Page Level Google Penalties
A 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?
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Keywords & Domain Names
Most likely if you try to buy a domain name for a specific keyword that you are after you will find that it is already taken. One of the biggest reasons these domains are so popular is having keywords in your site's domain name allows you to easily get the desired anchor text that you wanted to rank for. Over the years the search engines have tried to fight the abuse of keyword anchor text by making it less of a factor in the rankings, but in my personal experience it still carries a lot of weight.
Say for example your site is CNN.com. You would get a lot of links to your site with the anchor text of:
- CNN
- cnn
- cnn.com
- CNN News
- Breaking News at CNN
If instead the domain was News.com you would get a lot of links containing the anchor text "news". If "news" was the anchor text that news sites want to rank for (and why wouldn't it be) you would think News.com would have a leg up on CNN.com. Not only would it get more links with the proper anchor text, but Google isn't going to filter those anchor text links because of the keyword being in the domain name. Distinguishing between what domains are focused on keywords and which are brands is difficult to compute and I would think Google would want to error on the side of caution.
Now that isn't going to say that if your keyword is in the domain name you are automatically going to be sent to the top of the search engines. You still need to build a healthy profile of links from authority sites. It appears to me in the last couple of years Google has decreased the importance of keywords in the domain so that lower quality sites do not outrank authority sites. With so many more extensions being available rather than .com and .net, it's easier than ever for marketers to try and game the system and purchase keyword domains with odd extensions, further diluting the effectiveness of having keywords in the domain name.
Do not try to create hundreds of different sites based around similar keywords. For example, do not buy redwidgets.com, bluewidgets.com, and down the line. Instead buy widgets.com and build your navigation around different variations.
Check out this survey data composed by SEOMoz.org to see the importance of keywords in domain and subdomain names.
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Google’s Farmer Update
Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm to ensure that they give their users the best results possible, but early on February 24th they made a pretty big change. According to their blog post this "improvement" is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites.
What's defined as low-quality? Sites that copy a significant amount of their content from others or that don't add a lot of value for their users.
The goal here is to help promote high-quality content and the sites that produce it. If you want your site to rank then you have to produce original content that is throughly researched, providing an in-depth answers to what searchers are looking for.
There has been a lot of talk about "content farms" recently, so this update has been named the "Farmer Update" by several webmasters. It seems the intent was to de-value sites that mass-produce content like Demand Media, AOL, and Maholo.
This change has caused a lot of backlash from webmasters who felt like they were producing quality content before, only to see their rankings suffer a serious drop. Nobody is entirely certain what made their site become less-valueable in the eyes of Google, but I have a theory.
Sites that mass produce content do not get a lot of links. Some sites produce thousands of new articles each and every day, but they are not getting that same number of links. I think the key to ranking high with the new Google will be to build less news style content and more quality, evergreen content that will have a better chance of getting linked to. You might have to work a little harder at getting links to all of your pages, and not just focusing on the landing pages you most want your users to get to.
I don't think any site got a direct penalty. I think what happens is that normally each page that you have produces pagerank that you can use to drive anchor text towards your landing pages. Under this rule large sites win out in the long run because they can drive more pagerank to the pages they want to rank. With this update, pages that are worthless (in Google's eyes) aren't helping the sites push pagerank to their landing pages. Thus, the sites that went down in the rankings are just suffering a drop due to their internal links being discounted.
Now that's just my theory, but I think it matches up with Google's intent. Produce high-quality stuff, update it when need be, and it should draw links from other sites. If you are doing this I doubt your site will ever go unappreciated in Google's eyes.
Update: I checked WebmasterWorld and found an interesting post from user "DanAbbamont." His data showed the hit article directories have taken:
Article Directories Have Been Devalued Significantly
- ezinearticles.com lost an average of 34 positions
- hubpages.com lost an average of 31 positions
- squidoo.com lost an average of 15 positions
- articlesbase.com lost an average of 29 positions
- buzzle.com lost an average of 30 positions
- associatedcontent.com lost an average of 22 positions
- suite101.com lost an average of 33 positions
Update: Sistrix has a nice list of sites that have been hit hard by the newest update. The top six are WiseGeek, EzineArticles, Suite101, Hubpages, Buzzle, and AssociatedContent.
