Google Penalties... I get out everytime. Some Tips... Let's Discuss

[LMC]

Hey Guys,

As you most know, their tons of different Google Penalties that are handed out to sites, they can be as harsh as a complete deindex of your site, or a simple page drop somewhere into the 400-500's.

The Google Penalties greatly strike my curiosity because it is core knowledge to have when fighting for SERP ranks with a large network of sites, some of you may know, but I have around 500 websites currently, at least half make passive income everyday, the others are less frequent, but have some nice trends involved.

I've experienced around 10 different type of penalties across 40 sites, and each time I was able to get out of the penalty.

I'm not going to explain my exact steps, but I'm going to give you some tips.

Below are two of the most common penalties most of you guys will see using various methods taught here and throughout Internet Marketing.

1) Link Velocity

A simple formula here... a new site can start off strong, but if you start off strong you have to continue strong. If you give yourself 1,000 backlinks in Week 1, stop for three weeks and then do it again, I guarantee your main domain name will drop into 435-535 SERP rank.

If you do receive this penalty, you need to build some real relevant PR links and justify why you have so many links.

How do you justify? You have to send real organic traffic. People need to type you into Google find you, and click on your SERP.

But wait... Google is my source for organic traffic, how do I send real organic traffic if I'm ranked 500.

Use your mind.

2) Link Pattern

Too much of one thing is bad. You need to spread your link types. Blog Comments, social bookmarks, side wide links, footer links, spread them...

If you don't, you will experience a penalty if too much of one type of link is built too fast.

The fix involves fixing your link patterns and sending organic traffic to the site similar to above.

3) Over Optimization

I've seen weird things happen with this penalty. Things such as my meta descriptions and keywords do not come up right on Google, and that I get no credit for my on-site optimization.

The fix here is a bit difficult and requires a letter to Google for them to include your site again and some begging.

To stay away from this keep keyword density below 6%, have unique content, at least 1,000 words of it.

4) High Bounce Rate

High bounce rates will indeed drop you in the search engines a bit, but you can fix this yourself by making your site more navigational

Remember what a bounce rate is? It is a person viewing more then just the homepage.

This is why if you have a blog in which all the articles are on the home page your bounce rates may be high.

Try creating a static home page navigating people to your most popular posts or products, think as if you were walking into a store and how you want to see the information.

Electronics to the left, Apparel to the Right.

Navigate people.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In overall, I just wanted to make a post on Google Penalties and here your experiences with them. I've been able to successfully get out of Google Penalties by sending strong traffic that sits on my site for a while effectively dropping bounce rates and justifying my backlinks...

In the end, I come back stronger then before.

Anyone currently experiencing problems?

Anyone see the same as I do?

[paulgl]

I don't think any of those are google penalties.
They are all owner stupidity or being naive.

However,

Link velocity? I have a few sites that I never work on backlinks anymore.
They made the authority and are self sufficient.

Link pattern? How does google even care?

Over optimization? Then it's not optimization. You are breaking google
webmaster guidelines. Sure could lead to a de-index.

High bounce rate? If you are getting a bunch of non targeted traffic.
But bounce rate won't affect anything tangible in SERPs. There is far
worse to worry about.

The only penalty you have to worry about is getting de-indexed.
And that's for owner stupidity.

Paul

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by LMC

Anyone currently experiencing problems?

Anyone see the same as I do?

First of all, "link velocity".

For example, sites that go viral will get a huge amount of links very quickly. A recent example was the "Don't touch my junk" guy who got over 100K links to his site in the course of a week. Other sites pop up daily where they'll get 1000+ links in a day with few, if any links, appear afterward. However, they'll still hold their ranking for years.

Another example, sites kicked off by networks like icanhascheezburger, Breitbart, TMZ and others will get thousands of links overnight, most of them from the same IP address block, and will rank high quickly and keep it.

What matters here is authority, not velocity. If you get a 1000+ low quality links they aren't likely to be even seen by Googlebot and are also likely to be discounted if they are. You might think that the problem is 'link velocity' but the real problem is lack of link authority.

Next, "Link Pattern"

The same thing applies, lack of authority links.

