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Avoid Doorway Pages

/ Google, SEO practices, user experience / 1 Comment

Doorway pages will get you in trouble with Google.I thought the practice of creating doorway pages was a thing of the past. We’ve discouraged this practice since 2005 and  reported back in 2006 about doorway pages getting the German language websites for Ricoh and BMW completely banned from Google for six months. After that, I thought the practice had fallen into disuse. Apparently not.

Google just came out with a warning that they’re increasing the ranking penalty applied for this black hat SEO technique. Here’s what they wrote a few weeks go in the Google Webmaster Central Blog (emphasis is mine):

We have a long-standing view that doorway pages that are created solely for search engines can harm the quality of the user’s search experience.

For example, searchers might get a list of results that all go to the same site. So if a user clicks on one result, doesn’t like it, and then tries the next result in the search results page and is taken to that same site that they didn’t like, that’s a really frustrating experience.

Over time, we’ve seen sites try to maximize their “search footprint” without adding clear, unique value. These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof. To improve the quality of search results for our users, we’ll soon launch a ranking adjustment to better address these types of pages. Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.

Avoid Google’s doorway page slap-down.

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Google has a list of things you can check to assess your vulnerability to this new Google slap-down. I encourage you to check them out and make sure you’re safe from this newest Google algorithm change.

Share your experiences with local listings in the comments below.

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10 Ways to Over-Optimize Your Website

/ SEO practices, user experience / Leave a Comment

Don't over-optimize your website.
Google’s Penguin algorithm update

Penguin against over-optimization

The recent Penguin update to the Google ranking algorithm has lots of website owners, webmasters and SEOs concerned about”over-optimization”. Some forms of overly aggressive optimization have worked in the past to gain rankings that are undeserved. That’s one of the main things the Penguin algorithm was designed to correct. And I’d be surprised if Yahoo and Bing weren’t paying attention to over-optimization as well.

What is over-optimization?

But just what constitutes over-optimization? How do you know if you’ve over-optimized your site? Hannah Howard has outlined 10 ways you may have done that in a post at LonghornLeads.com.  She goes into more detail than I will here, but this may tell you pretty much all you need. Here’s the list:

  1. Keyword stuffing  — “If you’re looking for red widgets, you’ve come to the right red widget place because we’re the red widget experts. When it comes to red widgets …” You get the idea. Don’t do it.
  2. Hidden text  — This is an old technique I’m surprised to see some people still try to get away with: white text on a white background that’s just repeated keywords. It becomes visible only if you sweep your mouse over it. This will hurt you.
  3. Over-use of backlinks  — too many low value or worthless backlinks can hurt you. (Yes, you can have too many links, if they’re crappy links.) Your important link popularity is based on the number and quality of your backlinks.
  4. Weak links  — Too many reciprocal links above the fold on your content pages to help rankings of a partner or another website of yours is another red flag for the Penguin update.
  5. Forcing what should come naturally  — The practice of creating many mini-sites to feed links to your main site or creating large blog networks to drive links is one that’s become too obvious to do any good and Google will catch you.
  6. Content that’s too keyword-driven  — Content should be keyword driven to a point; you need to be aware of what keywords your visitors will be searching for. But focusing too much on that brings you close to keyword stuffing. If your text reads awkwardly because of your attempt to incorporate keywords, you’re over-optimizing.
  7. Too much keyword-rich anchor text on inbound links  — This is a relatively new one. Most people link to websites unthinkingly by making the anchor text (the clickable text in the link) simply be the name of the company or even the URL. For SEO, we hope to get keyword-rich links. But if too many of your inbound links have keywords in them, it doesn’t look natural, and is a symptom of link over-optimization. Many of those people are linking to you, not spontaneously because you have great content they want to share, but because you or someone on your behalf has asked them to. Google may de-value those links.
  8. Doorway pages  — This got some BMW and Ricoh sites completely banned from Google for more than six months a few years ago. People still try this technique, and the Penguin update will get them.
  9. Paid ads: too many or too prominent  — Yes, it’s legitimate for some kinds of websites to have some ads that generate revenue, but if you overdo it, or if the ads are irrelevant to what you’re discussing on a given page, that may earn you a Penguin update slap-down.
  10. Duplicate content  — I see this too often  —  a company that does, say housecleaning, creates a page for every town in their coverage area. And the content on all those pages is bound to be awfully similar. In some cases the content is identical except for the town name. Penguin will jump on that with both feet. Don’t do it.

Have you over-optimized your site?

