Having overly optimized web pages could soon get your websites in some hot water with Google and their search results. It has recently been announced that Google will start to penalize websites that engage in over-optimization practices.
In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will be covering some changes that you should be making to your SEO practices in order to avoid this type of penalization.
We hope you enjoy and don't forget to leave comments below! Happy Friday Everyone!
Video Transcription
Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another addition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we've been hearing a lot of chatter in the SEO blogosphere and on Twitter and on the forums about this new potential Google penalty that's coming down the line around over-optimization. Now, one of Google's representatives mentioned at a conference, South by Southwest, down in Austin, Texas, about a month ago actually, that Google would be looking into penalizing over-optimized websites and folks who have engaged in over-the-top SEO.
There's been a lot of speculation around when that's coming out, whether that's coming out. There are a few things happening, actually, this week and last night about, "Hey is this already something we're seeing?" Seer Interactive, right, Wil Reynolds' fantastic SEO company out of Philadelphia had this penalty, and people were wondering whether that was related to this. Not really sure.
But before this penalty hits, for goodness sake, SEO folks, let's make these changes to our websites because we could be in real trouble if we don't impact these things beforehand. I think these are some of the most likely candidates to be hit by Google's over-optimization penalty, some of the most likely patterns they're going to try and match against in this upcoming change. So let's talk through them.
Number one, your titles need to be authentic. They need to sound real. They need to sound like a human being wrote them that was not intending necessarily simply to rank for phrase after phrase. I'll give you a good example. Bad: web design services, web design firm space brand name, whatever your brand name is, web design. What does it sound like? It sounds like all you're trying to do is rank for keywords, not show off your brand name, especially if this is your home page or those kinds of things. You're repeating keywords three times. Web design is in this title three times. Think about whether a normal human being would read that title and think, oh yeah, that sounds legitimate. No, they'd think to themselves there's something fishy here, something spammy, something's wrong, something manipulative. Try instead, probably equally effective, if not more, brand name web design Portland Spiffiest Design Services. Now look, I've got the word "design services," which you wanted to get in here. I've got the city where you are that you're trying to target, got brand name web design, right, sort of branding myself as the product and the keyword. Much, much better.
Try and look through your sites and see if this is a potential issue. I've seen tons of sites where SEO folks have just gone overboard again and again. Don't get me wrong. I used to do this too. One of the crappiest things about this is, even if your rank, your click through rates go down. So you can rank in position two or three and be getting less than the people below you, because people don't think that these are legitimate titles and they perceive them to be manipulative, especially if you're targeting more higher end, savvy or sophisticated technology customers.
Number two, manipulative internal links. I see this a lot on side bars, inside of content, where people have taken all of the instances of a particular word or repeated it throughout the side bar or in the footer, those kinds of things, and are pointing with exact match anchors to the same page over and over again. Now, we all know as SEOs that the first anchor text link counts and only one on the page is going to pass that value. Linking repeatedly to the same page with the same anchor is not helpful for SEO, and it makes our sites look really spammy and manipulative and questionable to someone who's browsing it. Why would we want to hurt our conversion rates like this, and why would we want to point out to the engines that, hey, over here, I'm trying to manipulate you? What are you thinking? This is crazy.
Instead, go with logical, useful, change it up when you're linking to pages, maybe a couple of times, in some spaces. You have a blog post and it mentions a page on your site that you want people to actually go to and that you think is useful in context. Great, link over there. Fine, use the anchor text. Maybe use a modified version of the anchor text, a little longer, a little shorter, a little more natural sounding, and you're going to get these same results, but you're going to do it in a much more effective way. You're not going to be at risk of whatever is happening with this over-optimization penalty.
Number three, cruddy, link filled footers. I see this all the time still. You're just having a bunch of exact anchor links down in here that no one would actually really click and that come in lists. I often see them in light gray on light gray so that it's not particularly easy to read. Use your footer wisely. Use your footer to link to the things that people expect to find in the footer. If you really need to get anchor text on pages, find natural ways to put it in the real menu at the top, in the content itself. Don't be trying to mess around and throw footer links site wide, across things. This 2002, man. We're ten years later. It's like at least a decade past that.
Number four, text content blocks built primarily for the engines. You know how sometimes you get to a page and there's good content, usable stuff, an image, a call to action, and then weirdly there's this block of junk. It's this block of blah, blah, keyword, keyword, blah, blah, blah, keyword, keyword, blah, blah, blah. Why is that there? Why does that exist? Does that really work? Does that really trick the engines? Yeah, it tricks them into thinking that they should penalize you. Get that out of there. Rewrite that stuff, man. Seriously, this is going to cost you far more than it's going to help you. If you've got those spammy blocks of text in your pages, that have no purpose other than to get your keywords or some keyword into the text, and it's not actually helping anyone, it's not a good call to action, it's not helping your conversion rate, it will actually drive people away from you. Why are you trying to rank if not to get people to do good things on your site, and like your brand, and appreciate you and come back again and again, and tell their friends, and share it socially, and link to you? Don't be putting this stuff in here. This is dangerous for all of those reasons, and super dangerous given this over-optimization penalty that's potentially coming down the line.
Number five, back links from penalty likely sources. So this is one of the toughest ones because it's really hard to control if you've already gotten links from these places. But you can see with those 700,000 Google webmaster tools, pings that they sent everybody that said, hey, it looks like you've done some manipulative linking, and that kind of thing. Be really careful for all of these, link networks, anything that says private link network, or I have a link network and I'll place your site on it, or building up a network of sites that you then interlink to one and other. Come on. There are so many better ways to get links. You're putting a lot of time and effort and energy into building all of that stuff. You can do so many authentic things with that time. This is time terribly spent. Comment spam, especially those that are sent though automated software blasts, so you think of your XRumer or your SENuke, the article marking robot, or whatever, that's going to submit your site to tons of places or find open holes in the web where they can leave comments and link spam and that kind of stuff. Forum signature links, this is actually one where I suspect it's one of the places where Google really gets to know, hey, this guy clearly is a manipulative, black hat/gray hat SEO, because look, they're pointing to the same site where we found all the link spam from forum signatures, particularly on webmaster sorts of boards. That clearly indicates that's their site and their trying to rain for it, and all that kind of stuff. They've got a long profile, and they keep linking to all these things from their forum signatures. Just be very cautious about this. I'm not saying don't link to it, but maybe don't use your exact match anchor text or try to make it more of a branding play, try and make it more authentic feeling. Certainly participating in communities is a great thing. Just watch that.
Reciprocal lists, right, people are emailing each other back and forth and saying, "Hey, I'll put you on my list of links. You put me on yours. Oh, and we'll do it 20 times and we'll form this big reciprocal circus that's going to get all of us penalized." How great is that?
Article marking sites, I've talked about article marketing in the past. Generally when you see, hey, we're an article marketing site and we can help you rank higher, and submit your content to us and we'll link out, and the same is true for SEO focused directories, anytime you see a site that is essentially extolling the virtues of participating there, or contributing there, as being primarily related to the link and the anchor text and the page rank you're going to get, you can bet your sweet hiney that Google does not want to count that. That's exactly what they're trying to prevent, and I'd worry, whether it's this penalty or a penalty that Google makes in the future, that this is the kind of stuff that gets hit.
Last one, number six, large amounts of pages that are targeting very similar, kind of modified versions of keywords and keyword intents, with only slight variations, slight variation being the key here. So think:
used cars Seattle, used autos Seattle, pre-owned cars Seattle. Why are those three different pages? It sort of feels like keywordy, SEO-y, spam, right, and then there are pointing exact match anchors at all of these. This is the same page. You can target all three of these keywords very nicely on one page that's called Used and Pre-owned Cars/Autos in Seattle. Right, one page, good, you've got it. You've combined all of the things. You want to have that great user experience there. You don't want to have to build that three times. You're not trying to build a bunch of spammy anchor texts to each one that's pointing from each of the different ones. The used cars Seattle page has a link to the used auto Seattle's, it's sort of like, "What?" From a user perspective, "Why is that there? What is the difference between a car and an automobile exactly? I don't understand why these two exist." This kind of thing is something where I think it's a very clear pattern match that the engines can detect. Looks like they did some research and then just built a page for everything, and then they pointed links at all of them. Its manipulative, right. This is the kind of thing, also, that will get you in trouble.
So, one, one, two, three, four, five, six. Six things you should change, and even though I'm not the Count from Sesame Street, you should still pay careful attention to these, because I'm super nervous that when this penalty going to come out, there are just going to be so many webmasters and SEOs who are doing this kind of stuff, and I don't know which one Google's going to hit on this time and what they might hit on in the future. But I just want you to be okay. I want your sites to do well, and this is such bad stuff for user experience too. So please avoid it. Be careful. Good luck to you, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Hello Sir,
I am a Great Fan of You. Can you give me a job of sweeper in you office.
I... um... We're not currently hiring for that particular role. But appreciate the enthusiasm and the kind words!
Try to think high man, why you didn't consider as a SEO consultant at SEOmoz, always think big to get big :)
Well Said Syed.
You'll never know if you don't ask right?
You should have tried for Starbucks Consultant. Good effort though.
Love this. Any job at SEOmoz would be a good job! :)
haha - that's hilarious man. Good luck.
Nice tips Rand as per always, 2 more things that can save your site from getting penalized are:1. natural less keyword stuffed alt tags for images,2. using H1 and other heading tags wisely, that actually look natural rather than keyword spamy
+1 both of those. Good calls Dani!
Thanks Rand :)
Great point Dani! I actually had been working on that last Month, cleaning up all my image alt tags on my sites and clients sites. Posative results so far. :)
Kwel Integrity Marketing, this is great news ! Image optimization is often negelected by many SEOs although it can largerly help in ranking as per the theme of universal search, all search engines are using these days. Even naming the folders for images wisely and playing with alt tags creatively is major part of well-rounded approach to SEO and so it can ultimately help in increasing PR.
My take is:
The Golden Rule of SEO is Common Sense.
Your WBF, Rand, is all about this.
Post Scriptum:
Maybe we should start to talk about OOP and Exact Match Domains... and, as a consequence, evangelizing the concept of Entity, as it is not really understood by people, IMO. Or, if it is, it is accepted mainly as a theoretical stuff, but not put into practice.
Actually its a human nature, when we are implenting things we are desperately want results and in that case we stuff KWs, and over optimize, so first we have to sit and make some plans and startegy rather than implement direclty to the website.
But to be honest I do not think Exact Match domains are a huge problem here, Many brands have built products around an exact match domain, and people think to link "naturally" to your brand term weather it be the EMD or not. It is people who use EMD's on scale to spam which is the problem.
But I agree 100% that "Common Sense" is a real key element to SEO, if you make a website in which is too spammy/ too optimized and not user friendly you are going to run into problems.
I don't think exact match domains ever face the risk of being penalized just for being exact match domains. However, they have already lost a great deal of their value and they are likely to lose more of it in the future.
For example, the anchor text pointing to an exact match domain for that specific keyword might get devalued, since the fact that the anchor text is there doesn't mean as much as if it were pointing toward a branded site without the keyword in its name.
Exact match domains might also end up lowering some kind of tolerance threshold, since they are more suspect than typical sites. In other words, exact match domains might need to be more careful than branded sites.
As a small businessman I have an exact match domain name. I am incredulous at the notion my site should be penalized for using my DBA name as my domain name. If folks are looking for me, they should find me first,
If common sense is the test, depriving me of the benefit of the brand name I have spent 15 years building flunks.
Nice post Rand. I thought the over-optimization penalty is already in place though, been seeing a lot of fluctuations in rankings for our client's niches lately.
So have we. It seems to have hit the financial niche.
Who knew it's coming so hard at us? The ugly penguin.
I suspect that once it launches full-scale, we'll see Google make an announcement of some kind (though it could be retroactive several days or weeks after the fact).
It's about time Rand! Sure would have been nice for SEOmoz to do a post on this earlier, say like a month ago when Matt Cutts announced the changes. I was wondering why every major SEO blog and website had discussed it except for SEOmoz...
So as an Agency that helps small businesses with SEO, how woulld this change your game plan for link building? I know SEOmoz is an advocate of quality content only followed, by socail media promotion. But what about direct sources of links, is commenting on relevant blogs now out of the picture? Paid directories like yahoo out?
Internal factors should count. However, external factors #5 cant count and if they do count we are opening a new division for black hat SEO companies: Negative SEO...
External factors go against what Matt Cutts announced a little while back.
Google is being a hypocrite here big time. Remember SOPA and how Google flipped ish to ensure that they will not be monitored, Google used the whole people will lose their jobs if we go thru with SOPA. Well Google if your about to punish thousands of companies for SEO when in reality they just hired someone to do it, This update will cost many people their jobs and I’m not saying the SEO companies will lose. The actual company that provides the service will.
My answer to this is that owners and management should be more careful of who they hire and the integrity of their services. It's like hiring an IT person and getting penalized because they put pirated bootleg copies of software on their company computers. Why should we feel obligated to feel sympathy for turning a blind eye to any bad business practices? I guess it's time for those company's to start doing things the right way.
negative seo is a reality already and has been for some time, the only thing is that now google is lowering the bar significantly, take a look here:
https://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/
What do you mean when it hits?
It already has.
I am curious why you would expect ann announcement and in what form? I don't have the history with Google you do and would lilke to know if they will blog it, if Matt C. will mention it or if there is another channel that this "sorry we thrashed a million sites" public statement come from?
L
I don’t want to say much about it Please check out Google Update Was Just A Bug Says Google @ Seroundtable , Dropped In Rankings? Blame google! @ Searchengineland
or Visit Matt Cutts page on google Plus. You will find your answer.
Thanks so much for that link. I was wondering what had happened to my site.
I think every one is seeing it in all markets, even in .com.au I have noticed a few sites get hit in various niches. Crazy enough I have even seen websites with titles which seem very brandable, i.e a 2 word title,come up in the ranks whilst titles which are over optimized have been shut down even if the authority out strips it. Lets hope Matt Cutts comes to the table and actually lets people know what is going on with these updates and provides some further clarification rather then the research we have been putting together. But in reality he will probably put out a line similar to:"Google May or May not have released over optimization penalties, you may or may not have noticed this, please use ethical strategies or check web master tools when you get a notice."
I have seen these fluctuations as well.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for the special WBF. I am really careful about:
Some things that I am so careful about that have been saving me for long are:
How about applying the same legit keyword(s) once only per image... in alt images to hundreds of images on the same site?
Of coursre, diversity is always best practice.
