By Sam Khwaja, Director Web Strategy
If you or your SEO firm have experimented with rankings or implemented techniques that are out of Google’s webmaster guidelines (e.g. questionable link building practices), your website’s organic rankings may have dropped recently or completely disappeared…why? Because you might be in Google Jail.
Now what? How do you get Google to reverse or shorten your jail sentence?
Not long ago, a company asked us to do just that.
What Caused Your SEO Jail Sentence?
In this blasted scenario or Internet marketer’s nightmare, the first step is to do an in-depth analysis of your website. Check for funny business – anything outside of Google’s
webmaster guidelines – such as text or links whose font color is the same as the background color. Check any cloaking issues, especially on the home and top category pages. Check to see if your website has doorway pages, such as those that redirect to other top pages on the website. Does your website use a software or script that crawls Google (without using an API) or use Google’s bandwidth to calculate results for your own website? Once you find the culprit…or culprits, fix them.
What about your back links? Got any funny business happening there? Anything Google might deem unnatural or suspicious? Have a reputable SEO firm audit your back links. Make sure you’re in compliance with Webmaster guidelines and your links aren’t from a “bad neighborhood.”
Requesting Reinclusion
Now request for reinclusion a.k.a reconsideration. It takes a minimum of two weeks to get reincluded into Google; the most severe spam penalties can take up to a year to get reincluded.
If you manage multiple websites and all the websites have the same issues, we recommend you submit one website at a time with the most important one first. A penalty for a single website will be viewed as less severe than a penalty for an entire network of websites.
While submitting for reinclusion, do not mention how much you spend on AdWords or how much you make on AdSense. A business relationship with Google does not help you get reincluded into Google any faster. You certainly don’t want Google to delay your inclusion further, just to make a point they do not favor those with AdWords/AdSense relationships.
You should mention that the act you think resulted in the penalty has been removed, assure it will not happen again, and that you are in compliance with Google’s webmaster guidelines. Here is a quote from the head of Google’s spam team Matt Cutts on
reinclusion:
“Fundamentally, Google wants to know two things: 1) that any spam on the site is gone or fixed, and 2) that it’s not going to happen again.”
Now What? Just Wait?
Rather than sit around and wonder if it will take two weeks or one year to get reincluded, there are some actions that may influence Google’s review process. Remember, Google wants to satisfy user intent. Our hypothesis: If you can prove to Google that your website satisfies user intent, you can speed up your website’s reinclusion.
If users search for your brand but can’t find your company’s website in Google’s results, they will likely be dissatisfied. This goes against what Google wants to accomplish as a search engine. If your company can demonstrate it has a significant amount of what we call brand value to search engine users, you can strengthen the likelihood of getting reincluded faster.
Google looks at several different elements or signals to see if your website has brand value. Three signals we focus on include:
- People searching for your brand in Google
- Online news/media outlets talking about your brand
- Social media talking about your brand
The more people search about you in Google, the more people talk about you in news and social media, the faster you will get out of the penalty box. Google cares about your brand value because Google’s primary purpose as a search engine is to satisfy user intent. If someone searches for “example inc.” in Google and does not see “example inc.,” on the first page of results, they may assume Google is not capable of showing quality results and they will switch to another search engine (…or decision engine).
Current affairs and recency are very important factors in Google’s algorithm. Google wants to show freshness in its search results, so if news and social media talk about a brand, Google wants to display that website in its results.
This know-how can help you decrease a penalty by creating buzz in news and social media. For some companies, creating buzz around a brand in news and social media can be quite expensive. But if it’s done properly it should not cost an arm and a leg. You need to develop a strategy in a way that satisfies the Google robots and helps them understand the buzz about your brand. You don’t need a gargantuan branding campaign that requires a gigantic budget.
Maybe It’s Time to Stop Experimenting with SEO
You need to be very careful that you don’t exploit the robots in a way that whatever you do is regarded as spam. Your implementation of the strategy should be 100% natural and white hat. Otherwise, you will send wrong signals to Google and increase your jail time. If you don’t know exactly what you are doing please do not experiment. Hire a
professional SEO who can implement this with precision.