Going back to the example of cheezburger, they get most of their links from 'evil' interlinking of their online properties. Since their original site has authority, there's no problem with their obvious pattern. The same is true of other authority network sites.

Sure, there may well be patterns that Google uses to flag sites but these are relatively limited in number and mostly center around known spamming methods and troublesome niches (porn, pharma, etc). These rarely apply to the average person seeking to promote their site(s).

The problem most people have around here when it comes to this is analysis paralysis where they fret that they made 20 blog comments or profile links in a day instead of 10 or that some nice blog gave them a sitewide sidebar link and that would give them "too many links too quick".

And, "Over Optimization"...

Another 'penalty' that few people would ever encounter in the midst of normal site construction but they'll worry about it in a productivity killing way.

Let's go over to one of my favorite sites to pick on, nextag.com, and look at their page for women's denim vests for example. It's quite stuffed with keywords related to denim vests. The same is true over at thefind.com. Do you think they worry about keyword density and such when they generate their pages? I don't think so.

And, lastly, the ever scary "Bounce Rate" boogyman...

First of all, there's no accurate way for Google to track this information due the to huge variations in site design, site purpose and user interactions. Even with Analytics installed, this metric isn't of much value in indicating the relative worth of a site.

For example, Digg sees a lot of people pop in and out. Drudge Report sees a huge amount of bounces. Many other bookmarking and news sites see a great amount of bounce. It's perfectly normal for this kind of site to exist and it wouldn't make any sense at all for Google to penalize a site for it.

Also, most traffic will find their way to inner pages that meet their search criteria better. Search visitors rarely enter at the home page and navigate from there these days. Often they'll find the info they want on the page they entered on and bounce away. For example, if I'm looking for a PHP programming example I don't need to see another page on the site that describes a different function in most cases. Once again, it wouldn't make any sense for Google to penalize a site for this perfectly normal activity.

[ivanmata]

How about a temporary technical issue? My site experienced a bad week in technical terms, I think I fixed it and the site was up and running again. But then I stopped receiving traffic from Google in the web searches but still receive from Google images searches. It has been a week and things have not improved. I'm confused, did I break Googles guidelines? Should I wait a bit more? Shoul I submit my site for reconsideration? Is my site penalized at all?

[Eager2SEO]

What about some domains that just never index in google because of a past that you can't determine? Like the site below.....

[socialbookmark]

But i think Over off-page Optimization can penalize a website but not meta keywords and meta description. Also i don't think High Bounce Rate can penalize a website. Its wrong in my opinion.

[Cataclysm1987]

I think out of all the things you mentioned, over optimization is probably the most dangerous. The reason is pretty obvious.

Google takes the most weight out of whatever you put right on your site.

So if you turn your site into a shady, overly optimized super adsense spammy and malware infected AIDS virus of an autoblogging crapware spambotinator 5000 plus, Google will consider that your direct responsibility, and rightly so.

Inbound links on the other hand may be completely out of your control. It could be somebody else building them to try and tamper with your rankings, which is why I tend to think Google just ignores them or Google dances you for them, at worst, in 99.9 percent of situations.

So, in my opinion, just make your site look natural and build tons of diverse links. Google likely has a spam filter for link farms and sites that are geared strictly for SERPs and not for visitors.

[theseoguys]

One of my sites got a penalty last year after getting a one time "boost" from an overseas company. Due to the nature of the industry the site is in, it was probably ironic that a .ca site got a whole bunch of inbound links from Ukranian ip addresses in a short time, may have been the reason for the penalty. That is why I am skeptical to outsurce linkbuilding to overseas and have never done it since. The problem is nobody knows why they get a penalty.
What you forgot to talk about LMC, is using the request for reconsideration. In that case, we put in a request, told Google what we did, why we did it, and we won't do it again. Whether it was coinicidence or not, the site came back stronger than ever, and been top 5 ever since.

[Opportunex]

I'm currently working on a couple of sites which both have the same problem; a keyword optimised page which can't be found in Google SERPs yet shows up as a Google result when the URL is typed into Google.

Any ideas/suggestions?

Abdul.

[mitz]

I totally agree that all of the things mentioned can get your kicked out of the search engines...