But what about a site that has a ton of images with no alt image tags? A WordPress plugin could slap the same alt image tags on all images one fell swoop. But is it a good idea? Or do you think this might look like over-optimization -- especially if, say, 500 images were tagged overnight. Remember: the images have been on the site for months or years. And there are only a handful per article.
Hi Daniel,
If a web page holds 100 images and all have same alt tag means the keyword repeat 100 times. Secondly that keyword would be used in the title tag, somewhere in description and in the content - it looks spammy *lot of repetitions*
If we talk about 100 product images you can put their original names as alt tag and link the image to that particular product page. This might also help you to rank better for your product name and prevent you from over-optimization.
Another problem is if you leave the alt tags blank, it's no longer W3C compliant and could cause some accessibility issues as well. It's a catch 22 for sure.
Well, roll up the sleeves and dig in. It's booring work, but you can see it as an oppertunity to improve image rankings.
And booring things has fewer competitors, so that's another win.
What defines a unique title, description, img alt tag?
Lets say the keyword is "apple" would having tag titles" apple1 apple2 apple3 suffice or does Google count how many characters? How many words?
If keyword is "apple" you will never put apply1, apple2, you will put "apple 1", "apple 2" so that Google can read and it increases the repetation. :)
nice one
Aah. Thanks Michael. :)
Is the term target tool up-to-date with regards to over-optimization (e.g. keyword usage in document)?
Assume you mean https://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new (which is what term target became). It's up-to-date, but it's only going to catch the basics like repetition of keywords in titles, in body content, etc. The other, softer, less-machine-processable (for us, not for Google) signals aren't going to be caught, though we'll definitely look into ways to add them.
Good suggestion!
Can SEOmoz build an over optimisation checker tool perhaps?
Matt (Peters) is working on a spam-detection algo for his Mozcon presentation. We're actually in the process of gathering a seed set of spam sites/pages so we can pattern-match. The poor guy who's working on it (https://twitter.com/#!/KourteousKurtis) has some hilarious stuff on his monitor whenever the rest of us walk by :-)
Oops. Still referring to it by its old name :|
+1 on the spam-detection/over-optimization tool!
It's so hard to tell clients their baby (site) is ugly. Having a tool to report legitemite data would be great!
This! Incredibly useful for a huge variety of reasons!
Great idea. I have seen a page which gets a grade A in the SEOmoz landingpage checker, but but doesn't rank in top 100 where it ought to be in top 5.
When checked, the page has a keyword density of a whopping 8%, from 30+ repeats of the keyword. This should definately give a warning in the tool, and less than a grade A
Oooo great idea! An over optimisation checker tool would be great!
If we get big green ticks for all the points mentioned on the on-page keyword report are we more likely to avoid any penalisation from Google during the update?
Or is that grossly optimistic?
You should be OK, but a healthy dose of logic and personal judgement are essential too. The tool will catch if you're way over-using keywords, but not blocks of internal link anchors, whether text is readable and useful to humans, etc.
I understand, so a little bit of common sense will go a long way in other words!
Thanks for the quick response Rand.
I think the tool works great for the on page stuff, but personally I always aim for a B grade. I think an A rating is a little over the top (although not necessarily bad if the rest of your ranking signals are in order).
Sometimes you have to worry about the content itself more than the on page rating too. You might have 40 instances of a given phrase, but it could be warranted for certain articles. I rarely write the content for SEO, but for title tags, h1/2 I try to find a good middleground for users and search engines.
Can you please suggest the name/link of the tool you are referring to? Is there a tool that can help us evaluate the degree of overoptimization done on our Web site?
Thanks!
These comments are about the "On-page" tool in your Pro Campaign.
Sha
they are currently working on that over optimization tool not done yet.
Great WBF as always Rand, but I wanted to let you know it looks like you might want to updated the On-Page Report Card you linked to in your comment as the following item is listed among the low-importance factors:
Avoid Keyword Self-CannibalizationExplanationIt's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site (sometimes two if you've already achieved high rankings and are seeking a second, indented listing). To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. Note that using modified versions is sometimes fine (for example, if this page targeted the word 'elephants', using 'baby elephants' in anchor text would be just fine).
That seems to be in direct contradiction with point #6 in the video, no?
Also, your point is well taken in #6 used is the same as pre-owned and auto is the same thing as car... but it's not always that cut and dry. What if the 3 pages were "air conditioning installation seattle", "air conditioning maintenance seattle" and "air conditioning repair seattle"? These are 3 completely different services.
Also what about if it's the same service but defferent geographical areas. i.e. Pool Cleaning Services Miami, Pool Cleaning Services Fort Lauderdale and Pool Cleaning Services Palm Beach.
As long as each of those pages has unique content, they should all be fine. Rand is stating that abusing synonyms for SEO purpsoes is considered over optimization. It's one page per topic, so if you make 3 pages and just use different words (think cars/automobiles/vehicles) but really each page is about the same thing, that would be over optimization.
I am especially interested in n° 5. What if the page looks absolutely clean and not spamy at all - BUT they have got a link network payed (one of our customer some months ago - and they climed the serps like a rocket. The link farm is NOT! provided from our company).I warned the customer what can happen but he only pays attention to the results he is having right now.So I am absolutely curious how serious Google is treating that item - though that network should be so easy to discover.
Is this Google update right now only taking place in the US?
And one question to item 4) - Do you mean text content blocks which link to different websites or page internally?
I agree Petra. We have to fight your battle as well: to convince clients not to go for a quick win by using maliscious tactics but focus on the long run with authentic strategies.
Re: #5 - It's really hard to say. Sometimes it works for days, weeks, months, even a couple years in extreme cases. But the last few months definitely suggest way more attention paid by the webspam team, so I'd be nervous about taking on clients with dirty link profiles who are unwilling to remove and disclose them to Google.
Re: #4 - I mean content blocks with irrelevant/junky text and keyword stuffing, not necessarily links (though overdoing internal links is common, too).
It is hard to remove some very dirty link profiles in some cases, I mean if it is a 3rd party site they never have built the link on, even worse if the "previous SEO company" has gone in an built a huge amount of links for a clean B2B company on adult websites or high tier spam sites (I have seen one extreme example such as this recently, where the client was very clean to move to a large white label SEO company).It is near impossible to contact some adult webmasters to have things taken down ASAP, you just have to keep trying.
I think in the end of the day if you do recieve the link penalty you need to be 100% transparent with Google and show every thing give them all the bad links and say you have tried your 100% best to take down every single link you can and explain the ones you can not take down, I have heard of penaltys been removed in these instances.
Here's an example of what #4 is addressing. (just one example)
"many people find this page by searching google for [insert long list of keywords]"
One of the things that I preach to our consultants and clients is to always think of the end-user first. What makes sense to the customer? How can that page be most helpful etc. This means having helpful page titles, page content, images, links that all help funnel users to what they are looking for. "Think customer first, search engines second."
I completelly agree. Put people first (I can see this turning into a "chick or the egg" debate) , after all it's PEOPLE who buy your products.
Exactly! I think "Intent" is key: "Why are we adding these links" or "Why are we writing this text in this way".
The correct answer should be either "To increase usability / conversion rates" or "To directly drive traffic / customers".
If the answer is "To increase search rankings", then I think you are in the grey area...
Alex
Very true, People are the main driver to buy your product. If you are not CRO focused and making a great website/product for the masses it can be a problem.
I might take it one step further and say that you should be putting Google first. By that I don't mean put the algorithm first. I mean think about what Google wants the end user to do. The reason I make this distinction is because a webmaster and Google have two different opinions about what's best for the user.
The webmaster thinks that what's best for the user is to get them excited about their product and buy it. Google thinks that the best thing for the user is to get them spending a lot of time on the site, sharing it with their friends, comming back to the site, etc.
At least from a pure SEO standpoint, then, your primary "metric" should be user enjoyment. (I say enjoyment, not engagement, because in the end all Google really cares about is how much their users enjoy using them, not whether or not they are getting social about it, which is what engagement usually means in today's climate.)
In many ways enjoyment overlaps with sales, but it's not the same thing, and sometimes they can even conflict with eachother. There are circumstances where your average number of sales could go up, but your average user enjoyment goes down.
Just a thought.
Agreed. Putting people over search engines is definitely the way to do it.
2012...why on earth did it take Google so long to make this update? Sometimes it boggles my mind how good they are at somethings & others that are clearly spam, they allow to last for so long?
Exactly what I was thinking. I still see spam in results today and wonder how on earth it got there. But you have to remember, no algorithm is perfect and there will always be sites slipping through the cracks.
Overall I think they're doing a great job of cleaning up spam.
Right but now the problem is: I can point spam at a competitor site and from position 2 in google I move to position 1. This is called Negative SEO.
It often makes me wonder how much politics are involved...
Well I guess they have to check every eventuality.
No offense, but this is the best WBF that I've seen in quite some time. Timely, passionate and full of great advice that is still too often abused by SEOs who do their best to be white hat.
I think the biggest change to SEO over the past few years is the convergence with usability. Great sites have always had great usability to go along with their on-page signals, but I feel like Google has finally got to the point of being able to enforce their past rhetoric of asking people to design sites and content for users. Unnatural behavior is more obvious than ever.
I'm a Textbroker author. I still get clients asking to include a 3 word keyword phrase 12 times in a 400 word article. It's shocking, really.
overoptimization penalty in 2022:
Transcibing videos into text when noone reads it at all....
I actualy only read the transcriptions. I'm one of those "readers", and it doesn't matter how fast Rand talks, I'd rather read it. :)
all im saying is that what's good in 2002, or seemed like a white hat method, is then blasted as Google blasts the strategy. With each new algorithm update - it seems a new "white hat" way of thought is createdJustMHO
See the earlier comment someone else made about that, and my response, at https://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday#jtc177433.
Awesome Rand.. (Thumbs up, +1, Like, Tweet)
I don't see a +5 or I'd give it to him. I'd give him 5 of my own points. Great tips Rand!
The italics are killing my eyes. It might be just me, though.
I all experienced that things that you discussed Rand, they even have a page where all the internal links-anchor texts going to different pages are into. I also remove their dumb pages linked on their footer - they have a page for a keyword EX: network management, networks management, web design service, web design services - because they believe that they need separete landing page(s) every keywords.
We always want whats best for our clients and their businesses.
P.S. I'm just wondering Rand, is Google devaluing bad links? or getting you penalized for those bad links? Long debate. I can still see a website rank on top because of links coming from forum signatures and blog networks. (GRRRR).
" they believe that they need separete landing page(s) every keywords"
Yes, exactly, there's a difference between creating a landing page for every type of user, and a landing page for every keyword.
Rand: I can agree with most of what you're suggesting in this WBF, but your first item regarding spammy titles took me aback. The very example that you gave on the whiteboard as what NOT to do is listed as an "optimal format" here https://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag. And yet you state it as if it was a "duh" factor. I know this industry changes rapidly, but I don't think you should throw out the baby with the bath water. This format is a good foundational starting point from which you can begin testing variations, adding calls to action, etc. to improve click-through. For sites with hundreds or thousands of pages, having that general rule (Keyword 1, Keyword 2 - Brand) in place is a good stop-gap measure, especially when exciting-title-writing resources are limited.
So basically give up every seo technique you've ever tried and then rebuild all your content or delete it.
great...
I think this is a wonderful WBF. I have followed everything SEOMOZ teaches for the last 2 years. This past month, my rankings have increased and search traffic has sky rocketed. The good thing about this is that the people who really built their sites for the customer instead of Google will be rewarded. On one hand, I am glad this is happening. On the other hand, I sometimes worry it's an easy way to for a competitor to target me.
Interesting StuffRand! I think you actually give a hint to those who are confused and wanted to know what exactly is over optimization and how they should look in to their websites to know if there is anything they should care about!
I am not really sure about CTR ratio to go down with the use of keyword stuffed titles, but I have witnessed a fall in SERP rankings with the use of Keyword stuffed anchor text. In my opinion Title should be crafted in such a way that your title should include keyword yet spreads a message that a visitor can understand without getting confused.
One thing that should consider as important and that is the verity of anchor text in links that are coming from 3rd party sites, if you are going to focus the same anchor text over and over again you will defiantly going to face an over optimization penalty!
I do agree with actually all the points but to summaries what I can say is to stay safe with over optimization penalty all you have to do is to think and audit your website as a potential customer to see how many areas of the website actually confuse you and force you to switch to competitors website.
Suggestion: Google is seriously slapping the people who are trying to game the search… This is the time to be on the right track or there will be no track for you!
Awesome presentation. You have a way of distilling the message down very well.
I think big changes are coming, and in the near future we're going to have to start working WITH Google instead of against them.
People need to start focusing on their content, reputation, branding and trust instead of technical SEO, especially onpage optimization and paid links.
Another great Whiteboard Friday Rand. I dont see my sites falling into those 6 over-optimization patterns but it gave me some ideas now to fix something else on my sites.
Thank you
I hope this isn't another false dawn from Google. So much garbage still top of the pile, with no sign of change. Legit SEO seems to be fading into basically nothing and every week I am being pressured to join the dark side. Ho hum.
On a feedback note:
The change to loss of the volume control is due to a recent Wistia player update which sets the default player to not include a volume control.
I also prefer to have the control so I dont have to adjust global sound settings, but apparently the logic is "everybody has a sound button on their keyboard".
I believe SEOmoz could switch on the volume control when setting up the player, but it seems those of us who like the volume control are in the minority :(
Sha
Really? I've largely had the opposite experience. Far less darker shade stuff lately and far better and scalable results using white hat techniques. Particularly broken link building. So many great toolsets out there for doing that it's ridiculous. If you can make pretty good content (and you don't need to be a wizard to do that anymore, you can farm it out to any number of highly qualified folks for reasonable prices) you can link build via broken links - white hat as can be!
Very informative WBF Rand, it's great to hear what your major concerns are regarding the over-optimization penalty.
I have a question about number 6, having large amounts of pages targeting similar keyword intents or variants.
Now, maybe the keywords here are "large amounts", but in another WBF you suggested to create separate pages for different variations and numbers of keywords in order to avoid Frankenpages (See https://www.seomoz.org/blog/mapping-keywords-to-content-for-maximum-impact-whiteboard-friday), and now, you're saying not to do that.
I'm cornfused. Thanks and happy weekend!
Great point about the titles needing to sound natural. In reality, all the content on your site needs to sound like a human wrote it for a human reader. I think the over optimization penalty will go after sites that have technically done SEO right (no black hat tactics) but it's missing that human elements that makes for a great user-experience.
So funny and helpful to explain it to our clients :)
Thanks Rand!
