by Ross Dunn

Over the past 12 years consulting on web marketing  I have answered countless questions but one question I receive often stands out from all; how to remove a Google penalty. The following is an example of a question I received in the past from a person named Patrick:

PLEASE HELP! For the last 8 years we were #1 for a ton of search terms but then my site got penalized by Google because we had overused some keywords. We fixed the issue months ago but my top rankings are all still over the place. Sometimes we get back into the top 10 and we all breathe a sigh of relief, then just a few hours later we are on page 5. What is going on and how can I correct this? We are beyond frustrated!

First, Some Research

In order to answer Patrick’s question I needed to find out a couple of things about his website to make my answer more accurate:

• His site has excellent content right now and when I looked at past versions of the site I see the content was still great but definitely had keyword stuffing problems.

  Key finding: his site is really well done so I can see why it had top rankings before.

• I took a look at competitors found in the top 10 under several keyword searches that were obviously main targets for his website. After reviewing the backlinks for each competitor’s sites I could see they were all very well entrenched but their content was not up to par with Patrick’s site. I reviewed Patrick’s backlinks and was surprised to find that he had very few.Key finding: his competitors have a lot of backlinks than Patrick’s site does.
• An SEO Tool Note: I use Yahoo Site Explorer for cursory examination of backlinks for my clients and their competitors. For more in-depth research I use OptiLink by Winrose Software which provides excellent statistics that are very useful for analyzing the quality of backlinks among other things. Here are more recommended web marketing tools.
• I checked the server headers for their home page and other key pages to make sure nothing was outwardly wrong with their server configuration; everything was fine.
• I took some time to surf through Patrick’s website and discovered that not all of the keyword stuffing had been removed.Key Finding: Google may still feel his site deserves a penalty because it is not 100% clean.

My Answer to Patrick

First I will layout why it seems your site did so well to begin with. Your website has very few backlinks in comparison to your competitors who have significantly more. So, as near as I can tell your top rankings were so high because you had built an awesome reputation with Google by providing unparalleled content; I can’t find a single competitor that can match the quality of your content. For a long time you managed to stay at the top of your marketplace by continuing to provide great content. Unfortunately, you were over-optimizing the content by adding too many incidences of the same keywords (keyword stuffing) and Google took a disliking to it.

So why is it so hard to regain your ranking stability? Your site lost the glue that kept it competitive when Google penalized it. The glue, in this case, was your site’s reputation that was created based on your content which lost its stickiness due to Google’s penalty for the keyword stuffing. Without your content advantage your competitors have leaped ahead of you because they have far more links than you have and no ranking penalties (that we know of). Without links and with the Google penalty applied to your site your content hasn’t the power it had before so your rankings will fluctuate for an indeterminate amount of time; there is no sure time limit on a Google penalty.

My Recommendation for Removing the Google Penalty

1. Remove all of the keyword stuffing on your website. I know it is a large site and this is no small feat but it needs to be done. With your site cleaned and nothing remaining but quality content there will at least be an end in sight to the Google penalty and your site will also benefit from being more readable and usable to a visitor.
2. Begin an ongoing link building campaign now – there is no time to delay. Links are another path to building credibility for your website which it sorely needs right now. There is also a good chance that high quality incoming links will act as additional entry points to your website for Google to index your newly revised site and reconsider the penalty.
3. Review Google Webmaster Tools and attend to any errors/alerts/warnings that Google has provided. Also make sure to submit a fresh sitemap once the site is cleaned so that Google takes notice of any content that may have gone unnoticed and/or new content.
4. Freshen content on key parts of your website with rewrites or additional articles. This will provide positive activity that Google will not deny adds value to its index.
5. Bolster your Pay Per Click campaigns so they can bear some of the burden during this dry spell of low organic rankings.
6. Be patient. If you do everything I have noted above you are in a great position to succeed and your site will be stronger than ever before.

By applying these recommendations you will very likely discover that the Google Penalty was more a blessing than a curse because your site will come out stronger than ever before.

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from Search Engine GuideYou may also like to read:

• Backlinks- all you ever need to know about SEO
• Where to Get Links?
• Search Engine Optimization In A Nutshell
• FREE SEO Software Review Traffic Travis!
• What if my competitor is cheating at SEO?

How a Google Penalty Can Make Your Site Stronger is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website

PageRank is Google’s technology for rating the importance and quality of a web page. It is one of the variables used by Google to determine how high your site will be placed in the Search Engine Results Page when a particular search is actioned.

PageRank is a numeric value from 1 to 10, 10 being the best. Page rank is usually written as PR2 or PR5 for example. It is based on Googles assumption that when one page links to another page, it is casting a vote for that page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page is. Further to that, the Page Rank of the page casting the vote (linking to) raises the importance of that vote too.

Why is Google Page Rank Important?

Since webmasters can spend much of their time worrying about PageRank, an important question is: how important is PageRank, really? Well, if Page Rank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance and therefore a factor determining search engine placement, then you can see why it is important and something to be aware of. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is definitely an important one!

However, other factors besides PageRank, such as keyword density and placement, have taken a larger role in website ranking. PageRank is still relevant, but is perhaps not quite as important in websites ranking as it once was. Webmasters perhaps spend too much time exchanging and acquiring links to increase PageRank but may be better simply writing content and developing keyword strategies instead.

Keywords in the website title and URL can help a site rank much more competitively. Good content promotes more links by its nature, people like the content then they will link to it and ultimately improve your PageRank. Spiders also love content that is keyword rich and further the more pages you have out there the more chance you have of being found!

