How to Get Your Site Re-Evaluated by Google

First, The Background

One of my client’s has a very robust, enterprise level site. Thousands of pages, 50k plus inbound links, lots of original content, and a damn fine technical SEO structure (if I do say so myself). However, the client’s site was not showing up for any search queries in Google and only about 150 pages were indexed. Despite months of banging our head against the wall trying to figure out what was going on, we still weren’t getting any love from Google. We didn’t think that the site was being punished, we just thought that something was blocking the site from being crawled and indexed properly. We were getting crawled/cached regularly, but not increasing the number of indexed pages or the search rankings.

We spent months trouble shooting this site, making changes, increasing site efficiency, only to see our efforts get smacked-down by Google. This site was only getting about 3-5 hits a day from Google…not what you would call a successful campaign.

We finally came to the conclusion that we had to have gotten punished or flagged somewhere along the way. We thought that maybe the person who owned the domain before our client had conducted some spammy practices and gotten the site flagged…that wasn’t it. Then we started digging into all of the backlinks on the site. When we took over the project, there were approx. 35K backlinks pointing at the site, a majority of them were from a very large affiliate who was running ads for our client. As we dug into these backlinks and ads we noticed that they were not redirected through a 3rd party like Doubleclick or any other ad tracking software. We thought that was kind of elementary and glanced over it. When we inquired about all of these links we found out that all of them were implemented on the affiliate site and pointed at our client’s site in a 1-week timespan. AH-HA!!! This is when it hit us! Our client’s site went from a hundred or so links to over 30K in just under a week…all from the same domain.

It was obvious at that point that our site had gotten flagged by Google and was being left out of the results pages.

What to do Next??
We had to convince someone at Google to re-include our site in the SERPs. So, we logged in to our webmaster account (Google Webmaster Tools) and clicked on “Request Reconsideration” in the bottom right of the dashboard screen:

I read the guidelines for submitting a reconsideration request and crafted a couple of paragraphs about the situation and why our client’s site should not have been flagged. I kept in mind that a human will read this and I tried to appeal to this person logically and from a business perspective. Here’s the exact request that I submitted:

We purchased the www.ExampleSite.com domain back in Oct 2007. Within weeks of launching this domain we 301 redirected www.PreviousDomain.com (a Page Rank 5 site at the time) to www.ExampleSite.com. Despite having a large, content rich site we have been unable to establish any PageRank or rankings in Google; we can only conclude that we are being penalized for something. Is it possible that there was a penalty levied on the www.ExampleSite.com domain by the previous owner, which has carried over to our ownership?

Also, within weeks of launching the new site we struck an affiliate relationship with a site named www.AffiliateSite.com. We believe www.AffiliateSite.com, at that time, may have been using a very primitive ad serving system and listed all of our banner ads on its site, but all of those ads were not re-directed through some type of intermediary, they were all straight links to our site. Since www.AffiliateSite.com has nearly 100k pages, we instantly received tens of thousands of links pointing to our site. We realize this could have triggered the Google algorithm to penalize our site. So, we have changed tactics and are now using the proper redirects for all of our affiliate ads.

www.ExampleSite.com is an ethical, legitimate business. We are running a valid business model that people find valuable; we are not using any unethical tactics. We believe that we have been penalized for actions outside of our control and are requesting an investigation into our site and it’s ability to rank well in Google. Any info you can give would be appreciated. Please feel free to contact me:My Info, email address, phone number.

The Results
After I submitted my request I received the typical confirmation statement, something like “we get a lot of inquiries and it may take us a while to get back to you and there’s no guarantee of getting re-included…..blah, blah, blah”. I never received any response from Google about my request, nor did I get any follow up (it’s been over 2 months at this point).

However, within about 2 weeks of submitting the request, the number of indexed pages skyrocketed. After about 1 month of the request we saw our client’s organic traffic take on an exponential curve. Here’s the analytics graph from Mar 1 through Jun 6 for our client’s Google organic traffic:

As you can see, the request appears to have worked. We’re now realizing the traffic that we should have gotten several months ago.

The Lesson
- Always investigate what has been done to a site before you take on a new client. We spent months trying to figure out how to get this site ranked, when all we needed to do was look at what happened before we took on the account.
- When you submit a request, make sure you write a compelling case for your site and try to leave emotion out of it. This is business and the receiving entity on the other end is a person. Appeal to their logic, make your case, and cross your fingers.

Despite never receiving a formal response from Google, seeing our traffic take-off is good enough. It’s nice to know that our request for reconsideration was taken seriously and that we actually got results.

You’ve spent weeks getting your new website up and running. The content is good, the links work, and the site looks great. Now, how are you going to get people to visit? As far as online marketing goes, your two major options are Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and “organic” or “natural” search engine optimization (SEO). Each provides a unique list of advantages that can be leveraged to improve your site’s visibility and popularity on the web, depending on what stage your website is in.

The problem is that too often, PPC and organic SEO are viewed with an “either/or” mentality, rather than a cooperative one. In fact, most information regarding PPC and organic SEO on the web presents the techniques in opposing, comparative, or “versus” viewpoints.

According to some, choosing PPC as your online marketing platform means you must sacrifice the positives that organic SEO can bring (and vice versa). But why can’t you have your cake and eat it too? Well, if you play your cards (and plan your budget) right, you can. By implementing both PPC and organic SEO tactics to their online marketing campaigns, many website owners have found a winning combination.

Here are a few of the advantages that each online marketing technique can bring to the table:

PPC

• Instant Gratification- your ads appear instantly and bring traffic to site quickly
• Easy to Set-Up and Implement- getting a PPC campaign started takes a short amount of time and is a simple step-by-step process
• Easy to Track- PPC allows you to see how many clicks each keyword is receiving, where clicks are coming from, and how much each click is costing you

Organic SEO

• Provides Long Term Stability- investing in organic SEO ensures that your site will receive quality traffic over a longer period of time
• Its Free- unlike PPC, where you pay for each person who clicks on your ad, organic visitors cost you nothing
• Trusted More By Users- because organic listings are gathered and organized by search engines based on relevance, users are more likely to trust these listings over PPC advertisements.

By looking at the advantages that each technique provides, it is not difficult to see how using both can be beneficial to your site. The ease-of-use and immediate impact that a PPC campaign can provide is perfect for getting traffic to your site now. It can also act as a testing ground for keywords which can later be included in your organic SEO campaign.

While your PPC campaign is bringing your site instant traffic, you can also begin building the foundation of your organic SEO campaign. Although it takes time to build your site’s organic rankings, you will eventually be able to spend less on your PPC campaign for certain keywords that you are ranking for organically. The continuous stream of quality traffic that you can get through organic SEO will be well worth the wait.

Cloaking defined by Wikipedia

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users’ browser.

From Google’s FAQ section for webmasters you can also find the following statement:

To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or authors who engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings.

Webmasters have many different opinions when cloaking can be used and when it should not (you can read more cloaking threads at webmasters.com). In one particular instance I was looking at a website from a Fortune 100 company that I really liked (bcg.com), and it surprised me to find a cloaking technique in their H1 header text.

Are they really cloaking? Yes they are.  A person visiting the website only sees a logo on the top left corner, while the H1 tag is what the search engines index.

How are they doing it?: The company’s cloaking solution uses a simple css technique: they wrap a link around a div (named “logo”) which is then wrapped around an H1 tag.  Here is the html code:

<a href=”http://www.bcg.com” style=”cursor:hand”>
<div id=”logo”>
<h1><span>BCG - The Boston Consulting Group</span></h1>
</div>
</a>

Then they use CSS in order to hide the text behind the logo (so that only the picture logo displays to the user:

#logo {
width: 260px;
height: 111px;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
background: url(’/img/logo.gif’) top left no-repeat;
text-align: left;
float: left;
}

h1 span {
display: none;
}

Why not separately display the image logo and H1 tags?  Having a visible H1 tag on every page may not look aesthetically pleasant to the end user and some companies would prefer to show just a well recognized logo to their uses.  Cloaking H1 tags under an image logo provides a way to show the logo to the user while still have each page’s H1 tag include their brand name.

Are they alone? No.  Many other Fortune 100 companies (like Qualcomm, Quicken Loans, Ohio Health, Gore Tex, SAS) are also using this particular technique. I don’t believe Google will ban any website from cloaking their H1 tags with their image logo as long as it is clear that they just want to provide a better user experience and not distort search rankings.  In most cases all the companies that I’ve searched and found are just cloaking H1 tags with images for their brand name.