Really informative and simple video, which is what SEO should be. Too many times agencies/consultants over complicate SEO.
WBF videos rock!
Thanks for that post, Rand. Its great to see that Google are trying to make SEO more about optimising your site for the users rather than for the engines themselves.
When I heard this part: "What are you thinking? This is crazy." it really got my attention. There are a bunch of commenters that sound confused about some of the details this post- you basically have deconstructed & recommended against many instructions given over time, many of which have come from this blog. It's a little frustrating to hear that what we've been taught and taught each other over the years is "crazy". Would be nice to hear you rescind that comment and just acknowledge that we are all working on a moving target, the target has moved again, and it probably will in the future. SEOs should keep on trying to make websites better for the good of the web, and if we do that, generally good things (maybe a little money) will follow.
Uhh what? Where in moz have you seen spammy recommendations like the example given ?
Hi Nadia - Going back to 2004/5, I'd say the Moz blog and all the resources on this site have been very consistent about avoiding these types of overly spammy/manipulative types of SEO. If there's an old post or article we've got up that you think needs changing, please do point it out though - we're published thousands here, so it's certainly possible we overlooked some.
Great video again Rand.
One question tho, #3 about the footer, I noticed that SEOMOZ is using the 2002 footer style.... so it is not about the design, but rather about spamming the keywords in the footer, right?
say what?
If you are seeing a spammy, link-stuffed footer at the bottom of this page then I really need to get my eyes fixed!
I think perhaps you need to watch that part of the video again?
There might be a little communication deficit in play on this one :)
Sha
Check out his whiteboard drawing of the 2002 footer.. and check out the SEOMOZ footer. 3 or 4 columns of links, both are very similar.
I get the point.. I just had to mention it .. ;)
Think you misinterpreted what Etienne was saying. I think Etienne was pointing out that the footer on the bottom of this site has an old design, and was asking to verify that it's not the design of the footer that's the problem, it's whether or not you fill it with spam.
ah...no.
The diagram definitely shows multiple columns of links in the footer. (Column generally being used to indicate that there is more than one row of information for each horizontal space).
This is further reinforced by the wording Rand used "that come in lists" (A list generally being defined as "A number of connected items or names written or printed consecutively, typically one below the other"
I don't hear any reference to design. The "so 2002" refers to the practice of stuffing lists of links into the footer.
Maybe you didn't intend the comment as it came across, but to me it seemed you might have been taking a shot at SEOmoz for doing exactly the opposite of Rand's advice.
Apologies if I took it the wrong way, but I think we need to be careful not to muddy the waters for those who are less experienced :)
Sha
A couple more points as to why footer links are a bad idea:
#6 I can already confirm is being targeted hard by Google.
Hi Russ,
I imagine you say that because you have proves. May I ask you to maybe write a post about that in your blog or, why not, here?
I think a lot of people would be interested and appreciate it.
+1. See my question below (I was writing that before I even saw this comment!)
I link this one, it's a lot of common sense, but a good reminder to keep white hat. Were going through all our clients and ensuring they are not doing any of this ... so good food for thought!
Looking forward to the possibilities. No changes on my part need to be made.
@Savvy Panda: your icon reminds me of the the WWF icon
Rand, excellent WBF and VERY timely!
One point of confusion though, you say to avoid KW based anchor text links in your footer, especially sitewide...
But, well, I gotta ask...
SEOmoz appears to have these links in it's footer, pretty much sitewide (or at least on lots of pages):
* Link Building
* Reputation Management
etc etc...
Now, I know that these are more than likely there for users (although they vanish when signed in it seems, so not so sure!), but how would big G's algo tell the difference between:
Exact KW match anchor links in the footer (meant for users)
and
Exact KW match anchor links in the footer (meant for indexing/passing value)
Not saying that I disagree with you at all! Just wondered how you reconcile your statement in the video (especially "if you really need to find ways to get anchor text links in on the page, try to find natural ways to put it, in the real menu at the top (etc)), with the fact that you appear to have exact match (kw based) anchors in the footer of SEOmoz when one is not signed in?
Just asking so I can get a full idea of your thoughts on this, hope you don't mind Rand!
I have a quick question regarding over optimisation. We have read so much about what Google is looking for and the fact that fresh unique content will always be king. Not content that is forcibly keyword stuffed but useful information.
However, there has been a lot of talk the last couple of days about how a site with 0 content, no meta data etc (https://makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.co.uk/) is ranking currently No4 for Make Money Online.
from what i can see they have done nothing but build links. 9.5k according to Open Site Explorer many with the same Anchor Text, ie well and truely over optimised.
Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated as I spend so much time and money developing my website and having fresh useful content within it only to see things like this really is down heartening.
Thanks
There has been a lot of talk about a possible algorithm update rolling out that might include the over-optimization penalty but it all just seems to be speculation. Has there been any official news about an algorithm update?
Agreed - Unless Rand has insider knowlege, this is all speculation. Even if G doesn't factor any of the items in the video into the algo update, those issues still make your site look like crap. Hopefully, some webmasters won't change anything so there will be proof the update does/does not look at these items.
Rand, though still awesome, I see a few flaws with your assessment:
#1 Search after search I always see the keywords I'm searching for within the first 3 words of the title. Putting the brand there just doesn't make sense if the brand does not include the keywords best associated with it. However titles can still be written with natural language.
#4 The keyword block is default for Wordpress. Do you think that Google is just going to drop millions of high ranking wordpress pages? That and all the wordpress copiers out there make me doubt this will play a factor.
#6 This is a mixed bag. Some industries (usually technical) will have a page about every nuance of their product. "Transistor A is different from Transistor B, C, D & E because of Bob Loblaw." All of those would be very close iterations of the same content, especially in an white page, non-ecommerce environment which is where most high end technology companies live. Conversely I've seen sites where they purposely create thin content that is targeted at every iteration of the keywords they target. What indicators would show the difference?
Same doubt here concerning #6!
This is a good whiteboard Friday and I agree with everything stated. However part 5 built a little confusion for me. I thought relevancy is all that mattered with external linking factors. For example on forums I can find threads to post in that are all relevant to my topic Keywords. In this sense I am helping people learn about whatever they are searching, I feel like I deserve to rank for that keyword for helping other on the web.
After reading number 5, I am little dizzy. What does this mean authentic links? As long as an SEO is building a link it’s not authentic, is it? The only way for a link to be authentic is if someone likes content and links to it naturally.
In your opinion is future SEO to “ONLY” build content and share it via social networks? Forget blogging, forums, directories, and strategic link exchanges in relevant places. Or, is it going to be the same as always use blogging, forums, directories, and strategic link exchanges in relevant places. However, using different variation of my keywords?
Forums
Having a signature within a forum can only be set to one signature; maybe forums should let you put different variations of your signatures? Especially if your a great help to the users on the forum. Since this is not the case should I stay off of forums? No matter what any link I put on a forum will show up to Google as an attempt to manipulate. Lets say I have 200 posts on one forum, changing my signature now would mean I lose all those aged links, and all these new links will still be the same on 200 pages within one forum.
That's a great point about forums. Actually that one had me a bit confused as well... but I think the message was that the signature in your forums should be realistic and not stuffed with a bunch of anchor texts. I have seen some really crazy sigs with tons of links, each using different anchor texts.
Right, no matter what keywords I pick for my signatures, the forum will repeat the anchor on every comment I ever made or make.
Now im thinking, hmmm.. should I leave all my links and watch Google punish me for some helpful forum posts on relavent blogs? Or should I remove all these links I spent a ton of time building and lose my rankings for taking down the links down? Sounds like a lose/lose situation.
I too would like to know this. I've been quite active on forums that are clearly related to the subject of my blog, helping people out and stuff. The anchor text in the signature is always the name of my blog. Should I remove them?
One solution would be to vary your signature across different forums you are involved in... each forum can only have one link/anchor text for all of your posts but you could vary it across them.
Hey Josh,
From watching today's White Board Friday. I would suggest to use more of a long tail approach with forums. Reasoning, it is a gray/black hat area, having tons of [Exact] phrases might sound the alarm.
Forums usually allow two links some allow three.
For the most part I only leave helpful responses or i do not respond. From my understanding of SEO when you help users find what they are looking for, Google helps them find you.
I feel like a harsh update on forums can be useful. only to prevet the users that are not contributing. I have spent hours of my time and others time, researching and responding with value.
Im going to spend all weekend changing all my signatures. Im ging to anchor "Learn more about [keyword]" "[keyword] Help" "BRAND[Keyword]"
I really hope Google starts penalizing overoptimization. I hate it when competitors create spammy sh**y pages that are written for robots and I can't outrank them with genuine content.
I would rather see them devalue them instead of penalizing. What's to stop a competitor from aiming spammy links at your website to sabatage you?
At the end of the day there will be No SEO. They canablizing themselves with all of their rules. It will boil down to 1993 SEO. I guess everythign goes full circle. We will have jus directories.
Rand - a debate is raging at our agency - are the spammy footer links you refer to at 4:25 in the video similar to the footer links we find at many sites, like SEOMoz? Could you further define what would constitute over-optimization in the footer.Thanks,
Mark
Having all the keywords you are trying to target in a footer is over otimizing. Keep you footer clean, maybe have contact us/sitemap/directions to business/phone number etc...
Like Rand said, you only need one link from to a page internally to let the search engine know about it. Anything after that if not done with proper (within context) variation will look like spam.
Having an exact term ["keyword"] in your footer, H1,URL,Title,Body, Alt image and any other area it can fit without keyword variation will look lke an attempt to manipulate.
The idea I got about over optimization was doing too good of a job in a white hat fashion. These suggestions strike me more as grey hat SEO and potentially things that shouldn't have ever been done in the first place. Good tips to keep in mind though. Thanks.
I have recently started on my journey into SEO and I want to thank you for all your posts Rand. I have been employed with a firm for only a week now and my boss has pointed to your site many times already. This post especially is helping me to think about how I create my content. Being new to the industry, it is good that I can start from go with the way that content should be made to satisfy clients and Google going forward
"You can target all three of these keywords very nicely on one page that's called Used and Pre-owned Cars/Autos in Seattle."
Lets say we did create one page to target 3 similar key phrases, how is seo moz report card gonna look when we try to target all 3?
Pretty sure we're gonna get a big fat F? Report tool shows recommendations such having the kw in H1? Surely its spammy to have all 3 phrases in the same H1 tag? And we know we cant have 3 H1 tags?
So if we target 3 kw's per page, our on page score is gonna be a lot lower. The only place that will be strong for all 3 kw's will be a weel written title and havin gthe exact phrase in the content. This isn't exactly the best on page. Accoridng to seo moz report card, you should have the kw in H1, title, phrase match in content, broad match...the list goes on.
How can expect to get all 3 phrases in to the same page and still expect a high on page score? The way round it as we all know, is to create seperate pages for somw phrases. I could be way off the mark, but from what Rand is saying, it kind of contradicts what the pro tools reports tells us?
Great Thanks for Zooming in the things for me. But as per Rand saying making the different pages for exactly same product can make a negative impact, but if i have a product not exactly same but yes similar.
Not hard to understnd hosting plans so please look into the exmple and please help me further, like i have a special hosting plans for specific region of customers other than my random hosting plans which make a slight difference in my product. And i have done a lot of development work on to that, i will be thankful if you could help me to describe the precaution i could take by using a saperate pages for similar products.
Thanks in Advance!
Number of comments on this post clearly shows how much it was required and helpful for SEOmoz readers and webmasters, i have a very basic question on you 6th point on similar pages.
I understood that its not good to have number of pages for same product or service, but if i have a same service but diferrent pages trageted to different geolocation will it also puts thubs down.
Example: we are a web hosting copmany selling hosting services and for different geo location we have different plans so we could name our pages like: /web-hosting-india and/ web-hosting-chandigarh (Chandigarh region in India)
We are already doing this, hope you can recommend on this that we should conitnue to this or remove this kind of techniques from our website.
So basically, don't worry about SEO too much but rather worry about the user experience and you will do better SEO-wise... hmmm?
Probably the best and simplistic SEO good practice piece I've ever seen, no joking and I'm an SEO professional myself, absolutely loved it, great job.
Ken (Ireland)
Rand, nice Post. This is a brief overview or a suggestive warning to every SEO that focus on these changes or you will be slapped by the Google's over optimization penalty. Nicely presented suggestions in easy to understand way.
Basically this video could be summed up as "All those things you have previously done for SEO - don't do them or your will be punished" or "pretend to not do SEO and you could be ok" - and that is probably very good advice, nice one Rand.
The word "manipulation" gets used a lot in SEO (in a bad way), as Rand mentioned in this video. But if you think about SEO, it's exactly the act of manipulating, influencing, improving the search results - that's why we do it right. So even if we're doing the latest "under optimisation" strategies explained here it's still an attempt to influence the rankings. And who said this is a bad thing, well apparently Google.
So all of those SEO things we have done before, why did we do them? simply because that is what Google was asking for, Google would reward websites with rankings if they served up relevant content, had exact match links, keyword density etc etc.
Now Google is penalising perfectly legitimate websites for doing exactly what it used to like in a website yesterday.
If you run a shoe website, you're going to end up mentioning "shoes" alot on your website, Title tags, exact mtch links, you might even do an internal link to "womens shoes" , how terrible. Is this an intelligent well thought out approach for Google?
The issue here is not so much the methods of SEO it is simply that Google does not want too many people being able to manipulate their search engine results. So it started with targeting reciprical links, then extended to all the ones Rand has mentioned above. So then SEOs will find other avenues that Google currently accepts, like guest blog posts (they might not even be safe now), infographics (again might not be safe) etc - if these are done too successfullly by SEOs it will be deemed "over manipulated/optimised" - so in a nutshell, Google does not like overly SEO/manipulation and will continue to penalise it, particularly for the methods that work.
It begs the question, is Google going too far penalising relevant "over" optimised legitimate websites.
It's heading in the direction of the best SEO strategy is not to have one.
I think this raises a good point. Any SEO promotion technique that becomes too successful moves from good practice into manipulation. The reason being, Google's position is ultimately at odds with ANY type of promotion.
The search engines goal is to reward websites that deliver the best possible customer experience - any promotional techniques, including those currently deemed legitimate, will eventually come under attack as Google wants to reward sites that deliver great customer experience, not those with well-organised marketing departments.
As Google's algorithmn improves its power, vision and reach, SEO will disappear and hoards of us will be editing our CVs to find work as Content and UX Strategists.
Loved the video though. A couple of uncomfortable points raised... (grumble grumble). Time to make a few changes methinks...
