Google Updates

Web Spam

For those of us who regularly read blog posts regarding SEO, you will likely have read countless articles explaining how Google is working very hard to remove spam from its index.

For example, pages which use a lot of “keyword stuffing”, “spun content marketing”, or simply “content thin” pages. Google’s algorithm is actively looking to remove these pages from its index.

What exactly are the Google updates targeting?

High-quality SEO

So, there are no two ways SEO is hard work. It can take many months to see any results, which can mean sometimes dedicating hundreds of hours to try and improve a business’s organic search engine optimization.

So, it can take up a considerable amount of time. You need to have a lot of expertise to do SEO correctly, and you need to ensure that you’re following the best “white hat methods”, which are fully explained in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Needless to say, when anything is hard work, we mean millions of companies looking to take shortcuts and not put in the hard work that’s needed.

This can result in the business incurring an “algorithmic penalty” from Google, sometimes resulting in a massive loss of organic visitors to the company’s website.

That’s exactly what this update did to many websites; it analyzed pages, as well as blog posts, to look for low-quality content marketing and penalized those pages by either removing the page from Google’s index or simply lowering it to a position on Google where it’s likely to have little or no organic traffic because it might be repositioned onto page 10.

Do you have keyword-stuffed pages?

Suppose you’ve hired the wrong SEO company, a business that doesn’t know what it’s doing in that it’s not following white hat methods or Google’s Webmaster guidelines. In that case, the marketing company may have created low-quality pages.

For example, suppose your business sells a particular brand of handbags, and they hire a rubbish marketing company. In that case, the content writer might mention that handbag brand repeatedly throughout the article.

If the work reads unnaturally, in that it’s not offering helpful advice to the shopper, it keeps repeating the exact keywords, so the blog post reads like a broken record.

What we mean by that is the article has the keywords mentioned way too much, in an excessive way. The Google Over-Optimisation Penalty (Penguin Update) would likely have impacted that page or the entire website.

Spun content marketing

Many businesses, because they need to produce over 100 blog posts, sometimes make the wrong decision and use spun content marketing. We would not recommend using this technique; it’s a surefire way to damage your business’s search engine optimization and incur a Google penalty.

Excessive and over optimized anchor text

We would say that something your business should avoid is using unnecessary, over-optimized and excessive internal backlinks.

So, what do we mean by this?

Well, let’s say that you sell a product, and that item is, let’s say, cordless drills, yet instead of adding internal links, that would help the shopper to find the power tools that they would like to buy. Instead, the marketing company uses excessive over-optimized anchor text on a page, mentioning “cordless drills” in the anchor text excessively; this is likely to lead to over-optimization.

Instead of helping the shopper find the product they need, you will try to write the keywords that you want the SEO to improve for within the anchor text; however, this could lead to over-optimization issues and a Google penalty.

So, instead, make sure you write the anchor text in a “white hat” way and help shoppers find the right items they may like to purchase.

Would you like us to increase your business’s sales?

We have worked with many companies; some of these businesses are very well-known brands here in the U.K.

We have helped some of these businesses drastically increase the number of organic sales that they make each month. Whether you are completing SEO in 2023 or perhaps in 2030, what’s important is the focus on quality.

Always follow white hat methods of SEO.