Google is Cracking Down – Are You Listening?
By now you should be very aware that Google is looking much more stringently at your site and it’s content. The various algorithm updates should serve as notice, but Google also continually tells you just that as well. They tell you that their priority is quality unique content and a quality user experience.
We wrote about the most recent algorithm change a few days ago and how above the fold content is much more critical than it used to be. You can read about that here:
All of this is just further evidence of what Mike and I teach here – that you need to be focusing on quality and not trying to game the system. It is, however, amazing how many people we see that just don’t think it’s gonna happen to them. It does and trust me, it’s not fun either.
In the past couple of weeks we have seen a few people that have received the following message or something very similar to it from Google:
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://YOURDOMAIN.COM,
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, we detected low-quality pages on your site which do not provide substantially unique content or added value. Examples could include thin affiliate pages, doorway pages, automatically generated content, or copied content. For more information about unique and compelling content, visit http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
Now we’re not trying to be alarmists here, but after seeing more than a couple of these from our readers, we wanted to put out this public post on the subject. The truth is that if you’re still trying to game the system you’re in for a lot of disappointment in the near future. Please stop trying to take short cuts and instead focus on building quality and value. If you’re monetization strategy revolves around lots of sites with poor and or non-unique content, well, we highly advise that you check out the webinar from last week here:
The bottom line is that everything we’ve been telling you about is happening and at a much more accelerated pace than we initially suspected, so please pay attention. Google is serious about unique content. They are serious about protecting the user experience and they are committed to improving both.
One of the ways that Google does that is by conducting manual reviews of your site. Now they don’t worry about your site much until you’re getting some decent rankings, but don’t be surprised if it falls off the front page if you’re not focusing on quality unique content and providing a good user experience. We have personally seen various test sites of ours fall off of the front page rankings for both of those situations.
In one case we had a site that was front page on a bunch of keywords for a very long time. It had good quality unique content and was doing quit well. Then we started getting a bunch of junk traffic from overseas – very odd stuff. It was almost like paid traffic that would just immediately bounce off the site – less than a two second time of site. Now we’re not talking about a little traffic here, we saw our daily numbers go up by 20x previous volumes, so this was a significant amount of traffic.
About three weeks later the pages for those keywords dropped significantly in the rankings. It is our belief that this was due to the perceived poor user experience created by the super low average time on site and abnormally high bounce rate. The reality is that it was artificial and we weren’t in control of it. But the result was the same – those rankings disappeared. We don’t generally believe in coincidences and the apparent deterioration in the user experience is the only likely culprit. Perhaps a competitor was paying for this traffic to hurt the site which had long dominated this keyword…
Lessons to Learn
First off, if you haven’t purchased our Feeding the Panda or our SEO Post Panda training course – you need to do so. This is not a big pitch here, but the truth is simply that we’ve put hundreds of hours of effort into creating both of those products and they contain all of our best information on these topics. It would be silly of me to try and rehash all of that info again here in the blog post.
In fact, that is exactly how I became an info product creator. We had so many inquiries about Google Panda and I was re-writing all of the same information and sending it to clients repeatedly – so I simply decided to dive in a bit more and create Feeding the Panda as an all encompassing response.
If you do own those products, then I highly encourage you to go back through them and take another look at your site with objective eyes. Make sure to also keep your eyes on your above the fold content as well.
Lastly, there is a great resource that is still available online. I cannot link to it directly because others that have done so have been contacted by Google directly and I don’t intend to put our site into that list (I’m sure you can understand). But who better to listen to than Google itself, right?
Well there is a “leaked training document” from Google in the form of a PDF that is used to train their manual reviewers. This document goes over exactly what they teach their people to look for when manually reviewing a site. To find the PDF do a search on “leaked google review document” – you should come to it… But it is being pulled from many sites because Google’s not too pleased about it being out there, so it may not be out there for long…
FYI – Don’t miss our weekly SEO training webinars and keep up to date on the latest and greatest. You can register for the webinar here.
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On February 15, 2012 Miles wrote:
Very interesting, and probably good news for everyone managing quality sites. Should sort the wheat from the chaff. Can the manual reviewing process typically lead to a change in PR rank? I know Google PR is considered less important these days, but what is the likely reason for a drop in PR from 2 to zero??
On February 15, 2012 Adam wrote:
What an amazing find! Thank you Troy for bringing this to our attention. Just started reading it and very interesting I must say…
On February 15, 2012 Troy wrote:
Thanks Adam… definitely some good stuff in there…
Thanks for stopping by!
