Oh no! Google is Punishing me...
Today I want to discuss about a topic that comes up form time to time within conversations I'm having and I wanted to shed a some light on how Google Ranks websites and how "weighting" works in regards to your website ranking in the Search Engines.
I'm going to answer a few common questions and clarify how Ranking Algorithms work and what Google does and doesn't do.
Let's Talk about Backlinks
A backlink is simply a link from another website to your website. This is referred to as a back link becuase ithe website is linking back to your site. An example of a backlink is when you link from an Article Directory to your website.
Backlinks are a hot topic because everywhere you look uninformed and inexperienced "Guru's" are telling you that you need back links, no wait, now you don't need back links, no wait....backlinks will kill your business...umm...
In other words, they have no idea what they are talking about...and have never known what they are talking about :)
There was a phase a few years ago when a backlink counted as a lot of weight and the more back links you had from relevant websites, the higher you would rank. Google quickly caught on to this hole in their ranking system and changed things up and many people lost their rankings. People all over the place were losing traffic, and their businesses were in jeopardy Of couse, all of the Guru products that pushed backlinks went under and the people promoting them changed their view yet again!!!
What Google changed however, is where the confusion comes in.
Here's the Deal:
A backlink that used to give your website some weight, now doesn't. A website is not getting black-listed, they are not being punished, and you are not getting substantial "negative" weight from those old backlinks. What is happening is that Google simply doesn't give weight to backlinks like they used to.
So, can a competitor screw up your website rankings up by sending a bunch of low quality backlinks to your site? The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT. Backlinks are weighted so low that someone is not going to be able to hurt you by buying a bunch of paid backlinks from a known spam source.
A ranking algorithm that gives significant weight to negative points doesn't make sense because, as mentioned above, someone could actually HURT your website. The reality is that Google simply doesn't give weight to backlinks like they used to.
Where a website may have ranked before because of the weighting backlinks provided, that isn't the case now. You are not being punished, you're simply not getting the weighting points.
Exact Match Domains (EMDs) - Do they still carry Weight?
An exact match domain is a domain that has your intended keywords within the domain name. For example if I wanted to target the phrase: "How to lose 100 pounds fast", I would buy the domain name: www.howtolose100poundsfast.com, .org .net, etc.
The answer is YES...Exact match domains do carry weight but not as much as they used to. Last year you could buy a domain, create a website with little to no supporting content, and get ranked at the top of Google for the phrase (if the competition wasn't too high). Google made an adjustment to how much weight Exact Match Domains carry.
There are people out there (misinformed self-acclaimed "experts") telling folks that Exact match domains can KILL your business. No freakin' way!
Relevancy to an audience is the #1 most important thing when choosing a domain, so anyone that tells you that you will be punished for using exact match domains is in the WRONG! The bottom line is that EMD's once held more weight, where they hold slightly less weight now when ranking in Google.
Google will never "punish" you, they simply wont' give you points for certain things. NO one can sabotage your rankings by sending backlinks to you...no one can sabotage your website rankings at all.
How do You Rank and Get AWESOME Traffic?
The simple answer is write helpful, original, and engaging content on your website. Google will rank you very quickly if you are publishing content regularly and are focusing on writing with the intention to inform and help people. The training here at Wealthy Affiliate will teach you this!
So, that's my take on "Google Punishing" websites.
Have you ever purchased backlinks? Do you feel your websites have lost traffic and been "Punished" by Google? How are your Exact Match Domains ranking?
I'd love to hear "your take" in the comments below :)
Carson
Recent Comments
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I found this to be very informative and I learned a lot from reading the Discussion as well. It sounds like the key here is great content, great content and more great content!
It is nice to finally get the keys to the kingdom if you know what I mean.
The key take-away here is to avoid the nonsense marketing strategies altogether and focus on writing excellent content. Thanks for clearing the air on this subject.
Carson, how do you feel about high quality back links like PR 5 and above. Part of my current "to do list" is to start building back links from people in my niche with big authority websites with high PR (not to mention from street articles as well). Would you still say these kind of back links have no weight?
Chris
Hey Chris,
Backlinks carry less and less weight each time Google updates it's algorithms. Spending time on geting a PR5 to link to your website is not going to do much for you. In my entire Internet marketing career, I have never tried to get a high PR site to link to our sites. We consistently rank #1 for keywords we go after. Rankings come from content, not backlinks.
The importance of a backlink when your site is new is to get your site crawled and found by Google. Linking from StreetArticles.com to your site will give an entrance for google to find your site, that's it! After you've got a couple articles pointing to your site you should focus entirely on the website content.
Article Marketing is becoming less and less about getting traffic because Google has changed and is now ranking websites with high quality content VERY quickly. Sometimes within hours of being created!
