How Google penalises sites with too many of the same URL – Tested!
Last week I got an insight into how Google penalties work if you use a URL too many times in a blog entry.
In my recent article, I covered how scammers target Sedo users.
The article was included in the Google index within the hour, as it usually is for my blog, and for the following three days I had 80-100 daily unique users reach it through Google.
Then on the fourth day - all traffic to the page from Google stopped. Nothing. Nada.
After a quick investigation, I found that that particular page was no longer included in the Google index. The rest of my site was unaffected.
I looked at it in more detail and theorised that because I quoted the correspondence with the scammer, which repeatedly included his email address ("murphy@eliteinvestment.net"), Google must have decided that this was a spam message and excluded it from its index - probably because Google ignored the "@" sign and treated the companyname.com part as a URL, thus viewing it as being repeated many times over. The other option is that it doesn’t like too many repeats of the same email address, although i like my first theory better.
I decided to test my theory, and reduced the total number of references to the company from a total of ten URLs/emails (eliteinvetment.net) to only three. I then updated my sitemap and pinged Google to re-crawl my site.
Sure enough, a week later my article has been re-indexed, and is hitting traffic again. An insight into the mind of the (fluffy) beast.
It also shows that my pages were first ingested and indexed, and only a few days later the penalty was applied.
SEO and Journalism: “Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it”
I wanted to highlight an excellent article by Charlie Brooker about the impact of SEO requirements and the pressures of web-traffic-oriented journalism on the quality of news.
The article sets out to demonstrate its premise with the first paragraph and then explains it:
"Miley Cyrus, Angelina, Israel vs Palestine, iPhone, 9/11 conspiracy, Facebook, MySpace, and Britney Spears nude. And not forgetting Second Life, Paris Hilton, YouTube, Lindsay Lohan, World of Warcraft, The Dark Knight, Radiohead and Barack Obama. Oh, and great big naked tits. In 3D.
Let me explain. Last week, I wrote a piece on 9/11 conspiracy theories which virtually broke the Guardian website as thousands of "truthers" (painfully earnest online types who sincerely believe 9/11 was an inside job) poured through the walls to unfurl their two pence worth. Some outlined alternative "theories". Some mistakenly equated dismissing the conspiracy theories with endorsing the Bush administration. Some simply wailed, occasionally in CAPITALS. Others, correctly, identified me as a paid-off establishment shill acting under instructions from the CIA."
And its conclusion:
"...your modern journalist is expected not only to shoehorn all manner of hot phraseology into their copy, but to try and position it all in precisely the right place. That's an alarming quantity of unnecessary shit to hold in your head while trying to write a piece about the unions. Sorry, SEXUAL unions. Mainly, though, it's just plain undignified: turning the journalist into the equivalent of a reality TV wannabe who turns up to the auditions in a gaudy fluorescent thong in a desperate bid to be noticed."
The full article can be found here.
The VPAMAZON Voucher – A Story of Missed Opportunities (or: “how not to market on Google”)
Enter "VPAMAZON" or “VPAMAZON2” into Google to get these great offers, said the promo slip, that arrived with my Amazon book in the post today. It was advertising premium business cards.
I was intrigued by this marketing tactic. Was the advertiser sure that no one else would muscle in on his preferred search terms? So I went and searched for vpamazon, and what I found was even worse than someone muscling in on your turf: it was the advertiser themselves not using their own term in an effective way:
If you look carefully, you will notice that there is a paid ad at the top promoting 90% off business cards, which is where the promoter wanted you to look. The problem with this approach is that most people's eyes are trained to skip ads, and would look at the organic search results first. There they will see a link to an empty website (a Wordpress tag that is empty), and probably now this blog entry.
Even as a savvy web user I went to the Wordpress entry first. Only when I was confused by not finding anything, did I look at the advertising at the top, though some people would miss that altogether. Organic results tend to get most of the eyeballs.
And how to remedy this problem? Easy - just create a page on your site using the terms vpamazon and vpamazon2 like I did here. Duh! Why the advertiser didn't think to do this before launching an expensive Amazon campaign is quite strange indeed... Perhaps now they will...
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Other stories:
How do I get my site into Microsoft Live Search? – SEO Article #3
How do I get my site into Microsoft Live Search?
Although Google is king, serious search engine marketing should not ignore Microsoft's Live Search. Microsoft is investing significant resource into making its search engine live.com successful, and now is the time to ensure you are in on the action.
The steps you follow to get your site included in Live.com are very similar to those you follow with Google, although the results are a little unpredictable, and it doesn't seem to work as effectively or quickly. Then again, the Microsoft Live Search webmaster service is still new and in "beta" so I'd get in there now, before everyone else does.
