|
| Recent Articles |
Social Media Icons: How Many Is Too Many?
As some of you know I'm working on a redesign of my site. Part of the reason for the new design is optimizing the site more for social media, including the use of bookmarklets at the bottom of posts. This afternoon...
Links Vs. Content
There's a long standing debate in the search marketing industry about links versus content. Which is better? On the one hand there's the perspective that if you create great content, people will link to you naturally.
Social Media: Is It Viral, Or Just A Virus?
Much praise and adoration has been lauded on the alleged marketing and inbound link potential that social media sites, Digg in particular, present to companies looking to increase their incoming traffic and...
Getting The Best Out Of Article Syndication
We all hear how important articles are - especially when used as a tool to help boost search engine rankings. We often read many articles a day about our industry or about something we are trying to learn. However...
Long Tail Questions
I posted a while back about the Meaty Middle, and why it was more important than the Long Tail for the application I'm involved with called RMX Direct. The reasoning is that for an advertising application...
Finding The Strongest Links
Given that many large brands and mainstream media sites are trying to leverage their brand strength by adding interactive content to their sites and every SEO blog in the world (and some from distant universes) have posts about leveraging social media and...
SES Session: Drive Traffic With Google
This was more of a speed intro to some of Google's newer services. Topics included Google Analytics, Google Gadgets, Webmaster Tools and Personalized Search. Each presenter gave a quick 10 minute overview of...
SES Session: Vendor Spotlight
The vendor spotlight session covered alternatives or additives to going with PPC campaigns from companies like Google and Yahoo. They discussed how pay per call was more effective and available in more areas like TV and print than pay per click was. It also doesn't...
|
|
|
|
03.19.07
Penalties Vs Filters & Optimization Vs Over-Optimization
 By Aaron Wall
Jill Whalen recently posted to SEL about how duplicate content penalties are not penalties, but filters.
If you duplicate on a small scale duplicate content does not hurt you (other than perhaps wasting some of your link authority), but if you do it on a large scale (affiliate feed or similar) then it may suck a bunch of link equity out of your site, put your site in reduced crawling status, and / or place many of your pages in Google's supplemental results.
Jilll's article mentioned the difference between penalties and filters:
Search engine penalties are reserved for pages and sites that are purposely attempting to trick the search engines in one form or another. Penalties can be meted out algorithmically when obvious deceptions exist on a page, or they can be personally handed out by a search engineer who discovers an infraction through spam reports and other means. To many people's surprise, penalties rarely happen to the average website. Most that receive a penalty know exactly what they did to deserve it.
From a search engineer's perspective, the line between optimization and deception is thin and curvy. Because that is the case it is much easier for Google to be aggressive with filters while being much more restrictive with penalties.
From my recent experiences most sites that lost rankings typically did so due to filters, and most site owners that got filtered have no idea why they were filtered. If you were aggressively auto-generating sites your experience set might be different (biased more toward penalized over filtered), but here are examples of some filters I have seen:
• Duplicate Content: This filter doesn't matter for much of anything. Only one copy of a syndicated article should rank in the search results. If they don't rank all of them who cares? Even though duplicate pages are filtered out of the search results after the search query, they still pass link authority, so the idea of remixing articles to pass link authority is a marketing scam.
• Reciprocal Linking: Natural quality nepotistic links are not bad (as they are part of a natural community) but exclusively relying on them, or letting them comprise most of your link authority is an unnatural pattern. A friend's site that was in a poor community had their rankings sharply increase after we removed their reciprocal link page.
• Limited Authority & Noise: A site which has most of it's pages in the supplemental results can bring many of them out of the supplemental results by ensuring the page level content is unique, preventing low value pages from getting indexed, and building link authority.
• Over-Optimization Filter: I had 2 pages on a site ranking for 2 commercially viable 2 word phrases. Both of them were linked to sitewide using a single word that was part of the two word phrases. Being aggressive, I switched both sitewide links to using the exact phrases in the internal anchor text. One of the pages now ranks #1 in Google, while the other page got filtered. I will leave the #1 ranking page as is, but for the other page I changed the internal anchor text to something that does not exactly match the keyword phrase. After Google re-caches the site, the filtered page will pop back to ranking near the top of the results.
The difference between a penalty and a filter is the ability to recover quickly if you understand what is wrong. The reason tracking changes is so important is it helps you understand why a page may be filtered.
How can you be certain that a page is filtered? Here are some common symptoms or clues which may be present:
• many forum members are complaining about similar sites or page types getting filtered or penalized (although it is tricky to find signal amongst the noise)
• reading blogs and talking to friends about algorithm updates (much better signal to noise ratio)
• seeing pages or sites similar to yours that were ranking in the search results that also had their rankings drop
• knowing that you just did something aggressive that may make the page too well aligned with a keyword
• seeing an inferior page on your site ranking while the more authoritative page from the same site is nowhere
Comments
About the Author:
Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, an ebook offering the latest
search engine optimization tips and strategies. From SEOBook.com Aaron
gives away free advice and search engine optimization tools. He is a
regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and runs the
Threadwatch community.
|
