• All pages look the same• Competition has better pages…

Off-site Penguin

Penguin is mostly a big link clean-up pushed all at once.

After 5 years of linking review from Search Quality team

Google has a good understanding of what is a good and a bad link

If a website has many outbound links. Why keeping it in the PageRank process?

If a website has always the same kind of spammy inbound links, why not deactivating all these links?

OK, LET’S GO BACK ON TRACKS

Is it a penalty for real?

Make a quick SEO and Analytics check before panicking

• Better competition• Bugs in your tracking (now or before)• Indexing issues• 404 issues• Content changes…

Re-think your business model

« If your main target is affiliation and your main source of traffic is SEO, you may be in serious trouble »

Redesign your strategy

• Make him stay as much as possible on your website and make him leave to useful resources (NO, not ads)

• Make your content likeable and shareable

• Make your website popular (For real)

Link cleaning

The worse it is for indexing, the hardest it is to catch, the strongest penalty will be.

By order of priority:

• Spam comments• Automatic Link Exchange• Satellite sites network• Abusive widget links• Off-topic footer and Blog Roll links • Obvious Bought links

Disavow links

No reason why Google would not use this data No reason you would not clean your link profile if you want to move

forward… Yes, use it …. Cleverly !!!

Reconsideration request

Negative answer is not the end of the world…

Positive or neutral answer is not always the end of trouble…

Only when you have cleaned or disavowed every spammy techniques

• Mention all you efforts

• Show why you are worth your ranking (articles about you, super services…)

• Mention that you have added value and content for the users

MAKE

LOVE

NOT WAR

GOOD CONTENT

THANK YOU

@smonnier

french-seo.woptimo.com

@woptimo

International SEO – International Linkbuilding – International PPC