So how do you get your site into Live Search?
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Step one: create your website and make sure it has compelling content. It's safe to assume that Live Search will use similar tools to Google to try to ensure only content-rich, original, sites get high rankings.
Use the same tools described in the article how to write for Google. using the right keywords, putting them in the right places and in the correct way.
Step two - Let Live Search know that your site exists:
- a. Get a sitemap - First you need to tell Live Search about your site. The most effective ways to do this is by submitting a sitemap.
An easy way to create a sitemap is by using this free website. You need to save this file to your hosting space using the name "sitemap.xml" (without the quotes).*
*This tutorial assumes that you know how to upload a file to your website. If not, look for instructions from your web hosting company on how to do this.
- b. Got a sitemap? Great stuff! Now go to the Live Search Webmasters Center and sign up. If you already have a Hotmail account you don't even need to register, just use the same login details you use for Hotmail. Once registered, follow the prompts to tell Live Search about your new site (you have to enter your site's URL and follow the validation process, which is explained very clearly there).
- c. Now that you're in, and you've proved to Live Search that you are the rightful owner of your site, click on the "Sitemap" tab, and submit the URL of your site map.
Come back in a few days to see reports of who Links to you and what important sites you link to, according to the Live Search database. These factors will influence the ranking of your site in Live Search results, and help you hone in on good sources of traffic.
If you haven't done so already, also make sure you follow the steps to include your site in Google.
SEO articles in this series:
How do I get my site into Google? - SEO Article #1
How to Write for Google - SEO Article #2
How do I get my site into Microsoft Live Search? - SEO Article #3
What’s a “NO FOLLOW” tag?
Top Quality Articles for Bloggers – Blog Carnival
Welcome to the 2008 Blog Carnival edition of top quality articles for bloggers. This an ongoing edition, and you may submit articles for consideration here.
Submissions so far:
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Traffic2mypage presents Using OBP to increase web traffic - Part I - StumbleUpon posted at Traffic2mypage.com, saying, "This is a unique method i use on how to increase web traffic to your site using stumbleupon to find blogs to comment on that are active"
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Marcus Hochstadt presents Freebie Seekers posted at Marcus Hochstadt, saying, "Freebie seekers are everywhere. But did you know that they can literally destroy your Internet business success?"
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Milan presents Post Optimization: How To Optimize Blog-Post For Better Search Engine Ranking posted at A Blog About Online Resources, saying, "Detail idea about how a post should be optimize so that it get rank well in search engines."
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Marcus Hochstadt presents Increase Ranking With Contextual Linking posted at Marcus Hochstadt, saying, "Many people have a link page on their Web site, whereby it is a more effective way to have quality links by using contextual linking."
JHSEsq presents Your Online Writing Life: Protect Your Reputation — and Future (Part One) posted at Colloquium, saying, "A five-part series discussing prudent online practices that designed to protect bloggers' personal lives, reputations -- and careers."
This is an ongoing edition. Submit your articles here.
What is a Blog Carnival?:
"A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks. " (source: blogcarnival.com)
What’s a “NO FOLLOW” tag?
What is a no follow tag?
A no follow tag, or "nofollow" (if you want to be one of those hip new-speak people with "nospaces" between words), is a tag that websites and blogs sometimes add to stop search engine "spiders" or "bots" from following some of their links to external sites.
For example, when someone leaves a comment on your blog, they will often include a link to their homepage with their comment. If you have a "no follow" tag, then search engines like Google will ignore this link.
A "no follow" tag has two effects:
1. It stops spammers from leaving comments on your blog or wiki. Spammers will use any opportunity they have to propagate links to their sites - to fool search engines into thinking that their spam page is very popular thus increasing its visibility on search engine results. A "no follow" tag stops this sort of behaviour, because it removes the incentive for spammers to leave comments on your site.
2. It means your website does not "leak" links. This is a search engine optimisation (SEO) concept. Every time you link to a site, you are effectively "voting" for it, and your "vote" increases its popularity in search engine rankings. Every additional link on a page dilutes the "voting power" of all the other links on that page. This is especially important because internal links in a website (links to your own pages) also count. By diluting your page's votes, you are diluting your ability to make your own pages popular or those of genuine websites you like.
I noticed that your site is a "NoFollow free" site. What does that mean?
Although "no follow" is a great deterrent for spammers, it also stops genuine users who want to comment on your blog or site, but also want the credit to seep through and back to their own site.
I think it is fair to allow contributors to enjoy the reputational vote, and therefore I have removed all "no follow" tags from ThatDanny's comment areas. I feel that the benefit outweighs the risk. This does however mean I'll have to be more ruthless with comments that are solely self-serving, or contain too many links.