I'd forget about trying to get a PR5 backlink, and I'd not be concerned with pagerank at all.
Carson
Thanks Carson :). When you put it like that you start to realise the actual purpose of a backlink. I though it was worth more than that :).Every time you think you've come close to learning almost everything in this business there's always something new....ALWAYS lol.
For the whole year and a half I've been doing this I've never created an article off my site for eg in street articles. How important would you say it is to start doing off site SEO and publishing content in article directories?
Chris
The web changes all the time and it's why WA members are always up to date on what to do and what not to do. There are still products coming out from "well respected" (I say that in quotes), guru's who are pushing techniques that just do not work. Selling brand new "Shiny Object" products with little to no understanding of what they are teaching.
I guess what I'm saying is that we've got your back! ;)
Ha yeah that is true, the fact that us members are always in the loop is something I rave about when asked about or talking about WA, (online and off). It's one of my biggest promotional points.
And yeah absolutely Carson, that's always good to hear :D
Great writeup Carson. I was confused as to why I should put my time into articles instead of posts when it`s just a roundabout way to get keyword clicks anyways. How many articles would you say are enough before you start to focus completely on on-site content?
Since we're talking about ranking. How many blogs do you recommend adding per week to a new site? When does Google think a site is growing too fast?
I think you'll get differing opinions on frequency of posts, but several a week should suffice. Also remember that WordPress let's you schedule your posts so you can preload them and then schedule them into the future.
The more content you can add the better, so it really comes down to how much time you have. Two well written blogs per week is plenty. It will give Google some time to find the content and index it before you add more. Consistently adding two or more blog posts a week to your site will become an authority very quickly and you'll be out ranking the "monster" sites in no time.
I`m trying to do this full time from the get go. Are you saying it`s fine if I just pump out blog after blog? I`m talking 10 or so a day.
When google did this change I ended up with higher rankings cause I was writing good informative content thank you guys.
I recently was "punished" for changing titles that have already ranked. As I was informed: it seemed as if I am trying game Google which led to a complete the rank of my site.
Glad to say everything was back to normal in a month and a half! :) But do not do the same mistake i did folks! :)
When changing content, especially titles it can really confuse Google as to where you should be ranked. So, you were not punished, you lost the rankings because your TITLE was changed and Google had to re-index your pages and your site overall. You did not get negative ranking points by changing your titles, you may have lost some ranking, but you were not "punished".
When I refer to being punished I'm talking about going into the NEGATIVE with reagards to how your ranking points are calculated. You can certainly make changes that will negatively impact your rankings, but this is not google punishing you. It's simply that you are no longer going to rank for the keywords due to the content changing.
Any changes that you make to your site, especially the title, can really impact your site, but that is to be expected when content changes.
Hey Carson. I'm going to do my usual "cat amongst the pigeons" comment. Yes, Google claims it can and does "punish" sites, under the moniker of Webspam Content Violations: http://youtu.be/yFxNda5Z4eE There are some strategies that it does ignore, insofar that it doesn't weight in their favour as you've described above, but there are others that it does. I still meet people in chat occasionally that believe creating secondary sites to provide backlinks to their main sites, is a viable strategy, whereas Google specifically states that it's a Webspam Content Violation in that video and that it can "punish" you for it. Rich. x
In the June 2012 youtube video that you mentioned (which is still accurate), they're talking about duplicate content, bridge pages, and overall crappy websites that provide little to no value to the visitor. Google doesn't necessarily "punish" you if your website its self is crappy and offers zero value, they just don't give you any ranking power, and you'll never rank in the first place.
A low quality website is something that YOU can control if you are the website owner, unlike a backlink that a competitor uses to spam your site in attempt to drive your ranking down.
Carson
I trust the Google team about as much as I could throw them. The front end team is responsible for steering the sheep (herd), but the true brains and logic of the operation quietly are working behind the scenes.
If I were Google, I would be strategically cornering the gamers as well (which they do with their YT vids and their "tools" they roll out), but if I were creating something to rank in Google, I would be thinking not about the liaisons "pep talks", rather what the end user is wanting (the person searching in Google) and what the algorithm team is trying to work towards.
Glad to see that. I remember the company SEO Profiler dumping tons of spam, including porn, on my genealogy forum just to give people backlinks. They are probably losing a lot of business now and will have to resort to honest business practises to stay afloat. Great info and thanks. Carson.
Any company flogging backlinks for money is simply tricking people. Backlinks do little to nothing, but a business can always scam people so these companies will always be out there.
I like your confirmation that good content is important. I am a strong advocate of good, helpful content.