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Evergreen Content
Having already discussed short term content as anything that is relevant for less than one year it's time to focus on long term content. This content is typically referred to as evergreen content because it never goes out of date. Year after year these pages should continue to provide you traffic as searchers ask the same question and land on the evergreen page where you provide the answer.
Importance for SEO
Evergreen content provides valuable landing pages for SEO efforts. All of your most desirable, high traffic terms should have a page focused entirely on providing the searcher what they are looking for. You will be using these pages for your link building campaigns as the URLs for external links to help these pages rank high in the SERPs. You will do a lot of internal linking to these pages. They populate the menus on your site and get interlinked from other relevant articles that you write.
With so many links pointing to these pages you will be sending a lot of pagerank to your evergreen content. You need pagerank to get the page to rank high in the SERPs, but it is also valuable for getting other pages on your site to rank as well. Quality evergreen content will contain links to more focused articles on your site. This allows readers to drill down further into your content for more information about a specific topic and allows you to flow some of that pagerank down to that content.
The more useful your evergreen content is the more external links you will get to these pages. If you create a great resource that addresses a specific need visitors will be more likely to bookmark, share, link to and reference your material.
How to Create It
When creating evergreen content remember that you want to go in-depth on your topic. You want to specifically address a keyword phrase that users will be entering and solve the problem they are gathering information on with their search. The better your page at answering the user's question the more it is going to help you attract links, increase your traffic, and get subscribers or customers.
If you are creating a new site then you should have already picked your niche. Once you pick your niche you drill down a little bit and form categories. Instead of spreading your content out into each category, pick one to start with and really go in-depth. Then combine that content into one useful resource page and use internal links to drill down to the specifics.
For those of you out there who have an established site or blog, you already have content. If you are using categories, start with your most important or the one you have written the most about. Group those articles together. Do some keyword research to find a relevant high traffic keyword that matches your topic and use that to build your evergreen content page.
At a bare minimum you will want a quality introduction followed by a list of internal links that point to more specific information that you have already written. As you are piecing together your page you might find a gap in your content- a specific topic that hasn't been addressed. If you do, the good news is that you have some great new content ideas for what to write about. These evergreen pages are a great place to archive your most important content.
If you are still stuck on what to write about for your evergreen pages, try working on tutorials, how-to's, or answering specific questions. With tutorials or how-to's you can go step-by-step and include pictures. If you answer a specific question a potential customer in your niche might ask you not only have an idea for a great piece of content, but a page that will convert those visitors into buyers.
Cost
Since they will provide you long term benefits you want to make sure these articles are your highest quality content. These pages might be longer or require more expertise than short term content. Do not worry if you do not rank highly for these terms right away since it is not likely they will become outdated.
You will likely pay more to have this content written or use up more of your own time. You just have to compare the benefits of receiving traffic from a page for more than a year, or how much traffic you will receive in a short period of time from your short term content.
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Future SEO Ranking Factors
The game of SEO is always changing. More than ten years ago all you had to worry about was on-page factors and keyword stuffing. Five years ago buying links could guarantee you a top ranking. Where is the future of SEO heading?
First of all, let me stress that the importance of quality content and links isn't going away any time soon. Sites that produce quality content will get links and have users that keep coming back for more. Focus there first, and then worry about some of these other factors.
Page Loading
There is no doubt that faster sites convert better than slow sites. Visitors do not want to sit around waiting for your site to load. They are there to find information, and they want to find it quickly. The goal for all of the pages on my site is four seconds.
How fast is your site loading? Take a look at the "Site Performance" link in Google's Webmaster Tools, or take a link at Pingdom Tools. Follow Google's recommendations, look to upgrade to hosting solution, and read my how to speed up your blog for ideas on how to make your site faster.