I agree with you most certainly. Already I feel that my duties in SEO has been redefined as content strategy and UX strategy. It's interesting how our job descriptions in the SEO field are always in flux, mostly for the better I must say.
Same as Kyle, I feel like my SEO duties have already moved more to content strategy and UX strategy and away from optimization just for rankings. With the search engines always changing, the SEO industry is always going to be changing and so will our jobs/responsibilities.
Ah yes, I too feel I most repent ... grumbling along the way. For so long, I've been looking at page titles where someone put their brand name first and thought, "there's a missed SEO opportunity." Now, it's time to go and make some more natural adjustments. Even though I'm grumbling a bit, all of these changes lead to a better Search world, and I am always happy for that.
Google is optimizing their own product, to reduce ugly sites. Why it took them so long, they must know.
They are not punishing you for following what they rewarded before, they evolve, and so should you, if you want to stay in the game.
They have actually been talking about these changes for more than 1 ½ year now, so no-one can say , they didn`t get a heads up.
If you know your sites are ugly , for seo-purposes, why even be a webmaster ? Just for the money ?
It`s still seo, just a little bit more userfriendly.. thats all
"It's heading in the direction of the best SEO strategy is not to have one."
If you define SEO as attempting to manipulate the search results, than that's absolutely true. Personally, I don't believe that improving search rankings and manipulating search results are the same thing.
All SEO really should be is marketing mixed with an understanding of how the search algorithms work. The top priority should always be marketing, which always puts brand reputation first.
Google never came out and said, "we want you to get exact match links." They've always said the same thing, "create great content." That's not the only thing you should be thinking about when you're doing SEO, but it's absolutely the only thing you should ever expect Google to reward you for forever.
SEO will never die, it will just evolve. It is moving in the direction of user optimization. In the future you will be looking for other ways to measure and improve user experience and expectations than by measuring links. You'll optimize for time on site and bounce rate and social shares.
This doesn't take the geeky/tech/fun part out of SEO, it just makes it a more interesting problem to analyze and solve. There will be more variables to deal with but you can still approach it scientifically and your job will still be optimization.
As for the question, is Google going too far? Only if they irritate the end user. You can't expect anything more from them than keeping searchers happy. There's no reason to feel entitled to Google traffic. It's free.
There is only one thing I'm concerned about that could backfire on Google, and that is the possibility of negative SEO. They claim that negative SEO can't be used to take down a reputable site, but I have my doubts that this is true for small and medium businesses.
Hopefully when and if that day comes, they'll get good at spotting strange patterns (why would a business that already ranks #1 for a keyword suddenly build a bunch of over optimized links for that keyword, for example).
negative seo is a reality unfortunately, there are many case studies shared openly on forums already, you can find two here: https://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/
and more if you google, but obviously the vast majority of negative seo is done privately so because of that it has a much lower profile. but make no mistake, it does exist
So let me get this right..
We have a client who has hundreds of pieces of furniture. Naturally the word "furniture" amongst others (such as oak/mahogany/mango will be in the alt tag per image. So this client, could have hundreds of images, and as such hundreds of words which may be like this: "oak-wardrobe" or "oak coffee table" then google will now determine that as spam (oak)?
How many ways can you re-write a given name for something?
I understand google needs to combat spam, but it sucks for people who are in a similar situation to my client.
Great WBF Rand.
I actually thought the impression of the Count was pretty good too!
I guess this is why as a web designer, I have never been penalized. I wouldn't think to do any of those things to begin with, because they make no sense to begin with. Seems most SEO's haven't noticed the obvious, which is that search engines index webpages, and all webpages share one thing in common, they are all structured using HTML and CSS, any other code does not count. SEO's spend all this time playing around with manipulating keywords and other garbage, while I just create a good description of my content.
I still see a lot a website doing horrible over optimization.
Awesome WBF Rand as i also believe user experience is the future of SEO but what we should do when our clients push us to do things that we dont want to do how can we make them understand that SEO process is much more wider than just submissions.
it would be great if we have an WBF on that topic
thanks
I absolutely agree with all of this.
One thing to note however, is Huffpos who seems to excell in state of art in aggressive SEO -- see Farhad Manjoo excellent Slate article:
"HuffPo's Achilles' Heel .Search engine optimization won't work forever."
Well, forever hasn't arrived yet because it all seems to be still working for them, so, huffpos is an interesting case where the rules don't "seem" to apply.
Perhaps Rand could apply all this to Huffpos's site to answer the questions: is Rarhad right about Huffpos? If he is, is Huffpos really getting away with it, and if so, how are they getting away with it?
To a see a great video on how Huffpos does interlinking, search for "Seo copywriter shows how Huffington Post uses Seo" in youtube.
~ Christopher Skyi
Hi Rand I wait for Whiteboard friday video. I was eager to know your views on google update last week and it is there. Thanks for nice video again.
first, sorry for my english but it's not my motherlanguage.
great video BUT the question is, what will really happen and what is not more than blabla like so often in the past. for example:
google is always talking about "qualitiy content" and so on, but in average 10% of the top 50 results in google are automatically translated sites? and automatically translated content is everything but high qualtiy
EDIT: one question about the footer. which kind of links should NOT be in the footer?
I agree ... just think for how long we're expecting keyword-domains to have less importance - today, one of the fastest way to rank for a keyword is to have an exact match domain for it. Google's constantly updating, but announcements might not have to be taken 100%.
Which kind of links should NOT be in the footer?
Anything that looks like it was placed in the footer for SEO purposes alone.
It's the same general principle that applies to everything mentioned in the video.
When addressing senior executives I often use a tax analogy they grasp instantly. The IRS principle is that every transaction must have some legitimate business purpose beyond conferring a tax advantage.
The same principle shoud apply to SEO. Google is not there yet, but is making progress in that direction. So it's time to start preparing. Act the way honest accountants or lawyers do. Provide advice to clients on the best legit ways to arrange their affairs.
Anything that does not look natural. A site on shoes and then link in the footer to life insurance and credit repair would look like paid links and real users probably wouldn't be to interested in clicking on those links. Need to think in terms of relevancy and providing a good user experience on your website. Good tax analogy :)
I feel like I just got personally called out by Rand Fishkin!I started SEO in 2012, but somehow I got stuck in 2002.
Yes, I have footer links with perfect anchor text. And my menu links are no follow. There, I said it.
I promise to make amends for my sin.
If you just started that is pretty easy to do. If you are teaching yourself based on what you read about SEO online or even in books it is extremely easy to follow trends and even best practices of SEO that are now out of date. It happens! Keep learning! :)
So, what are you saying Rand, that Publishing article on major article syndication site is futile. If writing contents on article publsihing is futile then Google needs to rethink about this over-optimization update. Please suggest the needfull!
It depends. What is the purpose of submitting an article for syndication? Is it to reach as many readers as possible, or to get as many links as possible? If it's the latter, than it makes perfect since for Google to render these submissions pointless. A link that neither sends users nor serves as an endorsement from a reputable source is a pointless link. You would never place that kind of link if the search engines didn't exist.
And if you've found an article syndication site that actually does send high quality traffic to your site, than odds are Google won't devalue it. Even if they do, who cares, do it anyway, they're sending you traffic.
Hi Rand. As an SEO optimaizer I see lots of web sites and CMS that just do not much Google
webmaster guide line. THe CMS is so poor and the spider can barely crawl it. SO we use some text bob in the page in order to give it some relevant content. THis content do not have to be spamy.
Any how - I think always that lees is more in the SEO world :)
In ISrael link bilding is still one of the most efffective ways to get up the rank
Oh my god,,, I wish i read this last night. New to SEO and I just submitted my site to over 600 directories and link sites... Excellent video.
Ozzie
https://www.basmatigroup.co.uk
Great Video, very nice! But in fact it still can be seen - especially websites ranking for strong moneykeys on the first page of organic searchresults - that mostly there are no individual- or creative titles to read, just all kind of keyword variations....and it works perfectly
Thanks for this useful video. Though informations here vital ,these are not valid for any website. Though i use keywords without brand name and over optimized web site, i rank#1 in web tasarımı (web design) keyword in Turkey. So I need to note that,just check this but applications can vary. Google can penalize web in some manners, such as over backlink,misuse of content, over use of some seo tricks etc.
Thanks aganin
Really fantastic WBF Rand! I would like to ask you about #6. What about seperate pages for different geographical ereas? i.e. Photography Supplies in Seattle, Photography Supplies in Bellvue and Photography Supplies in Lynnwood.
Thanks Rand for sharing such a great piece of information...:)
What niches will not get hit by this? Me I am seeing sites that are still ranking with footer links for keywords with difficulty of 50%. Why Google make difference in the niches?
Thank you Rand,
Even with the changes in Google, I'm glad that our job as SEO's is becoming more professional. Removing spam and unethical methods.
We just have to think about the user, with content that search.
Hey, so before I've read that adding the company name to the title tag was a waste of space since the more words the less weight each one has, does that mean that now the title tag format must have the name, and if so it should be (company name): (naturally organized keywords) or can it be (naturally organized keyword) | (Company name).Thanks!
Few days ago I read an article about "Over-Optimization Penalty", on which SEO experts - Cyrus Shepard, Carson Ward, and Jim Boykin's gave their views on Google’s Over-Optimization Penalty. Very interesting.
https://www.sociableblog.com/2012/04/19/seo-experts-escaping-google-over-optimization-penalty/
Thanks for this Rand, really appreciated - a really helpful presentation.
Is there a way you guy could update the On-page optimisation tool (or something in a campaign) to scan a site for potential signs of 'over-optimisation'? This could be handy both for clients and also to work out if competitors may be over-optimising so we don't worry about them too much?
Tip #3 kinda confuses me because SEOmoz has about 20 column style footer links (when not logged into pro). What threshold would you guesstimate to be considered to have too many?
I can axe a ton of my footer links but are they really useless to providing SEO juice as opposed to a column link? I've tested column then switched them all to the footer and saw no change in those pages ranks. Guess I should also test removing some and those pages and watch rankings but still confused on this...
Hi GYMSN,
#3 is not about the page design, but the intent of the links - lists of exact match anchor text links that appear manipulative.
It does not matter whether they are laid out in columns, or as a run-on list separated with commas or the good old pipe. The point is that lists of exact match anchors that appear manipulative are not a good idea.
Taking the SEOmoz logged out footer as an example - All of those links are perfectly legitimate and link to the expected destination. If SEOmoz were being "bad" with their footer, you would see a list of exact match anchor text links for the highest value terms in their niche. Something like this:
seo software top seo software seo best seo what is seo software search engine optimization software for seo what is seo seo software tools google seo best seo software local seo top seo software web seo seo optimization software search engine marketing free seo software how to seo free software for seo search marketing seo seo optimisation software why seo
As you can see, the intent of the two is quite different :)
Sha
"Reciprocal lists, right, people are emailing each other back and forth and saying, "Hey, I'll put you on my list of links. You put me on yours. Oh, and we'll do it 20 times and we'll form this big reciprocal circus that's going to get all of us penalized." How great is that?"
How about non-reciprocal links. That's a part of non-organic link building that Google can never automatically identify.
I link from 10 of my sites to X of yours and you link from 10 of your sites to Y of mine. As long as there's no crossover in sites there's no footprint. And if the 10 sites of each party are discreetly maintained, that's a hole in Google's anti-spam prevention.
Intersting post Rand and thank you. Can you give your thougts on the recent post by Matt Cutts on the 19th suggesting Google made a mistake and that some sites had been penalised or even de-indexed?<br /><br />He gives no indication as to when this will be resolved or even a way on telling if this has effected your site, i beleive they should have notified webmasters in webmaster tools.<br /><br />I have 3 sites. 2 were hit with the Panda update and dropped about 5 pages. All 3 sites held these positions for 2/4 weeks. Then a few days ago 1 of the 2 sites dropped to page 26???? This is a site with a pr3, 10 years old and never used any kind of blackhat methods!!!! I ran it through your 'over - optimisation' tool and it pulled up a couple of issues like 'alt' tags etc but nothing to serious!<br /><br />The only difference between the sites interms of what they are and history is that the one that dropped to page 26 was registered with go daddy? and Cutts did mention something about 'parked domains' which we all know go daddy loves? Any thoughts ...
ps. the comment box on this blog is rubbish in IE9!!!! Now using chrome and works like a dream!
Great video Rand! Of course I'm feeling slightly paranoid about some sites that havent been updated in too long and need to get to work, but that's probably a good thing. ;)
Nice job on the WBF. I learned something like always!
Hi Rand,Just read the video transcript (thanks for laying it out in an easy-to-read manner).
Great video, I've just actioned points 2 and 3 (they were combined - crappy internal links in the footer, I've removed those and only placed important links in the future so that customers can navigate the site easily). We've never engaged in blog networks as such, so our long term strategy is certainly paying off compared to others!
Thanks!
Hi Rand,
I feel using targetted keywords 3 times in title tags with different combination, will it consider as a bad title tag? Also my keyword is Penny Auctions. If i write title tag as,
<title>penny auctions sites, best penny auction sites, penny auctions online</title> . Is this good title tag or bad?
I'm eagerly waiting for your reply...
Thanks
Hi Rajesh,
<Title>Best Online Penny Auctions Sites</title>
You can write in this manner also, If you'd like..
Though i m not Rand but it's my views... After reading Point no. 1 from this post...
Thanks for your reply Sangeeta. :)
I changed about 100 0f my post titles and removed duplicate keywords just in case but i'm wondering if this may actually be negative as so many of them have changed.
I also closed my blogger and tumblr site which i was posting new links to after publishing new posts as these are low qaulity links.
Internal links? I use google custom search to determine which page/post to link for a particular keyword but i know there will be many with exactloy the same anchor text. I don't see this as a reason for a penalty.
Enjoyed this one. At least I can control this as went made quite a bit of changes already to try and avoid an over-optimized penalty, whereas with the link penalty I am stuck policing the net for Google. I cleaned up a couple hundred links from sites we didn't want links from, nor ask for them. But they just keep coming, and I don't know why. Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I am still seething about having to clean up a mess I didn't create. Loved the WBF though!
Even Will Reynolds got smacked recently too? That just tells me that Google needs to turn the dial down a bit, some of these changes can't be permanent. The SERPs I follow now are LITTERED with hyphenated domain names where the big brands fell to page 4, 5, 6.
First off! Love listening to, don't always comment on, Whiteboard Friday's. Most excellent presentations, you have a knack of getting your point across.
That said...I am looking forward to Google (et.al.) getting it! Dangling good stuff from real people on their front pages. SEO over-kill be damned...speaking from the heart (with a touch of tasteful affilate stuff :) has been what I like to read and return to time and again.
