Identifying a Google penalty and how we overcame it
Thursday, January 7th, 2010Many months back we began working with a client who had just launched a new website and wanted to get some quick SEO results. Their portal site was an excellent tool, well set up for link building, but the site was almost entirely a graphic interface - no content.
Don't mess with the Google!
In our initial meetings I quickly identified this as a problem, and said we needed to aadd some content if we were going to have a chance to begin ranking well for the variety of terms they wanted to go after. The initial design had the interface all existing above the fold, and they wanted to keep it that way. So they created a “slider” div that allowed the visitor to move images and see descriptive content about the pages. I thought this was a good solution, until the client decided that they didn’t want to make an obvious link to enable this functionality. Rather than adding a “read more” button or something of the like, they developed a nondescript button and shoved it into a corner of the page where no user would ever find it.
The first words out of my mouth were, “You guys are running a serious risk of getting penalized for hidden content.” The designer wouldn’t budge, and they designed the site their way and rolled it out. The site quickly attracted links and quickly achieved top rankings for all of their desired target keywords. A few weeks ago, I got an email reading, “Our rankings have tanked! Help!”
The odd thing was, some of the secondary keywords continued to rank well. Only 4 or 5 of the site’s most important keyword had dropped from first page rankings to anywhere from the third page, the tenth page or to completely out of the rankings. This didn’t make sense as mere jitter, or a huge surge in competitors. The basic metrics (both on site and off) had not changed significantly in the past week, and entire pages weren’t being penalized, only certain terms. This was far too unusual to have happened naturally, so it became fairly obvious this was a penalty aimed at this site’s most important keywords. With the holiday rush on, they had no time to lose to get this organic traffic (which coincidentally was their most profitable traffic) back up to speed.
I worked with them to craft the letter, and followed Google’s reconsideration guidelines. It went a little something like this:
Our business is based on creating value-added content by categorizing service providers with direct access to their service pages. A user comes to our site to determine what service provider will offer the bhe best service, and for immediate access to the pages for those providers. We are providing a service in this market that is similar to the service that Kayak.com provides to the airplane ticket market. As a result, our rank in Google’s search results is very important to us.
Prior to recent events, we were ranked quite highly for terms related to our service such as X, Y, and Z. We’ve worked closely with an SEO firm, Netvantage Marketing based locally in Michigan, to obtain these search results. Following their guidance, we’ve gone from a relative unknown to a first page result for many queries. However, recently we have fallen off the results altogether for a portion of search terms, while maintaining our ranking for others. An example search term is “X”. Our Google webmaster tools report from last week tell sus that our search rank for this term was #2, but now search results don’t show us anywhere within the first 200 results. Whereas, “A” is a term we have been #1 for and still are #1 today. We don’t even show up when searching our own brand name despite the fact that all of the results are sites that are directly related to our business. This recent drop in rankings appears to have occured on or around December 5th, 2009 and does not correspond with any substantial changes in the content of our site.
The drop in results seems to indicate that we are being penalized for some reason. Netvantage Marketing has recommended that we make some minor modifications to our site and that we request reconsideration from Google. After a thorough review of our site, our only content that could viewed as worthy of a penalty is our “more info” content on each page that is not immediately visible until the slider is advanced to that page. We use the slider to present a cool and unique way of viewing our content without overwhelming the user with too much content at once. We had used a button that lacked a description to point to the slider page containing the additional information, but we have since replace the button with the clickable words “more info.” We believe that we are being true to the guidelines set forth by Google regarding the quality of content, and all of our SEO content has been planned and reviewed by our SEO firm. Please consider that our business is a value-added concept, and as a result we expect to be found on searches for the terms mentioned above so that a user is presented with many options for purchasing a related service. We have no intent to deceive the user and we have never heard of any complaints regarding users coming to our site and feeling mislead. As such, we would like to request reconsideration.
Sincerely,
Joe Public
I know that a lot of people can accidentally run into this problem, so I thought it would be valuable to show what a successful identification and reconsideration request looks like. For more resources of value, check out the following:
