Website Penalty? Steps to Diagnose and Fix a Google Penalty
One of the most devastating things that can happen to a small business – especially a business that generates leads and business through the internet – is a Google penalty.
A Google Penalty is often difficult to diagnose and fix, especially if you have recently made multiple changes prior to the suspected website penalty, such as a complete redesign or if you are not completely aware of what your SEO company is doing. I’ll provide you with some practical advice on how to diagnose and fix a Google Penalty.
What Was Done Before Your Website Rankings Dropped?
I suggest you apply the scientific method of eliminating variables here as well as ask yourself some honest questions. Let’s presume your website previously ranked well in Google for select keyword searches, and now it doesn’t – ask yourself this:
Did your website really deserve to rank for those terms?
Have you, your web design firm or your SEO firm recently made changes to your website?
Where does your website rank for a Google search of mywebsite.com? How about site:mywebsite.com?
What do you see in your Google Webmaster Tools account?
Has your organic search traffic dropped on all search engines or just Google?
Do you buy or sell links (or both)?
Do you run an affiliate program?
Review and understand exactly what has been done to your website prior to the suspected Google penalty.
Google Penalty or Search Engine Algorithm Change?
Sometimes your website may lose it’s rankings because of an algorithm change. OK – sometimes Google makes a change to it’s algorithm and that can impact your website, the rules do change and that’s a good reason to diversify your small business’ marketing exposure, as well as hiring an SEO firm that stays on top of this activity. Sometimes this happens for other reasons, for example new websites that rely on rankings because of keywords in the url.
In my experience, sudden dramatic drops in small business website rankings are not algorithm changes, but it’s possible.
Fixing a Google Penalty
Here are some of the things I recommend you consider to diagnose and fix a Google penalty:
Check your website for Malware and Viruses (every directory, every file, every line of code – start with .htaccess and your web logs.
Look at your links – use Xenu or a similar product, a bad link profile can crush a website.
On page content – could you be keyword spamming? Using excessive anchor text? Loading your footer with keywords and links?
Consider a reconsideration request with Google as a last resort.
Resources for Fixing a Google Penalty
Having seen this with several clients, I understand the frustration and real revenue consequences that come from a penalized website. I recommend the follow websites as resources as well as for more tips on diagnosing and fixing a Google penalty:
A great flowchart and article on diagnosing a Google penalty by Rand Fishkin at seomoz.org
Marketing Practicality – my firm, that specializes in small and mid-sized business SEO. We understand the seriousness, urgency, responsiveness needed to restore your website rankings.
If you suspect you have experienced a website penalty, I recommend you either plan on spending a lot of time analyzing exactly what changes potentially triggered the change or hire a professional, qualified SEO company. In order to properly diagnose and fix a Google penalty it is critical to understand what caused it. More important is fixing the penalty, and restoring your business’ website traffic.
Here are some 5 email marketing tips to better interpret, test and analyze your email marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing Tip #1: Interpreting the Open Rate
After reviewing your email marketing metrics, you notice one person opened your email 30 times. You think, “Wow! What a hot prospect!”. Not so fast. If you sent HTML email and your recipient uses Outlook with the reading pane, your results can be skewed. If someone uses a reading pane and scrolls over your email using the up or down arrow keys, the email is opened in the reading pane. That counts as an open, even though the intent was nothing more than quickly scrolling past your email to get to a different email. So interpret this metric carefully.
Email Marketing Tip #2: Test, test, test!
If your email marketing list is large enough, you should segment and test your list every time you start an email marketing campaign. Common and useful things to test in your email marketing efforts include:
Subject line – this is critical
Email Offer or Call to Action
List Segmentation – including: geography, age of leads, previous buyers vs. prospects, etc.
Landing Page
Creative
Email Marketing Tip #3: Use Website Analytics
If an email generates a click to your website, then what? Use your Web Analytics program to understand what happens next. Depending on your call to action, your Analytics program can tie in the performance of your email marketing campaign to the actual result.
Email Marketing Tip #4: Send HTML and Text Versions
Most email marketing service providers allow you to send an HTML version as well as a text only version of your email. Nowadays, most people use HTML as their default – but many people intentionally or not, only accept text based emails. Make sure you use both.
Email Marketing Tip #5: Follow Up with Qualified Leads
Prospects that opened up your email message multiple times or clicked through to your website, identified themselves as interested. Your next step should be to follow up directly with that prospect.
Email Marketing Service Providers
There are many email marketing service providers out there. Two of the most commonly used are iContact and Constant Contact. My personal preference is iContact but I use both depending on the client. If you have a small business and are looking for a quality email marketing service provider, you be satisfied with either of those two.
Email Marketing Tips Wrap Up
These are some basic email marketing tips. Email marketing can be as sophisticated as you want. But most importantly, your email marketing efforts should continually improve and yield a better marketing ROI. Contact Marketing Practicality for expert email marketing help with your small business.
If you are a small business and looking for an affordable way to reach out to your prospects, email marketing is a great channel. Most email marketing service providers have built in analysis and reporting so you can view your email marketing metrics in an almost real-time environment. But do you fully understand what the reports are telling you? Here are some email marketing tips to help you better understand email marketing metrics.