Recomendations on Cloaking Images: Because the sites in question are not already banned from Google’s search index, it’s probably the case that cloaking H1 tags with your brand image logo should be ok and won’t get your site banned.  In this case, it should be clear to Google engineers that you are not trying to change the message you give to people vs search engines,  but want to provide a better user experience.  They keyword here is “should”, so keep in mind that any form of cloaking in the long run is probably not going to be worth the effort - only the search engines know what is acceptable when it comes to what is considered “cloaking” and what is not - so it can become difficult to guess.

Also keep in mind that it’s usually not too difficult for a site to rank well for their brand name because normally there isn’t going to be a large number of competitors with the same company brand name out there.  Keeping a brand text in visible H1 tags, in the site’s title tags and or in backlink anchor text might be a better option instead of cloaking on any level.

If you haven’t already tried it, check out seodigger, a nice free tool that generates keyword ranking lookups for domains. In other words, if you browse to seodigger and type in a site URL like “http://www.bestrank.com” then you’ll get a whole distribution of the top keyword positions on Google for that domain. The tool also allows you to pull in and compare Google Adwords advertiser volume, competition volume, Wordtracker search volume and Overture search volume for each keyword position. Nice!

Why this tool is good:

• Quick and easy way to eye ball the top keywords a website ranks for, yours or your competition’s. You can see what’s working and what’s not for both you and your competition.
• Good way to generate keyword ideas by looking at a distribution of related keywords.
• Keyword rank and search volume comparisons allow you to see which keywords you should be targeting more aggressively in the organic search, because higher search volumes can pay off with a higher keyword rank.
• Offers a nice API so that you can pull in keyword data for your own applications.

Why this tool isn’t good:

• Doesn’t have data on all web sites. SEOdigger only knows about domains that people request results for. So if you punch in any random domain you might not get anything back - until they get around to compiling results on that domain per your original request.
• Keyword ranking data can sometimes be a few months old. They take their time to update results
• Limits your number of search queries for the non-paid version… but allows you to sign up to receive more queries per day.

Despite it’s drawbacks, seodigger is still good because it gives you at least a snap shot from a certain point in the past on a domain’s organic keyword distribution - and that’s worth a look.

One of the most important techniques that a web master can use to help make their site more search friendly is to properly implement 301 redirects. 301 redirects can be used to tell a search engine that page “A” is really supposed to resolve to page “B”, or we can even make it so that domain “A” should resolve to domain “B”, if needed.

But why should we care about page or domain redirection in the SEO world?

• Cuts down on duplicate content issues.
• Helps to transfers link juice into a concentrated areas on your site
• Helps get your pages indexed
• Helps your site Rank Better - can brings in more traffic

Here are some apache .htaccess and PHP examples of page 301 redirecting that I’ve used time and time again:

301 Redirct page A to page B

Redirect 301 /old.html http://yourdomain.com/new.html

You will also note the “/” before the old.html, which represents your root web directory. The “/” is necessary or your web server will not know where to find the old file. The command also requires you to provide the full URL for the new page.

Redirect page(s) from site A to the same page(s) on site B

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*olddomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$ [L,R=301]

This is a good way of transfering link juice from a domain name that you just bought to another existing domain you already own. The newly purchased site could have many links already built up over time and by properly 301 redirecting all page URLs to your existing site you are better able to take advantage of your purchase.

Note that the “.*” on the RewriteCond above which will catch any subdomain such as “www” and redirect that as well to the new domain.

Redirect all domains to a single domain

# Turn on apache mode re-write
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

# 301 redirect any domain that is not www.yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com
# EX: if olddomain.com is requested then it will be redirected to www.yourdomain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is good if you have more than one domain name pointing to the same web root directory and want to make sure that all requests to all domains get routed (301 redirected) to a single domain. You may run into this situation if you have a new domain that you want to use in place of your old one but want to transfer all the link juice from the old domain into the new one. Note, this solution doesn’t 301 redirect old page URL’s, it just redirects at the domain level.

