Since Google first started rolling out their
Pandas and Penguin updates, website owners have been scrambling to figure out what the algorithm updates mean, how they need to adjust to them, and what - if anything - happened to their own site in the rankings. After these updates, some website owners found their old practices they had tried negatively affected their websites. These were called "Google Penalties" and could range anywhere from dropped rankings in Organic search results for a short time to months. But website owners never really understood what the length of the penalties included. If a website was hit for some poor linking strategies, smart website owners would go in and clean their link profile up, disavowing spam links, branding their link profile, and more. If a website was penalized for duplicate content, smart website owners would once again go in and clean this content up, offering unique content instead. Sometimes these penalties remained, however. Organic rankings and traffic staunchly refused to return to pre-penalty levels, and websites continued to miss out on valuable visits and potential business. All of this, even after they've done everything they could think of to do, right? Maybe no. This week, Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts released a video addressing some of these videos. He was asked in his video series to explain what kind of penalties certain websites were hit with, and how strong examples were able to bounce back from them. The key point that Cutts mentions is some websites think they address the issue, but they don't go far enough. In this case, Cutts calls these website owners "repeat offenders", as they think they have solved the issue, but continue to let it linger. "Google tends to look at buying and selling links that pass PageRank as a violation of our guidelines and if we see that happening multiple times, repeated times, then the actions that we take get more and more severe," Cutts said. "So we're more willing to take stronger action whenever we see repeated violations." Cutts goes on to explain that being a repeat offender is different than just ignoring your website's penalties. He explains a scenario where if a website was penalized for buying links, and the owners know they had bought links between the middle of 2012 to the end of 2012, if they show good faith and begin going back to disavow all links they've generated in that time, it proves to be a very big action. It shows Google they are taking the penalties seriously, and working hard to correct the issue. This instance of "wiping the slate clean" so to speak may seem a bit drastic, and Cutts admits it's not the correct process for everyone necessarily. But doing what you can (on a new domain or an existing company site) to clean out spam links, re-work or delete duplicate content, and so forth, can be an option. This option becomes particularly attractive to clients in the industrial sector who have branded sites they need to keep, and may have been hit by Google penalties in the past. Clearing our the purchased links you know were bought between a certain time frame, cleaning up content, and generally returning to strong SEO tactics can help you bounce back in Organic rankings and traffic. If questions remain, contact Ecreative and let us see what we can do to help. Whether through our
comprehensive website analysis or a monthly
internet marketing program, we can dig into the nerve center of your website to ensure you do not get hit by Google penalties again. Watch
Matt Cutts' video response reference here below:
