Search Engine Lession

วันจันทร์ที่ 29 มกราคม พ.ศ. 2561

Chapter 9: Violations & search engine spam penalties

So far, we’ve discussed the positive signals that make up the Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors. But there are also some negative factors to avoid.

A word of reassurance: Very few people who believe they’ve spammed a search engine have actually done so. It’s hard to accidentally spam and search engines look at a variety of signals before deciding if someone deserves a harsh penalty.

That said, let’s talk about things not to do!

Vt: ‘Thin’ or ‘shallow’ content

Responding to a drumbeat of complaints about poor search results, Google rolled out its “Panda” update in February 2011. Panda targets what is described as “thin” or “shallow” content or content that is lacking in substance.

This domain-level penalty targets sites with a predominant amount of so-so content and essentially treats it similarly to the way it treats overt spam techniques.

Today, it’s no longer a question of whether the content is simply relevant, but also whether it is valuable to the user.

To learn more about this, see some of our articles in the category below:

Google: Panda Update

Vc: Cloaking

Let’s talk sophisticated hiding. How about rigging your site so that search engines are shown a completely different version from the one humans see?

That’s called cloaking. Search engines really don’t like it. It’s one of the worst things you could do. Heck, Google’s even banned itself for cloaking. Seriously.

While most people are unlikely to accidentally spam a search engine, the opposite is true when it comes to cloaking. That’s why there’s such a heavy penalty if you’re caught doing it. It’s a bait-and-switch, and it’s seen as a deliberate attempt to manipulate search results.

SEO: Cloaking and Doorway Pages

Vs: Keyword stuffing

It’s one of the oldest spam tactics on the books, yet it’s still being used, and the search engines still don’t like it. Search engines say to use words you want to be found for on your pages. OK, I’ll give them those words over and over again! How about 100 times. In a row? That work for you, Google?

Actually, no, it doesn’t. That’s “keyword stuffing,” and it could get you penalized.

How often is too often? There’s no correct answer here, but you’d really have to go to extremes to cause this penalty to kick in. It’s most likely to happen to non-SEOs who just don’t know better and might decide to paste a word many times in a row, typically at the bottom of a web page.

Vh: Hidden text

Once you decide to keyword stuff, your next thought will probably be “Why don’t I hide all this text that no human wants to see?” You might make the text white, so it blends with a page’s background. In doing so, you will have spammed a search engine.

Search engines don’t like anything hidden. They want to see everything that a user sees. Don’t hide text, whether by using styles, fonts, display:none or any other means that so a typical user can’t see it.

Vd: Piracy/DMCA takedowns

The “Pirate” update targeted sites infringing on copyright law. Under pressure from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Hollywood powerhouses and governments, Google began to penalize sites that received a large number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) “takedown” requests.

It’s unlikely that most sites will have to deal with these issues, but you should handle any DMCA takedown notifications that show up in your Google Search Console account.

Learn more about the Pirate update and piracy in the following categories:

Va: Ads/Top Heavy layout

Have you ever been on a site and found it hard to find the actual content amid a slew of ads? Where’s the beef!

That’s what the Page Layout algorithm was meant to address. Often referred to as Top Heavy, this penalty is reserved for sites that frustrate the user experience by placing an overabundance of ads before content. So don’t make your users search for the content.

Learn more about the Page Layout algorithm from the following category:

Google: Top Heavy Update

Intrusive interstitials are also an issue that Google has warned against and taken action over:

Vp: Paid links

Speaking of Google banning itself, it also banned Google Japan when that division was found to be buying links. For 11 months.

That’s longer than J.C. Penney was penalized (three months) in 2011. But J.C. Penney suffered another penalty after having its paid link purchase splashed across a giant New York Times article. So did several large online florists. And Overstock got hammered via a Wall Street Journal article.

The debate over whether Google should act so aggressively against those who buy and sell links has gone on for years. The bottom line is that to rank on Google, you have to follow Google’s rules — and the rules say no buying or selling links in a way that passes on search engine ranking credit.

If you choose to ignore Google’s rules, be prepared for little mercy if caught. And don’t believe programs that tell you their paid links are undetectable. They’re not, especially when so many of the cold-call ones are run by idiots.

As for Bing, officially, it doesn’t penalize for paid links, but it frowns on the practice.

