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SEO Penalties: What They Are, How to Recover From Them, and How to Avoid Them - Episode 02
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Grumpy SEO Guy
This is Grumpy SEO Guy, episode 2 Penalties. What they are, how to recover from them, and how to avoid them. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more About SEO than 90, 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because nobody understands how SEO penalties work. Don't worry, I'm going to explain them today. We're going to talk about three types of penalties. Well, actually four, because one of them is sort of a version of another type of penalty. We're going to talk about what they are, how to fix them, and how to prevent them from happening. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started. Everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical. And based on my experience, this podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. The penalties we're going to talk about today are keyword stuffing over optimization, spammy links, and negative SEO. And negative SEO is really just a version of spammy links, but it's a version that someone does to their competitors to get them a penalty. It's really bad, but. But it's something that you need to know about. And I'm going to share a few case studies, including the negative SEO penalty, because I want to explain what it looks like and how we eventually recovered from it. Now, there are many different kinds of penalties, and you may have heard of some of them, but there's a few main kinds that I already mentioned, and those are the ones that I want to talk about today. So the first kind of penalty that I want to talk about is referred to as a keyword stuffing penalty. Now, that might not be the official name of it, but that's the way I learned it. So that's what I'm going to call it. I'm going to describe it to you, and then you'll know what to look for. So keyword stuffing happens when you have your keywords too frequently on your website. So let's use the blue widgets example. Let's say your website is about blue widgets, and maybe you're selling blue widgets, you know, whatever. And if your content says something like this, blue widgets make great gifts. The best things about blue widgets is that if you get blue widgets and your friends get blue widgets, then you all have blue widgets. Blue widgets are so much fun. There are different types of blue widgets, right? You understand, like, nobody writes like that. That's awful. So anyways, that's considered keyword stuffing. So what that means is the search engines will see your website and they'll see the content on it, and they say, wait a minute, this person is trying to manipulate the rankings by putting their keyword in too frequently. Now what's funny is a long time ago that used to work, but then the search engines caught onto it and you can't do that anymore. So basically, before the algorithms were as complicated as they are today, the way that search engines determined relevancy was by how often a word appeared on a website. So if your website has the word blue widgets on it 800 times and somebody else's has it on there 0 times, your website is probably more about blue widgets than theirs is. But that can be manipulated. So the search engines kind of stop paying so much attention to it. So I think right now we should talk about how do you know if you even have a penalty? How do you know? Well, there's a couple ways you can know. Sometimes you might get a notification in your search console or whatever they're calling it now, and it might say manual action has been taken against your site. Okay. If you see that, you know you have a penalty. But usually they're not going to send you that kind of notification. You might not even get any notification at all. So how do you know if you have a penalty? Well, you should be tracking your website in a SERP tracker, right? So let's say you're tracking it, and let's say every day it checks the ranking of your website against your keywords. And good SERP trackers will plot a chart and you can view over time, you know, the site used to be here, and then it was here, and then it was here. It's a good way to show Your progression over time. And it's also a good way to justify your worth to clients. Anyways, let's say I'm just making this up, but let's say you were. Let's say you were position two. For a long time you were position two, and the next day you were position two, and the next day you were position two, and then you were position three, and then you were position two, and then you were number one, and then you were number two. That's pretty normal for a website that's in second position. You may bounce around a little bit, but then one day you check your position and you're in position 80, or maybe you're in position 90, or maybe you're in position 120. Right. You basically dropped off of the first page. Now, the first thing that you might think is maybe there was an algorithm update. And there could have been. But let's say for this example, there was no algorithm update. If you see something like that, you probably have a penalty. The next thing you have to do is find out what kind of penalty do you have. So let's keep talking about the keyword stuffing penalty. Check the content of your site. Does it read like what I just told you? Blue widgets make great gifs. Blue widgets are so much fun. And if you have a blue widget and I have a blue widget. Right. Like, don't. It shouldn't sound like that. Hopefully your content doesn't read like that. But there are tools you can use that will examine your content and they'll do what's called a frequency analysis, which basically tells you how often each keyword appears in terms of percentage. Now, different people have different ideas of how often words should appear on the site. Generally speaking, the general recommendations I think are like between 2 and 5%. 5% sounds kind of high to me. I would tell you to keep your keyword frequency at about 1.5%. Now. Is 2% okay? Yes. Is 2 1/2% okay? Yes. It's just fine. But less is more. Okay. If you remember from the first episode. Search engines don't even really pay attention to content when they're determining ranking. They do a little bit, but the algorithms are good enough to figure out what your content is about based on whatever you have on there. So you don't need to have your keyword a million times. The search engines can still figure it out. And if you remember the most important ranking signal comes from backlinks from authoritative websites with your keyword in the anchor text. That's how it's possible to rank a website for a term that isn't even on the website, which again proves that content doesn't even matter as far as ranking goes. So don't worry. Just remember, one and a half percent is just fine. It's not a problem. So what do you do if you determine you actually have this kind of penalty? Well, there's a few different ways to fix it, and I'm going to go over them. So if you have this kind of penalty, the first thing you should do is fix your content, obviously, take it down. Maybe it's at like 10%, right? 8%, 12%, I don't know. But the point is your keywords appear too much on your website. So reduce it, reduce it down to 1.5%. And the first thing that people might recommend is get your keywords down to 1.5% and then, you know, update them, obviously. I mean, update the pages and then just wait, just wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You know, a lot of penalty recovery is waiting and it's not always the best way to do it. But sometimes, you know, depending on what happened, if your penalty was so bad that you got kicked out of the results entirely, you can request reinclusion. You know, that sometimes takes forever, if it even works. But if waiting is not your style, there's one other thing you can do, and I'll talk more about this later, but you might just want to start over with a brand new domain. Sometimes penalties take forever to be fixed. You might be waiting six months now. You might get back to your original rank, you know, in a week or two or a month or a couple months. It's possible, but it might take a long time. And I would ask you, how do you feel about waiting six months? Would you wait six months for your website to get back? Because if you have a penalty, just because you clean up your content doesn't immediately mean the penalty goes away. It might, you really have no control over that. So just consider the fact that you might need to start over with a new website. Now, we're gonna talk more about that later because that's kind of a hassle, but it's also sometimes the fastest option. Last part of this penalty is how do you avoid it? Well, I'm gonna give you two tips. The first tip is gonna be obvious. The first tip is keep your keyword frequency about one and a half percent. If you do that, you won't encounter this penalty. Okay, that was easy. Now here's your second tip. A lot of the time People don't examine their menus. You might have a drop down menu that has your keywords in it. Your keywords in your menu might say something like, you know, blue widgets for sale, blue widget comparison, blue widget review, blue Widget Marketplace, I don't know, like whatever. But the point is, you got blue widgets over and over and over. And even though you don't see it because you don't think of that as being part of your content because it's not like in the blog post or whatever that you updated, but it is on the site and it does count. And not only is it going to affect that page, but it's going to affect every page on your site. So having menus with your keywords stuffed is a good way to get a penalty on your website. So don't do it. The second type of penalty that I want to talk about is called over optimization. Now again, this one has different names and there was an algorithm update years ago that really brought this one into force. Let me explain it to you because you've probably experienced it. You remember I was talking about anchor text. Anchor text, of course, being the strongest ranking signal, especially when your backlinks are from authoritative websites. Over optimization is when too many backlinks have the same anchor text. So let's say you're trying to rank for blue widgets. If 50% of your backlinks use the anchor text, blue widgets, that's over optimization. Now why is that the case? Well, if it were happening organically, if people just