Greg Boser will be speaking on “Penalties and Ranking Drops” at SearchFest 2015 which will take place Friday, February 27, 2015 in Portland Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I got started making a living from the Web back in 1996 as a webmaster/designer for the SMB market. By 1998 I realized my design skills were not nearly as good as my emerging SEO skills, so I moved exclusively to the marketing side of things and I’ve been there ever since.
My current gig is President and Co-founder of Foundation Digital, which is a consultancy that specializes in developing data-driven earned and owned media strategies for enterprise-level clients.
2) Panda and Penguin have certainly gotten all the PR…but are there other types of penalties out there (besides deindexing) and how might one tell if they’ve been penalized outside of Penguin/Panda?
Yes, there are many flavors of penalties that produce similar results as Panda/Penguin that appear to be automated. The one we see the most has to do with over optimized anchor text. It tends to show up when a site that has an overall solid and trustworthy profile gets a little carless/aggressive with links to a handful of pages. When that happens, it’s not uncommon for the site to take a hit only for the specific phrases contained in the anchor text.
As far as determining if you’ve been hit by something automated that isn’t directly tied to Panda/Penguin, the first step is to determine whether or not what you see internally is in fact only happening to you. That’s where services like SearchMetrics become very helpful. They give you the ability to see how volatile your entire space has been, and that can help you figure out if you if what you are seeing is really a penalty or if you have simply been caught up in some sporadic algo tweaking that doesn’t make to any official algorithm release list like https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
If everything in your space is stable, and you are sure you don’t have any manual notifications, then the next step is really figuring out where specifically the traffic loss is coming from. If you have basic rank tracking in place (which you should) for your most obvious phrases, it’s pretty easy to spot whether or not you took a hit on a handful of specific phrases, or there was an overall demotion of all ranking content.
If you don’t have keyword tracking in place you will need to spend time looking at organic landing page reports in your analytics.
Once you’ve gone through that process, where to look further usually becomes pretty clear.
3) When I Google “Buy Viagra”, I can still seem some sites that have seem to have broken the rules to get onto page 1. Do you thinking “cheating” can always be a viable strategy or is the ability to trick Google about to vanish?
Well, if you listen to Google, the days of aggressive SEO are extremely numbered. But I’ve been listening to them say that for over 15 years, and yet, we’re still talking about it, so I’m not convinced. 🙂
That said, I will say that they have made significant strides in reducing the shelf-life of most forms of webspam. And that in turn has created some real separation when it comes to the profiles of spammers vs. non-spammers. In the not so distant past, it wasn’t uncommon to find fairly prominent brands engaging in tactics that Google frowned upon. But now that they tend to find and ding aggressive tactics quicker, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for a company who wants to build a strong brand that ultimately develops a large and loyal audience to go down that path.
For those types of companies, organic search is often the foundation that everything is built upon. And constantly getting smacked and having to start over just doesn’t get them where they want to go.
On the other hand, in highly profitable affiliate driven spaces like Viagra sales, there is zero need for long-term brand development simply because those who are looking to buy Viagra online don’t care. They do a search, click on the ranking site, and then click the buy button. And not once in that process do they ever think about not going through with the purchase because the domain name isn’t amazon.com.
In that kind of environment, continuing to invest in the exploitation of algorithmic holes makes perfect sense. And as long as the profit margins cover the costs involved with the process of constantly building and launching new short-term sites powered by “cheating” it will continue to exist because Google is much better at catching cheaters than they are at fixing how they cheat.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.