Social Media
Google is already using Twitter and Facebook to help determine relevant content. The more times your pages get tweeted, retweeted, and liked on Facebook the better you are going to rank.
If you want to improve your social media score, get active on each of the platforms. Make it easy for visitors to follow you on either and use it to communicate, not just push your products or post automated junk.
Clickthrough Rate
If you are lucky enough to have a high listing on a results page you better make sure that it's relevant to what users are searching for. If they are not clicking through then Google is going to think you are not relevant for those keywords and knock you down the rankings.
Want a higher clickthrough rate? Treat your descriptions the same way you would a PPC ad. Call the user to take action and click through to find what they are looking for. Use the keyword in the title and description so it shows up bold.
Bounce Rate
So a user is clicking through from the results page to your site, but once they get there they quickly realize it's not what they are looking for. Google is tracking bounce rates and if you aren't giving users what they want, they will "bounce" you down the results pages.
To help improve your bounce rate, give the user what they want. Write quality pages or try and ranking product pages for what the user would be searching for, and not something that is borderline relevant.
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Why Links Are Important for SEO
Back in the early days of Internet marketing search engines used meta tags, meta keywords, and a lot of on-site factors to rank pages in the results (SERPs). Then Google came along and found a better way to do it that depended in large part on links. It's not just how many links you have, but the quality of the links that matter. Let's take a look at the two main reasons that links are important for your SEO strategy.
Gets Your Site Indexed
This part of the equation is overlooked but I wanted to list it first to show just how important it is. When you create content, you want to make sure that those pages get indexed by the search engines so you can show up in the SERPs. More reasons on why content is important, it gives your site authority and pagerank that you can sculpt to the pages that you want to show up for the keywords that you are targeting.
The more links you have pointing to your site, the more times that a spider will leave someone else's site to crawl yours. Link variation plays a big role here. If you are getting all of your links to one page then the spider starts in the same place each time and goes from there. If you get links deeper into your site, the higher the chance that you are going to get more pages ranked. That is why when getting links to your site do not only worry about a few pages, but get links deep into your site so more of your pages show up in the index.
What Your Site is About
The anchor text of the links pointing to your site tells the engines what your site is about. It is very important to getting a high ranking, but the search engines know just how important it is too. That is why they are so against paid links, because that is just a way for marketers to game their system and get their site ranked high even if they don't "deserve it" naturally in the search engine's eyes.
Say there are two sites are competing for the top spot for a certain keyword. One of them has 25 backlinks with the keyword as the anchor text and the other has 100 links of the generic site name or URL. Most likely with all other things being equal, the one with the targeted anchor text is going to win out.
Getting backlinks from relevant websites is also important. It used to be that you could get any old site to link to you and Google would give you plenty of love. Now the spiders are smart enough to realize that a golf blog linking to a golf tip site is a better indicator of relevance than a link to a golf tip site from one about dinosaurs. The link from the dinosaur site isn't worthless, but it isn't as powerful as from a relevant niche.
Don't get me wrong, you are going to want to concentrate on getting your keywords in the anchor text of links pointing to your landing pages, but don't make that the 100% focus of your off-site optimization.
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Why Content is Important for SEO
When site owners get started out with search engine optimization (SEO) they always here that "content is king" or to drive more people to their site they need to write more articles. Not a lot of people explain why they need to do these things or what good comes from it. It's obvious that content speaks a lot about what you have to offer and should convince visitors that you are an expert or that your product/service will solve their problems, but it can also help you gain more traffic. Here's why:
Landing Pages
I like to try to only target 1-3 keywords for each page on the site. That means as you build up the list of terms that you are going to go after, you should have a landing page for almost every one. This will help increase conversions because the traffic you get will be targeted to a page that is custom tailed for almost exactly what they are looking for.
Long tail keywords
When working on SEO it's common to focus in on those money keywords that are 2-3 keywords long, highly searched for, but yet highly competitive. However, when you have a bunch of content on your site you can drive visitors with long tail keywords. These are keywords that are low traffic so sites do not concentrate on them specifically. An example would be if you are selling Armani suits and were ranked for "half price black armani suits."