randomly were linking to your site because the content is so good, I don't think 50% of people would use blue widgets as their anchor text. It just wouldn't happen. People would say things like, look at these or here's a cool site. Or you can read more about that here. Now, some people would use blue widgets, of course, but not everybody, not 50% of them. So if you find you have a penalty and your content is okay, you might want to check your backlinks. There are various tools to do this. We're going to talk more about that later. But check your backlinks. If you have a ridiculously high percentage of something that's your keywords, you probably have an over optimization penalty. How do you fix it? This is a good question. Now there's a couple different options. Let me walk you through them. The first thing that everybody thinks of is, well, I'll just change the anchor text. Now if you control the websites, then yes, you can just go in there and change the anchor text. However, if you do that, that might seem a little bit manipulative as far as the search engines go. Why? Well, let's say you're a search engine and let's say you gave somebody an over optimization penalty. And then all of a sudden all of these websites are changing their anchor text. Do you think that would ever happen organically? I mean, sure, if other people link to you, you might identify these links and email them and say, hey, can you change this? You know, can you change this anchor text, please? And they might say yes, or they might ignore your email. But if all of them start changing, that looks a little bit suspicious. So if other people have linked to you and you want to email them and ask them to change it, yes, of course, go ahead and do that. If all of the links to your website are from your own websites, and there's definitely a right way and a wrong way to do this, and we're gonna talk in detail about this in the future. This is what I would recommend. Over time, don't do everything all at once. Because if you do everything all at once, that's gonna say, hey, look at me, I'm gaming the system, so don't do that. But what you need to do is, if it were me, I would pick about 60% of those links and I would remove them. I would remove them slowly. I don't know what amount of links you made to your website. Let's say, for example, you have 40 backlinks that are all using over optimized anchor text. I, I would take about 60 to 70% of those. Okay. And I would slowly remove them. Maybe one every couple of days. Okay. Once you remove these links, you don't change the anchor text. You remove them and you leave them. And you never link from that website to your website again. That's the first thing I would do. The second thing I would do is I would start building more backlinks using better anchor text. What does better anchor text mean? Well, your keywords should definitely be in some of your backlinks, but not a lot. Okay. The majority of your backlinks need to be things like click here or check out this site or just. We call those generics. They need to be generic things like you can learn more here or whatever. And some of them should be your URL, just whatever the URL of the website is or maybe the page. Some of them should be branded, you know, whatever the name of your company is. Now, I do want to make one little comment here because it's very common to have branding. And the search engines tend to really like branding. So if, and so I want to say this because I'm pretty sure that somebody is thinking this. They're thinking, well, what if your keywords are your branding? Okay, let me give you a little example. Twelve years ago, it was pretty common to put your keywords in your URL. So if you were selling blue widgets, you might get bluewidgets.com. okay, that's probably taken. You'd probably get blue-widgets.com right, whatever. Now, 12 years ago, just doing that would get you a little bit of a boost. It was helpful, it was relevancy. But spammers exploited it and it stopped working in your favor. So what if blue widgets was the name of your company but it wasn't your keywords? How can they tell the difference? Now, I don't know the answer to this question, but let me tell you what I presume. I would assume that in crawling millions of websites, it has probably used an algorithm to determine phrases that tend to occur together. And from those phrases, it can probably extrapolate keywords versus brands. So, for example, blue widgets is probably something that appears pretty often. Now, obviously, like, it might not, cause I'm just making that up. But you know, it could be whatever, whatever your keywords are that are a specific thing. It would seem like blue widgets and the search engines would see blue widgets and they would say, oh, this is specific keyword phrase. If it's a company name, like, I don't know. Have you ever noticed how a lot of companies these days, they're not even like actual words, they like make up words for their names. So if it's something like that or if it's like a brand new keyword that's like never been used before, it probably doesn't consider it as a keyword phrase and it probably considers it as a brand. Now I'm not sure if that's entirely how it works, but it's feasible that the search