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Dear Google: Penalize This!

Posted by admin on December 18, 2006 in SEO Theory

For the past several months, a fair number of Webmasters have been complaining about a “-30″ or “+30″ penalty (depending on who is doing the complaining). Marios Alexandrou recapped what little information he could find about the situation on his blog, including a link to a post by Adam Lasnik in Google’s support group where Adam gave a typically ubiquitous reply.

In essence, what Adam said amounts to, “If you did something wrong, fix it and ask for reinclusion. If you didn’t do anything wrong (i.e., you’re not really penalized), work harder.”

I’ve seen this “-/+30″ behavior before. It affected Xenite.Org early in 2005 when Google rolled out the Awful Update (from February to May). Actually, it only affected the old pages of Xenite.Org that managed to survive in the main index. Most of them simply vanished. But I studied the effect with curiosity as I added new content on a weekly basis. The new pages ranked well for their targeted expressions. That told me that Xenite.Org wasn’t under a penalty, and when Google finished the update/recrawl/whatever-it-was Xenite.Org regained all its former top five rankings.

Is there a connection between what happened to many sites early last year and what happened to some sites this year (starting, I guess, around September or October)? Only Google knows, but I believe the first reports of this effect started to emerge soon after Google wrapped several weeks of rolling out new stuff in July and August (which Matt Cutts announced in advance).

The first I heard of this situation was in October, when SE Roundtable described what people were saying on everyone’s favorite SEO forum. If you glance through the comments, you’ll see that I said nothing. Usually when I say nothing in response to complaints from forums it means I am absorbing new data, thinking about the possible implications and connections.

From August 17 to October 17 is two months. 8 weekly data pushes should have happened around that time. Unfortunately, this period represents a dark hole in my data history because I lost my previous job, launched an independent full-time SEO consulting business, and subsequently took a search strategy job with an Internet marketing firm. By October 17 I was buried deep in coming up to speed on a LOT of customer accounts and propositions.

Nonetheless, I saw the discussions of the “penalty” in a few places and I assumed it meant that Google most likely implemented a nasty new filter. This filter, I surmised, may not just disallow certain links. It may trip a switch and flag URLs for review (or some other processing).

It’s no accident that people complain about being on the third page of results. 2/3 of all click-throughs occur in the first 5 positions. By the time you get to the second page, you’re in the droppings left by the long tail of click-throughs. If you don’t have alternative sources of traffic, you’re in big trouble if you leave the first page.

People assume, generally — when sites lose rankings after updates — that Google has probably taken some backlinks out of the mix. But what I’ve not seen anyone suggest or test (testing is better than suggesting) is whether Google might have identified some snarky outlinks on a few of the sites in question.

Sudden drops in ranking can be due to any number of factors, and usually combinations of several. Let me offer a few suggestions:

1. You been penalized for misbehavior (everyone assumes this — most people are usually wrong)
2. Your 30 top competitors just got a lot of optimization (not likely, but there are actually sneaky things your competitors can do to hurt you — and I ain’t talking about the SEO myth called “Google bowling”)
3. The search engine changed its ranking algorithm (this actually happens more often than most people realize)
4. You took down some content that was helping you rank well when you thought it was really your worthless spammy links (I can’t begin to count the number of times I have seen people shoot themselves in the foot this way)
5. You were de-indexed for a perfectly normal, valid reason and your site is just moving back up after being recrawled and reindexed

So how do you determine if it’s a penalty? There are a number of things you can (and should) do. First, review what you have done to the site in the past two weeks. If you can legitimately, honestly say “Nothing” (absolutely nothing — no ifs, ands, or buts are allowed but, hey — cheat yourself if you want to be hardheaded about this) then it’s probably not because of anything you did.

Now, “what you have done to the site” includes any of the following: deleting content, changing URLs, moving servers, changing software, changing templates, buying links, joining link management programs, adding links, deleting links, changing words, changing bold, changing templates, changing anything in any way that any search engine may see no matter how blase and noble the motive.

Okay, let’s assume you’re in the 5% of people who didn’t go out and do something stupid and won’t fess up. The next thing you need to do is look at the environment. Is there an update in progress? So how do you tell when Google is updating? The short answer is to look for lots of complaints in forums. If you check four or five relatively active forums and don’t see newly launched threads like “Sudden drop in Google”, “Lost my rankings in Google”, “Google update?” then there is probably no update in progress. Of course, you could just be the lucky Webmaster who sees it first. If you wait a week, and an update is in progress, you’ll usually see other people start to complain. If you’re affected by an update, there is nothing you can do but wait.

