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Last week, we released the result of a survey of Google News Ranking Factors with some of the top news sites in the business. You may have already heard about the Top 10 Positive Factors for high Google rankings, but we think it would even more useful for you to take a closer look at the Top 10 Negative Factors that hurt website rankings.
Recently, Google conducted a survey and found many local news publishers repeating a lot of SEO mistakes that eventually hurt their website rankings. So, here’s a list of top 10 negative factors that contribute to low rankings of your website:
1. Duplicate Content
The biggest negative factor for search engine rankings was duplicate content. Although there were many publishers creating duplicate content, Google survey confirmed that they also used other sources for creating scrapped, spunned, and plagiarized content.
Every day, Google is becoming smarter at finding out the original source of content many websites use. As a result, Google have degraded the search engine rankings of such websites that borrow their content from alternate sources.
So, next time you distribute the press release on your website, remember to separate the original news content from the press releases by creating two different sections for each and inserting “nofollow” tags in each links for the press releases.
2. Writing Vague and Abstract Headlines
Abstract headlines don’t include targeted keywords in it. It may seem creative not to include keywords, but they aren’t still targeted. It’s okay to write titles like “Ho No!”, or “Do Be Do Be Do”, or any other vague titles you can think of, but in order to see raise in search engine rankings, you need to stick to what works. Learn how to do the keyword research and then include important keyword in your title.
Make sure the keyword also fit in naturally instead of appearing “stuffed”.
3. Sites Not Using Google News Sitemap
Many news sites aren’t using Google News sitemap. I am surprised! Using Google News Sitemap has a dramatic impact on the crawling, indexing, and rankings of your site. And the best part is that it’s very easy to implement, too. So what are you waiting for? Use Google News sitemap and see a boost in your search engine rankings, now!
4. Publishing Low Quality Content
No excuse for bad writing anymore. Google News can manually and algorithmically figure out sites that publish low quality content – mis-spelt words, poor grammar and punctuation, and generally low quality content.
5. Blocking Googlebot via Robots.txt
If you are blocking Googlebot, intentionally or unknowingly, then check your robots.txt file really fast. This is one of the old-school SEO blunder many news website repeat, over and over, calling their SEO consultant every night.
If free traffic has stalled, then one of the first things you must do is check your robots.txt file. Make sure you don’t include these two lines in the file: “User-agent: *” and “Disallow: /”
Let Googlebot find your site and improve search engine rankings.
6. Poor Site Performance
If your site is producing a lot of 500 or 400 errors and loads slowly, eventually your site’s ranking will drop too. Google always want to send traffic to fast loading pages. To monitor your website’s performance, you can use variety of free tools, like Google Webmaster Tools (look “crawl stats” and “site performance” report) and Google’s Page Speed Tool.
One way you can improve your site’s performance is to use a script that will keep track of server logs whenever Googlebot receives 4xx or 5xx errors. Send this log to your SEO consultant notifying them of errors. Whoever responsible for that poor performance will be busy removing those errors if they don’t want more emails from you.
7. Poor Citation Rank
You won’t get up in Google’s ranking if you can’t get other websites to link to you. Citation Rank is a measure of how well your story, post, or blogs gets linked from other sources or referenced on other sites, specifically on other news sites.
8. Low PageRank Domain
Another reason why your site is suffering on Google ranking is that the overall SEO program isn’t competitive. That means you aren’t getting all the basics right.
So, make sure your website is accessible by major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Write articles targeting profitable keywords. Get other sites link and reference your site, regularly.
9. New Site
Just like new sites have harder time getting high rankings in search engine results, new sites with low or absolutely “zero” trust and history will have a difficult time to rank as well. Brand new sites, therefore, must demonstrate authority and trust by getting linked and referenced from other well-established and authoritative sites.
Get your site shared in popular social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Plus. Get your content well-clicked relative to other news websites for a specific news story. Instead of covering a broad range of topic, focus on specific niche for proper rankings.
10. Using Syndicated Content Having the Same Titles as the Source
This may sound like the same things as duplicate content, but we still think that this case deserves a little more attention as more and more news organizations are relying on syndicated content, without even taking time to rewrite the whole content.
So it is better in the long run for you to produce your own content.
Google keeps updating their algorithm every now and then to ensure that webmasters are using the right SEO techniques to gain the rankings. If you got hit by Google Panda and Penguin, then you need to find what the “illness” is. When you know what Panda and Penguin targets when you violate their terms, you are in a better position to recover from penalties with great precision, effectively, and efficient.
Panda targets website and pages that have low-quality content, or “thin content.” But most importantly, they attack sites/users that publish the same low quality content on content farms “stuffed” with keywords and links but offer nothing in value for the reader.
On the other hand Google Penguin attacks sites that violate Google’s quality guidelines. Penguin would get a site in trouble that uses black hat SEO techniques, like keyword stuffing, or webspam, and cloaking. Other less suspicious tactics like inserting irrelevant links (link farming) going outside the page of the content would also force Penguin to block a site.
Hit by Google Panda?
If you were hit by the Google Panda, here are a couple of things you can do to recover from the slap.
Substitute thin content
Revisit your site and check for duplicated content on pages, particularly those pages that contain your main keywords and make it content rich. Read the whole content again as if you were a visitor to your site. The content must be easy to read, useful, fresh, and informative.
Warning: Don’t be tempted to use “spun” articles on your website. Instead, use only “original” and “fresh” content. You may save few bucks now but later run the risk of getting penalized, wasting more time, effort, and money.
Once you have identified thin content on your website, you can use Google’s Analytical tool to get more specific information of pages that usually get very few visitors each day. But the number may vary depending upon your website. For example, if your main pages usually have 100 visits a day, then you might want to consider the number below 20 a risk factor.
Likewise, use the ‘Disavow’ tool from the Google Webmaster tool to find unnatural links in a page and duplicate content and remove them. If you can’t do this yourself, hire a professional SEO expert.
Once you have identified these pages, immediately replace the existing content with a high quality – unique, fresh, and informative – content because many poorly written pages often get fewer visits.
Use Ads Sparingly
If your site does not contain any ads, then you are not likely to get hit by Panda. On the other hand, if your site has numerous ads, then you need to consider using them in an intelligent manner. Remember that the only reason a visitor wants to be on your website is to get useful information that solves their problems and not to get overwhelmed by looking ads promotions.
Add Quality Content and Avoid Shortcuts
As mentioned earlier, the only reason people come to your website is because of the content there and that’s what Google wants to happen. Nevertheless, you will find low quality sites ranking high with low quality information which leaves Google users disappointed. Since Google don’t want to tarnish their name, they introduced Panda. Shortcuts will only lead you to slap by Google. But if you are not sure if your content is high quality, or the links are broken, or basically contain blank pages, or if you don’t know how to do perform these tasks, then you may want to consult a trusted SEO expert to check your website and do a clean up. In this regard, the expert would be able to identify empty pages and broken links efficiently & effectively.
Hit By Penguin?
Well, if you are hit by penguin, then there a couple of things that you will need to do in order to see yourself back at the top in rankings. Penguin has resurfaced again. Click here to read more about it.
Check and Clean Up your Backlinks
The first thing you need to do is remove any links that come from low quality sites. If you were buying links, then do away with them as sooner or later your site has a high chance of getting caught by Penguin.
If you should buy links to get high rankings for your website and pages then make sure you know what you are buying. Ask your SEO expert to send you the list of websites your site will be linked to. These sites must be relevant to yours in terms of topic, and most importantly, have a high page ranking.
Don’t Over-Optimize!
Make sure that your website isn’t over-optimized with anchor text as links. While building links, try to use variety of keywords as anchor text for both internal and external links. Ensure the anchor text in the links fit naturally with the sentence and the context. If you don’t know how to do this, you may want to ask SEO personnel to your web pages. Web pages, after all, are meant for human readers.
Clean up both Internal and External Links
Make sure that all your links are working and there aren’t any broken links, and it doesn’t return a 404 error message after clicking. Although Google doesn’t penalize on this, nonetheless, it contributes to poor user experience and sooner or later will impact your website’s search engine performance.
Go Social
One way to increase your chances of evading penguin slap is by using the social networks especially Google +. Google always favors their own site and it’s good to work with them for your benefit. Google views links from social websites as natural and therefore will assume that people are happy with your website content. If your content is shared in social networks, then you are not at risk of being hit by Penguin. When you go social, you at least look more legitimate in the eyes of Google and not a fake enterprise or individual.
Summary of How to Recover from Panda & Penguin
In order to recover your website and pages from Panda and Penguin, you need to ensure providing good user experience, which includes publishing high quality content that are fresh, unique, and informative.
Likewise, avoid taking any shortcuts by publishing “duplicate” and “spammy” content that doesn’t add value to its readers and are only used for promotion. Never use black hat SEO technique to build links and influence the search engine rankings of your website. If Google suspects these activities, they’ll completely ban your site.