Bet that is true for most of you too...huh?
These aren't much different than the best practices I've been using since, well, since the Florida update in 2003. I have been surprised, let's say for the last 1-2 years how much people were still using keyword-stuffed footers. I always tell people that my best practices are conservative, because that's how you keep a site ranking high without interruption, but I must admit, I have felt pressure to do things likespammy footers lately.
#6 - that's a very easy one for Google to detect with their latent semantic data, and if they treated over-optimized content like duplicate, would be significant to cleaning up their index.
I think it is much harder to police page titles fairly. If you are designing scalable web apps with good SEO principles, and you are working with products and team members that are also aware of SEO principles, then automation of metadata using default naming conventions like product pages based on product names could get you in trouble.
I think 'Spammy Footer' would be an excellent band name.
Question: What is the difference between an over-optimized site and a low quality site?
I would say the two are inextricably related.
An over optimized site, one that would trigger this questionable and (as always) mysterious, over-optimization penalty, is per definition a low quality site. Since, if it would be a quality site, there would be no reason to penalize it.
In that perspective, hasn't it been Google's primary efforts for the last many years, to let quality sites rank high and to keep low quality sites at the bottom of the rankings (or even penalize them when they violate the webmaster guidelines)?
Therefore I don't really get what all the fuzz is about with this 'optimization penalty'. Striving for quality content will still be the primary objective for Google. Excessive SEO is an indication for low quality content (one of the many), but should never be the 'target' itself.
As for the guidelines in this post:
1-3: Titles that don't make sense, keyword stuffed blocks/pages, spammy-looking internal (footer) links, etc. are all indications of low quality content. If i.e. Google has found some new way to interpret whether a title phrase is naturally build or not, it would be likely that they would use this to improve their search algorithms instead of using it to penalize over-optimized websites.
4-6: Incoming links from spammy/penalized/low-value sites: Don't we already know that Google doesn't pay much respect to these kinds of links or even completely disregards them? Trying to distinct genuine, respectful links from the ones mentioned above should be Google's primary objective. Let's say if 'in the ideal world' Google would have a way to flawlessly valuate links. Would there be any need to penalize websites for link manipulation? No, because those sites will have little or no benefit from those links anyway.
7: Different pages for basically the same content/set of keywords. Again, the misuse of keywords/on-page optimization should not be Google's concern. Google's concern is to make sure that they can identify user-intent as best as possible and deliver the best matching search results accordingly. When someone searches for 'online shop' the results should be nearly identical as when he or she searches for 'online store' IF Google identifies that the user-intend is the same for both queries.
Obviously, the examples mentioned above are a bit oversimplified, but I do believe that Google's emphasis does not (and should never) lie on recognizing/penalizing over-optimization. In the long run such a strategy could never work, it is like a cat chasing it's own tail.
Hello Rand,
Great video on WBF. You can see how many positive comments have been given by people so for. You've done a great job. I really enjoyed the points you've shared with us.
I agree with all of your points.
#1 point you talked about is really very interesting, and it definitely will help out all SEOs. Yep, Title should be written in a way that you actually want to give comprehensive information about your product by remaining under 67 characters.
#2 I'd add- Internal linking should be done in a way that you've used a key term on your page in content and user want to read more about that term, you should at least link this key term internally to that particular page. But all it should sound natural not to manipulate or get ranking..
#3 Keyword stuffing in footer is really a bad practice and you are actually inviting BOT to penalize your website in terms of Keywords stuffing in the form of over linking. Give most important information in your footer which a user actually wants to read. It can be about your product, company, popular content etc.
#4 Content should attract users and must be appreciate by users NOT having keywords stuffing- and its good if users share it on some social media websites- FB likes and tweets and now G+ :-)
#5 participating in forums aggressively and collecting BLs through some automated software is really a blast on a website. I know some guys who did in 2010 and now they are penalized.. saying, Oh! Where is my website in SE?
Efforts put manually by SEOs give actual SERPs rankings. Do guest blogging guys.
#6 Its non sense to create pages that sound similar to each other. You wana trick SE but a user can be distracted as same kind of information is spreaded over multiple pages.
In Short, see your website from critical point of view, take feedbacks from your users, and keep an eye on your content. Then you'll be able to generate user oriented stuff.
Guys, its 2012 not 2002 and what will happen in 2022? I'm thinking about it!!!
Syed
Thanks for such nice demonstration Rand. Can you please give few examples of site doing #4? If someone is building links from blog comments by initiating a valuable dicussion, or by sharing something valuable, would that also trigger Google penalization? Moreover, What will be the penalty, will that be banned for life?
Jesus, I have to quickly change all the signatur links that I made in forums. Thank you Rand. Your posts are the best!!!!! I wonder if I should remove the link from the forum signature and just put the brand name + keyword there.
Thanks Rand for providing such a informative article amd make me aware about the Google updates...
"does it really work? ah, ya, it tricks them into penalizing you!" lol
Brilliant post! Be nice to finally see our competitiors who are above us on Google due to blackhat link spamming be penilised. Its bad news for them, good news for us, hopefully!
Video does not load?
Hi Downpour,
A similar problem was mentioned by someone on last week's WBF too.
The suggestion from Jeff at Wistia was "that's likely a Flash issue. I would reco reboot/Flash update (if possible)!"
Hope that helps,
Sha
Why has Google taken so long to clamp down on such brazen over-optimization tactics ?
Good post Rand. I read about your challenge
"Rand Fishkin Challenges You To Take Down SEOmoz With Negative SEO" if all of us here start building spammy links as a team for SEOMOZ it will be more than a million/day. Matt may give you a call and ask to stop it. :)
Everyones so worried about these changes and that they will hurt the industry. The way I see it - if youve been following Google best practicies (ie White and not black hat) you should be ok.
These elements highlighted by Rand are things we should not be doing anyway. No matter what changes, small or large that google make they want to index content that looks and feels like its been written by and written for humans - these changes will help that.
We shouldn't be keyword stuffing, creating multiple, similar pages on essentially the same topic or being lazy about link building just to rank higher - this is not natural and doesnt read that way.
Google is changing, not to punish the good but the bad in the industry.....and the good who get caught up should by mistake should have nothing to worry about as they should be good enough to recover.
Hoping that Rand Fishkin's predictions of Google's over optimization penalties are on target. It's time to flush the web of these spammy SEO tactics.
I think it was Bob Marley who said it best when asked about SEO spam tactics in - "They might fool some people sometimes. But they can't fool all the people all the time". Or something like that. :)
My focus has been, and will be, on growing my client's businesses using a variety of online marketing channels - trying to employ a holistic approach. Conversions > SERP Positions.
Hi Rand,
I like the post but practically speaking you have given very less emphasize on Off Page optimization, just one point out of 6, in my experience whatever i feel is most of the sites are getting Messages from Google is due to low quality link building, participation in Link farms , buying links, Reciprocal linking, etc etc..
I am very Sorry if you are not agreed with my point..
Be googd if Rand could clear some of the latest respinses up? Seems theres a lot of conflicting and contradicting opnions, even from Rand himself.
On another note, if what Rand is saying is true then check this out.
One of our clients, main keyword is "bridging loans", in the UK. Now after looking at some of our competitors links through seo moz we get this website https://www.dotcomwebdesign.com/. this is the top referring site for the competitors links. SEO Moz gives this 86 domain authority....86!!
Now go find the phrase "bridging loans" on that website.....(I'll wait).............
Is that a great link? authority wise yes it is.....but its clearly link spam at its best. So i ask, (remember that i love seo moz since i started using their tools) Rand why is their so much contradiction and conflicting information between what you say in the above video and what we find using the seo moz tools? The tools are there to help us make decisions, and 9 times out of 10 we will do what the tools recommend (they are the best in the industry after all) but if we dig a littl deeper, like the example above, its not so rosey?
This site is one of the best tools for me. You are spot on and very helpful. Thank You!
Great tips Rand. I have learned a couple things after watching your video. Thanks!
Post Penguin, is using the same keyword in your title and <h1> tag deemed over-optimisation? I know that in 2011 Rand's view was to do so. But now?
Thanks for the info. I'm tackling SEO for my start-up video production company and this is all new to me. A couple questions relating to my site www.heartwavemedia.com
1. If my brand is new should I still lead with it in the page title as per your example? For example:
Heartwave Media | Video Production Services | San Francisco Bay Area
or...
Video Production Services | San Francisco Bay Area | Heartwave Media
2. What kinds of links do you feel are appropriate for a footer? I designed ours to be an integral part of navigating our site, at least that's what I intended.
3. I'm also curious about page titles. I understand that each page needs a unique title but should I still incorporate my primary keywords? For example:
About | Heartwave Media
or...
About | Heartwave Media | Video Production Services
Looking forward to future posts. Cheers!
hi to all, I am a new member here and I registered here as a member here because my site got hit by penguin and I found something valuable in this blog to clean my site. That is about the identically named internal urls in my site. I changed all urls, but I am not ready to leave old urls and I redirected all to home page of site. Waiting for the result of this correction.
I love this video, he really states some oudtated tactics that people use that need to stop. I have personally changed my tactics after this video.
Time's up for some serious changes on my siet I think. Thanks Rand !!
great video, but I suspect few of us can afford to make all those changes, unless you have an amazing site and your content or service keeps people coming back. for most of us, who will have average or poor quality sites, its all about doing just enough to avoid the penalties.
Even naming the folders for images wisely and playing with alt tags creatively is major part of well-rounded approach to SEO and so it can ultimately help in increasing PR. Condolence Messages
Useful tips. Manual and natural link building is still the best way of generating traffic.
Wish I would have found this sooner. Great info.
Awesome I really needed to see this. I'm still relatively new to all this. But we had seen a spike in our rankings then everything just crashed. Basically we had made duplicate pages for different cities and I realized that our website is pretty my getting looked at as spam. Time to go in and redesign things! thank you
Thanks Rand! Awesome as usual! Has there been any update on the google penalty since the video?
Sometimes i feel you work for Google. You speak what they want you to speak. I am not saying that you are wrong. you are absolutely right and trying to save us from Google's penalties but there is a lot of competition in the market and white hat SEO's are helpless. I bet 80% of SEO companies are using keywords stuffed titles. search anything on Google and the listings on first page has titles stuffed with keywords.
Hi Rand! Another nice Whiteboard Friday from you. Thank you for sharing this. Now I know what changes I should be making to my SEO practices in order to avoid penalization. I will also be sharing this to my friends. I would highlt recommend that people doing SEO works must also watch your video. Keep up the good work!
This post should go under SEO basics
How would you recommend, tags or bunch of keywords on blog posts?
Rand, I will love if you could give em your opinion concerning to the rel= attribute for images. I have a web in which I use the exact keyword that I want to rank for plus some variation on every page of it. The rel attributes are automated and look all like this:
Eg. Discount coupon Dell, Discount coupon dell 2013 for one page...for 1 page
Coupon code ASOS Coupon code ASOS 2013 ...for another .... etc.
Any advise ? Our traffic got down by 1000% percent, we are no where to be found for all keywords and we have only a few questionable links and many quality ones so I suspect that we where penalized for over optimization.
Thanks a lot!
A great resource for overoptimization practice. We are just too worried with the penguin hits. This kicks that little penguin off back to the north pole :)
This is really helpful. I'm glad that most of these are not an issue for me. One of the things I've been working on this last year is altering the anchor text. I did have a concern on my site as I do have a similar page on my site that I have for many different towns. The towns and zips, as well as google maps differ, but the main content is similar. So one of the things I did in November was to help make them different by adding all the street names where we did work in each town. The positioning is that we are your friendly neighborhood flooring store so that works too. I'm going to see if I can come up w/ any other additional ways to differentiate those pages.
Thanks for this post. Nice and very helpful.
wow...amazing video :)
Great video and content. Thx for the beforehand tips. We try to optimize well but there is a fine line... We needed to make changes.
I just want to thank you RandFishkin for this video. I think big G is getting better with their algorithm this time. So quality is better than quantity this time.
Hi Rand,
I am a great fan of you. I never miss any post especially white board friday from seomoz. I am in seo for the last 4 yrs. In this post you are talking about over optimization penality. May I know if I need to stop directory submissions and forum profile creaion with signatures.
I am not commenting or posting any topic in forum for the time being. I just create a profile with signature in forum sites in order to be a part of it. Will that create problem for over optimization?
I am using fresh articles for submitting in article submission sites. Can I spin this article making 75% new content and make the content writer to verify it and submit in these article submission sites?
Can u share some off page activities for getting high ranking for keywords in search engines. Since I am doing only bookmarking submissions for getg back links now, due to this update.
Do "Category Lists" prominently displayed in one column of every page throughout a blog site risk being viewed as a "Content Block" (Your Item No. 4)? (Assume the categories are topics that are intended to be useful to guiding the reader to subjects of interest.)
Finally, someone that gave a list of items to work on with actionable parameters. Thank you!
I like how Rand achknowledges that he use to do some of these bad practices, I think we all go through a process of getting it wrong but not many of us remember. For me over optimisation equates to writing for Google, instead webmasters should have Google in mind but ultimately they should write for potential site visitors.
I read that google wants to be able to see every page from a link on your website somewhere. So I am guessing that a link laden sidebar is necessary for an authority site. Now I believe I link laden sidebars should be removed from all but index page. Is this correct. Index page still needs sidebar so google can see everything on my site. Is this correct also.
Last "Penguin" "Over Optimization" or whateveryou want to call it make this video such a not relevant video, spammy duplicated content, meta, and titles are all over 1st page on local search terms more then ever before.
I saw some fluctuation already from 18th of April and it was later declared Google’s Mistake Over Parked Domains Might Be To Blame, but yesterday i read it on search engine land that the update has already happened affected 3% of search queries.. This whiteboard friday will really help ppl who have got an over optimisation penalty.
Great overview of how to make changes for the over optimization pentaly. One question that I have that I have not been able to find anywhere on the web is what to do with footer credit links such as ' website desigen by company". What should a company do with these? Make them a no-follow? Link them to a credits page onthe designed website where there is a back link to your website inside of content and images? Or don't do them at all? PLEASE HELP. Can not find any chatter on this.
I would keep it "follow" should be a very natural link.
Mmybe mix-up your link location plus if you put the site together according to the webmasters guide lines, I am sure you will only gain link juice..anybody disagree?
