It doesn’t sound like it’s very interesting as far as generating leads, but if your website is not able to gain rank – and it’s not on the first page of Google – for lots of different keyword phrases even after you’ve done all the things that you should be doing. But there might be an issue, so what we’re going to do is talk about what Google penalties are and how to detect and clean up your website.
So has your home to your website been penalized by Google here we go so for algorithmic penalties. Here are some surefire clues that your website has been penalized by Google, so when I say algorithmic penalties over since the year 2000, I believe there have been Google algorithm updates. Some of them are very small. In fact, in some years there have been more than one google update algorithm update per day so, but there are but have been some very big algorithm updates by Google since a year 2000 and eat one of those updates that they do.
That’s really big that the aim and the goal is to make sure that google is giving the consumer or the person searching the kind of information they want and not giving them spam or junk. So Google wants to make your search experience very relevant and very good. So, in order to do that, it has to get rid of spam and junk and things that people do that, just don’t make any sense. So how can you tell if your website has been penalized? Your website is not ranking well for your brand name anymore.
That’s a huge one dead giveaway. If your site doesn’t ring for much else, it should at least do well on one keyword phrase which is the name of your company or your brand, any one page, any I’m sorry, any page. One positions that you had are slipping back to page two or three without any action on your part, that is a clue page drink for your site has dropped from respectable two or three to a big fat zero.
We don’t even look at much for page rank anymore, it’s more about keyword, phrases and I’m going to show you a picture to of what a penalized site versus a non penalized site looks like the entire website has been removed from Google’s cash search results overnight. That’s a huge clue, you’re running a site search, and i’m going to show you this in a minute: the site, colon, your domain com and a keyword, and it yields no results or weird results.
Your listing, when you eventually find it in google, is for a page on your site other than the home page. So if your home page isn’t ranking, but maybe your about Us page, your services pages ranking, it could mean that your home page has been penalized. If you see one or more of these factors, you can be pretty sure that a penalty has affected your site. We see that all the time when people come to us and they want us to use a website that they’ve been using and haven’t, had any luck getting rank, and now they want us to add content and do SEO that’s fine.
We can do all that. But if they have them penalized, it’s almost impossible for us to make a difference without knowing some of these things. So here are reasons that you might to get penalized. Your website might get penalized by Google and any of the reasons that are in red are ones that that that I see pretty frequently so the first one is buying links. You cannot buy links to increase your page, your increase, your rank.
Lots of people have done it in the past lots of SEO. People have done it without telling their clients. That is a bad deal, and you do not want to do that so no buying links. If your SEO provider did it in the past and didn’t tell you you could be penalized and not even know it excessive reciprocal links. If you’ve been exchanging lots of length of clients, it could be seen as a manipulation attempt.
So you want to make sure that you know a few very relevant exchanges of links are awesome. You know one assisted living facility links to you, you link to them fabulous, but when you have hundreds of reciprocal links, that is a problem duplicate content. We talk to people about this all the time. Any duplicate content on your site makes it less useful in Google’s view, and that could result in the penalty make sure your content is unique and well-written use tools like copyscape.
I can’t emphasize that enough. When we write articles for our clients, they are one hundred percent minimum of 75 percent, because sometimes there’s a quote or a definition of a disease process, but most of the contents beyond that are all the content beyond. That is one hundred percent. You need to that client, so quotes are okay and definitions are okay, because you might want to define Alzheimer’s or you might want to define Parkinson’s disease in a article, but the rest of that article had better be unique, and for us it always is overuse of H1 tags: this is more of a geeky term that you may not know if you’re, not a web developer, but behind the scenes of your website anything that the headline has what’s called an h1 tag.
H1 tag means make it big make it bold, make it big. I want it to be a headline, so if you use h1 tags all over the place at the bottom of your website, your headline should be at the top, and then you should not have more headlines at the bottom of your page. It looks a little spammy and Google would see that as trying to manipulate the system. Internal 404 errors. The 404 error is when you go to a page on your website and there’s nothing there.
So Google wants to know that you tend to your content and weed out any errors and problems and wants to know you’re taking care of your website if you’re delivering 404 errors inside your own website, meaning the content is not there or the page doesn’t exist. It’s a signal that your users aren’t getting the information they asked for, and it shows that the site’s map being well maintained, keywords, stuff, content.
You see this a lot. There are all kinds of weird and wonderful rules about keyword, density and content. The truth is that none of these rules are proven in a very high keyword. Density is a flag for poorly written content, so we said home care, st. Louis home care, st. Louis hump, your st. Louis home care, st. Louis home care, st. Louis over and over again in an article for a who resided in st. Louis or had their business.
In st. Louis Google would see, okay, that’s keyword stuffing, it sounds dumb. Therefore, it is done. Therefore, it’s penalized, so footer links – and most of you don’t have to worry about this, but some web designers use furlings as a navigational aid. That’s fine and some try to manipulate PageRank by using the footer as a place to pass link juice. Unnaturally, that’s a long definition, but what it really means is that you can’t you know, get more.
You shouldn’t try to use your footer links to get more. You know pagerank missing, site map data, google uses the xml sitemap to parse your site structure and learn how to put together so inside of google analytics in inside. Something called you that used to be called webmaster tools, which is now called the search console. The search console will accept your site, xml sitemaps. When we develop a site, we always include a system that puts together your site, xml sitemaps, and then we submit those to webmaster tools or search console whatever you want to call it so that google has an easier time indexing.
All the pages of your site and you’re in Google understands higher sites put together, so we do that for our clients. Every web developer should do that for their clients, hidden links. All the links in your site should be visible and useful to others useful to users. Anything that’s hidden is considered suspicious, so if it doesn’t light up when you scroll over it, it’s not underlined it’s not in the blue color.
You know. If you can’t tell that it’s a link, then that could be a problem broken external links. If you don’t keep links up-to-date, Google will see me, don’t care about the user experience and they’re happy and are happy to peg visitors off to various 404 error pages. So if you are linking away from your site to other sites – and we see this a lot on your resources page, so everybody wants to have this long resources page that has all these links to the Alzheimer’s Association and to PDFs that you can download.
But nobody bothers to go back in and update those resource pages once they’re out there number one. You don’t need a resource page, because you are the resource for your clients and number two. If you don’t go in and update those pages from time to time, when we redo a website from somebody, we check those links and almost the time they haven’t looked at them since 2008, many of them are broken, and so we reconfigure those resources pages.
So they don’t have broken links so make sure you go to your resources pages any page where you might be having a PDF, download or other kinds of resources for seniors and make sure they all work scraped content. This is not something that happens in the home care industry so much, but it happens. Sometimes web site managers pull content from other sites in order to bulk up their own pages. But Google sees this as a pointless duplication, replace it with your own original content.
Instead, in other words, don’t go copy your services, page off of somebody else’s a services, page hidden content, less ethical, optimization tactics include disguising text on a page to manipulate the theme or keyword waiting, so, in other words, you’ve got hidden content in there. It’s behind the scenes and no one can see it Google’s on to that and it doesn’t make any difference anymore. Anchor text overuse okay, so once upon a time SEO, experts worked on linking certain keywords in order to reinforce their authority.
Since 2012 penguin update the overuse of anchor text linking is strongly discouraged. So in other words, if I had a link on, let’s say care, calm and my care comlink was home care st. Louis Missouri. But I used that text home care, st. Louis Missouri on every link back to my website that I had on other websites, then I would be penalized for the keyword phrase home care st. Louis Missouri. Instead, it should be things like read more learn about this.
Learn more visit our website, even though it doesn’t it’s not a keyword phrase, it’s a better thing to do to use something that is normal, as opposed to a keyword phrase so visit our website learn more read more. Those are much better from other websites to your website. Don’t all use the same keyword, phrase website, timing out or down. If a website goes down, everyone gets upset the visitor, the webmaster and the search engine.
If Google can’t find your site, you would rather d index it rather than keep sending visitors to a dead end. So if you leave it down and we’re not talking about an hour two hours or even eight hours, we’re talking about five days six days eight days, if your website is down it’ll get the indexed keyword domains while domain names aren’t that risky in themselves domain names With keywords – and them might be so if my website address instead of being Valerie’s home care service com, if it was home care, st.
Louis com, there is a chance that I could be penalized. So Google might see that as anchor text manipulation. If you do use an exact match domain make sure it has plenty of great content on it. Otherwise, Google will assume you’re trying to fool people into clicking on it. Overuse of meta keywords. We see this all the time behind the scenes on your website. There’s a place for every blog post in every page, where you can put keyword phrases.
We see people fill in with hundreds of different keyword, phrases or other SEO s, and if we take over that site, guess what we strip them all out and put the one or two that are relevant to that page meta keywords have been a topic for debate For some time they are way too easy to manipulate make sure you use normal no more than five per page slow speeds. If you’re slight, if your site is slow, it can be penalized because folks get irritated with it.
So does Google spun content spinning content is content, theft and really it just goes back to you duplicating content or just spinning some of the words to make them make it look like it. A hundred percent unique and really it can be easy to get fooled by this. If you hire writers – and you don’t know them or you haven’t been in this business like we have hiring writers, they can try, try to spin content and make it look a higher percent, unique and actually, in the end of the day, it’s cheap.
It doesn’t make sense, and it’s awful if you buy cheap content. If you buy content that was written by someone in another country, perhaps – and it can be a lot of spun content and grammatically incorrect comment spam, we see a lot of this on WordPress sites, especially we often will turn off commenting on websites, because, typically all that Ends up there is spam. You don’t get a lot of folks commenting on articles from a home care website, no matter how good they are.
It just doesn’t happen that often so we turn off those comments. You don’t get spam hacked content. If your site has been hacked, Google will quickly quickly remove it from the search engine act quickly to contain hacking, attempts and restore sites from backup. If the worst does happen, I’m going to show you a picture of that in just a second speedy link, building it’s natural to want your new site to rank quickly, but don’t overdo it lots of similar links pointing to the same place as a sign of automation.
Don’t artificially bump your link velocity make gradual changes over time. So when you all went out when you’re out there and let’s say your hometown of st. Louis Missouri and you’re a home care agency, you want to rank for home share st. Louis instantly. But we tell folks, if you do it right and you view it over time and you want something that will last plan on it taking six months to get to the first page of Google if your site’s not penalized okay.
So this is a picture of screenshot. Today, from google of a site that is not penalized and has not been hacked, this is a site that we developed. This is a site that has not been penalized and its care resolutions calm. So, if I put in up here, this is the important piece I put site and then a colon and then chair resolutions, calm and then a space. And then I put my keyword phrase home care. What I’m looking for is to see, because we know how important that keyword phrases to this client is to see if they show up for the keyword, phrase home care, and they do there’s all kinds of articles here that are showing up for the keyword phrase home Care, that’s perfect.
This site is not packed and not penalized for the keyword phrase home here. That’s awesome news. This site is penalized for the keyword phrase home care, so this is not a site that that l, tcp created or maintains. We have given the client much help and information as possible to eliminate this situation, so this is a site that we did not create. It happens to people all the time is not the fault of the site owner.
It is something that we take very seriously so when a client comes to us and we are hosting their site and maintaining it, we use a company called security suc. You are, I secure a dotnet and we use that company to do nightly backups of content and to also do every six hour malware scans. So when we do a web site when we host it and we’re responsible for it, we have the system set up as soon as that site goes live on the internet.
When you don’t have a system like that set up, and especially when you’re using WordPress. This is what can happen, and people may not notice it for months if the site hasn’t been taken down off the internet by Google. You may not even know that this has happened to you. So here’s what we did we put in the same exact keyword, phrases of site, colon reliant at home care, calm and then the keyword phrase home care, and this is what happened.
So the main thing that comes up is that this site may be hacked. Now. I can tell you that this site has been cleaned up and it is no longer hacked and there’s no problem with it at all. But this is the problem they’re having now the after effect, and that is that there were because it was hacked and it was left that way for probably a fairly good amount of time. All of these spam things come up, so we have here / that I t8 a PDF chapter 17.
None of this is their stuff. This is not their stuff that should be on their website. Now, if you were to put in site colon reliance at home care calm – and you were to put an elder care or senior your care, you would see the content from their website come up. But unfortunately, they’ve been penalized for the words home care which is so important to them, because that’s what they do so it’s going to take a while for them to get the site clean back up, but there’s no harm in going to it.
It just had it had an issue: that’s been cleaned up, but now it’s going to take a while for it to recover. You don’t ever want that to happen forum linking so if you’ve ever been on a forum. Maybe one that’s about caregiving or something like that. You can put your signature in there and your link to your website. You can do that if you want to do that, that’s fine, just don’t go, have pay somebody to go into a million forums and leave a stupid comment and then put your website address.
That is considered spam. Hiding your sponsors, how do you having a sponsor is not a bad thing, so, if, if you have a sponsor of your website, you need to make it plain and clear the people coming to your website. This website is sponsored by blah blah blah and say something about them have a whole page about them. If you want, but don’t try to hide it, it’s just something that is worth just letting people know you have a sponsor.
That’s fine, robots.Txt flaws. A txt file is inside of your website, and this is more for the web developers. Sometimes web developers will put excessive blocking in there, so you have to just make sure that Google is not blocked in any way shape or form, and this can also be hacked. So it’s something that just you know to keep an eye on links to suspicious site. So if you have, if there are suspicious sites out there and you link to them – and this goes back to buying links – that’s when it usually happens – you don’t want to do that landing pages, it’s okay to use a landing page, and that means I paged.
It’s sort of a stand-alone page on your website to use it for advertising, but you don’t want to just have a bunch of landing pages. So it’s okay to use one! If you’re doing a Facebook ad or a google adwords, and it’s ok to use landing pages. People do it all the time, but don’t expect that they will ever rank for anything and they’re used for for pay-per-click advertising most of the time over optimization.
