Page Level Google Penalties
TweetA couple of years ago you only had to worry about domain level penalties, but now search engines have refined their penalties for specific pages on a site targeting certain keywords. The most common page that gets hit is the home page. I'm not really sure if that is because the index is the most popular page on almost every site or whether it's the favorite target for people to try to game and get higher rankings for. Here are some of the factors for page level penalties:
Over Optimization
Often times the page level penalties are only applied for specific keyword phrases. You might be "over-optimizing" if you have too high of a keyword density on the page. Keyword stuffing is a thing of the past, so make sure your content flows naturally and speaks to the user, not the search engine spider.
If a site owner is obviously targeting a certain page with an overuse of keyword rich external link anchor text the search engines might apply a penalty. With natural links people aren't always going to link to your "widgets" page using that anchor text. They will also mix in your site name, strange parts of the sentence, and the exact URL. If the only links you have pointing to that page are for the keyword, you might get penalized.
Sitewide links can cause a problem. I don't think keyword rich, sitewide links give you as much juice as they used to. If you see natural blogrolls almost all use the site name, or brand name as the anchor text. They don't use keywords and rarely do they link to internal pages over the home page.
You can also over-optimize your internal linking structure. You want to vary how you link to the page. For your menus, think of what is best for the user and don't worry about keyword rich anchor text. Using a "widgets" example don't fill your menu with "red widgets", "blue widgets", "green widgets", and on down the line. Instead title your menu "Colored Widgets" and use the links of "red", "blue", and "green".
Links from Bad Neighbordhoods
Getting links from bad sites, either that have been de-indexed for hosting malware or penalized for some other reason is often brought up by the experts as a reason to draw a penalty. While you don't want to intentionally generate links from these sites, nor do you want to hack someone else's site to get a link back to yours, I don't think the link alone will get you into trouble. If that was the case a hacker would just break into someone's site and add links to a competitor, benefiting from their rankings drop by moving up due to their penalties.
Page level penalties are tough to detect. As the site owner you might think that you need you aren't ranking well yet because of not enough links so you go out and find more incoming links to that page with the same anchor text you are being penalized for! That can be really frustrating I'm sure. You will also still receive a decent amount of traffic to that page, even though it's the less targeted long tail traffic, further enhancing your belief that everything is fine.
How can you tell if you are suffering from a page level penalties?
- Did you buy a bunch of paid links that used the same anchor text pointing to the same page?
- Does that page not rank well for the targeted keyword? You might find yourself with a -5, -10, or -30 penalty so a sudden drop by that many spots is a strong indicator.
- Does the page rank well for related but not too closely matched keywords? It's better to test several so you can see any significant differences.
- Are you linking to that page with your keyword anchor text from every page of your own site?