The following category has posts with more information about paid links:

Link Building: Paid Links

Vl: Link spam

Tempted to run around and drop links on forums and blogs, all with highly optimized anchor text (like “louis vuitton handbags 2013”), with the help of automated software?

You suck.

You’re also not doing SEO, though sadly, all the people who hate the spam you leave behind get the impression that’s what SEO is about. So SEOs hate you too – with a passion.

If you do go ahead with it, most of the links won’t give you the credit you were thinking they would. On top of that, you can find yourself on the sharp end of a penalty.

This penalty has been given more weight in this version of the table based on the efforts Google has made in neutralizing and penalizing link spam and, in particular, the launch of the “Penguin” update.

If you’ve been caught dabbling on the dark side, or if a fly-by-night “SEO” company got your site in hot water, you can disavow those links on both Google and Bing in hopes of redemption and a clean start.

More info & redemption

To learn more about spam, you might check out this category: If you’re seeking redemption, here’s guidance from Google on how penalties are applied or removed and how to request reinclusion:

Get a reference copy of the periodic table

Congratulations! If you’ve been reading through this guide from the beginning, you’re done! We also have a reward for you.

Continue to the download page, and you can get a PDF version of the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors suitable for printing, framing or just future reference. You’ll also find images that you can embed on your site.

Best of luck with your SEO efforts!

Chapter 8: Social media & ranking in search results

Using links as an off-the-page ranking factor was a great leap forward for search engines. But over time, for a variety of reasons, links have lost some of their value. Some sites are stingy about linking out. Others block links to help fight spam. And links get bought and sold, making them less trustworthy.

Enter social media. If links were a way for people to “vote” in favor of sites, social media sharing represents a way for that voting behavior to continue. Social signals are emerging as potential ranking factors as search engines determine how to leverage our social interaction and behavior.

For the record, Google has repeatedly said that it’s not using the major social networks of Facebook and Twitter as a means to rank pages. However, conventional wisdom among many SEOs — and our own view — is that social is important as an indirect factor.

Content that gets socially shared can, in turn, pick up links or gain engagement, which are direct ranking factors. As a result, paying attention to social media is important to SEO success.

Sr: Social reputation

Just as search engines don’t count all links equally, they don’t view all social accounts as being the same. This makes sense, since anyone can create a new account on a social network. What’s to prevent someone from making 100 different accounts to manufacture fake buzz?

Nothing, really, other than the fact that fake accounts like these can often be easy to spot. They may only have a handful of “quality” friends in their network, and few might pass along material they share.

Ideally, you want to gain references from social accounts with good reputations. Having your own social presence that is well regarded is important. So participate on relevant social platforms in a real, authentic way, just as you would with your website, or with customers in an offline setting.

Ss: Social shares

Similar to links, getting quality social shares is ideal, but being shared widely on social networks is still helpful. Good things happen when more people see your site or brand.

Again, participation in social sharing sites is crucial. If you don’t have a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page or a Google+ Page you’re missing out. You’re not building up a network that can help spread (aka share) your content, site and brand.

For more information on social media and search results, see the categories below:

Chapter 7: Personalization & search engine rankings

Years ago, everyone saw exactly the same search results. Today, no one sees exactly the same search results, not on Google, not on Bing. Everyone gets a personalized experience to some degree, even in private browsing windows.

Of course, there’s still a lot of commonality. It’s not that everyone sees completely different results. Instead, everyone sees many of the same “generic” listings. But there will also be some listings appearing because of where someone is, who they know or how they surf the web.

Pc: Country

One of the easiest personalization ranking factors to understand is that people are shown results relevant to the country they’re in.

Someone in the US searching for “football” will get results about American football; someone in the UK will get results about the type of football that Americans would call soccer.

If your site isn’t deemed relevant to a particular country, then you’ve got less chance of showing up when country personalization happens. If you feel you should be relevant, then you’ll probably have to work on your international SEO.

The articles in the category below offer some international and multilingual tips:

Pl: Locality

Search engines don’t stop personalizing at the country level. They’ll tailor results to match the city or metropolitan area based on the user’s location.

As with country personalization, if you want to appear when someone gets city-specific results, you need to ensure your site is relevant to that city.

Check out the following links and categories for more locality information:

Ph: Personal history

What has someone been searching for and clicking on from their search results? What sites do they regularly visit?