But let’s assume there is no update in progress. Maybe you’re the new kid on the block in your niche. You had great rankings for a few months. You showed those old-timey competitors you know how to do your thang. Cool. Great. Good for you. But are you really naive enough to believe that no one else is optimizing for this niche you just invaded? I’ve seen a lot of travel, insurance, entertainment, real estate, and medical sites enter the fray through the years. The Webmasters usually express total exasperation at the idea that some of their competitors may be optimizing too.

Think about your competition. Are they good enough to have engaged in search engine optimization? Is it maybe possible they saw you shoot to the top when they were all relaxed and not doing anything, and now maybe they are out there building links, adding content, redesigning Web sites? It happens. You need to figure out if this activity is going on. But before you run over to Yahoo! to check their backlinks, you need to grapple with reality here: you most likely have not done your competitive analysis homework.

Most likely, you glance at backlink reports for your site every week and say, “Hm. Okay, those paid links are showing up.” But how often do you run backlink reports for your competitors? Dudes, if you know nothing about what their backlink growth rate is, checking their linkage when you’ve lost rankings tells you exactly nothing.

But let’s assume you’re the only competitive SEO in your niche. Hey, it can happen. You’ve found a way to monetize a search expression that the black hat scraper spammers haven’t identified. The best thing you can do at this point is to say nothing. Keep your mouth shut. If you go complaining to forums because you’ve lost rankings in a nearly virgin expression, you don’t need to be sending up smoke signals that say, “Over here! Money to be had over here!”

Sometimes, rankings right themselves when you do nothing. Google is constantly recrawling the Web. A lot of people don’t understand what that means. In part, it means they are yanking URLs out of their database and putting them back in. Sometimes, if you have weak linkage, it takes a while to get back in and get ranked again. (NOTE: I skipped to the end of my list on the assumption that you can handle the omitted stuff with some common sense and reason.)

Sometimes you lose backlink credit. Now, we know you’re not narrow-minded enough to think it’s all about links, but let’s say in your early naivete as you first got into search engine optimization you went out and read everything you could. You bought eBooks, read ranking factors documents, browsed forums. And after doing all that, you came to the genius conclusion that, “Hey! All I need is links!”

Okay, genius, if you’re ranking on links you’re trying to dance on a bar stool as you balance it on one leg. Think about that metaphor. You have to be really, really good or really, really fast if you want to rank this way. Why? Because most of those cheap links you got probably didn’t pass value to your site, and the links that do pass value most likely don’t stay in the index on a regular basis.

The easier a link is to get, the easier it is for a search engine to remove it for you at the most inconvenient time. The latest SEO buzzword these days is “quality links” (okay, it’s an expression). No one really knows what “quality links” are. Most of the people who use the expression really have no clue.

Think about the kind of links you would give freely from the home page of your 50-page domain. All your little baby pages link back to Mama root URL. You know — from having read all your eBooks, SEO FAQs, blogs, and tutorials — that the baby pages make Mama page look very, very important. Are you seriously going to hand out your most valuable link love to just anyone?

If your answer is “yes”, you’ve probably just figured out why you lost your rankings.

But I’m hoping your answer is “no”. And if your answer is “no” then my point is that you want to capture inbound links that have as much thought and consideration behind them as you would give to the outbound links on your own home page. There are good reasons to link out to other people’s domains from your home page, but those reasons all have something to do with “compelling content” or something you feel very strongly about.

You want passionate links. There is no such thing as “quality links”, but there are plenty of links that represent a belief that something is really, really worth linking to.

Not coincidentally, you’ll often see Googlers referring to those links as “editorially chosen links”.

Be the link editor you need to be, and you’ll see the kinds of links you want for your site. Will they prevent you from getting a “+/- 30 penalty”? Absolutely not, but among other benefits they’ll help you weather search engine storms. Because, you know what? Passionate links send you traffic regardless of what the search engines are doing.

I’ll take as many passionate links as I can give — or get. They’re worth all the thought and juice I put into them.

Good luck with your “penalty”. I hope you get it figured out.