engines have two different collections of information and one of them is common keywords and another one is not common keywords. Or rather, you know, they probably only need one. And if it doesn't exist in that first set, then it's probably not considered a keyword. I'm not sure if I explained this well, you probably don't need to worry about it. The takeaway from this is don't buy a domain with your keywords as the domain because it's not a good idea to do that. So back to fixing this penalty. I told you what I would do if you control the links. I told you what I would do if you don't control the links. The other option you might want to think about is starting over with a new domain again, because once you fix all your backlinks. And I'm going to tell you a story about something similar in the next penalty, because I've had something similar to this happen before. And I'll tell you how we fixed it. So if you get an over optimization penalty, you got to remove a lot of the over optimized links and you got to replace them with better links that are generic over or the URL and that aren't over optimized. And again, this could take a long time. This could take months, it could take six months and maybe you still won't get results. Which is why I said you might need to start over with a new domain. How do you avoid it? Well, if you're controlling your links, don't over optimize. That's pretty easy. Now, I can't specifically give you the percentage to use because I don't know how many keywords you're targeting, but try not to go past 5% and I'm being conservative here. Okay, but try not to go past 5% per keyword. Now, I'm not talking about generic and I'm not talking about branding. I'm talking about specific keywords. So if you're selling blue widgets, don't have more than about 5% of your backlinks, use the anchor text. Blue widgets. Or that might say to the search engines, hey, we're manipulating the system. We're gaming the system. Of course, you can't control how other people link to you. So it's possible you can accidentally get over optimized, but it's not likely. 5% per keyword. Ish. Now here's a trick. So say you're trying to rank for blue widgets. You don't want more than 5% of your backlinks to use the anchor text blue widgets. But you can have it in the anchor text with other stuff. Like look at these blue widgets here for more information. And that entire thing is the anchor text. That's somewhat getting around the issue. But you know, look, less is more. Always be conservative because it is much, much easier to avoid a penalty than to recover from a penalty. Okay, you want to push it. You do 5%, you do 6%, you do 7%. Oh, hey guys, we're ranking even better. Let's do more. 8%, 9%. And then I'm not giving specific numbers. I'm not saying 9% is like the threshold, right? But you keep pushing it. You keep pushing it and then you get an over optimization penalty. Guess what? Now you're off of the first probably 10 pages for six months. Was it worth it? It wasn't worth it. That's how you avoid this penalty. Don't over optimize your anchor text. The third penalty that I want to talk about is the spammy link penalty. I'm going to give you a case study in this too, because this actually happened to me. But let me explain it first. So as you remember, I told you, the best ranking signal you can get is is authoritative backlinks with your keywords in the anchor text. But of course, not too much. You still want the authoritative links, but you don't want your anchor text over optimized. What are spammy links? A spammy website is basically the opposite of an authoritative website. So an authoritative website is a website that the search engines say this website is good and a link from this website is worth a lot. Now you might say, how can I even tell if a website is authoritative in the first place? There's different tools for that and we're going to talk about that later. Really, the only thing you need to know now is that spammy links from spammy websites are bad. A spammy website is literally the opposite of that. The search engines say this website is bad and we don't want to provide any value with its backlinks. Now there's something called a bad neighborhood. A bad neighborhood is a group of websites that are linking to each other that are considered spammy. When bad neighborhoods link to you, it can affect your website in a bad way. Let me give you an example of when this happened to me. I had a website in 2009 and this was a website I made. So I've studied martial arts a lot in my life. And I made a website about a very technical training set in kung fu. I don't want to give it away, but it was a very, a very niche thing in kung fu. And I knew a bit about it and there wasn't a lot of information about it. So I made a website and I had about 20 articles on it. They were all handwritten by me. They were pretty good. And this website was ranking. I was number two for quite a while and I was pretty happy. You know, I put adsense on the website and you know, I made some money. But let me Be honest. It was like a couple bucks a month from this website. It was just a little experiment. It was right when I was getting into working online. And, you know, I just wanted to do it and see what was possible with AdSense. Now, just a quick little comment about AdSense. I think anybody who says they make a lot of money on adsense is lying. I know there's a lot of people on forums that say, oh, I made $1,000 a week on AdSense. Yeah, I don't think so. That would take a lot of traffic. I know one guy who makes a lot of money. Like, I've actually met this guy in real life. I've seen his website and I've seen his figures, and this guy has a lot of visitors to his website. I believe he was getting 100,000 uniques per day. Okay? Most people online talking about how much they make on ad or trying to get you to purchase their AdSense courses, there are nowheres near that. So, anyway, I just made a website and I put AdSense on it. I made, like, a couple bucks a month from this website, okay? Now, it didn't get a lot of traffic because it was a pretty uncommon topic. But the point is, I was ranking number two. I was happy. Okay? One day, after being a number two for a very long time, my website dropped down to, like, page eight or something ridiculous like that. I was like, what happened? My content is good. And so I checked my backlinks, and if you remember, in 2009, it was very popular to make what's considered a content site. And what people would do is they would crawl the Internet and they would just copy articles from different websites, and then they would paste them on their own website with a link at the bottom to the website they copied it from to, like, link to the source or whatever. And so my website that was ranking number two suddenly had hundreds of backlinks from websites that had stolen my content and then linked back to me. And these websites were considered spam. So as soon as they were considered spam, any website that they linked to was considered spam. And so I realized this, and I said, I gotta get rid of these links. So at the time, there was something called a disavow tool. I think it's still around, actually. But let me tell you, I'm gonna explain this more. I've never had success with the disavow tool, and I've never talked to anybody who's actually had success with the disavow tool. Let me tell you what it's supposed to do. And then I'll tell you what I think it actually does. The Disavow tool is a way of sending to Google all the backlinks to your website that you don't want to be considered. So for example, if you get like, let's say you get some spammy backlinks. Ten, let's say you get, let's say you get 10 spammy backlinks. Now that's probably not enough to do anything, but just hypothetically, 10 spammy backlinks. And you'd select them, you'd paste them into this file and you'd send them to Google and you would say, devalue these links. Don't count them. I don't know what's going on with them. I don't want them to count towards my website. And then what's supposed to happen is they get removed from consideration and then your website goes back to where it was because it's no longer spam. Well, I tried that and it didn't work. It didn't work at all. And I waited six months and it didn't work. I disavowed all these links just like I was supposed to and nothing got changed. Now what I think the Disavow tool actually does is I think it's used by Google to help them locate bad neighborhoods. So it's possible that some of the websites that I put on there Google was not aware of, but now they are aware of them. I think it's used to help them find linking websites that are designed to manipulate the rankings. Low quality spammy linking websites, I think that's what it's for. At any rate, six months goes by and I'm pretty annoyed because why is my website not back at the top of page one? It's obviously good. It was at the top of page one for very long time. I disavowed all these spammy backlinks. So you know what I decided? I'm just gonna start over. I'm gonna buy a brand new domain, I'm gonna copy my website over. And that's what I did. Within two weeks, I was back on page one. Now I wasn't at the top of page one, but I was on page one. And it did take a while. It took a while to get back up. But I had to start over with a new domain. I'd followed all the rules, I disavowed everything and nothing happened. Six months, nothing happened. And my content was obviously good enough. Now I know I say that content doesn't matter. But you have to remember, this was a very uncommon industry. So there weren't even a lot of websites in the first place that really dealt with this. But my content was good enough for the search engines to look at it and say, okay, we understand the relevance of this website. We're going to put it on page one. In other words, if the disavow tool worked, then based on my content, which was exactly the same on both the old and the new website, I should have been back on page one. But I wasn't. So I made a new website. I copied everything over, back on page one in a couple weeks. And then, of course, I had to build smart backlinks to eventually get back up to the top. But it was very interesting that the disavow tool didn't work. It was very interesting, wasn't it? And again, I don't really trust anyone in the SEO industry, but I've never talked to anybody who's ever had success with it. So maybe you'll have success with it. I'm not saying don't use it. I'm just telling you I've never had success with it. So how do you fix spammy link penalty? Well, I don't know that you can pull the links because they're obviously on other people's website. So you probably have to start over with a new domain. Well, there's sort of one way you can avoid it, and that's by making sure that none of the links that you create are spammy, but you can't stop other people from doing it. Which brings me to my next topic, Negative SEO. Negative SEO is just a version of spammy backlinks. And I'm gonna tell you a story here because I had this happen to a client. Now, negative SEO is the kind of thing that the search engines will say, oh, it's not real. It's not possible for somebody else to do something that can harm your website. And then they'll say, well, it's pretty unlikely that someone else can do something that will harm your website. And then they'll say, it's not really possible. And then they'll say, well, you know, it's really. It's not very common. You know, look, it's possible. I've seen it happen. So let me tell you a story, and let me tell you how we fixed it. Eight years ago, I had a client in the fintech industry. Very competitive industry, very competitive keywords. We eventually got him to the top of page one, and he was doing very well. Everything was Going great. And then one day he messages me and he says, hey, I think I got negative SEO'd. And I was like, what do you mean? And he's like, well, I'm off of page one completely. And I confirmed he was in fact off of page one completely. And then when we looked at his backlinks, he had a whole bunch of backlinks for things like gay porn and Viagra and all of that stuff that has literally no relation whatsoever to FinTech. Now I'm talking thousands of backlinks. So what happened was a competitor went out, bought a bunch of spammy links on some low quality websites and directed them from the low quality websites to my client's website. It's the opposite of what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to get good quality links to your own website and help your own website. But what negative SEO does is, is it hurts another person's website. Don't do it. You're not supposed to do it. It's pretty mean. But I want you to be aware that it does occur every once in a while. So we tried disavowing them. Of course that didn't work and eventually what we had to do was start over with a brand new domain. And again, that takes a long time. You lose all your authority. Content was the same, everything was good. And eventually he got back up to the bottom of page one and we slowly worked our way up to the top of page one. But it was a huge mess and there was really a lack of clear cut ways for handling it because it's not like those people are gonna remove the links. And even if they did, it's not like that would probably resolve anything and disavow tool that didn't do anything. Send a list of thousands of spammy domains that didn't do anything. And I mean, if you think about it like fintech, I don't wanna give away his keywords or his website, but it was a fintech company. Like that has nothing to do with Viagra or anything. Like honestly. So you would think that the search engines would say, wait a minute, this is somebody messing with him. But no, it worked. It was a successful negative SEO project and it cost my client thousands of dollars because he was doing very well. And when you go from the top of page one to nowhere, you lose a lot of money. So let me just clarify because I think somebody might misinterpret that when you go from the top of page one to nowhere, you stop making money because nobody finds your website. So that's basically what happened. We had to start over with a new domain and it was a huge pain. And we eventually got him to the bottom of page one and we eventually got him back near the top of page one, but it was annoying. He was mad, I was irritated, and that's my story. So negative SEO is a real thing and there's really not a bunch you can do other than start over with a new domain. Now, hopefully in the future the search engines will enact measures to lessen the chance of negative SEO happening. But I don't know, it's still a thing, so we'll just leave it at that. So we've covered three types of penalties. We've talked about keyword stuffing and how to fix it and how to avoid it. We've talked about over optimization and how to fix it and how to avoid it. We've talked about spammy links, how to fix it, and how to avoid it, and we've talked about negative SEO for a little bit. So I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you have any questions about penalties or how to find them, or how to fix them, or how to prevent them. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. I hope this episode is helpful and if you have any questions or if there's anything that you want me to talk about on a future episode, you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.com and I'll talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next time when we talk about domain acquisition and how to build a portfolio of authoritative sites that you control and that you can use to rank your clients, websites, or your own sites. This will be your first look into how the SEO industry really works.