This type of personal history is used to varying degrees and ways by both Google and Bing to influence search results. Unlike country or city personalization, there’s no easy way to try and make yourself more relevant.

Instead, it places more importance on first impressions and brand loyalty. When a user clicks on a “regular” search result, you want to ensure you’re presenting a great experience so they’ll come again. Over time, they may seek out your brand in search results, clicking on it even if it’s below other listings.

This behavior reinforces your site as one that they should be shown more frequently to that user. Even more so if they initiate a social gesture, such as a Like, +1 or Tweet that indicates a greater affinity for your site or brand.

Chapter 6: Link building & ranking In search engines

Links were the first major “Off-the-page” ranking factor used by search engines. Google wasn’t the first search engine to count links as “votes,” but it was the first search engine to rely heavily on link analysis as a way to improve relevancy.

Despite the chatter around other signals, links, along with content remain the most important external signal for Google’s search rankings. But as you’ll find, some links are more valuable than others.

Lq: Link quality

If you were sick, which would you trust more, the advice from five doctors or from 50 random people who offered their advice as you walked down the street?

Unless you’ve had a really bad experience with doctors, you’d probably trust the advice from the doctors. Even though you’re getting fewer opinions, you’re getting those opinions from experts. The quality of their opinions is better, so they carry more weight.

It works the same way with search engines. They’ll count all the links pointing at websites (except those blocked using nofollow or other methods), but they don’t count them all equally. They give more weight to the links that are considered to be of better quality.

What’s a quality link? It’s one of those “you’ll know it when you see it” types of things in many cases. But a link from any large, respectable site is going to be higher on the quality scale than a link you might get from commenting on a blog. In addition, links from those in your “neighborhood,” sites that are topically relevant to your site, may also count more.

Lt: Link text/anchor text

Amazon has millions of links pointing at it. Yet, it doesn’t rank for “boats.” It does rank for “books.” Why? Many of those links pointing at Amazon say the word “books” within the links, while relatively few say “boats,” since Amazon doesn’t sell boats.

The words within a link — the link text or “anchor text” — are seen by search engines as the way one website is describing another. It’s as if someone’s pointing at you in real life and saying “books” and declaring you an expert on that topic.

You often can’t control the words people use to link to you, so capitalize on your opportunities to influence anchor text, within reason.

Ln: Number of links

Plenty of sites have found that getting a whole lot of links can add up to SEO success. Even more so if you’re getting a lot of links from many different sites. All things being equal, 1,000 links from one site will mean far less than 1000 links from 1000 sites.

Long ago, the sheer number of links used to be far more important, but the number has decreased steadily in importance as search engines have learned how to better evaluate the quality of links.

Tactics such as viral linkbaiting campaigns, badges and widgets can all be effective at securing large numbers of links, and even search engine representatives have suggested these methods.

But in your quest for links, don’t fire up automated software and begin spamming blogs. That’s a bad thing, in many ways, as we’ll explore later in this guide.

Chapter 5: Trust, Authority & Search Rankings

If search engines can decide to trust links or social accounts, can they learn to trust websites? Absolutely. Many SEOs believe that site trust plays a big role in whether a site will succeed or fail from a search perspective.

Ta: Authority

Is your site an authority? Is it a widely recognized leader in its field, area, business or in some other way? That’s the goal.

No one knows exactly how search engines calculate authority and, in fact, there are probably multiple “authority” signals. The type of links your site receives (lots of quality or “neighborhood” links?) or social references (from respected accounts?) and engagement metrics (long clicks?) may all play a role in site authority. Of course, negative sentiment and reviews may hurt site authority.

Google itself has downplayed the idea that sites have much authority, though it does say pages do. See How Google measures the authority of web pages for more about this.

Te: Engagement

A quality site should produce meaningful interactions with users. Search engines may try to measure this interaction — engagement — in a variety of ways.

For example, how long do users stay on your page? Did they search, click through to your listing, but then immediately “bounce” back to the results to try something else? That “pogosticking” behavior can be measured by search engines and could be a sign that your content isn’t engaging.

Conversely, are people sending a relatively long time reviewing your content, in relation to similar content on other sites? That “time on site” metric or “long click” is another type of engagement that search engines can measure and use to assess the relative value of content.

Social gestures such as comments, shares and “likes” represent another way that engagement might be measured. We’ll cover these in greater detail in the Social section of this guide.