Now this is one then I see a lot and we just talked about that. Google doesn’t like to say too much of a good thing and over optimization Council usually means you’ve gone a step too far, and your bid to obsessively out SEO everyone else in your industry. So, in other words, if the articles and everything on your websites, a home care home care, senior care, senior care, senior care elder care elegant over and over and over again like mentioning it once or twice in an article is fine but mentioning it 10 x, 20 Times that’s way over optimized, you don’t need to do that malicious backlinks! This is an interesting one.
I haven’t personally seen this, but I’m sure it exists even in the home care world. Your site never deserves this penalty, but it’s something you should know about. If you’re, really unlucky and unethical competitor, may try to shove your site down in the search engine ranks by getting it penalized, the most common cause is malicious backlink campaign. In other words, they go out there and they buy links but they’re not linking to their own site.
They link them all the bad links to your site to try and destroy you, which is horrible and seems like a lot of waste of time. For someone to do, they must really not like you. I haven’t seen that in home care industry a lot, but I know it does happen: poor mobile websites, boy. We have seen a lot of this if you have an older website or one that was built even just a couple of years ago. If it’s not mobile optimized, it will be penalized as of april 21st.
2015. If you do not have a mobile, responsive website, you are automatically in penalty and everybody uses mobile devices now iPads and laptops are not mobile devices, but you’re our phones, your iPad, your cut your any kind of tablet, even if it’s a tablet that looks like a Laptop those are mobile devices, so people will not see you if you do not have a mobile, optimized and mobile responsive website having few outbound links.
You know we talked about not linking away to other sites too much, but on the other hand you want to have a few links to other thing, so your resources page we’re coming back to that. If it’s up to date and if it’s in good shape, then it’s not a bad thing to have: it’s not really necessary, but it is not a bad thing to link away if your source, if you have a source of your article, it’s okay to put a Link in to the original writer of the content that you source – it’s okay, to do stuff, like that, if your domain has a bad reputation, I see this people don’t know that their domain has a bad reputation, but it does you may have purchased.
The domain. Has a bad history and you don’t even know it and that could cause you problems when you try to build a new website around it. Unfortunately, this is often a dead end street. You would be best cutting your losses and buying another domain. Rather than throwing more money at the problem. Don’t try to clean up a historical disaster. Buy a new website address using a content farm. This is, I guess, something that people did.
They would have a get content put I’ll make all these different websites out there and all those websites would have links back to their website those other websites they would develop or had shallow low-quality content. You never want to. No one calls them content farms anymore, but you definitely do not only get involved in that. Beware of quick fixes – and this is my last sort of advice on this – don’t employ anyone that claims to have a magical, foolproof technique that will help you get your site to the top of the search engines.
The only way to rank well is to put in the ground work overtime, and that is the honest to god. Truth. If you don’t put in the work, you will never come up in search engines, so every problem will will require a slightly different solution. But here are some things you can try number one, don’t panic. Even massive website suffer from penalties. Your website isn’t the be-all end-all of life and you can work around it.
Disavowed troublesome links. There is a disavowal tool in google, you can google it and you can find a link to it. You have to know what those links are that you want to disavow. So if you have a bunch of bad links that are pointing to your website, you think they’re, awful and spammy and either you did it an SEO provider. Did it you don’t know who did it or you just bought the domain name, and it has a lot of bad stuff going to it.
You can ask Google not to count trouble. Some links that are harming your websites. You can put in a disavowal follow their directions. You can upload a text document with all the links you want to disavow and Google will take care of that get some links removed. Well, disavow is good, it’s not perfect, put in some legwork and try to get some of the links taken down. So if you can contact the other web provider to have them take down links, that’s a great idea request reconsideration.
If your penalty with a manual there is our algorithmic penalties, meaning Google doesn’t tell you why you’re penalized you have to guess at it. Usually we can come down to two or three things. Sometimes it’s a complete mystery, but there are reasons you can usually figure out. Why someone’s penalize? If you do enough research, if it’s a manual penalty, then Google will let you know they will put something in your search, console to warn you or do something.
So if it’s a manual penalty, that’s a pretty big deal and you have to clean up your site and then request reconsideration and then wait it out. Sometimes it takes Google a wild act on your changes and disavow request, and then it could take awhile to recrawl. Your site, in a few cases, it’s better to abandon a site rather than to fight the Google penalty. Your domain has been tarnished, there’s a little you can do, but most penalties can be fixed with a little effort, some hard work and an ethical approach to rebuilding your site.
So that is my spiel for our HCR. Be members on how to know if your website has been penalized and how to clean it up? If you have any questions, this is valerie van Leuven. You can reach me at valerie at el tcep, calm or you can call 888 404 1513 or visit us on the web at LTC social marcom thanks everybody for joining our webinar today. I hope you have a great weekend and we’ll talk soon. Thanks, bye, you
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