Tag: SEO

Your traffic and activity on Google.com has been great for years. Everything looks great, business is trending up and then your traffic crashes, and doesn’t just crash a little, but crashes a lot. Could the image to the right be your website’s history?

If it is the first place to look is your Google Webmaster Control Panel to see if Google has done a manual penalty for link schemes. If you do see the ill-fated message that your site is and has been penalized can you ever fully recover? This article at the MOZ blog states that typically you cannot fully recover the traffic you had before. Giving several examples, the writer visually shows that in some cases a modest return to traffic can be achieved but not usually back to the previous traffic levels.

For some website owners, this is a pretty hard fact to acknowledge; that what their SEO firm or what they have unknowingly have done has impacted their business with no real chance for full recovery. Although each case is unique and the reasons for a Google Smackdown may be different, full recovery may simply not be an option.

Make sure to check into the blog post I mention and review the graphics and charts as they are very telling. What I’ve seen personally is that when a site owner has been hurt with a placement penalty their only recourse for immediate improvement is to move into AdWords with a fairly large click budget while they make a significant effort to remediate the problem. However; it is clear that a business may not always fully recover what it has lost, one, when it comes to trust with Google and two, when it comes to Google driven traffic.

A lot of things have changed over the years in regards to how a website should get organic or unpaid search placement particularly on Google. One of the tactics that SEO’s are having the hardest time letting go of is keyword density.

I have to say that in my own personal experience, this used to be a very usable approach and one that really bumped a website up in the organic results – but no longer! In fact, have too heavy of a keyword density on your page and you may now actually trigger a Google penalty for keyword stuffing.

If you have not updated your website content in the last two years and you have seen your search placement drop, I would recommend that you have a careful review done of your page content. You may actually need to be proactively revising the content to remove instances of keywords that you had previously added.

We typically would strive for about a 7% keyword density on the home page of a website, but now if you mention the keyword phrases you are targeting more than three times in your content you may be getting yourself in trouble.

Here are a few important thoughts I’d like to share on this topic:

1. Don’t build keyword density in your pages at this point in time.

2. If you previously have built up keyword density, now’s the time to start removing density proactively.

3. It’s time to review the length of your pages. If you have to scroll more than once to read page content your page is too long and needs to be made more concise. The key to understand here is that mentioning a phrase three times in a page of 250 to 300 words of content is way different than mentioning a phrase three times in a page of 1,200 words. Although we are not talking keyword density per say, pages with too much content will be trying to cover too many topics and that length now may actually work against you both in not being a narrow enough focus and being too long for mobile device use.

4. So now big concerns are keyword density, page content topics, AND page length!

If you need real help on your website content, I encourage you to review our services to see how consulting with us will bring clarity to a change in approach for your website and content creation strategy.

It can happen to the very best of sites managed with white hat SEO as in this case study found on the MOZ blog; Google smacks your organic placement down and you can’t even find your business name in a search on Google.com.

Usually this type of severe penalty is reported to you on the Google Webmaster Control Panel under manual penalty.

John Mueller of Google responded to the MOZ blog writer’s question on negative SEO tactics with this response:

“…You mean like when somebody creates spam links but also links to Wikipedia? … We have seen it happen before. Sometimes we can tell but sometimes it’s a little bit harder… but [if] you get a manual penalty from it you will know about it so you can just disavow the links.”

Other SEO have stated that to remove a Google penalty you should work to manually clean up links before using the disavow link tool, but clearly Google feels otherwise.

If you have not been using shady or spammy link growth tactics and you’ve gotten a Google smackdown, make sure you review your link numbers in the Google Webmaster Control Panel and disavow those that you have not worked to grow. It may be the fastest way to get your position back.