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View Full Version : Google penalties Fact or fiction



lav
08-22-2010, 08:43 PM
Ive been searching for info on how google penalises sites or pages in particular. There are so many mixed views out there that it really comes down to someone having to make a guess at it really. Just want to get some views from you guys here.....

Will a site be penalised for unnatural growth? eg if someone adds 5 or 6 blog posts a week in the first couple of months of the sites life.How fast will google allow a site to grow without penalising it?

Will a site be penalised for building backlinks too quickly? eg say a link to a post gets retweeted very often or there are many links from forums etc within the first couple of days (or weeks) of making the blog post.

Will google penalise just the page or will it penalise the whole site?

If a page or site is penalised how long until google will lift the penalty or is it gone forever?

vangogh
08-23-2010, 12:22 AM
While I do think Google imposes penalties at times, I don't think they do this often. I doubt Google would penalize a site for publishing 5 or 6 posts a week. That's hardly a lot of posts at any times. Think about a brand new news blog, which could easily post a dozen times a day from day one. Same thing with backlinks. I doubt there's a penalty for gaining too many backlinks quickly. That's often very natural if a post is well done in some way and spreads quickly.

What I think happens with many people claiming penalties is their page or site didn't do as well as they thought and instead of thinking they might not have done things as well as they thought, they assume it must be a penalty. Blame the other guy.

What seems reasonable to happen with getting many links quickly is that those links aren't counted as you would expect. Since spam sites might also generate links quickly, Google might flag the page or site and withhold some trust for a time until a later point when other signals point to the page and site being legit. That wouldn't be a penalty as much as a delay in benefits.

As far as both page and site being penalized, I think there are times Google would penalize a page and when it would penalize a site. I'm more inclined to think if Google thinks a penalty is warranted it goes toward the whole site, since I don't think they penalize lightly. Again what most people think are penalties are likely more the page or site not ranking as well as the person thought. However I do believe there are times when penalties come into play. Just not as often as you see mentioned.

If a site is truly penalized then fixing whatever caused the penalty is usually enough to remove it, unless the penalty led to the site being removed from the index, in which case you'd likely need to submit for re-inclusion (after fixing what caused the penalty) and hoping and waiting on Google to accept.

lav
08-23-2010, 10:46 PM
Think about a brand new news blog, which could easily post a dozen times a day from day one.I did actually think of that, and to see it suggested across a lot of forums that "unnatural growth" will be penalized was a little confusing. I have about 15 blog posts ready to go and have been hesitant to publish them too quickly because of the things I have read.

I also have some concerns over "duplicate content". Some of the product pages which I am about to publish have the same content other than a different heading and different image, it seems silly to have to reword every page considering they are the same product but with a slight variation.

vangogh
08-23-2010, 11:23 PM
Keep in mind that much of what you see about seo in forums has no basis in fact. People argue over everything as I'm sure you know. When I read through one thread and found two people arguing with each other though they were actually taking the same stance I stopped trying to learn seo from forums. Except this one of course :)

You might want to hold some of the posts back though for a different reason. If the goal is to run a consistent blog and you don't post everything at once you'll have posts at the ready for a few weeks. Why not publish 5 posts right away and then save the other 10 for 1 a week. You'll be set for a little over 2 months.

The product pages do sound like duplicate content. Again though it's not a penalty for having duplicate content. Basically you're leaving it up to the search engines to decide which one to rank and they may not choose the one you want. You probably want both to rank, but that likely won't happen. Changing images and page headings is good. Make sure each page has a unique page title and as silly as it seems try to rewrite some of each page. You don't have to rewrite everything. Some content can be the same, but try to make the pages as unique as you can.

KristineS
08-25-2010, 05:20 PM
I've never heard of Google penalizing a site for growing too fast. I don't see why they would. Likewise I don't believe a site would get penalized if it were mentioned on Facebook or Twitter too much. That would kind of delete the purpose of social media.

Where Google will penalize is if you are purchasing backlinks. Link farms were a real problem a while back and Google cracked down on them and sites that were linked to them.

vangogh
08-26-2010, 03:13 AM
Kristine the thought comes from the idea that spammers might put a lot of content quickly. Since a lot of spam sites use auto generated content, it's possible they could create hundred of thousands of pages in a matter of days or weeks. Legitimate sites couldn't realistically do that. So if it looks like spam and smells like spam and walks like spam…

It's conceivable that Google could look at a signal like content growth to determine is a site is legit or spam.

Same basic idea with building links into a site. Again spammers are auto generating links say by spamming a forum. One signal I use in determining if a new member is a spammer is a simple Google search. When I see a member not only joined here, but 1,000 other forums in the spam of a week, it's pretty obvious they were using automated tools to join all those forums most likely for the purpose of generating links.

It's more natural for most sites to gain links at a slower pace and so Google might also look at link growth as a signal. However there are plenty of times where a site would generate a lot of links quickly that's natural. A post goes viral and everyone links to it. If you break some major news story, everyone is going to link to you for a few days before moving on to the next news story. A quick surplus of links probably isn't the best signal.

Getting back to content growth, in Jason's case we're talking a small handful of pages. That wouldn't set off any signals. It's rather common for sites to launch with many more than 20 or so pages and add new ones at a rate of 5 or 6 a week.

KristineS
08-26-2010, 05:34 PM
O.k., I see what you mean now. So Google might have some level they've set that they think is realistic growth for a site, and if your site suddenly mushrooms far beyond that they might see it as a problem.

That makes sense.

vangogh
08-26-2010, 10:49 PM
Yep and just to be clear I'm not suggesting any of the above is actually happening. It's a theory that's been put forth by some. It seems logical that Google would track the rate of growth of both content and links. As a general rule if Google can track something they probably are. However I think people think way too hard about this. Unless you're creating content or links in an automated way I can't imagine how you could create enough of either quickly enough to set off a warning flag.

lav
09-01-2010, 09:09 AM
Basically you're leaving it up to the search engines to decide which one to rank and they may not choose the one you want.this brings me to another one that not many can agree on. Im thinking of trying the domain mirror plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/domain-mirror/) so that I have different domain names point to one installation and show different URL paths and a different blog title for each domain. :) but Im worried about duplicate content. There are so many different opinions on the subject

Im guessing from what some others have said and by your statement above VG that google will just pick the pages which it feels is the best fit.

heres my dilemma.... I have mysite.com as my primary domain with a series of blog posts and pages about a particular product called "coolproduct". I buy the domain name coolproduct.com and point it to my site because I want to be able to link externally to my blog posts at http//coolproduct.com/about-coolproduct/coolproduct-post instead of mysite.com/about-coolproduct/coolproduct-post .....will google see this as duplicate content? I would have thought that if someone now searches for "coolproduct" google would choose http//product.com/about-product/product-post as opposed to mysite.com/about-product/product-post

Im worried there may be other implications that this may bring to the rest of my site that I havent thought of. eg the rest of my site gets ranked as coolproduct.com instead of mysite.com lol

vangogh
09-01-2010, 05:10 PM
I didn't look through the plugin in detail, but assuming the other domains use permanent (301) redirection then there won't be duplicate content issues. Google and the other engines will see the destination as the domain. So if domain-1.com points to domain.com and domain-2.com points to domain.com, the search engines will only index domain.com (assuming the redirection is set up properly)

You use a plugin like that more for type in traffic or advertising. If you think people might type in the domain name directly it makes sense. If you want to advertise and use the different domains to track which advertising works best it makes sense.

Google will see duplicate content if both pages have the same content. That could be pages on a single domain or multiple domains.

Is the idea you want to attract people to affiliate links for coolproduct or is coolproduct a product you sell? In either case I'd pick a domain the main one or coolproduct.com and use that domain for selling the product or getting people through the affiliate link. You can use the other domain to link to this one, but make sure it does so with different content. So if you're selling on coolproduct.com use mysite.com to write a review.

billbenson
09-01-2010, 05:21 PM
If you do a 301, although someone typed in cooldomain, the domain that is being pointed at will be in the url. I'm not sure I see the point unless perhaps you are using Adwords or something else to get the user to type cooldomain? I don't think cooldomain will show up in the natural serps with a 301.

vangogh
09-01-2010, 08:42 PM
The point is for type in traffic or to keep someone else from owning the domain and competing. The idea wasn't to have the two domains both show up in search results. I think you're better placing things on one domain. It's less marketing work to promote one site and it's a quicker road to building the authority site search engines, at least Google seems to prefer.

The benefit of keywords in a domain isn't a super benefit except for an exact match search of the domain. If you own it, you keep the competition from getting that benefit and you do the usual to rank your pages for the keywords of your choice.