This is a guest post written by Andy Drinkwater at iNet SEO (this is Andy on Google+)
Roll back the clock to April 24th 2012. There had been much speculation that Google was releasing an over-optimisation penalty that was set to hit website owners who were trying too hard with their Internet marketing efforts.
Literally over night, websites were dropping 50% or more of their traffic as the update rolled out, leaving owners baffled on how to correct it. Dubbed Google Penguin, this over optimisation penalty was hitting websites that were deemed to be deliberately ignoring the Google best practice guidelines – but this wasn’t always the case with many innocent sites also feeling Google’s wrath.
With hundreds of millions of monthly searches for Recruitment related searches, this was hitting the industry hard. Here are the current top 10 phrases that between them produce over half a billion monthly searches* (source: Google).
1. Job
2. Careers
3. Recruitment
4. Agency
5. Recruitment to Recruitment
6. What is recruitment
7. About recruitment
8. IT recruitment
9. Vacancies
10. Recruitment jobs
Of course, Google hadn’t set out to purposely hurt the recruitment industry; it was done to try and provide better results to those searching for these and many other phrases.
How to avoid being hit by updates
So why did some websites get hit by this update, and what can you do to prevent things like this from happening in the future? The secret is to do just enough without going over the top. I know this might sound vague, but there is a line, and you can’t cross it. Here are a few pointers that you can compare against your own website.
Link Building
If you do decide to try and build backlinks, proceed with caution. When embarking on any link building, it is important to remember that Google wants to see links that
1) Deserve to be there, and
2) Look natural
This is sometimes easier said than done because for this to happen, you need to spread your link building efforts over a wide a range of platforms as possible, such as blog posts, articles, forums, social media, static links, syndicated news, Wiki’s and much more.
By spreading this activity, you reduce the risk of everything looking exactly the same. The same goes for your anchor text (the link text that leads back to your site). Never use the same one over and over again and diversify by not always trying to use keyword-heavy text.
Tip: If you have ever bought or sold links, look at removing these.
Writing Content
As it stands, it is not enough to just have a page of content that explains what you do. It’s not even always enough to have this professionally written so that it has a higher degree or readability (look for ‘Flesch readability’). You need to have content that is so appealing, that people want to stay and read; they want to share it with others on social platforms; they are inspired to read additional pages on what you do.
It’s all about creating that ‘X-Factor’ for a page.
This isn’t actually as easy as it sounds because many site owners might be a little set in their ways and think that injecting a little humour (I don’t mean jokes) into a page will have a detrimental effect.
Remember, whatever you write, and however it’s written, try to break the mold and write something that doesn’t follow the same path as everyone else.
Tip: Always write for visitors, never for the search engines
Stuffing Keywords
Many years ago, if you wanted to appear 1st page on Google, it was all about how many times and ways you could get a word or phrase onto a page. This lead to pages with lots of hidden text and huge chunks of content that added nothing whatsoever to the page.
Although most seem to have the grasp of this now, there is still a virtual line that you should never cross. When trying to optimize a page, you need to look at which phrase you wish to target, and use this sparingly. It is important not to over-use it but try and use it in the URL, Title and high up in the page content once. Past this, you can use it again where it makes sense (for readability), but keep a very close eye on it.
Tip: Count how many words are on a page. Count how many times the phrase has been used and then work this out as a percentage. Keep this to around 2-3% as an absolute maximum.
Link to other sites
It might seem like you are defeating an object here, but Google actually likes to see pages that link out to other related sources. This doesn’t mean that you should go out and add a ton of links to every page on your site, but rather you try not to worry about someone heading off and reading an industry association page, for example.
To Google, it will look unnatural if you never provide any other high quality sources for people to read. Look at this as you (as a professional) showing others that they can find related information on another professional service.
This will add credibility to your site! But don’t worry, you don’t need to add links to every page – just try not to be too concerned that this will be a bad move, because it wont.
Tip: Keep external links on a page to a maximum of 2 or 3.
Hopefully those few tips will allow you to have a look at our own site with a critical eye and see if there are changes you can make that will help benefit both you and your visitors.
Remember, it’s about doing enough without going overboard.
