While many digital marketers are involved in developing website strategy, many are unaware of the criteria that Google uses to assess their websites for ranking purposes, and how decisions made at the planning stage can impact future search performance.

I want to talk through a range of the most common mistakes that marketers make that can earn the wrath of a Google penalty.

How does Google work?

First up I think it is important to understand what Google’s goal is:

“Google wants to deliver the best answer to users queries first time, every time (otherwise they might start using competing search engines)”

Everything Google does is built around this premise and keeping this in mind at all times will help you make the right decisions in your website planning.

In order to deliver the best answer in the search results Google uses a number of metrics to assess and rank websites for search. These include:

  • the quality and quantity of the content on each page
  • the design, crawlability and speed of the website
  • the links pointing to the domain and each individual page

These measurements have been vulnerable to unscrupulous SEO’s using a range of “black-hat” techniques to trick Google into ranking pages higher than they deserve.

To counter this Google has developed a number of algorithms separate to the main ranking algorithm to ensure that the pages they are ranking in search deserve to be there. Whether you have been engaged in “black-hat” SEO activity or not, as a digital marketer it is important that you know how these algorithms work so you don’t get affected.

There are two main algorithms that you need to know about and these are known as Panda and Penguin.

Google Panda - targeting low quality content and a poor user experience

Panda is known as the quality algorithm which is a little understating its potential impact and wide range of website factors it looks at. These factors include:

Uniqueness of content including:

  • Titles and descriptions
  • Main body content

Quality of content including:

  • Length
  • Comprehensiveness
  • Number of ads (especially above the fold)
  • Page download speed

Panda is designed to penalise websites that have lots of “thin” content and are seen as not providing a quality experience for users. Websites that are penalised for Panda usually lose all their non-brand keyword rankings.

Because Panda is an algorithm that only runs on occasion, once you are hit you have no idea how long it will take to recover your previous rankings, even if you have fixed all the elements on your website that could have triggered the penalty. And there is no way to know if you have fixed all the elements either, because Google doesn’t tell you what set the algorithm off.

Google Penguin - targeting low quality links

Penguin was developed to target websites that had built up an unnatural link profile, usually due to a range of black-hat SEO techniques that had been employed by previous SEO consultants. Links that can contribute to an unnatural link profile include:

  • Directory links
  • Forum links
  • Low quality websites such as article directories
  • Link farms
  • Private blog networks (PBNs)

In addition excessive keyword rich anchor text in your incoming links is the other element that can hurt you even if you are getting links from good quality websites. You want to make sure your anchor text is diverse and makes sense in context.

Until recently Google wasn’t very sophisticated when it came to measuring the value of links to a website - it was very much the case of the more links the merrier and SEO consultancy was in many ways a case of building any kind of link to a client’s website that they could.

First Google built the ability to measure link quality into its main algorithm so that editorially given links from relevant, powerful websites carried much more weight than links that weren’t so, and they then developed the Penguin algorithm which went a step further and actively penalised websites that had built excessive amounts of bad links to their website.

Just like Panda, Google runs Penguin on an adhoc basis so if you do get hit with it you don’t know when you are going to have an opportunity to recover, even if you have cleaned up your link profile.

How do you check to see if you have a penalty?

Up until the latest Panda update which is being run out over a number of months, Panda and Penguin updates have been rolled out and completed in around a week. This means that if you have been hit with one of these penalties previously it is pretty easy to find out as you will have experienced a sudden drop in traffic around the time of an update.

More information on Panda and Penguin rollout dates check here. 

 

By Damon Rutherford, Lead Consultant for Digitator SEO. 

PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.

comments powered by Disqus