Overview of Email Marketing Metrics
Most email marketing services provide the following common metrics:
Bounces – A bounced is mail didn’t get delivered to the intended recipient. This could be for a host of reasons – the email address was spelled incorrectly, the address no longer exists, the email was blocked by a firewall, etc.
Released (sent) – Released emails were sent and delivered to the recipient.
Unsubscribes – The email was delivered and the recipient unsubscribed from your email service – basically they have removed themselves from your email list.
Opens – The email was opened (more on this later)
Clicks – If there are links in your HTML email, any clicks are tracked.
Forwards – The recipient used your email marketing service provider’s forwarding feature to send your email on to another person.
Complaints or Spam – Complaints are registered when an email recipient reports your email as spam to their ISP (Internet Service Provider). It is usually done by clicking a Report Spam button in their email client.
The Most Important Email Marketing Metrics
The three most important email marketing metrics. When analyzing a campaign I initially focus on three key email marketing metrics:
Bounce Rate: the bounce rate is an indicator of the quality of your list. If you are emailing an in-house prospect list and you experience a high bounce rate, it’s time to perform some database hygiene and get your email addresses updated
Open Rate: The higher the better. If your email isn’t opened, your message is not conveyed. A good open rate is influenced by crafting a great subject line and how familiar the recipient is with your email address and company. It also indicates the relative level quality of your list; better prospects will yield a higher open rate. Interpreting the open rate can be tricky though, see my email marketing tips post.
Click Rate: These recipients are even more engaged than those who just opened your email and deserve special handling.
Email Marketing Metrics Wrap Up
Once you have a good grasp on email marketing metrics, you’ll be much better prepared to interpret the results of your email marketing campaign. Next step is to understand the basic nuances of email marketing which can be found under my 5 email marketing tips. Contact Marketing Practicality for expert email marketing help with your small business.
Google Caffeine, FeedBurner and Ultra Fast Google Indexing
After you create a new web page, do you wonder how how much time it will take to get in Google’s Index? It’s something I constantly check for my own website as well as for my clients’ websites. But over the past several months, I’ve noticed ultra fast Google indexing when you combine blog posts, Google Caffeine and FeedBurner.
And I mean ultra fast – my posts are indexed by Google in three minutes. The group at Hobo-Web also wrote about this phenomenon.
(Update) In this case – Google indexed the web page in two minutes:
Time to get in Google's Index
Formula for (Almost) Real Time Indexing
Here’s how I’m set up:
My blog is WordPress
The RSS feed is connected to FeedBurner (which pings Google Blog Search)
My FeedBurner is also using the Socialize feature to update the post on my Twitter account
Here’s what I have observed:
Blog post is submitted
Search for the targeted keyword(s) appears in SERPs (search engine results pages) almost instantly as in 3 minutes
Rankings bounce around for a few days before stabilizing
Google Caffeine, FeedBurner or QDF (Query Deserves Freshness)
Admittedly, this post raises more questions than it answers, but hopefully you will share your own observations and experiences.
The time to get in Google’s Index is likely tied in to the Google Caffeine infrastructure change, FeedBurner integration and the QDF or Query Deserves Freshness part of Google’s algorithm.
QDF – which is covered in more detail by SEOmoz here – deals with a part of Google’s algorithm which identifies certain topics which are deemed to require more frequent updating. So webpages covering topics which fall into this category get indexed more rapidly.
However, I believe Google Caffeine, FeedBurner and technology advancements have more to do with this than the QDF part of the algorithm.
Google Does Not Index all Web Pages at the Same Rate
No kidding right? But seriously, in the last two weeks, I’ve experienced three very different indexing situations.
Blog Post Indexing
When connected to FeedBurner, new posts on my WordPress blog are indexed within a few minutes.
When the blog posts are not connected to FeedBurner, it takes significantly longer.
Non-Blog Web Page Indexing
A client’s home page was revised – content, title and meta information only, not a redesign
12 days later – the changes are not reflected in the SERPs
Standard (not a blog) HTML webpage – not connected to FeedBurner or RSS
Bing picked up the change after about a week
This is a Page Rank 4 website that gets a respectable amount of website traffic
New Website
Created an e-commerce website for another client two weeks ago
Website was added to Google Webmaster Tools
Sitemap was submitted
Links were added from authoritative, established websites
Website is not indexed in Google, Yahoo or Bing after 2 weeks
This is what is referred to as “The Sandbox” effect
Shorten the Time to Get in Google’s Index
If you want to shorten the time to get get in Google’s index, hook up your blog to FeedBurner. Whether it’s the new Google Caffeine infrastructure, FeedBurner or a refinement to the QDF portion of Google’s algorithm is a technology question. If you want your blog posts to get immediate visibility – consider adding FeedBurner.
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Furl]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/furl.png)
![[Google]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[Propeller]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/propeller.png)
![[Reddit]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/reddit.png)
![[Sphere]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/sphere.png)
![[Sphinn]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/sphinn.png)
![[Squidoo]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/squidoo.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Twitter]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Email]](http://www.marketingpracticality.com/smallbusinessmarketing/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