Thanks again Rand. I feel that its a positive change that had to happen ultimately. I think its good that google are finally chasing the spammy SEO stuff out of town. Be interesting to see when this comes into effect.
awesome tips to save urself from google penalize algo's. luckiley i dont do this stuff :) and lol i love the expression at 3:54 \m/ hahaha :D <3
OK, the information if cool, but yesterday the google hit. I had changed all the on-page seo things. What can I do if I have some spammy backlinks? Obviously, I can't change them. What is the backlinking strategy for this case? Thanks!
This is crazy. I think from now on I woud just stop be to fussy about but SEO
Thanks for the awesome article! As a person who's new to SEO I find your site extremely helpful. Any ideas when this overoptimization penalty will be in effect?
Hey thanks for all the great videos. This is another be good and you'll do good video. keep it up.
Hey Rand, Thanks for this information. I flow you before a year and you share a interesting information in whiteboard friday.
You this article and tutorial is very interesting thanks for share.
Is "article marketing sites" the same as syndicating articles on sites like prlog.com, ezinearticles.com, ect.?
A little late reaction, but an awesome WF!! To bad I can only give one thumb up
As always, great information! It's almost like Google wants websites and webmasters to forget focusing on SEO and to instead focus on their audience and the audience's engagement. Whoa, novel concept! =) Thanks for the information!
Thanks for the great info, Rand!
I rely on the Term Target tool and aim to get an A for my desired keywords. This tool tells me when I've keyword stuffed the title, so I can fix it. Is that still a good measurement based on what you've said with the title here in this whiteboard? We never put the same keyword in there 3 times.
We try to pick keywords for the title that are relevant to the page, have the highest traffic and lowest % difficulty score. Sometimes, the keywords are similar, but we're not totally confident LSI will compensate, so we put variations in the title. Our titles are usually: keyword, keyword, keyword. We use the meta description to clarify and qualify clicks from there. Now I'm worried about these titles. Help!
Thanks
I read the writings liking Thank you
I guess if I already naturally optimise sites without over doing it with keyword spamming/thousands of links (I carefully look for variations of keyword on a theme) then I have very little to worry about?
It was great! I learned a lot and I will share the information with my teammates.
thank you Rand!
Great to have all of that information in one consummable ten minute chunk. I found the first few points interesting (titles/links/footers) and will keep an eye out for them but the other ones... hopefully no one is still doing those last few points?! Thanks.
Good stuff right here. General rule of thumb if it seems like it might be spam it probably is.
I think google will be looking at user reaction to base websites content (just as always). If a page has done of content with keywords in it but high bounce rate, then the page is over optimized but if it doesn't then it is not.
As for links, nothing new.
Another good WBF from Rand.
So for page titles you're essentially looking at using phrase / broad matching as opposed to several variations on an exact match.
We likey!
Nice post, Rand.We're all guessing about "over-optimization" at this point but these seem likely targets. And they are good rules to follow regardless of penalty.
This is really helpful Randfish.
Decent tips but I think in the end of the day you need to use common sense too, I mean the other day Some one just sent me an email with 7,300 blogs in a private network, asking if I needed "SEO" help, I replied I'm not looking to destroy my SEO!
The thing is I did some spot check and people have gone for like 1k footer links lol.
But yeah gone of the days of making spammy titles you really need to make titles that sounds great and that people are going to want to click.
SEO over the last year has been a wild ride, lets hope Google stops the crazy stuff and goes after the right people.
Excellent post! Time for some changes..
Excellent post! Time for some changes..
One More good Post By Rand...
Thanks but i think Over SEO Over Optimization Penalty has been started implementing by google as one my website www.gowebbaby.com is been penalized recently 2 days before..
All the Keywords are lossing thier ranking continously.
Any Suggestions....
Another awesome WBF.
Thanks Rand for mentioning some probable over optimization factors we can take care about before Google strikes.
Great video once again rand. I really do love your stuff and it works inspiring. I do feel however that #5 makes the field for black hat seo's. If i wanted to destroy my competition and started linkbuilding them on al those spammy linkfarms and so that my competitor would be penalised. That doens't seem right does it?
I will be lookin in to these post again and translate them into facts for my costumers.
thnx again rand.
Really good video about those 6 things. However, I think Google can't detect every spammy sites but it's a good thing that he try to penalise them.
Great post, Rand. This is the kind of content that makes SEOmoz great. You can tell through this post that you really care about other webmasters and SEOs, and you've put your heart into trying to help.
Thanks for being awesome.
you can see just based on the total number of comments this is a hot topic right now and great WBF as always. I now have to go change some of my 2002 footer links. LOL
Awesome WBF as always guys! I dont know if anyone has ever mentioned this but I personally would really LOVE a screen shot of the white board (either before or after the video) so i can see the white board up close and personal. It would also save my poor hand from having WBF note taking cramps! Maybe Jen could post it on Facebook? That would make me smile!
Thanks for rocking!
Great post. I think too many people will ignore this advice (along with the dozens of other reputable sites giving similar advice) and will deeply regret it when everything they worked for is lost.
With regards to #5
Hate to say it, but I think for most sites if they have been doing the naughties in terms of link-building, whether on-purpose, through a bad SEO company, or someone trying to be clever and hurt them, if their position has dropped that heavily and they have 100s or 1000s of links to try and get rid of I would not advise they spend the time trying to fix them.
Either trust the penalty has affected them and they can re-build from where they are now (beats me) OR scrap the site, create a new one, have all the original site point to a home page ON THE ORIGINAL SITE saying you've moved and either just give the new web-address without a link or NO-FOLLOW the link and hope that Google doesn't penalise on that (or be braver still and not no-follow it).
For all but the largest sites the cost in terms of time and effort, or employing someone, to go through all those sites and try and remove the links and HOPE that gets them back to where they were (which it probably wont since it's entirely possible it was those links that helped them get there in the first place) just wont be worth it. I just can't see the ROI being worth it.
Obviously, this will be a site/business by site/business decision and what is worth it for one probably wont be for another.
Good mesaage there Rand, i am glad you included comment spam, i see many people on Q&A recommending comment spam as a way to get links.
Mmm... maybe we need to make a distinction - again - from what is a correct use of Comment Marketing (tactic that Rand talked about here in the past) and pure comment spamming.
The first is perfectly licit inbound marketing tactic, as it is used first of all with the purpose of gaining trust between the blog reader/owner sharing knowledge, also citing sources (not only your own site) via links.
The other, well... it is a direct call for spam box throwing.
Thanks for another post practice and thought invoking. It definitely put things in perspective and I realized some important things I have to work.
Hi Rand
Awesome post as per usual Rand.
Rand, do you think the majority of this over seo penalty in your opinion is going to be more on-site related than off-site links? Or do you think big part of it is going to be link based over seo? Such as over optimised anchors for example?
I am sure many will agree sorting out the on-site parts is the easier of the two to fix. I honestly admit not all my SEO tactics have been white hat, over the last few years; we have dabbled in few other link building techniques which have worked and which we no longer do or promote. But getting all those links taken down is no easy task in itself, especially for links built a while back.
Right and taking down those links will make you lose your rankings anyways.
+1 Rand!
Great tips for avoid the over-optimization penalties! Many are older SEO tactics that have been around since the late 90's and need to be updated. I admit to building web pages based on single search phrases but try to use a variety of anchor text when building links for them.
Thanks again, "...I want you to be OK"
So I'm wondering about the article sites such as Ezine and the like. How will this affect those sites? How will this affect my links on those sites? Thanks!
Great information!! Thanks for sharing and helping us to prevent before the update could affect any webmaster... I would like to know some recommendations for getting back links, which won't affect negatively our rankings.
Ps. It's one of the best WBF this year, thanks Rand!
Great Whiteboard Rand! Funny stuff!
It's probably going to be a gradual roll out to their algorithm. Beefing up some formulas while implementing new ones. No doubt keeping an eye those Search Quality Hightlights!
Excellent post and very helpful as always. It's all good!
One question though - If there are links in the footer that go through to individual services pages that have targeted keywords in anchor text such as "web hosting", "Domain Registration" etc.. I would assume these links are ok, but any feeback would be appreciated
Thnks Rand. Great presentation agian. Often you see Google rolling out these improvements in US and UK first, before they're active in Europe's mainland. At least, that's what I think. Above all, these would be very welcome improvements!
Ahhh!! Superb post Rand. Hats off!! Even I was thinking that this penalty was into system from a very long time by Google. Now I feel that there can be more points or areas which comes under 'over-optimization' that we did not even came across yet.
Hi Rand,
Would like to about internal linking stuff.
I have a site with 150+ product and category pages.
And I have covered them (150 links) all in my top navigation (drop down menu) and that is present on my site's 500 internal pages including blog section. All links are crawlable.
Is it going to harmful for me?
Waiting for response.
Hi Rand,
While I agree with the keyword stuffing in the titles... I have a question....
What if the website offers those services listed in the title of the home page? Would it still be penalised or is it better to find a general term that would sum all the services?
As always great post.
This is one of the most informative and expalnative information bit that can be used to clear out confusions on the much talked about Google's over optimization penalty.
Thanks Rand an excellent and useful video as always.
The message seems to me to be simple; honest on page stuff, real content and genuine links. All can be optimised without resorting to spammy behaviour and in the long term this will always be beneficial.
edited
This! #3 in particular grinds my gears - we are in 2012 not 2002 maaan.. those pesky footer links. Why do web designers feel compelled to still use them these days? I've been butting heads with some designers about this & have forwarded this vid to them for their education :) hopefully the word "penalty" will knock some sense into them.
So what should be in a footer?
Thinks such as links to your contact page or terms and conditions are things that you may want to add to your footer.
I think what Rands trying to get at is that people stuff hundreds of keywords in the footer using exact anchor text which are no use top anyone, in the hope of being ranked for those terms.
Michael
It's worth noteing that Seer Interactive was able to bounce back (a lot faster then most of our clients will be able to.) The reason they were able to recover from the peanalization, is becase their site and their link profile was organic. They didn't have a bunch of spammy back links and black hat pages backing up the algorythum's decision to peanalize them.
Make these changes that Rand is talking about, because EVEN IF your sites gets hit by an algorythum change, you will probablly be able to recover from it.
Good video Rand.
No, Seer was affected by something completely different, not a penalty.
I believe it was this: https://searchengineland.com/dropped-in-rankings-google-mistake-over-parked-domains-118979
Good and timely WBF, Thank you
Hello Rand,I always listen you and learn loads of things from you.My direct question to you what activity I should do that is not manipulative, spammy.I am doing only one that you suggest 'guest blogging'.Please let me know of some other activities
You know it is so obvious when you sit down and actually think about it. I have already started making some of these changes, exactly as you mention above.
I feel a little sorry for those business owners that do not have the time to do all this, keep up on everything Google changes and are still doing things the old way - I remember a video by Matt Cutts a while ago that said something about "Make things easy for us, do not try and rank one page for 50 differen keywords" be specific.
I know a lot of webmaster and SEO's (including me) that took that too far. Its get back and fix and as many pages as possible.
Brian
Sorry, question
Thanks for this update. I have been speaking with one of my clients, and he still wants to keep his title tags like this "Plumbers Birmingham|Electricians Birmingham|Gas Satey Certificates Birmingham"I have suggested "Birmingham based Plumbers, Electricians and Gas Safety Certificate Issuers"He has come back and said that he knows that he needs the keywords in order in the title to rank. Whats your thoughts on this, do you feel that the fact that the keywords are in the title regardless of sequence is enough?ThanksBrian
While waiting for the answer by Rand, I give you mine:
I would do a test, asking to a significant bunch of people of looking at the SERPs your client site is ranking high with that Title (if any), and to click the result they think it is the best.
Then present the results to your client. If he sees the low CTR caused by a keyword stuffed Title tag (and probably it is the same in the meta description), maybe he will start considering the opportunity to change it.
With clients is always better talking about the money they are loosing or are going to loose.
I would suggest swapping it around and using 'Plumbers, Electricians and Gas Safety Certificate Issuers in Birmingham' if you are thinking about keyword order.
I personally find people put the location after the keyword. It would be better to focus a page on each though, optimising for each respectively.
Home - Plumbers, Electricians and Gas Safety Certificate Issuers in Birmingham - Plumbers in Birmingham - Electricians in Birmingham - Gas Safety Certificate Issuers in Birmingham
I wouldn't think this would get seen as content farming as all pages are offering a very different service. You wouldn't hire a plumber to change a lightbulb. Although if you need to hire somebody to change a lightbulb you might not know the difference between a plumber and an electrician!
What if a competitor want you to be penalized and add links to your website in all those junk and spammy farmlinks?...
Use Webmaster Tools to let Google know if you can't remove them.
Simple yet a lot of basic forgetten seo, Love your friday white board forum.
Isn't it slightly ironic that Rand says don't involve yourself with SEO directory networks, yet on the "Learn SEO" (https://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo) there is a direct link to SEO directories https://www.seomoz.org/directories.
Probably you missed the nuance in what Rand said:
the directories to avoid are those ones which explicitly talks about the Seo benefits of having your listed in their pages (and maybe paying an extra for being presented higher than other sites).
Actually those "Seo" directories mostly have their PR cut, sign of a penalization by Google.
All different kind of directories are those ones that really do an editorial control of the listings and those other, quite usually niche/topic/industry based, whose nature is clearly a "reference" one.
Those two kind of directories are the directories listed in the SEOmoz page.
I've got to say, sticking with the theme that content rather than promotion is key, then surely all directory links will eventually be devalued / penalised.
What does having a link from a directory say about your site? How many good sites with no SEO agency / team have directory links? In the last 8 years, how many directory links have been created for any other reason other than rankings?
All that directory links in your portfolio tells google is that someone who knows about SEO has had a go at the site. It is absolutely not an indication of quality content, which is Google's end goal.
As I can recently attest, strong directories do still have a massively positive effect, but surely their days are numbered...
So can we clarify? There are some good article directories, how about Pr submission directories?
I think Rand meant that you shouldn't be relying on directories (of any sort). A good SEO strategy incorporates link building/content generation/directories/social/etc... Relying solely on anyone of these elements might be good in the short term, but in the long term, you're asking for trouble!
Great stuff for making me site clean and spam free. I will take care about the notes you shown in video.
Thanks Rand. This is really helpful and very clearly explained.
OMG.. What a similarity between my discussion with my team yesterday..
I had discussed with my team regarding lossing our ranking in google before 5 days. I had stared the discussion with the change of Meta Data and explain with some good examples that we can put title in very natural way with targeted keywords. Then Also discussed about interlinking structure as well as OBL and other submission work. What we not discussed from your video topics is #6 using of three different page for three different keywords!!!
