SEO Upgrade & Repair Google Site Penalties
A WEB SITE IS LIKE A CAR - If a design make-over is like paint & body work - then an SEO Upgrade is like an engine rebuild.
Many site owners are suffering poor search engine performance for problems that they did not cause! If you have an older site you could be in grave violation of issues that formerly weren't even issues - like
keyword stuffing,
link farming,
content scraping, and other issues caused by your past or present web designer.
if this goes on, unnoticed, for years you appear to Google, Yahoo and others as unrepentant and in total disregard of their guidelines.
You will be penalized where it hurts and your business will suffer as a result.
The first thing we do is check for flagrant violations, then drill down to multiple minor
technical standards errors that, in quantity, will hurt your page rank. Finally, when we remove all obstacles, we begin the organic optimization described below.
"Your web site is one of your most cost-effective tools for countering the effects of the economic slow-down"....Bob DeStefano
Optimize Meta Files - big impact!
- Title wording and content relevancy is crucial
- Your page title is crucial to getting noticed - and you are also graded on how well it relates to actual text in the body of the page. A page title should fit together with the page description like a intelligent question and a good answer, as that is how it will display in Search Engine Page Results.
Even though they're under the page, the surfer will see them clear as day in the search results. Internet Outsource Tampa Bay has a professional writer that can handle this with aplomb.
- Description Relevancy is the other half of search results display
- Displayed right below the page title, in a well structured page, is the description. It is the answer to the statement or question posed by the title. This too is graded for keyword relevancy and for your chance at a "SERP"(Search Engine Results Page presence).
This is an art and a science - the art of content word smithery balanced against a cold hearted bot simulator that creates a sort of crossword puzzle mind game. The stakes: 100% relevancy!
- The keyword / metafile relevancy game
- Google has denigrated this tag. However, Bing and Yahoo still use it, and Google gets secondary search results from them. We aim for 100% content relevancy when we use the keywords metatag.
- Adding Robots and other directive metatags
- These are helpful for directing the search bots - they qualify your page.
Adding Text Content - if you're short on content
- What if there isn't enough text content on the page?
- Google refers to this as "Thin Content"!! Text content is all Google sees. I can't stress textual content enough - pictures mean nothing to a search bot - nada! Copying content from other sites ("scraping") is not the answer. A web bot is a total wiz at comparisons.
If you have entire paragraphs that occur, word for word, ten different places on the net, bots will make a summary judgement and knock you back in rank.
Fresh content is especially valued by search engines, failure to update content will ultimately degrade your search ranking.
- Search Engine ranking is a match game. Keyword research will reveal the "Phrase That Pays"
- People type their searches in headlines - "business for sale Tampa", etc. The closer your headlines are to their headlines, the better you do in a search.
Image File Size Optimizing - to speed up load time
- What do pictures have to do with Search Engine Results?
- Images (.jpg, .gif, .png, etc) used to be the biggest file size / load time hogs on a page. They often still are! Add to that too many scripts just to display the page, and you risk the user hitting the back button. In the age of DSL and cable modems, many designers got sloppy with image large sizes - they didn't see the mobile revolution coming. With smaller transfer file size, pages load much faster - especially relevant for mobile devices. The easiest part of an SEO Upgrade.
Look at it from the web viewer's perspective, even though your site is judged by the search engines for load time, your much harsher judge is the web visitor. If he or she gets impatient with your load time, the back button is just a click away.
- Image "alt tagging" = an accessibility feature turned to your SEO advantage
- As stated elsewhere on this site,
image alt tags no longer show up when moused over, but the web bots see them! They were originally used for blind accessibility, and screen readers like "Jaws", but for the masses, it is a place to put keywords cleverly in the code. If you display a picture of Abraham Lincoln, but alt tag it "Elmer Fudd" - the bots will just "see" Elmer!
Text Tagging - fine tuning your content
- Drawing the bots to certain relevant keywords or key phrases
- This is actually a process done during the design phase. We tag your text copy , most importantly to assign importance to the main headlines. Tags also identify your address, fill out abbreviated headline text.
Hyperlinking - why is this last?
- Inbound and Outbound links - very important
- If this is so important why did I place it at the end? The simple answer is you need all the page copy in place to add the links. Links in the copy that refer to other pages on the site, as well as outbound links. Too many site owners fail to prioritize these as much as the search engines do.
It can be done over time, but it should be done!
The Most Cost Efficient Way.....when you write your own material, you know what other content of yours is relevant to particular passages. When you proof read, simply mark these words and put the URL
(or location in other raw copy in brackets and we'll do the geek stuff. We can find quality outbound links by putting your keywords in a search engine and finding the best match.
Hyper linking involves finding words or phrases in your text content that directly relate to other locations inside and outside your web site. It is very important - especially to Google. It is what makes the web the web. If you look at a spider's web you will see the analogy - inter-connectivity. Google puts high value on outgoing links and an even higher value on quality incoming links.
Inbound links pointing to you will raise your page rank.
Google likens it to an election - and links are votes. Buy bulk links is not the answer - Google will penalize you for linking schemes. Avoid linking to questionable, low quality sites! Google believes in the old adage "you are your five closest friends". Also, quantity of links is good only if the other sites relate to your topic, so be cautious with link exchange offers.
"What can I do about Google Penalties?"
I have worked on a number of sites that were under one Google penalty or another - for conditions existing prior to my efforts. Their plummeting presence was WHAT sent them to me. The best organic optimization will not remedy this immediately. One client, who had trusted the wrong outfit, was banned from even
paid advertising on
Google AdWords!
When told of such a condition you may ask "Then what's the use of an SEO Upgrade? The simple answer is - when do you want to start the process of fixing your problem?
The process of mending begins the day you discover, and remedy, your "violations" and become
Google compliant. and submit a site for re-index. This all depends on the severity of the infraction.
These violations are usually created by semi-knowledgable designers and wise guy hackers who "guarantee" you search engine domination. Although you did not commit the violation yourself - you are responsible. You will be advised of this before work is done.
About Google Penalties
Linking Schemes Penalty
- Be advised that excessive blog linking is NOT the fast track to success. Blog links have been denigrated in value, and in large quantities can decrease your ranking.
- Linking schemes to artificially pump up page rank can earn you the dreaded "fifty positions back "penalty. It is just as it sounds - 50 positions behind wherever you would have been - effectively, off the radar screen..
- Manipulative link schemes - Especially reciprocal link trading and/or linking out to sites that Google even suspects you're getting paid for.
- Cloaking - Displaying one version of page content to search engines and a different one to visitors.
- Beware of the misuse of the CSS "display:none" property!!
- "There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you're scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines"
...source, Google
- Cloning sites - when you point the DNS from many different domains into the same directory causing each domain to display the exact same site.
- Having multiple domain names directly point their DNS to the same file set is a SERIOUS breach of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and is expressly FORBIDDEN. This can get you totally banned from searches. There is no cure for the domain names involved.
- There is no penalty for sitemap errors except the poorer performance they may cause in indexing
- Misuse of ref=canonical Tags is adding a link in the source code that is not visible on the actual page.
