How well do you know about Google penalties? Don’t you agree we sometimes worked too hard in our work at home business and may have overlooked its relevance and importance. Well if like me, you may not have an easy time juggling with just too much work on your hands, coupled with a day job that sucks your life away. The last thing you really want to worry about is incurring the wrath of God Google, who when applying the fullest extent of its power, can make you lose your pagerank or the ultimatum - de-indexing your website. Two weeks ago, I had the Google penalty. Or did I?
Two weeks ago all my main keywords that I ranked, specifically ‘work at home ideas‘, and ‘legitimate home internet business‘ lost their usual page 3 SERP from Google. On checking further, they were nowhere in sight not even in hundred positions. I think I got the dreaded Google penalty.
Conduct Test for Google Penalty
- Check that the number of urls Google previously indexed your website remains the same. (I used this tool, Website Grader and found out I had the same number of urls indexed)
- Did you link to any “bad” sites. Check your outbound links to determine if you may have inadvertently linked to sites on gambling, casino, porn, link farms, doorway pages. (I used Bad Neighborhood detection tool and found a handful of suspects and deleted them immediately. Do take note that this tool though useful for this purpose, may not be perfect as it’s selection criteria uses keywords associated with such “problem sites”. So a perfectly legitimate home internet business whose webmaster includes the word ’sexy’ in the post title may be flagged out too.)
- Have you over-optimized your website, a technique sometimes used by others in aggressive link building using the same anchor text keywords instead of having a good variety of the main keywords. ( I have followed a very clean link building strategy after having written my 5-part link building strategy blog series. Read up Matt Cutt’s warning about possible penalty on keyword stuffing.)
- Do you buy or sell links? Everyone is familiar with Google’s stand on the buying and selling of backlinks. As it firmly promotes a more natural link building within the blogosphere, such penalties can be expected for companies and others who blatantly do this. ( I don’t buy links but I do sell text links on this blog. I wouldn’t be concerned about selling ad space on your own website without a 3rd party, as there is no way a search engine could track this)
- Automated Page redirect - Bloggers using JavaScript automated re-directs often result in Google penalties as these pages are perceived to be doorway pages.(I don’t practice this)
- Have you done too much reciprocal linking: Google’s algorithm may activate its filters when there are incidents of unnatural backlinks accumulation through excessive reciprocal links exchange using the same anchor text links.( I avoid reciprocal link exchange focusing more on one-way and three way linking)
What You Can Do When You Get The Google Penalty
- If you really have the Google penalty, you should contact Google to find what really you have done wrong or contravened their bible Google Webmaster Guidelines.
- Correct your website problems e.g. keyword over optimization. If this penalty has caused you losing your page rank, Google may take a couple of months before your page rank is restored.
- If your website has been de-indexed by Google, correct your problems immediately and submit a Google re-inclusion request.
My brush with God Google ended as sudden as it came, after 4 traumatizing days. Fortunately I did not get slapped with a Google penalty although I think Google algorithm may have a clever way getting my utmost attention to a ‘what if’ scenario. The two possible reasons I think this happened were because firstly I failed to update my website within the 17-day frequency, something which I have written about before. Secondly I was not doing enough in backlink accumulation. That said, my SERP came back to page 3 positions for ‘work at home ideas‘ and ‘legitimate home internet business‘ and I was relieved. Even my ‘Squidoo Secrets‘ keyword resumed it’s page 1 ranking. As they say, after bitterness, sweetness follows.
What do you think?
Do you believe the business you are conducting does not violate Google Webmaster Guidelines or you strictly follow a white hat SEO approach. Or do you have a few grey areas or techniques which you may need to look at a little closer. I love to hear from you and getting your insights.
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Sun, Sep 21, 2008
Link Management, Search Engine Optimization, Work From Home, seo