You may ask why worry about them if they are low traffic? First, you aren't going to put any extra effort in. Second, the benefits compound when you get several thousand keywords sending you a few new visitors each month. Third, these long tail keywords typically have a higher conversion rate.
If you notice related long tail keywords that send double digit visitors to your site each month, consider writing an article focusing on that topic.
Authority
Each page that you create adds authority to your site. You need authority just to break into the search engine results (SERPs) and the more you have allows the specific search engines to "trust" your site that much more.
Sculpting Pagerank
Not only does each page on your site add authority, but also pagerank. You can then use that additional pagerank to feed your landing pages by linking to them with the proper keywords in the anchor text. You will really only see the benefits from doing this when you create over 1,000 pages on your site.
With additional pages you can also silo your content to ensure that more of your pages get indexed. A good way to do this is with categories in WordPress. For each of my most popular categories I will create a different menu that is filled with top posts a visitor would want to see if they are interested in that particular category.
Too Much
You don't need to keep typing away until your fingers go raw because you will see diminishing returns. While it's true that each additional page adds value to your site, that value is only added if the page actually gets indexed. If you don't have any links pointing to your site then it doesn't matter if you have 1,000 page, none of them will be in the index so none of them will be able to show up in the SERPs nor add any authority to your site.
Post content at a pace that you can maintain and monitor your webmaster tools to make sure that all of your pages are getting indexed. If your index percentage drops too low, then you need to work on getting more links to your site. The article I wrote on how to get your site indexed faster also applies to getting more your site in the index.
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Easy Keyword Generator
The first step to doing any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is to have a keyword list of the targets you are going to go after. Generating a long list that combines different commonly used phrases can be difficult so that is why I was pretty happy when I found this keyword variation generator for excel.
It is fairly easy to use. All you have to do is come up with a list of prefixs then a list of keywords. The spreadsheet then gives you all of the different combinations for the two.
So let's say you have an e-commerce store that sells dog supplies. Your keyword list might look something like this:
Prefixes: Blue, Red, Holiday, Yellow, Black, White
Keywords: Collars, Leashes, Clothes, Placemats
The spreadsheet would then combine the two, giving you 24 different keyword variations.
This isn't a perfect solution, since some of your keywords might use certain prefixes and others note. In our example if you are selling carriers, treats, or food then having those prefixes might not give you the best combination to go for.
After you have your keyword list, you can then start targeting these combinations with your SEO efforts, or if you do PPC advertising then you have a nice list of keywords to start testing and tracking.
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Keywords Per Page Strategy
When site owners first start trying their hand at search engine optimization (SEO) one of the first questions they ask is "how many keywords should you focus on for each page?" The reason why there is a limit to how many keywords you should target does not have as much to do with it being difficult to get a page ranked for several different keywords, but more about conversion.
The real limit that you have to work with is the title tag. Titles play an important role in the on-page optimization of your site. However, knowing how important links are to SEO and the anchor text of those incoming links even the lack of on-page benefits can be overcome.
The real reason you want to limit the number of keywords you aim for on a single page is conversion. Do you notice how if you search for a keyword in Google it is bolded in the results? That goes for the title tag, the description, and the URL. This helps with clickthrough rates, so by creating a page with the keyword in the title, description, and URL (by naming the page after the keyword) you are going to get a higher clickthrough rate to your site.
Another conversion benefit for creating a lot of pages for different keywords is that each landing page will be tailored to the visitors needs. Let's say you sell golf clubs on your site, and more specifically putters. If someone searches for "Scotty Cameron putters" do you want them to land on your overall golf clubs page, or take them right to your section on Scotty Cameron putters so they get exactly what they want? Trust me, conversions are going to be higher the less you make the user work to find what they want.
The final reason I like to limit the keywords per page is that having more content is important for building up the authority of your site and this is an easy way to do it.