Instead, add quality content that adds value to its readers. Make the links inside each page natural and link them outside other sites that are relevant to your topics.
If you are new to SEO, then you may have little knowledge on Panda and Penguin which have been the talk for the last couple of years. Penguin and Panda are algorithms used by Google to analyze websites in order to choose which one ranks above the rest in the search engine results page commonly known as SERP. Before Panda and Penguin, Google used other algorithms which only relied on Keywords.
Why Panda and Penguin?
In the past couple of years before the introduction of Panda and penguin, many webmasters had various techniques that they used to rank on the top at the SERP. If you are new to SEO, you should note that the average ‘searcher’ on Google rarely goes past the second result page and therefore, if your website isn’t close to the first page, you may never get visitors to your website. Some of these techniques were genuine while others were totally unacceptable. One of the common techniques was the use of keyword stuffing. Since Google used to check on the page that had the most number of keywords typed on the search box, sometimes ‘Searchers’ got disappointed by what they got on the page. Google realized this and had to introduce a way in which they would ensure the common ‘searcher’ would find the ideal website with the information he or she is looking for.
What are the Effects of Google Penguin and Panda?
The reason as to why Penguin was introduced was to ensure that spammy links into low quality websites were eliminated. Have you ever clicked on a photo online and it automatically takes you to another page which isn’t relevant to what you were looking for? This is the kind that penguin was looking forward to working on. Panda also works on ensuring that website owners provide quality and unique content on their websites. Some webmasters used to duplicate content from other websites and just tweak them which would lead to too much content that is similar. So if your website had low quality content or duplicated content, panda would slap you immediately if not dropping on the SERP ranking. The main aim of these two animals is to ensure that webmasters get organic traffic to their websites and also offer quality content to their visitors.
What if Hit by Penguin or Panda? How do you Recover?
If you are hit by panda or penguin, you only need to do a thorough check on your website. Some of the things that you need to look out for are:
– Quality of your content (Read here for ideas on web content)
– Quality of your backlinks (Here is how to create quality backlinks)
– Ads
– Social networks
If you find out that your website has poor quality content, remove the pages and replace them with others or polish the already existing content. If you find out that you have links originating from poor websites, please take them down and look for genuine links from social media. You should also check your website to see whether you have blank pages or broken inbound links and so on.
Summary
Over the years, many website have been hit by Google’s Penguin and Panda updates. Google uses these two updates to analyze sites in order to determine which site ranks on top of another on search engine result pages, known commonly as SERP.
Before Panda and Penguin emerged, many webmasters and blog/site owners would use “unacceptable” SEO tactics, like keyword stuffing, black hat SEO techniques, and link farming just to influence the rankings of their website.
These site didn’t add any real value to its readers. As a result, more searchers, including people like you and me, found sites containing junk content and spammy results. More people started to get bad experience using Google search engine.
Google noticed this trend and soon decided to take proper measure to ensure that visitors got the most relevant, useful and ideal content for their search terms.
Although the process of SEO has become a little bit difficult than the old days, nonetheless, Penguin and Panda updates are good measures to offer quality content for visitors.
Just consider – you are a searcher too. If you found site that add nothing in value, wouldn’t you be angry having waste your time?
For black hatters, it was a dark day when the big G launched its newest algorithm update designed to fight any kind of spam. Launched on the 22nd of May 2013, it’s here to make sure that spam is out of the way and only unique content and genuine links are considered when ranking websites. The new penguin 2.0 version 4 is designed with up to date technologies that are better than what the previous version was using. These technologies are meant to ensure that any backlinks in a website are natural in order for Google to have only the best in their rankings. Here are some of the things that will change in the error of post penguin 2.0.
What next?
The new algorithm uses a couple of factors to rank your site. The new penguin 2.0 is able to determine whether visitors that come to your site enjoy what you have to offer or leave with nothing. The algorithm is capable of detecting the number of times your website is bookmarked, how many times a visitor comes back for more and the number of times it’s shared on social networks. This Google algorithm update even knows when you use natural and bought backlinks.
The main updates hat will affect your site
Spammy links will be a thing of the past with penguin 2.0 version 4. Page ranks will also not rely on advertising. In the case of link spamming, you better not go there as you will be slapped. Matt Cutts says that the algorithm has a sophisticated way of analyzing links and therefore they will have accurate information before taking down any sites. Here are some of the things that Penguin 2.0 is discouraging.