One thing I have always wondered about - and perhaps you can shed some light on it. For ease of reading I use bullet points and sometimes tables. Does this type of structure make it more difficult for website crawlers and decrease my rankings with Google?
As long as it's HTML based (which it is if your using the editor in WordPress), search engines can get to the text of those constructs. Where it has trouble is when you put Adobe Flash objects. But I've read that it's able to handle those easier now as well.
Hey Carson, what you said makes a lot of sense. But where does Google's Disavow tool fit into all this and why did they create it?
The thing about the Disavow tool is that it instantly tells Google that you're site should be looked into for "Gaming" the system and that it may be related to "Gaming". This tool has always caused me to question the impact of the tool.
The questions here are:
A) how could Google allow other people to sabotage a website?
B) how could a tool like the "Disavow" tool just clear things up?
Allowing negative weighting due to back-links because it could cause a frenzy of people screwing over other people and would open up an entire industry of "Screw over my competition". The impact of a low-quality back link cannot be much, if any. Moreover, the impact of any backlink is not much.
Let's say you have an awesome site, and someone decides that they don't like you ranking in the #1 position. So...they decide to go out and pay a few bucks to get 1000's of poor quality back links pointed to your site. If Google allowed these back links to negatively impact your rank, that #1 ranking would be gone instantly. This is a hole that simply shouldn't exist.
Google can't allow people to sabotage other people, it could be an ongoing situation where people constantly hammer another website with poor back links.
Also I just want to note that I've never heard of someone who lost rankings due to once getting ranked for poor quality back links, being able to get their rankings back by submitting their site to the Disavow tool.
So, the question remains if the disavow tool does anything at all. Google may not give you any points for a low-quality back link, but the real question is how can it harm you?
This brings up the point that backlinks carry little weight in comparison to what they used to, and they are one of 200 things they consider when ranking your site.
IF Google is giving some kind of negative weight it is marginal and it cannot account for much in terms of ranking. Negative weighting and "punishing" doesn't make sense because of the possibility of Gaming and being hurt by competitors. That said, with the Disavow tool and Google's vague documentation about backlinks, if a backlink can harm your website, then it's incremental and certainly not enough to bump you out of #1 spot.
Carson
+1 for perfect logic and 100% agree there should be hordes of crazies rushing about sabotaging rival sites if backlinks caused damage BUT - yup, had to be one, huh? - I've seen three Members whose ranking, earning sites have tanked completely in the last few months and the common factor has been that they'd all used an automated paid backlinking service and their sites lost their rankings within a couple of weeks of doing so. Now this may well just be coincidence, it's possible they would have tanked anyway or there's other factors involved. Is it maybe possible that Google utilises additional criteria to evaluate such backlinking? Any thoughts?! Rich. x
There could very well be some many factors involved with how backlinks affect rank, but every argument will come back to "who initiated the backlinks" and "are they valid"?
With regards to people's sites tanking in the ranks because they used to buy backlinks could very well be the situation where Google has found something else on the site that is affecting the ranks. When Google Panda and Penguin 1.0 and 2.0 rolled out, backlinks were made much less influential and from everything I'm seeing online they carry little weight.
Let's consider a link from a GREAT website with AWESOME content. What happens if someone were to post a bunch of spam within comments. Would any links from this website now have "Poor quality" backlinks? Google loves fresh content so pages change all the time, so with this the quality fluctuates. In this argument Google may consider a backlink great one day, and poor the next.. How could a webmaster possibly keep up with backlinks from fluctuating content from active sites?
So, we find ourselves back at the original argument that backlinks carry little weight. If backlinks carried as much weight as they used to, the webmaster who has incoming backlinks is not in any control whatsoever, and this is NOT how google works. Webmasters (the owners) have ALL the control and part of patching Google's Algorithms is to make it so that no one else can affect your hard work.
Thanks Carson, really appreciate you taking the time out to answer at length. It's important to me, because I've been assuming that the paid backlinking services are what's caused their problem, and it therefore seems that's hugely unlikely and I should have looked further. I hate misadvising people, so I've been truly interested to learn more. Thanks again! Rich. x
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I had purchased backlinks on a website i scrapped three days ago. It`s still up and running(because why not?) and I notice it`s actually getting a couple search hits a day now. So odd.
This site is probably ranking because of other reasons than the backlinks. Those purchased backlinks most likely have little to nothing to do with the traffic you're getting. If a site has traffic, no need to pull it down :)
Crazy. I was told to scrap it and start fresh when I talked about it over in the first certification course. When I say purchased I`m not talking about singlular backlinks from a high pr site; I mean an automated link building service. I counted 300 backlinks directly to my site and more going into my wordpress.com blog about the site.