non-www to www

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This 301 redirect can keep your site from tripping duplicate content filters by search engines. Imagine that you did not implement a 301 redirect from non-www to www, then suppose people were to link to a page on your site using non-www and www at the same time from different places… then search engines can get confused as to which URL to throw into their index and since they have 2 URL’s with the exact same content on your site they will see it as duplicate content - and that’s your fault, leading to the engines probably not trusting it = your page’s SERP rankings will drop.

www to non-www

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Redirect dynamic URL to static looking URL

RewriteRule ^product.php?id=(.*)&category=(.*)$ /$2/newpage.htm [L,R=301]

As an example, here we are redirecting http://www.yoursite.com/product.php?id=231&category=seo

to

http://www.yoursite.com/seo/newpage.htm

This kind of 301 redirection is pretty crucial for a lot of shopping cart type web applications that utilize variables in their URL strings. It’s better to leave out unnecessary information in the URL string that a search engine can’t use for indexing - such as an ID of your product or some other random variable specific to the internals of your site that would otherwise mean nothing to human searchers.

Redirect .htm pages to .php pages

RewriteEngine on
ReweiteBase /
RewriteRule (.*).htm$ /$.php

This code can also be used for different page extensions, just replace the htm with your old page extension and replace php with your new page extension.

Redirect all pages in a folder to a single URL

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^oldproduct(.*)$ /new-landing-page.php [L,R=301]

This could be good for example, if you once had a product that you no longer carry but you still want to transfer any link juice from those old pages into another single page somewhere in the local directory.

Redirect page A to page B using PHP

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

PHP is nice in that it is a server side language (executed before the HTML is returned the search engine) and you don’t need to mess with your .htaccess file or even have an apache server to 301 redirect using this method.

So that’s it for now. I’m sure there are many other methods or cases where you may want to 301 redirect pages… if so let me know and I’ll add them to this post. Happy 301-ing.

I recently consulted with an executive from a lead generation company here in San Diego about a problem they were having with their site not being properly indexed into the search engines. The site only had about 35 pages of their several hundred article and tip pages indexed for organic search. They even had pretty good internal site linking, from what he was telling me. This is what I found after reviewing and FTPing into their site:

• Because they recently switched domain names (within the last 6 months), they had successfully 301 redrected their old domain to their new one but were not 301 redirecting their domain.com to their www.domain.com, creating two indexed domains and potentially tripping duplicate content filters.
• The site was using Google’s Sitemaps application. Unfortunatley, the sitemaps.xml file being served up on their domain had an XML parsing error caused by some rogue “&” being placed into some of the URL strings listed in the XML file. The error was preventing the search engines from reading the file and indexing the corresponding pages! But here is the kicker: becuase the sitemaps.xml file was returning an error, Google decided not to index the rest of the site - even though running through a simple Xenu link check revealed good internal site linking to several hundred pages on the site. (as pictured below)
  In fact, there were about 35 properly formed XML page URL’s listed in the XML sitemap (about the same as listed on Google’s site: command) before the first “&” character was found in the file, stopping the indexing process dead in it’s tracks! This just goes to show that Google’s sitemap application supercedes a site’s internal linking structure and that you need to be very careful when dealing with sitemaps for indexing purposes.

I ran across a great little article (link to article below) today written by William Flaiz, the President of SEO over at Avenue A | Razorfish. William very succinctly, and intuitively, wrapped up the hottest trends for 2007 and explained their impact on search marketers. Social Media and Universal Search were huge in 2007 and will continue to grow in popularity, and use, through 2008.

William also touches on a point in his article that is one of my pet-peeves; the insistence by more and more companies to have a flash based website.  I understand that companies want the latest and greatest website and that they want their websites to stand-out from the competition.  But, if you don’t implement proper SEO planning into the DESIGN phase, then you will waste a lot of money on a site that cannot be indexed properly by the search engines.  It really could not be more simple…you have to plan properly, which means implementing an SEO expert early into the design phase to work along side the site designer.

Ok..enough of the rant.  Take a couple of minutes and check out William’s article titled: New Search Engine Trends, Old SEO Troubles in 2007.

Here’s to a great 2008!!!

