If you noticed since late April that your website has gone down in Google Search results you are probably left with a lot of questions. If you're currently paying a website company to manage, host and optimize your site you may even be frustrated dropping from page 1 to page 3.
The good news is the company you're working with is probably trying to actively restore the value of your website as you're reading this. What happened back in April is Google changed their algorithm to what has been code named as the Penguin update. This update was targeting websites that violated the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically these involved guidelines were keyword stuffing, cloaking, link scheme participants and duplicate content. I will break these down briefly below:
- Keyword stuffing is exactly what it sounds like - an over use of terms you are trying to target. "Drunk driving lawyer handling drunk driving cases for people charged with drunk driving in Michigan." You wouldn't describe yourself like this to someone so don't write about yourself (or let someone write on your behalf ) like this. The example is extreme, but the reality is even if only 10% of your content on a page is your keyword it is probably too much.
- Cloaking is having the Search Engines spiders read something that is actually different than what the user sees in their browser. Cloaking is often a spamdexing technique to get high ranks in search engines quickly by seeming more relevant to search requests than you really are. All done in deceiving ways. Do no evil.
- Link Schemes - links to manipulate page rank, links to web spammers (bad neighbors), excessive reciprocal links and buying/selling links that pass PageRank. Don't over think this too much - if it seems like a grey area it is probably black hat. Not all links are created equal and you would rather have a handful of strong relevant links than 1,000s of garbage ones. When you get those emails that will give you 10,000 links for $35 do yourself a favor and delete it.
- Duplicate Content - You can't successfully trick search engines for long having the same content on multiple pages in your website without getting flagged for having duplicate content. It is a terrible experience for the user so obviously Google wants to limit the visibility of these types of sites. Sometimes duplicate content happens accidentally. If you had someone build your website that didn't have a lot of experience you may have several URLs that all provide the same content, but on different pages. Even though you see them as one page, the search engine spiders can read them all:
- http://mysite.com/article/category/thunder
- http://mysite.com/thunder
- http://mysite.com/thunder.index.htm
So how do you get your search engine rankings back?
One is to report webspam that Penguin may have missed. You can find that here.
Things you can do on your own involve doing an analysis of your website and the links that your website has. Google Webmaster tools can help provide this, but there are other services (paid and free) that can assist you.
If you are working with a company that is managing your website make call to them and ask what they are doing for you. Maybe they are already well into this process or maybe your phone call will get them to start it.
What other tips do you have to share?
