Factors to Avoid Domain Level Ranking Penalty
Everything is going well with your site. You have been reading about how to rank higher in the search engines and then using that additional traffic to make more money than ever before. Then one day it happens. Your site loses it's rankings for all of it's important keywords. It's disappeared into the abyss of the Internet and you start to panic. You think your run on making money online is over forever.
If this has happened to you don't worry, you probably were too aggressive either with your link building tactics or with your advertising methods. Let's take a look at a few of the top factors that can harm your site at the domain level so you can figure out how to get your site back near the top of the rankings where it belongs.
Getting Hacked
The absolute worst thing that could happen to your site is it gets hacked. Someone breaks into your files and uploads harmful scripts that redirects visitors to another site, tries to scam visitors into giving away their information, or any number of other devious schemes.
It's not always easy to tell when you have been hacked. If Google discovers something wrong you can normally be alerted in Webmaster Tools and your site will be removed from the indexed until the problem is resolved. You can also use Google Chrome's safe browsing to investigate the pages on your site that have been marked as malicious. If you are hacked then you need to make sure to find and fix the problem. Check StopBadware for tips on cleaning and securing your website.
Cloaking
Google's webmaster central describes cloaking as "the practice of presenting different content or URLs to user and search engines." Are you being deceptive in serving different pages to Google than to your visitors? There are not a whole lot of good reasons to do this. The only reason I have ever presented varying content to users was by using geo-targeting (serving different content to different IP locations) and even though that can benefit the user with higher relevance I normally don't even do that.
Selling Links
If you are going to sell links then you need to make sure to include the nollow tag, otherwise you risk getting penalized. I don't sell links on any of my sites, but I have purchased them before. I don't know for certain what the threshold is to lose rankings when a site sells links. A lot of times I still see active cache dates and results in the SERPs when I research sites I can purchase links from, but I do think that if you get caught selling links all of the links on your site lose value and your trust goes down with Google. I recently read a case about someone trying to sell a site on eBay, excessively bragging about how he uses the high PR of that site to inflate the rankings of his other sites. A few days later his site was banned from Google and the worth of his site dropped to next to nothing.
If you are going to sell links, don't be blatantly obvious about it. Having content that advertises the fact that you sell links is going to draw a red flag and make your intent more obvious. If you are selling in-content links without the nofollow tag someone is going to have to contact you directly to see if links are for sale, rather than just seeing it on your site and making an easy conclusion.
Off-Page Factors
Some of the experts think that paid links, comment spam, links from link farms, or other manipulative sources can harm your site. They also believe you are running a risk if you get a lot of links for a short period of time from questionable or lower trust sources or a high percentage of your links use keyword rich anchor text.
I am not quite as sure about this. Google has been pretty clear that they would not allow a competitor to harm someone else's site, and all three of these off-page factors would be easy ways to do just that.
On the other hand, I think Google would interpret these signals as low-quality and discount their value, making your efforts to build links in this fashion go to waste. That's really more of an indirect penalty rather than having a direct, negative effect.
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Website Content Development
It doesn't matter what kind of site you are running, if you want traffic then you need content. I would even go as far as to say if you are not getting enough traffic to your site, then the quick and easy solution is to build more content. With each additional page you will get more long tail traffic and you'll build the pagerank of your site.
Kinds of Content
- Short-term (relevant for less than one year)
- Evergreen (long-term content which is relevant for more than one year)
So why do we need content anyway? What purpose does it serve for us? Here are the three main reasons content is so important.
Attract Searchers
Each page on your website has the ability to attract searchers. Even pages that you write that aren't targeted for specific keywords will generate long tail traffic. Why worry about the long tail? According to Google around 50% of the searches they process each day are unique, meaning they have never been used before. This means that you can't specifically target them because you have no idea what terms these will be. However, the more content that you have on your site, the more likely you will draw in long tail searches based on your niche.
When building content you want to start to your most sought after terms and then spread out from there. The further you go from your main targetted keywords, the more long tail searches you will gather. For my established sites with more than 200 pages, over half of the traffic I receive comes from keywords that I am not actively targeting.
Creates PageRank
Each page that you create on your site adds Pagerank. The more pagerank your site has the more you are able to influence where it goes on your site. Directing Pagerank to pages build for high traffic keywords will help you rank near the top of the results for those terms.
External Links
Quality content will draw links from other sites. These external links can be used either for traffic (nofollowed) or for ranking (passing link juice). Even though you want all links to your site to be dofollow, you can't really complain if a nofollow link is giving you visitors, especially if those visitors are converting. Links that are dofollow help pass pagerank and allow you to go after higher traffic keywords.
Each article that you write will help fill one or more of these purposes.
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How Many Pages of Your Site Are Indexed?
For search engine optimization (SEO) purposes we have talked about why both content and links are important. In both articles I stressed how vital it is to get a high percentage of your pages indexed in order to maximize the traffic to your site. How do you know how many pages of your site are indexed though? Here are the tools that I use:
Google Webmaster Tools
Let Google tell you how many pages on your site that they have found and are indexed. Submit your sitemap to their Webmaster Tools. Google provides a lot of useful information, but what we want to focus on here are how many pages are in your submitted sitemap, and how many of those Google has indexed. You want to see a very high percentage here, past 90%.
Google Search
If you go to google.com and search for "site:(yoursitename.com)" the results will show you how many pages are in the index. This number varies from what is in Webmaster Tools and you probably won't get as high of a percentage of your site indexed looking at these results.
AOL.com
Google powers AOL.com's search, but the difference is AOL doesn't include the supplemental index in their results. These are lower quality pages. So, doing a "site:(yoursitename.com)" search here will show you how many high quality pages your site has in the index. I feel like this gives you the best idea on how well your site is getting indexed and if you need to work on getting more links to your site.
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How to Choose Keywords
The key to understanding the SEO game is being effective at managing your resources. You only have so much time in the day, plus you don't want to spend more money than you have to or you won't make as much in profit as you could.
Most of the traffic you will see from the search engines comes from being on the first page. This article on SEO Black Hat shows AOL data that shows almost 90% of all click throughs take place on the first page. You will also see just how important it is to be no. 1 as 42.1% of all clickthroughs are for the first result. It's great to be no. 1, but you also have to be realistic. Getting on the first page for even competitive keywords is a goal that you should be able to reach with a little hard work.
Now that you know how important it is to reach a first page ranking, how do you choose which keywords to go after? This depends on how much you can make for a first page ranking.
I do not like it when people throw hard numbers out there that is a cutoff for what is worth their time and what isn't. If a keyword has 1,000 searches per month but those visitors spend about 5 cents per click, would you rather target that keyword over another with 100 per month and $5 per click?
Let's just say you can get onto the first page for whatever keyword you want. I'll round the estimate up to a 5% clickthrough rate for a first page result, since we aren't really taking position into account. If you go to Google's Keyword Research Tool, enter your keywords and check their search volume. How much profit would you be making if you had 5% of those visitors each month? If you don't know your profit margins or earnings per lead then use the PPC cost for those keywords to give you a rough idea.
After you have your list of keywords check for the ones with the highest return on investment. That is how keyword targeting should work, based on profits and not just traffic numbers.