-Troy
On February 15, 2012 Troy wrote:
Hi Miles,
PR changes all the time and can fluctuate a great deal. We’ve seen our site here jump around from PR N/A to PR5 – though most of the time it hovers around PR4 like it is now… Running a large network of high PR sites, we see fluctuations all of the time. Many times it is just a sign that things are being re-evaluated, etc… or in flux. PR, as you have said, is not the biggest factor – more importantly are the rankings…
We’ve also seen big fluctuations in PR if you’re doing anything major on the site, like adding a bunch of content all at once, or changing the design site wide, or changing URLS with redirects, etc…
-Troy
On February 15, 2012 Kirby Hopper wrote:
I hope Google’s bots can tell the difference in quality material – written by others and posted on their websites – posted on our websites to better the user experience (ya know, provide more relevant articles for the customer) – and fluff inserted to game the system. Just how exactly does a bot know the difference?
On February 16, 2012 Miles wrote:
Thanks, Troy. We have recently relaunched the site with loads of new content, so that may explain it. Our rankings have held up well, however.
-Miles
On February 16, 2012 Troy wrote:
Yeah, that could be it then… In general, the best way to do that it is to phase it in rather than all at once site wide. It’s not always feasible, but it “scares” Google less…
-Troy
On February 16, 2012 Chris wrote:
Hey Troy,
In effort to seek out a niche that fulfills all the criteria in your recent webinar, and to establish authority in that niche to only see competitors try to sabotage your rankings is defamation of traffic to say the least. However, Is their a way Google can reevauluate your site based on this “false perception” of non-unique visitors?
On February 16, 2012 Troy wrote:
Personally, we never contact Google – never have, probably never will… we just don’t want the added attention or inspection personally. The old term that **** happens, well, yes… it does and it’s kind of part of the SEO world we live in. In the end, we are all pawns on Google’s chess board, so we just kind of acknowledge that going in and try not to stress about it too bad.
To give you an idea of how little ours or any of most anyone’s sites matter to Google, consider this. When it comes to AdWords accounts, about 5% of Google’s AdWords accounts spend over $100,000 per month on adwords and account for 80% of their Adwords income. So, how much do you think they really care about the 95% of the people that spend less than $1000 a month on PPC? That’s why PPC has pushed all of the “little guys” out – because if you’re not spending $100k or more, you’re a “little guy”. And honestly, the “real” number is $1 million per month or more on AdWords to even “get their attention” – THAT is just a small flicker of the big money that they deal with… and is why we’ve never even bothered with reconsideration type efforts.
Sorry to perhaps “depress” you, but just keeping it “real” man and tellin’ it like it is…
-Troy
On February 17, 2012 Chris wrote:
Thanks Troy I understand where your coming from, and by your transparent advice you teach through webinars, blog post especially your products! Is monumental. It’s amazing how your approach is distinctive and yet more conservative compared to other SEO courses ive purchased in the past had I followed I definitley would have been a victim to the Google Panda Algo change. It’s just upsetting to know that competitors would use this fallacy of traffic as an advantage for themselves.
- Chris
On February 21, 2012 Dean Ethridge wrote:
Nice article, and great information. I’ve been using Traffic Geyser and Magic Submitter to do my article submissions, along with Video Submission, but may look at a service like this in the near future. Thanks for posting
On February 22, 2012 Troy wrote:
Thanks for stopping by and contributing Dean… Make sure to checkout our weekly training webinars on Thursdays at 3pm EST.
-Troy
On February 26, 2012 Jason wrote:
Interesting comment about competitors sending fake traffic to your site to increase the bounce rate. All I can say is it was short-sighted on their part. Karma. If only they realize the same can happen to them.
On March 13, 2012 lansingautorepair wrote:
I was a recipient of one of these lovely emails and it scared the shit out of me. I have enjoyed 1st place ranking for years on numerous websites for my auto repair shop which makes me $1000′s every day.
I went a little over board and purchased around 50 domain names and put up one page websites with completely different and keyword relevant content. I think the big mistake I made was linking them all together.
Thank God they did not knock off my main site but it seems many of my other sites no longer show up in search results.
I noticed today a few are back up where they were.
On March 15, 2012 Ana wrote:
Mike, Troy,
I would like to ask you what about using blog networks and services like uniquearticlewizard and similar now? Isn’t it risky to use them? I have heard that some networks were penalized recently together with all the sites which were using them.
Will you be revising networks and article submission services you use?