Search engines are typically cagey about the use of engagement metrics, much less the specifics of those metrics. However, we do believe engagement is measured and used to inform search results.

More information about engagement is available in the following category:

SEO: Engagement

Th: History

Since search engines are constantly visiting your website, they can get a sense of what’s “normal” or how you’ve behaved over time.

Are you suddenly linking out to what the search engines euphemistically call “bad neighborhoods?” Are you publishing content about a topic you haven’t typically covered? Such things might raise alarm bells.

Then again, sites do change, just as people do, and often for the better. Changes aren’t taken in isolation. Other factors are also assessed to determine if something worrisome has happened.

Similarly, a site with a history of violating guidelines and receiving multiple penalties may find it more difficult to work their way back to search prominence.

In the end, a good overall track record may help you. An older, more established site may find it can keep cruising along with search success, while a new site may have to “pay its dues,” so to speak, for weeks, months, or even longer to gain respect.

Chapter 4: HTML Code & Search Engine Success Factors

HTML is the underlying code used to create web pages. Search engines can pick up ranking signals from specific HTML elements. Below are some of the most important HTML elements to achieve SEO success.

Ht: HTML title tag

Imagine that you wrote 100 different books but gave them all the same exact title. How would anyone understand that they are all about different topics?

Imagine that you wrote 100 different books, and while they did have different titles, the titles weren’t very descriptive — maybe just a single word or two. Again, how would anyone know, at a glance, what the books were about?

HTML titles have always been and remain the most important HTML signal that search engines use to understand what a page is about. Bad titles on your pages are like having bad book titles in the examples above. In fact, if your HTML titles are deemed bad or not descriptive, Google changes them.

So think about what you hope each page will be found for, relying on the keyword research you’ve already performed. Then craft unique, descriptive titles for each of your pages. For more help about this, see our posts in the category below:

SEO: Titles and Descriptions

Hd: The meta description tag

The meta description tag, one of the oldest supported HTML elements, allows you to suggest how you’d like your pages to be described in search listings. If the HTML title is the equivalent of a book title, the meta description is like the blurb on the back describing the book.

SEO purists will argue that the meta description tag isn’t a “ranking factor” and that it doesn’t actually help your pages rank higher. Rather, it’s a “display factor,” something that helps how you look if you appear in the top results due to other factors.

Technically, that’s correct. And it’s one of the reasons we decided to call these “success” factors instead of ranking factors.

A meta description that contains the keywords searched for (in bold) may catch the user’s eye. A well-crafted meta description may help “sell” that result to the user. Both can result in additional clicks to your site. As such, it makes sense for the meta description tag to be counted as a success factor.

Be forewarned, having a meta description tag doesn’t guarantee that your description will actually get used. Search engines may create different descriptions based on what they believe is most relevant for a particular query. But having one increases the odds that what you prefer will appear. And it’s easy to do. So do it.

The following category takes a closer look at the meta description tag:

SEO: Titles and Descriptions

Hs: Structured data

What if you could tell search engines what your content was about in their own “language?” Behind the scenes, sites can use specific markup (code) that makes it easy for search engines to understand the details of the page content and structure.

The result of structured data often translates into what Google calls a “rich snippet,” a search listing that has extra bells and whistles that make it more attractive and useful to users. The most common rich snippet you’re likely to encounter is reviews/ratings, which usually includes eye-catching stars.

While the use of structured data may not be a direct ranking factor, it is clearly a success factor. All things being equal, a listing with a rich snippet is likely to get more clicks than one without.

Read more about structured data in the categories below:

Hh: Header tags

See the headline up at the top of this page? Behind the scenes, HTML code is used to make that a header tag. In this case, an H1 tag.

See the sub-headlines on the page? Those also use header tags. Each of them is the next “level” down, using H2 tags.

Header tags are a formal way to identify key sections of a web page. Search engines have long used them as clues to what a page is about. If the words you want to be found for are in header tags, you have a slightly increased chance of appearing in searches for those words.

Naturally, this knowledge has caused some people to go overboard. They’ll put entire paragraphs in header tags. That doesn’t help. Header tags are as much for making content easy to read for users as it is for search engines.

Header tags are useful when they reflect the logical structure (or outline) of a page. If you have a main headline, use an H1 tag. Relevant subheads should use an H2 tag. Use headers as they make sense, and they may reinforce other ranking factors.