If you have a Wordpress blog, you can do the same, and install the NoFollow Free Plugin on your site. It automatically removes no follow tags, and gives you several option on how to control them.
UPDATE ON 24 July 08: Noble as the nofollow initiative was, I found the number of spammers wanting to use it simply as a link-exchange was becoming too much of a time commitment - and this grew the more popular my blog became. I still think new blogs should use it when they start up to encourage comments and engagement, but at a later stage you may find you have to pull the plug. I did.
SEO articles in this series:
How do I get my site into Google? - SEO Article #1
How to Write for Google - SEO Article #2
How do I get my site into Microsoft Live Search? - SEO Article #3
What’s a “NO FOLLOW” tag?
How to Write for Google – SEO Article #2
This is a continuation from: How do I get my site into Google? - SEO Article #1
SEO Article #2: “How to Write for Google“ (and some stuff about toads).
I'll start with my usual caveat: you should write content that people would like to read, or as Google puts it: 'Always focus on the users and not on search engines'. Even if you are one of the scum-of-the-earth spammers who create pages just to trap innocent people (who searched for Niagara, and you gave them Viagra instead) - you should entertain the notion that they're not going to buy your overpriced-counterfeit-drugs -that'll-probably-kill-them, unless you actually give them some information that they would like to read, or that is useful to them -- and neither will Google (include your site, that is). Remember also that content is king and the better your content - the better you will rank.
But there are other things you could do to improve your positioning: You will be better noticed on Google if you have two things:
1. Get links from other websites to yours - Google treats every link to your site like a 'vote' of confidence. Not only that, but if the websites that link to you have many other sites voting for them, then they have a higher ranking, and therefore you have a higher ranking. This ranking is referred to by Google as PageRank. And you can see a site's PageRank in the Google Toolbar, if you have one installed (Read more about PageRank here and here).
IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT PAGERANK: when you first start publicising your website, don't worry too much about PageRank. It can take months until Google calculates your PageRanks, and by then, hopefully, you would have worked on getting lots of links from people who love your excellent site. This site, for example, was launched in May 08, and (at the time of writing) has still not been pageranked. It doesn't stop it from appearing at the top of Google search results many times over, and that all has to do with its content, and how it is presented (See below).
2. Write well for Google. No one outside of Google HQ knows exactly what formulae Google uses to assess whether your content is good. It is safe to assume that it tries to weed out spam, and that it looks for signs that your page grammar indicates a proper language article, as opposed to just a succession of words. But there are things that will help your writing appear higher in Google rankings. I say this from my own experience in getting to the very top of search results, even if your site is new and your PageRank is zero:
- Go niche - if no other site on the web uses the word combination "What are hulk frogs?" and your site does, then when there is a sudden interest in hulk frogs, your site will appear at the top of search results. It's as simple as that. If, on the other hand, you try to write about "The Movie Hulk", you will be competing with millions of other hulk sites, and are much less likely to reach top position. Once you've digested the consequences of this effect, you will realise that if you cover a niche area, use niche expressions, or tackle niche questions and topics, you are much more likely to get noticed. Of course, if your website is all about Britney Spears (you
- Consider word density - word density refers to the number of times a word or expression appears in an article. If you write about cane toad feeding habits and you repeat the term "cane toad feeding habits" and the expression "cane toad" many times, Google will conclude that your article is about cane toads and their feeding. If your article has more of these words than another article written by someone else, Google may well conclude that yours is more relevant to the search term "cane toad feeding", and place your site above the other. (See what I did there?).
Of course things aren't as straightforward as a count of the number of words, and your search-results position depends on other factors as well, but this is a very useful method, and works well for me. I should probably also warn you (again) not to try and trick Google here. Use a word or expression too much, and you might be under suspicion -- and Google will penalise your site or ban it as spam. My advice thus is: bear in mind the words that people will search for to reach your kind of content. Then use them often, and use them in expressions that are likely to appear in searches.
- Consider word weight and importance - Google gives more weight to elements on your page that are enclosed in title tags like h1, h2 etc. By using these tags you are saying: this text carries more weight. In the same way, Bold and Italics can signal that a word, expression or sentence is important.
- Consider word positioning - The closer to the top the more important. If you start a paragraph, the closer a word is to the start of the paragraph the more weight it has, etc. It is better to say “The feeding habits of the cane toad – is today’s topic” rather than “today’s topic is the feeding habits of the cane toad.”
I know it is very difficult to bear all these things in mind when writing, but after a while they become second nature. In some articles you pay them more attention, because you want to hit your niche harder, and in some you don't, because you are writing for volume, or for fun.