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Paid backlinks
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Backlinks from dangerous sites
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Article marketing
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Comment spamming
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Poorly written guest blog posts
How do you avoid a slap from Google?
What Google is looking for are people who are using white hat methods to acquire traffic to their sites. You will need to remove all kinds of links that point to your website that you think might be unnatural. The nest thing you will need to do is offer genuinely written content for a real human audience. In order to achieve this, you will need to engage your customers in social networks as weld as in your website. Furthermore, you need to create fresh content for your website on a regular basis.
How do I recover from the Google algorithm?
In case you get hit by Google, the first and foremost things to do are analyze your link profile for spammy or low quality links. In order to achieve this, it’s good to use the Disavow tool offered by Google. This is one of the best tools and it will assist you to clean up the bad links. Make sure to get yourself involved in social media and get real traffic from there. The main idea here is to make sure that the content in your website is valuable to your clients or site visitors.
Here are all the versions of Panda & Penguin updates with their rolled out dates.
If you found your site’s ranking drop during any of these times, it’s likely that your site was flagged either by Panda, Penguin or both.
Panda updates till date:
1. Panda 1.0, aka the “Farmer Update” on February 24th 2011
2. Panda 2.0 on April 11th 2011. Impacts all English speaking sites
3. Panda 2.1 on May 9th 2011
4. Panda 2.2 on June 18th 2011 or so
5. Panda 2.3 on around July 22nd 2011
6. Panda 2.4 in August 2011(Panda goes international)
7. Panda 2.5 on September 28th 2011
8. Panda 2.5.1 on October 9th 2011
9. Panda 2.5.2 on October 13th 2011
10. Panda 2.5.3 on October 19/20th 2011
11. Panda 3.1 on November 18th 2011
12. Panda 3.2 on about January 15th 2012
13. Panda 3.3 on about February 26th 2012
14. Panda 3.4 on March 23rd 2012
15. Panda 3.5 on April 19th 2012
16. Panda 3.6 on April 27th 2012
17. Panda 3.7 on June 8th 2012
18. Panda 3.8 on June 25th 2012
19. Panda 3.9 on July 24th 2012
20. Panda 3.9.1 on August 20th 2012
21. Panda 3.9.2 on September 18th 2012
22. Panda Update #20 on September 27 2012
23. Panda #21 on November 5th 2012
24. Panda #22 on December 4th 2012
25. Panda #23 on December 21st 2012
26. Panda #24 on Jan. 22nd 2013
27. Panda #25 on March 25th 2013
Penguin updates till date:
1. First Penguin Update on April 24th 2012
2. Penguin 1.1 on May 25th 2012
3. Penguin #3 on October 9th 2012
4. Penguin #4 (aka Penguin 2.0) on May 22nd, 2013
Google has done it again! It introduced Penguin 2.0, which only means that some SEO experts need to change their strategies. After announcing its release, head of Google’s search spam Matt Cutts assured hardworking internet marketers that the new release would be able to deal with spam in a better way because it uses an improved technology. Now, you may be one of the people who have been hit by the penguin 2.0 and don’t know where to begin. Well, here are some of the top things that you need to do in order for you to recover from as penguin 2.0 related slap by Google.
Google now employ human moderators rather than just search bots to scan and review websites that contains “thin content,” and uses black hat SEO techniques – link farming and cloaking – to unethically influence search engine rankings.
So, now “user experience” is the key!
Follow these simple steps to recover from Penguin 2.0:
Clean up your link profile
Regardless of the number of updates that Google introduces, you need to make sure that your link profile is clean. Since you may have been using different SEO skills for the last couple of years before the penguin updates, it’s likely that you may have a couple of ‘unnatural’ links in your website which is what Google is fighting. If you were using paid links and the like, it’s good to trash them before Google catches up with you. You can do this by using a couple of tools such as Google webmaster tools, open site explorer, and linkbuilder among others. These tools help you in analyzing all backlinks in your entire website. Use disavow tool, provided by Google to help webmasters, to identify and remove spammy links that infest your website and pages.
Manual Penalty and Submitting a reconsideration request from Google
If your website has received a manual penalty notice from Google, then you need to fix your site so that it complies with Google’s quality guidelines.
Look for unnatural links or artificial links those points to your site, via Google webmaster tool, that may be influencing the search engine rankings, make changes to your site.
Once you have made the changes, submit your site for reconsideration request from Google. If you find any unnatural links on your site that you cannot remove or control, submit those details in your reconsideration request, too.
