February 16, 2011

The Truth Behind Google Rankings and penalties

People often come to me after they have had trouble ranking their site in Google. Either they have trouble understanding to nature of SEO or they have tried working with another SEM/SEO firm only to realize that their goals were only realized in the short term and that their site has now been penalized by Google.In a nutshell, any firm that flat out tells you they can get you a top ten Google ranking easily is full of it, at least on a competitive term. If you have a small to midsize business in beverage industry, and introducing a new cola product, do you really think you can easily outrank Coca-Cola for the term “cola”?
Like most things in life, if it seems to good to be true it usually is. However, there are deceitful practices out there that may allow you to rank highly for a short period of time. However, Google is very smart and will catch on quickly and penalize you.If you are one of the many people out there that can’t figure out why their site is not ranking well or has significantly dropped in ranking, this is the video for you, right from the top dog at Google. Click here for more info
Here is a quick excerpt :
Matt explains there are two groupings of penalties a site can receive in Google.

  1. Manual Penalties, such as reports submitted to Google for things like off topic porn and things like that.
  2. Algorithmic Penalties in form of classifiers for things like content spam, keyword stuffing, cloaking, sneaky JavaScript redirects and so on.
  3. On the algorithmic side, when you change your site and remove the spam (i.e. keyword stuff, etc), after Google re-crawls and processes your site and pages, normally, you site will bump back up in the search results.
  4. On the manual site, the penalties “time out” and “expire” after a specific amount of time. The length of the penalty is based on how severe the penalty and how badly you are breaking Google’s webmaster guidelines.
  5. Matt finally adds that you can also do a reconsideration request, which would expedite removing a manual penalty. But a reconsideration request will not help you with an algorithmic penalty – you would need to fix your site to fix the issue.