It’s worth noting that this article may prove its own point in rather an unfortunate way, by attracting a lot of zoologist in search of the feeding habits of the cane toad. To them, I apologise. It’s just the way search engines work.
There are further writing tips for Google, and I might get back to them in a later article. For now though, thanks for reading.
UPDATE: To prove that I wasn't just talking nonsense, search Google for the keywords 'feeding habits kane toad' by clicking here. Now re-read the article and you will see why this is.
Do come back to ThatDanny.com for the next article in the series (or subscribe to this blog to get notified when it is published).
SEO articles in this series:
How do I get my site into Google? - SEO Article #1
How to Write for Google - SEO Article #2
How do I get my site into Microsoft Live Search? - SEO Article #3
What’s a “NO FOLLOW” tag?
How do I get my site into Google? – SEO Article #1
Getting your site into to Google is the easy part, getting it to appear in relevant Google searches is quite another. But let’s start with how you get your site into the world’s most popular search engine.
SEO Article #1: "How do I get my site into Google?".
Step one: create your website before you submit it, and before you promote it in any way. Make sure you follow these important rules:
- a. Your site should include content that people would actually want to read. If people find your site engaging and informative, they will link to it. If they link to it, you stand a better chance to rank high in Google search results (more about rankings in a future article). If you only follow one piece of my advice – the above should be it. As Google itself advises: "Always focus on the users and not on search engines." This is very true when you create content, although there are many ways to get even better exposure. In this series I will cover the things you need to know, to get you ahead of the pack.
- b. When you create your engaging content, make sure it includes a lot of text. Google loves text, and is much more likely to include your site if it is text-rich. But refer back to point 'a' above. Create text-rich content that is interesting, not just text for the sake of text. Content is king. Good content is the emperor.
- c. Make sure you know how to write for Google. This involves using the right keywords in your content, putting them in the right places and in the right way.
- d. Don’t spam or use any dirty tricks. There are a lot of dirty tricks that people use to try and get higher Google rankings for their websites. Sometimes they make it to the top, but more often their site will get penalised by Google or even blocked as spam. And there are legitimate ways of getting ahead of the crowd, so don't sweat it. Do it properly and the rest will follow.
- e. Unless you absolutely know what you're doing, avoid the following: frames, Macromedia Flash, iframes, content inserted by JavaScript and image maps. All the above may be difficult for Google to read when it checks your site. It uses an automated indexing system (known as "Googlebot") to read your site and rate its content, and if it can’t – you’re stuffed.
So you've created your site, it abounds with great text content and is appealing to visitors. Now you are ready to start what is referred to as SEO or SEM.
What is SEO? SEO= Search Engine Optimisation.
What is SEM? SEM= Search Engine Marketing.
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Step two - Let Google know that your site exists:
- a. Submit a sitemap - now is the time to finally tell Google about your site. One of the most effective ways of doing this is by submitting a sitemap.
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What is a Sitemap? a sitemap is a file that tells Google about your website's structure, what pages you have on your site and some further useful information. You can see what a Google sitemap looks like by clicking on the "sitemap" link at the bottom of this page.
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The easiest way to create a sitemap is by using this free website. You need to save this file to your hosting space using the name "sitemap.xml" (without the quotes).*
*This tutorial assumes that you know how to upload a file to your website. If not, look for instructions from your web hosting company on how to do this.
- b. Got a sitemap? Great stuff! Now go to the Google Webmasters website and sign up. If you already have a Gmail account you don't even need to register, just use the same details. Once registered, follow the prompts to tell Google about your new site (you have to enter your site's URL and follow the verification process, which is explained very clearly there).
- c. Now that you're in, and you've proved to Google that you are the rightful owner of your site, click on the "Sitemap" link on the left-hand navigation bar, and choose to "add a sitemap". Follow the instructions, and voila, you can sit back smugly. Google knows about your site.
NOW WHAT? If you followed all the advice in this article, and your site has good content as described above, it will be included in Google within a few days. As you'll realise very quickly though, this is just the start of your journey. You've created a website and you want the world to see it, not for it to languish in search results page number 33. You want it to rank high and appear in Google searches. You want it to be visible. We’ll cover the next steps to achieve this in SEO article #2.
Come back to ThatDanny.com for the next article in this series (or subscribe to this blog to get notified when it is published).
SEO articles in this series:
How do I get my site into Google? - SEO Article #1
How to Write for Google - SEO Article #2
How do I get my site into Microsoft Live Search? - SEO Article #3
What’s a “NO FOLLOW” tag?