Ultimately Page Rank is important, but it is not worth obsessing over; there are many other factors involved in website ranking that should be given nearly equal consideration. The best thing you can do is build a great website, with good well written content and useful information and your page rank will improve by default due to people automatically linking to your pages!

Free Google Page Rank Checker

You may also like to read:

• Effective Link Building To Improve Page Rank
• Internal SEO
• Quality vs Quantity Links
• How Google segments the contents of a web page
• What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

What is Google Page Rank? is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website

In Googles words:

“AdWords helps connect you with potential customers in the right place, and at precisely the right time by placing relevant ads on the right-hand-side of our search results pages.”

Google AdWords adverts are displayed along with search results when someone searches Google using one of your keywords/keyphrases. That way, you’ll be advertising to an audience that’s already interested in your business.

Try it now, go to Google and type “cheap gardening tools” into the search. You get a list of results, yes? The first thing you see are the sponsered listings in a faint shade of pink, there you are, that is Google Adwords. Below this pink box on the left side of the page there are the normal, non paid, known as “organic” search listings. To the right of the page you have some more “sponsered listings” or Google Adword advertisments.

Google Adwords is a Pay per Click (PPC) system which means that when someone clicks on the ad the advertiser is charged a fee, so be kind and only click if you are really interested in their product.

Unlike traditional PPC advertising where your ad position is based on how much you are prepared to pay. Google adwords reward relevant ads by increasing their position and for bad or irrelevant ads it decreases their position, and in some cases suspends them all together.

Google measures the ad popularity by monitoring how many people click on the ad (Click through rate). The more clicks the more popular and the higher the ad. With Google ads you don’t have to pay the most to get listed first! You need to provide the most relevant and popular ads.

It’s true that at the time of writing this article it’s one of the largest ad platforms available today! The question is should you be using it?

Google AdWords Advantages

Google AdWordsG aims to provide the most effective advertising available for businesses of any size. Their aim is to help you meet your customer acquisition needs by enabling you to:

• Reach people looking for your product or service
• Fully control your ad budget
• Easily create and edit your ads
• See your ads on Google within minutes of creating them

Google AdWords gives you 24/7 access to detailed performance reports that help you track the effectiveness of your ad campaigns. Google adwords comes with some nice features, and is fully customisable for any advertiser:

• Cost-per-click (CPC) pricing, so you pay only for the clicks you have received at a price you have set (choose a maximum CPC from £0.01 to £100).
• Cost-per-impression (CPM) pricing for those who prefer to target individual content sites and pay by the impression.
• Daily budget you set, starting from £0.01.
• Targeted ads you create and manage.
• Ad scheduling: run your ads on the days and hours you want.
• Online performance reports 24/7 in your account.
• Additional network of sites and products for increasing advertising exposure.
• One or multiple ads targeted with one or more keywords.

Google Adwords claims to be the best marketing tool for small to medium size businesses. But is it?

Why use Google Adwords

It is the quickest way of bringing highly targeted traffic to your website. It has many uses; you can use it to:

• Test a product
• Test a Sales letter
• Traffic source for very competitive niches when organic listings are too difficult
• Sell a product

You can quickly and easily bring targeted traffic to your website as it only costs £5 to register; and once registered you can start to using them straight away. They are easy to use and Google provides excellent help.

Are Google Adwords worth it?

Now I know that there are lots of people out there who are having great success with Google Adwords but I have to give a word of warning, your potential return on investment (ROI) can not be very high from the start. Why? Well, the time and effort required to make sure your campaign is returning suitable visitors to your site and not just ANY visitors to your site is actually quite high.

Google Adwords is not nearly as simple and easy as people seem to think. Unless you are in an extremely focused and highly targeted industry, if you simply bid on the popular keyword phrases for your business you will pay a lot of money and probably get visitors who are not targeted to your specific products and services. Your budget will run out pretty quickly and you may not see any custom back for it. So my point is, yes google adwords can be effective but only by spending time and effort on optimising your google adwords campaigns.

Take for example the keyword phrase “web design Leeds”, I would get the opportunity of 1500 hits per month with that at the time of writing this article, BUT I would pay £5.29 for each click through to my site and I am not guaranteed a sale! Think about that this way, I could use that budget to create a successful banner campaign on various websites where I may get more targetted hits.

The only way you will get value for money from google adwords is by spending time learning how to use it, (try the google adwords learning center) and researching keywords using keywords tool and then spending lots of time tweaking your campaign to suit your budget. Now thats a lot of time and effort and is what I mentioned earlier, a reduction in ROI. My Google Adwords Tutorial may help you too.

Google Adwords can pay off when you find highly targeted keyword phrases that you can get for low bid amounts but unless you are willing to devote a major chunk of time learning how to effectively run a Google Adwords campaign, or are willing to pay someone each month to manage your campaign, in most cases you will be throwing money away.

Like anything in life, you need to spend time learning, if you do you will reap the rewards but Google know most people don’t, and they sit back each month lapping up the money people throw away on adwords campaigns simply because they could not be bothered to invest a little of their time learning how to use thier system effectively.

For more help read our Google Adwords TutorialYou may also like to read:

• A Guide to Google Adwords
• Google Adwords Tutorial
• Google Analytics For Better Search Engine Marketing
• How to Promote a Website
• Internal SEO

A Guide to Google Adwords is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website