My business’s website recently fell victim to some of Google’s penalty measures. Thankfully, I was able to overcome them and just wanted to share my experiences. In the course of searching for answers and a remedy to the problem, I read some of the articles from SEOmoz (particularly this one by randfish), so I wanted to show some gratitude as well and hopefully help others out of this sort of predicament. Also, I really thought I was more doomed than it turned out I was. I followed the guidelines set by Google and followed the advice I found on some webmaster forums and sweat it out for a few weeks, and the problem was solved. I hope this provides a useful example to some of the other small (or large for that matter) business people out there.
(By the way, if you’re interested in any kind of look into the cleaned up site and/or code as you read through the process I went through, my business’s site is www.infidelityrecordings.com)
- First of all, always keep a log of changes you make to your website. It will be invaluable should you ever encounter a dramatic change in search engine results (whether or not they’re related to an actual “penalty”).
- In my case, the penalty was almost definitely due to some newly added bad links (irrelevant and/or “bad” sites that had 0 page rank, were link farms, etc). Do yourself a favor and avoid overlinking. Look for established sites in your industry and check their page ranking first.
- I also had some other questionable schemes on my site. They had seemingly been working for a couple of years without triggering any penalties, but they were potentially in conflict with Google’s webmaster guidelines, so I opted to remove all of these as well now that I was under the proverbial microscope. These other alluded to “schemes” were:
- An opening page that could have been deemed a deceptive “landing page,” although it was really intended to be just a streamlined index page. As I said, once it got to this point of penalty, I decided better safe than sorry and went back to a full informational index.
- Additional keyword text repetition in small font at the bottom of the index page
THE REMEDY:
- I removed all the items above. I removed my links page entirely, got rid of the extra keywords, and removed the landing page.
- I created an XML sitemap of the newly uploaded site (I used the sitemap generator from auditmypc.com, as I found it more user-friendly than google’s tool) and submitted the sitemap to Google through the webmaster tools section.
- That was really it. I had to wait about three weeks and two re-crawls by the GoogleBots, but then I was right back where I started…page one on all my important keywords…even without any links page.