I am currently having a problem with over optimized pages like Opportunex is...

Previously I have dropped in the search engines for having broken links on my website...I fixed them and within a few days I was back....

If you do not believe that any of this happens then you haven't been around long enough...

Of course bounce rate causes problems too...This means you are not satisfying the visitor...Why should google show your site when it does not give the visitor what they want?

[mitz]

I just am not too sure about incoming links. I know they affect you but I am not sure how much.

[DOWORKSON]

Everything else has been covered in detail so i'll just chime in here and show you how I do my on-page optimization:

1 Word Keyword: 5-7% density
2 Word Keyword: 3-4% density
3 Word Keyword:2-3% density
4 Word+ Keyword: 1-1.5%

Sometimes if I can't sensibly fit in a 3-4 word keyword, I will break it up but keep it as much of it as possible and stuff it in wherever you see fit.

Use that as a guideline for density but another tip that gets me great results is for every single article, I use scrapeboxes wonder wheel scraper (you can do it manually or use other tools) to get 5-10 other related keywords and add those in at least once.

It requires a bit more work if your doing it manually but for 25% extra price, your writers shouldn't have a problem going the extra mile for you.

[markowe]

Interesting discussion, and I am glad the s***b*x hasn't been mentioned once. I am finding these dances (that's all they really are, seems to me) are almost always linked to off-site factors (they happen long after I stop updating site content), though even that's hard to prove conclusively since we tend to all-too-readily put big drops down to our linking activities. Also no doubt there are various random elements deliberately introduced into the algo to prevent reverse engineering (hence why there is still SO much wild speculation about Google SEO). Nevertheless I have seen it enough times to make some sort of connection between a big backlinking campaign and a drop. But sites ALWAYS come back. People say again and again "just keep building diverse links", but they are right. Whether it's a few days or weeks, they always come back if everything is OK on-site (my splogs are different, at least I never tried to recover them, maybe I should try). It's like someone said, there are just too many variables off-site for Google to permanently 'penalise' a site, short of a very poorly diversified BL profile or a lot of BLs in bad neighbourhoods, obvious stuff (how long before profile links get slapped?).

In other words, I am a convert from believing in the sandbox (there, I mentioned it, rats), and that mindset is working great for me. Maybe there IS a sandbox for those who believe in it - designed to weed out the lowest of the low quality sites by scaring their newbie owners into giving up without a fight - it worked on me a fair few times, but no more..!

[RMC]

I have one question about:
"a new site can start off strong, but if you start off strong you have to continue strong. If you give yourself 1,000 backlinks in Week 1, stop for three weeks and then do it again, I guarantee your main domain name will drop into 435-535 SERP rank."
Does it mean that i have to produce backlinks forever or until i am #1 in Google and have a lot of traffic? Or if site gets older then i can stop backlinking? I cant make backlinking forever even if i am #1 in Google. How long?

[salma66]

can someone help me...

if i get backlinks for my blog from a forum signature with 300 posts...then I manage to rank the blog at the 1st page of google...then if i delete the signature, will it effect my blog position?

If I add another URL in my signature...will it count as 300 backlinks & is it a good thing to do in SEO?

[Brendan Mace]

Originally Posted by RMC

I have one question about:
"a new site can start off strong, but if you start off strong you have to continue strong. If you give yourself 1,000 backlinks in Week 1, stop for three weeks and then do it again, I guarantee your main domain name will drop into 435-535 SERP rank."
Does it mean that i have to produce backlinks forever or until i am #1 in Google and have a lot of traffic? Or if site gets older then i can stop backlinking? I cant make backlinking forever even if i am #1 in Google. How long?

Google will give you a temporary penalty if there is an extreme variation in link velocity. Yes, you pretty much have to continue backlinking your sites consistently. But you do not need to send the exact same amount of links forever.

Once you get to number 1, you usually do not need to keep blasting links as hard. But you should still send a reasonable amount of links to avoid being flagged by google.

Google wants things to look natural. 1000 links 1 week. And then ZERO links the next is not natural.

[RMC]

But how to send strong traffic that sits on the site if you are ranked 500? Paying to some backlink provider for that or there another ways- facebook, twitter etc.?