What should you look out for?
Some of the main links that you should look out for are paid links. Links originating from irrelevant blogs or websites, links from directories, links from sites that have been de- indexed and sponsored posts among others that you may feel can’t be found by real human beings.
Some directories are good, though. For example, directories that are well established and have high PR and are relevant to your topic are best source to get backlinks to your site. Just be wary of link farms that seem like article directories. Link farm consist of links with “do-follow” tags. Most business or blog owners desperate for high search engine rankings turn to buy links from these link farms. However, getting a “do-follow” link back from irrelevant source just to influence search engine ranking is considered to unethical and Google penalize your site for this.
Make sure that all these links are removed and have a disavow document. After cleaning up the mess, you will need to come up with better link building strategies that should be in a position to adhere to future Google updates. There are many link building strategies available and all you have to do is look out for the most suitable. First of all, try to get as much relevant information as you can from reliable resources. There are webmasters who know good linkbuilding strategies and have published books on the topic. Make sure to read these kinds of books before settling for one link building method.
Use Social Media
Another thing that you will need to do in order for you to recover from penguin 2.0 is to become active on social media. It’s believed that in the near future links originating from social media will be more valuable than normal links. It’s probably something Goggle are working on considering their very own Google +. Depending on your business, you can use one or more of the major social networks. Make sure you engage your audience in these social media platforms. Finally, ensure that you provide high quality content on your website. Although keyword optimization is important for targeting audience, it is still important to write unique content meant for human and not just only for search engine bots. Put your effort in providing genuine content that adds value to people. With the above mentioned tips, you will be able to get back on your feet and even escape future slaps from Google.
Summary of how do you recover from Penguin 2.0
If your site has been the victim of the recent Penguin update, these are several steps that you can take to recover from it:
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Clean up your link profile removing ‘unnatural’ links using tools like Disavow tool
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If your site has received manual penalty from Google, clean up your site and submit a reconsideration request from Google
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Use social media to recover from Penguin attack as they are often considered more valuable than, let’s say, normal links
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While keyword optimization is important, make sure to write high quality content that adds value to readers.
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Last but most importantly, stay genuine!
The rolling out of Google Penguin 2.0…
Finally, the most improved algorithms- Google Penguin 2.0 is live. After its launch on the 22nd May of 2013, Matt Cutts promised a whole new experience with the new innovation. When it comes to page ranking by Google, webmasters who have always relied on black hat methods, might be having a long day as they won’t be able to do a great deal with black hat methods anymore. The update is more powerful than it’s predecessor. It’s known to have the best technology that will ensure proper scanning of backlinks in order to keep off spam links.
What is it all about?
As you all know Google keeps updating their stems in order to ensure that webmasters gain page rank is a genuine way. Unlike the keyword usage thing they used long ago, Google will use new techniques to rank websites on their search results. Google is using penguin 2.0 to approach a more thorough scanning of backlinks and the methods used for page ranking. Google is working on ensuring that only the sites that give their customers what they promised get the places in their SERP. In simple terms, your customer should get the content they came to check out in your site. Therefore, if you were giving tips on how to cut belly fat, the content there should give real and viable methods to cut belly fat.
What are the consequences of Penguin 2.0?
There are some major websites that have been slapped by Google for using bad SEO strategies. Generally here are some of the things that will happen as a result of Penguin 2.0.
Adult content backlinks are useless–
After a thorough scrutiny of your website links, Google will slap you when it finds any links originating from an adult site. Porn links are going to be treated as spam and this may affect your rankings.
Hackers will be exposed–
After Google updates their hack site, it will be easier for them to identify hack sites. With the help of the webmaster tools, it will be easier for Google to report any hackers.
The death of guest blogging–
Since Google realized that most guest posts seem legit but are full of links, it will be useless after penguin 2.0 to write a post in order for you to get the backlink. Whenever possible, it’s good to use an original bio for each of your websites or blogs.
Multiple language websites–
The website that use more than one language will be affected by the changes that come with Google penguin 2.0.
Cliff hanging will be a thing of the past–
For hardworking people who have nice websites; they don’t have anything to worry about. Nevertheless, for those who are using bad SEO techniques, they will suffer with penguin 2.0 as it doesn’t allow any site to stay in the middle-not bad not good.
Sites which command respect in their respective niches will enjoy more in terms of rankings in the said niche. Therefore, if you are one of the owners of certain niche websites, make sure you work hard and smart enough enough to top in your niche.