A client of mine recently sent me the following snippet of text from his company’s SEO person named “Ron”:

I double check with Ron about what constitutes changes to our site that may cause issues with our SEO and this was his reply:

You can change whatever you want after we have established positions……EACH time major changes… i.e.new pages, new sections, structural changes, etc are made there is the possibility Google will throw you in the sandbox…we never know until you look at them if they are a risk…..minor content changes are USUALLY okay..as long as they are reSEO’d…all I can tell you is go ahead and do what you want…if you lose positions afterward…it is what it is….we will do our best to avoid that from happening….but no one in their right mind makes changes to a site that is just newly changed and being indexed…it becomes a spiral of failure….

When I read this I cringed and couldn’t believe this person is still in business:

• If I were the owner of the company, I’d ask “Ron” why cnn.com and msnbc.com rank very well for “news” on Google, they always seem to be “changing” their content!
• Google’s Sandbox is a set of filters that can apply to new sites in order to reduce web spam results. Old sites have a bit more trust and the filter doesn’t apply.  The site in question is over 3 years old.
• Making changes to a site is not bad, in fact, if you have poor rankings already then you have nothing to lose.
• Adding content or sections to a site can help a domain pull in more customers because more pages (tickets) are being placed into the search results (lottery).
• As long as your pages don’t look like spam, you will generally be ok. Don’t link out to other spammy web sites and don’t organize your pages to be unreadable by a human (don’t stuff keywords)

I was also told by my client that “Ron” advised his client company that changes to the site would be best made every “6 months”.

Do you see where this is going? Yes, we have what you might call an unethical SEO on our hands.

If I could, I would nail this dumbass right to the wall. I hate unethical practice and seemingly ignorant people. I myself have even been accused of being an unethical SEO (before I did any work) by a gullible, desperate person looking to find cheaper SEO labor.

Unfortunatley, and to the best of my knowledge, they continue to use “Ron’s” services while paying “Ron” a lot of money each month to “optimize” their company web site. I’d get a second opinion!

I was just checking analytics traffic for my special effects website and came across a startling number: today alone, as of 2:30pm, I’ve had 138 referral visits from lowcarbfriends.com. “What the hell?” I said to myself… I usually have a LOT less referral traffic to that site. It looks as if somebody liked the video I posted on the fat chick losing weight using adobe photoshop (I love that program by the way). I think from this particular incident I’ve learned a few things:

• Interesting/good ideas spread: not only did one person link to my blog site but there were other people commenting about that person’s link, creating more links to my site in the process.
• Obviously, referral traffic (if you can get it) is good. There are many other ways to gain referral traffic, just take a look at Digg or Del.icio.us
• “Filling the gaps” is key: If you want more referral traffic try playing on people’s interests or unfulfilled concerns. In this case, a weight loss support web site linked to my video about losing weight via photoshop. I wasn’t looking to get links from a weight loss site, but naturally people found what I posted and found it interesting. How about reading forums or blog comments and look to see what questions people pose… then fill the gaps with answers in the form of something newsworthy!

So all in all, I give referral traffic a big thumbs up. Thanks guys.

I recently was given the chance to perform technical optimize on an e-commerce site that dealt with selling vacation packages and cruises… Regardless of what they were selling it’s always good to follow a few simple rules for best optimization practices:

Use descriptive URLs

It’s best to have descriptive, static looking URLs on your site. For example:

http://www.mysite.com/cruises-1.html

looks a heck of a lot better than:

http://www.mysite.com/index.php?product_id=1&
category_id=22&cart_session_variable=somelongstrangetexthere

and it’s easier for your customers to remember when and if they decide to return to your site. Search engines also like simple, descriptive page names that relate to what your page is about.

E-commerce URL Plugins

If you’re using the popular zen-cart or oscommerce shopping carts you may want to give Magic SEO URL a whirl as this was a fairly simple install for both carts, it works very well and their support staff is responsive. The only downside is that the $89 plugin license works with just one site at a time and the author places a non-removable link at the bottom of your site’s index page.

Use hyphens, not underscores

Try to use hyphens “-” and not underscores “_” when using spaces to separate keywords within your page names.

Keep your pages closer to your root directory

A page at http://mysite.com/pageA.html can be seen as more important under certain circumstances than a page such as http://mysite.com/directory1/directory2/pageA.html

If you must use page variables…

If you absolutely must use dynamic looking URLs, all is not lost. Try to keep the number of page variables at two or less and nothing too long or funky looking. DO NOT use the term “id” in your variables. Google has been known to disregard pages using this variable identifier.