Have you done any of these things? Most of us have, more or less, at one time or another. And over-optimizing your site is as bad as — or worse than — not optimizing it at all.  Take a good, honest look at your site with these transgressions in mind and fix any you may have inadvertently committed.

Want an unbiased look at your website? Rank Magic can help.

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JCPenney Slammed for Black Hat SEO Tricks

/ Google, links, SEO practices / 1 Comment

JC Penney penalized by GoogleLast month, the New York Times published an article about a search engine optimization investigation of  JCPenney. Puzzled by how well jcpenney.com did in organic search results for just about everything they sold, they asked an SEO expert to look into it a bit more. The investigation found that thousands of unrelated web sites (many that seemed to contain only links) were linking to the J.C. Penney web site. And most of those links had really descriptive anchor text (the clickable text of the links). It seemed that someone had arranged for all of those links in order to get better rankings in Google.

The New York Times logoThe Times presented their findings to Google. Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that the tactics violated the Google webmaster guidelines and soon the JCPenney web site was nowhere to found for the queries they had previously ranked number one for. Matt tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.

What happened to JC Penney after cheating with SEO tricks?

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JCPenney, when contacted by the Times, claimed they didn’t know anything about the links and promptly fired their SEO firm, SearchDex.

[Update: SearchDex subsequently either went out of business or changed their name.]

So where did JCPenney go wrong? Why did they do it? What have they lost? And how do they get it back? Read on to learn more and make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

 

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Rat Out Your Competitor

/ Google, SEO practices / 2 Comments

[January 2015 update below]
Jill Whalen, noted Boston SEO guru, was conducting an experiment to see if Google actually cares about how websites cheat to get to the top of their search results. Her guess is that they don’t, or they would have done something about it a long time ago. To test it, she suggested you rat out your competitor and watch what happens.

How to rat out your competitor to Google

You can participate in that experiment. If you have competitors who are beating you out in search engine results through spammy, deceptive, or unethical SEO practices, go to the website for Rat Out Your Competitor. Let them know what your competitor is doing, and they’ll look into it and report it directly to Google.

How to Rat Out Your Competitor to Google for Cheating

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[Thanks to Dean Voss for pointing out in the comments below that RatOutYourCompetitor.com is no longer what it once was. A better way currently is to rat out your competitor’s webspam directly to Google via their Webspam Reporting Tool.]

Rat out your competitor.[Update 2023] I’ve had the occasion to do this a few times in the intervening years and find that it does work, but sometimes only temporarily if the Google addresses the problem and then soon afterward the offender puts the spammy technique back in play.

For example, a competitor of one of our clients was keyword stuffing their company name in their Google Business Profile.  I alerted Google to that behavior and Google corrected it promptly, reverting their name back to their real name without the added keywords.  Unfortunately, that competitor soon noticed the change and changed it back.  We’ve gone around on this three or four times; each time Google fixed their company name, the offender put it back within a few weeks.  So this may take a little patience and repeated action before Google makes it permanent.

How about you?

Have you had success with this? Please let us know in the comments.

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Google Bans BMW … and Ricoh

/ Google, SEO companies / Leave a Comment

BMW Banned from GoogleHigh Google rankings can bring lots of business to a web site. As a result, it’s tempting to try to fiddle with the system. Some forms of search engine optimization are acceptable, but others aren’t. One “black hat” technique, the use of a so-called doorway page, has apparently thrown BMW’s German language web site out of Google’s results altogether. <See coverage in Forbes>

Google’s page rank method can be as lucrative as it is powerful, and it is tempting to try to fiddle with the system. Some forms search engine optimization are acceptable; others aren’t. One such approach–the use of a so-called doorway page–has apparently thrown BMW into reverse.

According to media reports, the word gebrauchtwagen or “used cars,” appeared 42 times on the doorway page of the carmaker’s German site. Doorway pages, for the uninitiated, are Web pages with little or no content that exist almost solely to redirect Web surfers elsewhere. Google’s search technology doesn’t like the pages and apparently slammed the door on BMW, dropping its page rank to 0.

Matt Cutts, the Google engineer famous for his blog discusses this incident along with the removal of a Ricoh web site for similar transgressions.

It appears that at least some of the JavaScript-redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, which is very encouraging, but given the number of pages that were doing JavaScript redirects, I expect that Google’s webspam team will need a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages. We’ll probably also need some assurances that such pages won’t reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded. I’m leaving comments turned off on this post; there are no doubt plenty of other search engine optimization areas to discuss this.