And today i m feeling glad by getting this one from the one and only WBF.. GREAT GREAT.. I'll share this video with my TEAM.. this video helps them to get more clear ideas..
obviously the presentation was not that good as yours Rand (Infact there should not be any comparison with your presentation becoz ur the best :) )
But what the most important part of this video is we all nervous about upcoming penalties of Google..
And RAND, +1, FB share, Twitte, G+, thms Up for this post... THANKS U FOR THIS INFORMATION..
I consider myself a "creative SEO", and no one gives me a job because I refuse to do what you are saying on this video. The purpose of SEO is totally forgoten by a lot of people, our job is to help clients to get more sales, by giving the best content and the best advicing, which is the purpose of Google too.
I'm the first one who appreciates what Google does, preventing SEO's tricks to get in the first pages, I want the best content on the best search results, and that's what I'm selling as a SEO, which doesn't mean that I don't believe in things like, the right keyword, the clean links, but if you ask me, the most important thing, and what really get sells, is content, so as this video says, stop wasting time in this because you can't win Google, that is the only truth, don't sell a lie.
@MTello
Hey Rand.. I did put up one blog regarding the same before few days..
https://www.affordable-seo-services.com/articles/5-simple-steps-to-deal-with-googles-over-optimization-penalty.html
I love it when Rand is speaking about black-hatish spammy tactics :) You can see how almost all the time he's about to blast off and start cursing... but he manages to stay (almost) calm! Quite logical tips here tho.
Very useful inforamtion as always Rand.
Just one question
Some of our sites have links in the footer which are keyword landing pages but these pages do have good content. Is this tactic related to point 3 in the video.
Please advise
Thanks
Rand,
I'm very happy that you've come to a substantial coclustion instead of the bandwagon of "yeah! google destroyed all these spammy blackhat sites. You got what was coming to you" stance most IM's were on at the first update in the beginning of April.
What are your thoughts on shit like this though?
Simple message here: think MORE about the people and LESS about ranking in the search engines. The rankings will come because you are actually providing a solution to the people with good, quality information, and Google is doing all that it can to help ensure that. :)
Thanks for a great WBF, Rand.
surprised you didnt mention a large volume / percentage of exact match anchor text to pages.
I think he did address that...
he did for internal links and penalty likely sources, which i agree with. i just think on a whole an engine could pull your anchor and see that you have x,xxx of pages with ~75% exact match anchor text from x,xxx root domains, you might be someone whoe is pursuing linking opportunities. if we learned anything from Panda it was that decision trees could be used to trigger a penalty so more than thing could bring it on and cause the peanlty.
either way the tips are great for someone to do a quick self site audit and see what they need to fix.
Good point Joe! High percentages of EM anchors is often correlated with manipulative linking (unless you've got badges or embedded content or some sort of licensing that's white hat, but responsible for a large % of your links).
We - Pallasart - have links to various business types that we build sites for on the bottom of all our pages. The content in them is almost the same. Our Luxury Stores page and the High Tech page rank really well under searches for "luxury store websites" we are #1"high tech websites" we are #2We get some traffic off sample sale websites too.Can anyone tell me if we are being potentially penalized for these footer links? We used to be on page one for Austin web design and then fell to page three in the last few months. We are working very hard to get this fixed and the video was very helpful.
We have been discussing this all afternoon and it is getting heated. we are at an impass as to whether or not our footer links are hurting us or not. If anyone has an opinion we'd appreciate it...
You might want to share the website URLs specifically at www.seomoz.org/q or even consider contracing with an SEO professional you trust to review it. Very hard to diagnose without direct observation and a full perspective.
Thanks Rand - we hired a guy two weeks ago and his report is coming out next week. We have already been implementing some things hr jad been telling us to do. He's really bright and sharp. I couldn't reach him to get his take on this and posted hoping to get some direction in the meantime. I suppose I had a manic reaction to watching the video (I love your whiteboards) and I drove my staff crazy about this issue of the footer links. I did finally get an email from our SEO guy this morning and he said to remove them from the front page along with some hidden text we had there. We'll continue reviewing things next week.
Our SEO guy told us to take them off our front page and go from there -
"along with some hidden text we had there"
Invariably, the answers are simple ones.
That made for an awesome 10 minute break Paul! Not only was the information a great revisit relating to a new change, but it was totally entertaining! More like this please! :D
Definitely a great guide for covering your bases, and a lot of these things are just painful to begin with (overly spammy title tags, for example). All sites should be aspiring to fix these problems. Do you need to fix all of them right now? Eh, I dunno, depends on the size of your site, IMO. I think cleaning up your link profile is the most important thing. Title tags you can switch pretty much at will - it's not like you'll be submitting a reinclusion request because of bad title tags (unless you think that's a possibility??). If you have a site that you can edit yourself and that isn't too big, I would probably wait and see what the update hits before rushing to make too many of these changes. Thoughts?
how will this affect CTR's from the search engine? notice you mentioned this, but it doesnt make sense that Google would want to make their engine less user friendly.
how will this affect rankings in bing, blekko, duck duck go?
these are just a few questions running through my mind about #1
ignore question #1. skimming got me, after a lil back n forth with rand and some heckling from inside the office i saw what i had skimmed over.
I think the footer links penalty has been active for years. I've seen sites get yanked and then regain their rankings within days of removing the links.
I'd hate to this that Google would punish sites for coming correct with their SEO. Hopefully, they're making it so the spammy tactics listed here are less effective rather than penalizing websites that deploy them. It wasn't that long ago that some of these were considered best practices.
You can't yank Mom and Pop's Local Bakery just because they have the word "cookies" too much in their titles, especially if they're the most relevant.
I doubt the penalty would be that harsh, specific and one-sided. It will likely look at lots of elements in combination, not just throw out all the sites that repeat keywords in their titles :-) Still, fixing these now can make it less likely that you'll be hit, and none of these are a good idea anyway from a usability/user experience or SEO perspective (since these are so intricately connected).
beyong how many link is a footer considered cruddy filled with link ?
Dracula Musical lol. I like the points you have made. However, I feel alot of this is specualtive at the moment. We really don't know what exactly is going to happen when this new option hits the field. Being more natural does seem like the best way to go. That has always been an issue though when it comes to seo e.g. Writing for the search engines compared to writing for the user
I have a site that has survival kits. We have pet survival kits, outdoor survival, and indoor survival kits. They're 3 different pages bc they're different products, but according to you, Google will think i'm trying to over optimize for survival kits?
No, I don't think that is what Rand is saying and here is where we need to listen carefully...what he is referring to in the video is essentially multiple pages which must, by virtue of the keywords they have targeted, contain basically the same content. This specifically refers to very slight variations in keyword or keyword intent, which really refers to the exact same product.
Rand explained this further with his specific example:
Used Cars Seattle ... Used Autos Seattle ... Pre-owned Cars Seattle
Let's take a look at what we have there:
Used = Pre-owned
Cars = Autos
So these three pages may target 3 different keyword terms, but they are selling the exact same product!
In your case, you have 3 completely different products - while there is a partial keyword match for each, they should have their own pages because in real terms they are really not related.
Hope that helps clarify things for you :)
Sha
I appreciate the input, but i feel like you're explanation assumes Google can tell the difference. They can't. Users know they're different products, but web crawlers don't.
Likewise, I have a website with similar page names; Wedding packages, wedding flower arrangements, Wedding Centrepieces and a few more….. Could this deem to be manipulative or spammy?
That's why this is not going to happen. This is going to be a blip on the map as I stated above. I see this as a scare tactic and maybe a whuppin' for some companies in highly competitive markets that are doing things WAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYY overboard. If you have 15 footer links for wedding centerpieces, flower arrangements, etc. and get dinged I will eat my shoe.
I do not know if I am over optimized hear are some example of pages
Homes for sale in [city state]
Short sale homes for sale in [city state]
Foreclosed homes for sale in [city state]
These would be titles per page, sprinkled in four times through the page, and all bolded in the conent and one an h1 and one an h2.
Also, should I be putting my bran in my title? For example: Homes for sale in [city state - url]
I am not MR SEO. I am just learning the ropes.
Down with paid links, good thing I haven't gotten into that. What about some of the more reputable paid links like Yahoo's Directory and the Better Business Bureau? Legitimate links or no?
Yeah - those are probably fine. It's less the payment issue and more the intent (to manipulate Google's rankings).
I welcome this 'over optimization update'. Hitting the sites who intensively use the #2, #3 and #4 over optimization tricks will make a big difference for a few of our clients (rankings would go from page 2 to top 5 on page 1)
Many thanks Rand, +1. Great explanation through video and can be easily implemented on our ongoing porojects.
A great and timely video however I disagree on a few points.
If the anchor text of a link is meant to describe the page the link is pointing to, its perfectly natural to use consistent anchor text across your own site and on other sites such as in forum signature links. Using consistent language to describe your products and services helps to prevent confusion for your customers.
To some degree linking to another page multiple times throughout an article could be excessive but then again if its a long article I think that its inline with providing a good user experience. I do think that linking a page to itself is ridiculous though (some will do this to benefit when their content gets scraped).
I would argue that trying to 'mix up' the anchor text for internal and inbound links is actually more deceptive and manipulative than being consistent.
That's not to say that Google couldn't still make a change that would penalise this behaviour if they thought it would improve their results overall. They could consider this legitimate use of consistent language as collateral damage in the ongoing struggle for the best results.
However, all of this is somewhat irrelevant because Google should be able to recognise that internal links and self created links on other sites, such as forum links, are not editorial and therefore not 'votes' for a site's authority in the same way that editorial links are.
"I would argue that trying to 'mix up' the anchor text for internal and inbound links is actually more deceptive and manipulative than being consistent."
- The point being, you're not meant to be actively seeking links, links should come from other people "naturally", "organically", so it is only logical that people would use different language to describe your content/products.
As for internal links, your website should have a good navigation so the only link that will count for each page would be the navigation to the page. Unless the page is not found in the navigation, because it is a small aspect of your site, in which case the anchor text should be in context with the sentence it is embedded in, and will often be different, if the content is engaging and well written.
But like you said, all internal and obvious self created links should carry very minimal weight, and over doing it may cause a penalty.
Just my thoughts.
Great WBF Rand, Am looking forward to follow-ups on this topic as Google starts laying stuff out a bit more clearly. Love seeing all the minds on here thinking in and out of the box, so easy to get stuck in the box in this industry. Hoping this topic gets brought up at Mozcon 2012! Hopefully Google is doing this right...
Now I have to go clean out the basement of a few 2001 sites, that are collecting duest...LOL
Made me laugh throughout. You make a really good teacher Rand. :)
I checked my blogs while watching the video and made a few tweaks. Thanks for this.
Love these tips. I have one question though: What sort of information do you suggest I can add to the footer?
Thanks!
Great video Rand!
Thanks so much for the tips and heads up. I think I won't have to make any changes, but I'm definitely going to double check everything!
Are all content blocks bad news? What if they provide useful information without being spammy with keywords but aren't necessarily at the top of the page?
So long as they're user-friendly and real people would find the text content valuable, you should be totally fine!
I am just curious. How Google can gauge that the content block is relevant or not if it is not spammed with unneccessary keywords? or is there a criteria to know?
Holy shit, so many comments! Hope someone reads this one.
My 2¢: If I was to hire you as my SEO, and saw you do all the stuff Rand pointed out not to do in this video - I would fire you on the spot.
Anyone who cares about their website would not let "Credit card credit company. Increase credit ratings. Credit beaurou" be used on their site. And if they do - that's bad for your portfolio to work with these folks.
-d.
Thanks for the valuable information. Interesting what you point out, with the sidewide footer links.
I an a way its an awesome post, and really helpful. In another way - its really scary.. If seer got knocked out ( and I know this is speculative) its reason to be worried.
We are returning to pro tools and campaign manager to refine based on this post.
V
RAND - GOOD STUFF!
So many of my clients / friends / and just curious people ask me constantly what is the next BEST way to optimize a site...
As you noted here: Offering valuable resource with USEFUL content and a GOOD reason for your audience to share it, use it and link to it!
I think that is 80% of the battle thus leaving 20% of very white hat SEO tactics.
Be easy and let us have a good weekend SEO ninjas!
Really, I was waiting for this time... the time has come to come with the natural links, contents.. I am already ready with my content writing team to face this. They have to play a main role in this changes. All will be filtered with this changes. No more spamy. It will increase CR and now seo includes CRO. No separate packages for this.. :)
But still I see many sites are there who come with the very spammy title and descriptions, and it seems that Google hasn't taken any steps till now..I am astonished that many of them are SEO companies!!
Check out some of keyowrds here, you will find those sites in first page:
SEO Company India, seo company newyork, SEO Services India, seo company chennai, seo company Bangalore and many more from all over the world.
good stuff Rand. Loved the part with 2002 -> 2012 ;P
I think you should have added and stressed all kinds of paid links at Point 5.
These days I deal a lot with "-50 filter" cases regarding paid links. One of our clients bought 3 links of different kinds from 3 different websites. He is paying like $150 per month for one of the links. And they think the link is great because the DA is 90 and PA is 58. Yes. These links gave them a quick boost. For 1 week. Bam! They are #3 in Google! A week passes, the website gets "-50" penalty and gets a "love letter" from Google. The client still thinks the links are cool and when I tell him that he needs to remove all 3 links and respond to Google, he still regrets and hesitates to do so.
This is the real life example, just happened this week.
If you have ANY paid links - get rid of them ASAP.
Ok I am going to sound like a dork but I never did use these techniques :).
Maybe I am not a "dork" but just really "conservative" ;)
I like everything except #4. It's too vague as to what constitute good content (with a few keywords in it) and content that would be penalized. You need content on your page for the search engines to understand what the page is about. Why have a video transcription for your videos like this one? It's because the engines couldn't tell what the pages are about without it. Does the transription add any value to the user? Does anyone actually read the transcription or do they just watch the video?
Liked all the others points. Thanks for sharing.
I don't know about others, but I often ONLY read the transcription.
Responsemine, I actually just talked about this last night to a library and information science class. There are several more reasons than just search engines to include the transcription.
1) In some cases, it is required by law. The state of California requires all of the state university professors to include transcription of any audio they post.
2) It's good accessibility for those with any hearing impairment.
3) It's much faster to read the text than to listen to the same amount of text spoken. You can look through the transcription and see what you are interested in, and then go to just those areas (especially if the transcription is time-stamped).
4) Not everyone is in a situation where they can play the audio.
5) If the language of the presenter is not the native language of the viewer, the transcription can help the viewer understand what is being said.
I too greatly prefer the transcription. I prefer the wriiten word for a variety of personal reasons but often I am surfing in public settings and audio/video content is just not appropriate at those times.
Rand,
I agree with the 6 possibilisties where google may use their hit. As per my knowledge I have listed few other possibilities as well. Kindly advice on this:
1. Loading more content in the home page. ( Trying to cover all the pages of a website in their home page)
2. Building more than 100 links per day targeting particular keyword or page or keyword page ( is there limit? )
A simple question:
If you feel, giving continous links between internal pages from any content then what would be the status of wikipedia? because I guess they are the one who initiated this formula isn't?
Thanks,
Joishina,
Wikipedia often does not use every instance. For example if you go to their their page on "jeans" you can see that are using word "denim" at least nine times and internally linking it to another document only twice. Another important thing (in fact even more valuable and logical) is something that Rand covered in 2010 is:
Many SEOs have also suggested that a certain "bar of trust" can be achieved in Google, after which, negative links may be devalued, but likely don't cause penalties or rankings drops. This makes a lot of sense to me (though it's nearly impossible to prove), since "Google-bowling" is largely defeated and even good sites who stray into black/gray hat link building will simply find themselves wasting money, rather than being removed from the results (which could, for many popular brands/sites, cause a loss of relevance in the results for users).
Original Post
First of all, I would like to appreciate you Rand for awesome presentations. Ever since I have seen Panda updates, I am attached with this forum videos presented by you. Very helpful. I have one confusion in my mind. You have explained in your videos that Google will consider the network of sites as spam. I have a network of sites. One main site and with it are attached franchise sites. We are only sharing forum on all sites i-e Same forum news on all sites. No other dupe content or any link building going through this network. Are we on the safe side or some danger is there. Looking forward for your expert opinion. Many thanks.
If the franchise website are also linked to each other that might give Google a signal that you probably spamming. Moreover, it is not a recommended technique to call same content on two or more different that will definitely get caught by Google. You can use cross domain rel=canonical in this case.
Can you expand a bit about #3? At which point does it cross the line and become spammy? Thanks!
Past the Sitemap necessities IMO
Hey Eric,
SEO Cat is cool! Does he/she have a website?? ;)
Sha
Good video Rand. Nice tips. What's most interesting to me about this is how we are all talking about things that Google allegedly already frowned upon. Why is it now we are worried its going to smack these sites down. Curious to know if your thoughts on the effectiveness of this considering these are all practices Google has said not to do for years.
I'm starting to wonder if its going to be less about individual practices and more about combined practices. So if you have ALL of these things in place you would get smacked down, but a handful of them in place and Google would let you slide. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
i'll believe this when i see it. i was just poking around at some page titles for some local businesses in my area that i know are just spammed to the heavens like Slider Windows | Window Replacement | JR Neely Windows | Replacement Windows | Window Contractors | Window Company | Lansing Windows | Lansing | MI | Michigan | Lansing Window Contractors
are these guys going to get nailed? chances are half their competitors are locally, too. this would throw the web into a massive upheaval if just this update happened (in my humble opinion). i certainly think there's validity to every point here, but if google finds a way to algorithmically roll this out and does it in one fell swoop it's going to be anarchy.
as always, i appreciate rand's idealistic approach, but i have a very hard time thinking that a page title like "web design tampa, tampa's #1 web designer | joeschmo design" is gonna get nuked. the title i mentioned above, if it were in a prominent market, sure, i could see that getting killed, but c'mon.
i may end up eating crow on this, but i think this will be much more minor and incremental than everyone's making it out to be. especially for those of us working mostly in regional mid-market accounts.
interesting discussion as always, and that's why i love this site.
I personally see this as a great opportunity for our clients. We've noticed a lot of competitors that had popped up out of nowhere, but were ranking competitively with some of our clients. We've seen many of these drop off in the last few weeks. It's good when you explain to the client the tactics these guys are using and that they will eventually come to bite them in the end and it actually happens.
Word up, Rand. I'm all for white hat SEO. All your points are solid and pretty much what i've been practicing lately, but #5 confused me a bit... Particularly this passage:
"Reciprocal lists, right, people are emailing each other back and forth and saying, "Hey, I'll put you on my list of links. You put me on yours. Oh, and we'll do it 20 times and we'll form this big reciprocal circus that's going to get all of us penalized." How great is that?"
Is this sarcasm? Ah, ef it. I'll research more about link building tonight. Right now I am at work and can't watch the video. Shouldn't even be on here. But if you or someone could please elaborate, 'twould be most appreciated.
Rand, Great post and really just continues to drive home the point of being honest with your self and honest with your customers.
What is your take on sites that are in violation of one or many of these points. Do you clean up the site all at once and let the chips land where the fall, or do you work slowly to see how changes influence traffic and rankings?
Nice to see you on the blog Justin! Hope all's well in S.D.!
Hi Aaron, Give me a call some time.
-Justin
Maybe the update will hit commerce sites using .org domains. LOL
Rand - another great Whiteboard Friday presentation, thank you!
Any chance you could place a picture of the whiteboard on this page? It's a bit rough on the eyes in the video and there's lots of good stuff in there that would be helpful to be able to read through.
Thanks and have a great weekend!
Hi Rand, Its always been great to watch and read WBF.
I agree with all the 6 points which you said but I have same question regarding point #2 which is been asked by joishina about the internal linking
#3 point made me to think on it and made a little confusion as well about exact anchor text links in the footer.
Preach it, Rand!
This is great! It really helped me with my site. I had no idea what I was doing. But these directions allowed me to formulate a strategy. I am now working with someone who is helping me with the more advanced details!! Thanks so much! Trae from www.charleighpaige.com
Wow as always great Whiteboard Friday Rand. I must say I was guilty of at least two on this list and just spent the last hours making changes on Entrepreneurrookie. The anxiety is a little tense not knowing exactly when Google will strike with this penalty or whether you as a site owner or webmaster missed something they'll see as over-optimization. These six steps are a great starting point, thanks a million.
I actually think that there is a new type of "spam" that Google is encouraging. Site content spam. I have been noticing that the sites with simply the most content related to an area are rising in the rankings. So sites like Cafepress and Etsy that have literally hundreds or thousands of products related to an area are at the top of the rankings, even if they have 0 links to the page.
What does this mean? Well, you cant compete based on quality of products and content, you have to compete based on a huge amount of content in a specific area. You need to have 100 obama t shirts, not just 15 really cool ones. But what does this mean? It means that any site that has a focused, but great products will be lost.
In this new world, there will be alot of crappy content that makes it to the top, simply because there is alot of it. And the mega-sites like Amazon, ebay and other marketplaces will dominate. That isn't a better solution than links, it is just a different form of spam.
Hello Rand,
I really - really respect you from the bottom of my heart. I see your posts time to time and i am getting amazed by how a good guy you can be.
Please, read my post here from my personal blog. It is a small one. All folks SHOULD know about this and trust me, you will like it.
Basically, i promise - that you will love it and you will comment on it from a new post of yours here in seomoz.
Just do this favor to me and read it.
Here it is the link : https://googlicious.gr/matt-cutts-only/
If this is really what the "over-optimization update" is going to do, then I love this a lot. We can't beat a particular site that has the exact same keyword written over all the images on their home page, and have those blocks of keywords sidebar on every page with little unique content and they have been ranking at #1 forever because they have got like thousands of backlinks. I was expecting that they would get penalized a long time ago but oh well, maybe it's time they get what they deserve.
Thank you very much Rand. It was awesome and highly appreciated for this warning. You said there is a lots of good way to build links. Can you please share in another post how to create authority backlinks which actually works, I've tried and still trying some Article Network which are actually posting my unique and quality contents to several article directories and relevant blogs and getting amazing ranking boosts from over 6 months, do you think google may suspect this? I'll really appreciate your reply.
If you look through the Link Building category of the SEOmoz blog posts at https://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4 you should see a lot of great ideas.
Great Tips
Very pedagogical and motivational videos. You obviously spend a lot of time preparing them, and thinking over how to best put together these type of videos, but I can also feel that you are a natural. You have a talent for explaining complex issues in a relaxed and trustworthy manner. Thank you.
So this means a lot of changes coming to SeoMoz on-page tools as well?
Rand and all, I very suspicious about Goolge panalizing spammy backlinks...I can't belive google will count spammy backlinks as negative factors. I more belive that google will just ignore spammy links rather the penalize a website that have severals spammy links.
The reason behing my though is that I could build up thousands spammy backlinks for my competitors website and kill their ranking. Isn't it strange that google did not think about this side effect?
What do you think?
Not saying this is a good thing - but I had this same thought. Now, it will be "buy spammy backlinks to your COMPETITORS sites and kill their rankings, but watch yours improve". So, instead of buying links to their own sites, people will just spend the money on bad backlinks to their competitors?!
Seriously?!
I think this idea is at least worth a comment from Rand (unless I missed it somehow).
What is Google doing about this?
...and actually spammy links are very cheap to get and very easy to place using any spummy script... Yes, would be great to have Rand opiniion on this!
Margie Google would not penalize any site on the basis of single contraint, but they do so by considering multiple constraint and patterns (both on-page and off-page). Moreover, they would analyze a the data of a certain period of time (may be of 6 months or more), it minimizes the chances for competitors to do continuous investment on buying spammy links even when they are not sure to achieve their desired results (and they DEFINITELY cannot control on-page constraints and patterns).
Rand posted an excellent post (like he always does :-)) on What if My Competitors Point Spammy Links to My Site? in which he mentioned "It could, in fact, be that the "penalties" many SEOs often ascribe to paid links are in fact the result of a much more sophisticated analysis by Google looking at multiple aspects of a site's presence before making a determination of the link intent. Given that, in nearly 10 years of SEO, I've only heard of two reasonably verifiable instances of "Google-bowling" (the process of pointing bad links at a site or page to hurt it's rankings) working, my guess is that Google's webspam team has developed some very impressive methods here."
I hope this would answer your and Luca concern :-).
Thanks Rand, I appreciate your time and advice, it really help to optimise the site
Hi,
very good information rand....
Hey Randfish,
I got a question according to "rule 6".
What if you have an active blog with more then 500 posts, and a small percentage has olmost the same url/keyword focus?
For example if you have an article/url focussed on "tips on dating" and one on "dating tips".
I think the site visitors would not care if weeks in betwean an article about olmost the same subject/keyword is published.
will it be penalized?
Also, will the whole site be penalized or just the articles with very related keywords ?
Good advice Rand, this is SEO Philosophy 101
Hi Rand,
Its very very nice...
Thanks
I need to know some qucick things,
If someone creating fresh content page to tragteing different keywords we call it"Landing Pages" so why you were list down this to penalty, google loves content and if we target the keywords on three different pages with different fresh content so why google hit our website?
And is blog comments worthy for Brand name or KW? for if we use both simultaneously?
BTW sir you always help others :)
Google doesn't hit for just 1 reason. It depends on many things such as: website contain adsense, low quality links, same anchor text targeting to the particular page, no social sharing, heavy pages (take time to load a web page) etc.
Also, if you make good content for 1 page and other pages have duplicate content, it might affect the good page too.
Their is not problem making new fresh content, search engines love fresh content which is unique and high quality.
You run into a problem when you make say 3 articles about the same thing on a website in a short period of time with little to no uniiqueness. Example their is a Earthquake at Silicon Valley, you make an article about " Earthquake at Silicon Valley" then you make an article about "Silicon Valley Earthquake", Then you have "Big Silicon Valley Earthquake" 3 pages all with similar content 300 words all about the same thing it is spammy.
Awesome information..Now I cleared..
awesome tips
Great info Rand.
It looks like in quick way optimization You allways dead!
cool taht Google asking more human work in website seo optimization
No, no, no, no NO!
There is no such thing as "over optimization"!
https://www.paulmartinseo.co.uk/over-optimisation-meme/
Rand,
I want to say another excellent whiteboard Friday and and that I am extremely happy you focused on this as I agree it will be a another roller coaster ride from Google or as some believe a non blindfolded smack at the piñata we call a livelihood. Google does have a duty to its customers the people that read the ads I mean it's real customers people that focus on outbound marketing and use pay per click all the time. Well Google wouldn't be what it is without excellent results. We all have to step up I do not personally like the approach of someone being innocent before guilty I know it's not a court of law and this business I last month never would think someone would easily be able to hurt my rankings without me doing something about it. Unfortunately for people in our industry we are at that place now I know Google gives you positive points for being able to make your website navigate easily, remain quick to load, and even look good.
The idea that Google has decided some of the sites we see someone put more work into or did better job on according to what we told the mattered let's even the playing field. The web is free I hope to never find a glass box with the chrome browser logo in Vladimir Lenin's tomb. It seems Google wants is called to be equal I can respect that but if you can make your websites colors tell the Google algorithm yours is more appealing than another site so you rank 1 higher and people like you and me take that into account and use the colors that Google likes that is manipulating our result just as much as anything else that was considered white hat and is now grayish black.
Don't get me wrong I hate black hat ideas of doing blatantly wrong things like keyword stuffing buying links (now) I think cheating is not the way to get what you want but bombarding everyone with a Webmaster account who I know some of these people unfortunately will have no idea what to do or what even happened because they think they will have applied the techniques said to be best at the time. I don't think things like not enough white space or perfect coding should be something anyone's getting penalized for. I know it's not happening on a full-scale yet but I believe this is where Google's going. The only problem I see with it is they're going to try to get everyone to use pay per click the only safe way to promote your site.
I am a firm believer in inbound marketing I would really not like to see this industry be forced into outbound PPC marketing. Because using PPC in my book is manipulating your conversions directly through Google by paying them. We all know they don't care about anything else but the money to put a website that could have a very low ranking or thin spamming content.
As a almost 1st choice offer. I am currently rebuilding my entire website. I feel that because the new one will be available in the week approximately it is going to be best if I take my existing order and what I believe to be clean something Google would like off the web until we know just exactly what Google has now imposed so can conform to their wishes and live a otherwise somewhat normal lifestyle. I think this is could hurt the guys that have MOZs scores around 6 or 7 and page ranks around 5+ because they have old domains and unfortunately for them the site is not then updated since it started to draw customers while any change for a site that it thought it had a perfect could be devastating and this will be very interesting.
I also want to apologize if I went on too long to anyone I am exhausted and now I have to work all weekend. I do agree strongly with Rand about the footer being a mimi link farm. Thanks Rand you just tell me when an argument that's been going on for months. Great job and I hope everything works out for everyone reading this did not mean to be glum just want to be told what the right thing is and do it.
Respectfully,Thomas
Adderall much? lol.