These slides have been presented at Supereweek conference in October 2012 in Siania, Romania. They give an overview of what are the different Google penalties : manual penalty, automatic penalty and also the famous Google Panda and Google Penguin. We present some advice to get out of penalties. If you want more information, don't hesitate to contact us at woptimo.com

1. HOW TO DETECT PENALTIES
AND WAYS OUT

2. Who am I?
• Since 2000 : freelance webmaster, researcher, teacher…
• 2006 – 2009: Google Search Quality and Google
Analytics teams (Dublin, Ireland)
• Since 2009: SEO in France. Founder of the SEO Agency
Woptimo
• 2011 : Co-founder of Search Quality Alliance
AND I AM NOT GOOGLE

3. GOOGLE’S MISSION

4. Back to basics : Google Mission
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s
information and make it universally accessible
and useful.
Let’s analyze this mission from a SEO point of view.

5. Useful information
What is a useful information ?
Google should judge it depending on:
- User’s feedback ( is it useful ? )
- What it brings to the table (is it a new information ?)
Relationship between users and content is at the heart of
Google’s approach.

6. Accessible
Accessible : what do they really mean?
Do not put any useless steps between actual
information and Google
In other words: Kill the middle man !

7. Organization
And now, let’s organize all that…
Diversity = NO to SERP crowding
Google needs to know as much as possible about
every domain.

8. GOOGLE’S WEBSPAM
ISSUES

9. Mafia wars
 Big spammers with high velocity. Big network with porn & malware
 Bad Javascript, Gibberish, strange spike of traffic…

10. Automated network
 Satellite sites, automatic comment, automatic link exchange
 Often created by X-Rummer, Sick Submitter, LFE…
 Quite easy to spot. Google spots one, and kill everything…

11. Protecting index integrity
 Every technique not considered as « useful » for the user can be
impacted:
 Link buying, abusive crosslinking, abusive press release and directories,
link exchange…
 Manual review needed to avoid collateral damage

12. Infrastructure protection
 Any type of penalty or anti-abuse process can cost millions in CPU costs
 Google’s velocity is crucial. Penalties should be applied at the right
moment (indexing, ranking, display …)
 Since Google Caffeine, Google seems to have much more freedom

13. NEW: Communication
 Google is less and less secretive
 Every webmaster alert is true but not always accurate and actionable
 There is more good than evil out there !!!

14. TYPES OF PENALTY

15. Manual penalty
 Usually, Google prefers automation. But user experience can’t be
accurately measured with an algorithm.
  Local and manual Quality Review to penalize websites

16. What is Search Quality Team looking for?
• Is there any hidden text or cloaking? Or is it a legitimate technique?
• Is it pure affiliation? Or is there an added value?
• Is this link legitimate? or has it a SEO/spammy intent? Has it been bought?
 Some of these questions can be tricky. Any decision is reviewed by
several persons before being pushed.
 All the websites are under the radar.

17. Automatic Penalty
 Based on traffic quality, indexing speed, targeted keywords, code snippets,
neighbourhood…
 May be really harsh or … quite harmless

18. Blacklist
Nothing in site:
 Very rare nowadays. Used for parked domain or very very bad sites…
 As a warning for bad behaviour such as hidden text, cloaking…

19. Semi-blacklist
 You don’t rank for your « brand » name and domaintools sites are before
you
 Or you rank only for your domain name but not with your home page title

20. Up and Down
 You suddenly lose 50% of traffic from one day to another
 Some recovery sometimes with no apparent reason

21. Ranking slowly decrease
 For a bunch of commercial keywords only
 For all you keywords slowly

22. WHY ME?

23. Traffic quality
 Do you have mostly syndicated content, ads or affiliation?
 Do you actually care about user’s experience?

24. Inbound links quality
 How did you create your links? An intern, an agency, a software, yourself?
 What techniques did you use ? (yes, even 5 years ago! )

25. Why not other websites?
 Are you sure you’re the only one?
 Are you sure you’re better than them? … Seriously?
 Anyway, their time will come…
 In the meantime, spam report, if you feel like it…

26. GOOGLE ZOO

27. Google Panda
This is NOT:
- Duplicate content filter
- Overoptimization filter
- Cloaking filter
This is a way to promote websites with good
user experience

28. Google Panda
Google has a lot of user data from:
• Internet Explorer toolbar?
• Chrome?
• Search history?
• Internet Service Providers?
• Search Quality Raters?
Don’t try to hide, don’t try to guess how Google
knows…. But he knows…

29. Google Panda
Filter about user experience
Pushing down websites that don’t reach a certain standard
• Price comparison
• Thin affiliate
• News aggregation
• Directories
Websites that are between Google and the actual
information.

30. Google Penguin
 Several Penguins, at least 2 algorithms in 1 push
 Could be automatic penalty, but better for communication

31. On-site Penguin
Overoptimized pages:
• Not in any menu
• Too many times the same keywords
• Same keywords in title, H1, content, url
• All pages look the same
• Competition has better pages…
Quick Fix on pages can actually help really
quickly.

32. Off-site Penguin
After 5 years of linking review from Search Quality team
 Google has a good understanding of what is a good and a bad link
 If a website has many outbound links. Why keeping it in the PageRank
process?
 If a website has always the same kind of spammy inbound links, why not
deactivating all these links?
 Penguin is mostly a big link clean-up pushed all at once.

33. OK, LET’S GO BACK ON
TRACKS

34. Is it a penalty for real?
• Better competition
• Bugs in your tracking (now or before)
• Indexing issues
• 404 issues
• Content changes…
Make a quick SEO and Analytics check before
panicking

35. Re-think your business model
« If your main target is affiliation and your
main source of traffic is SEO, you may be in
serious trouble »

36. Redesign your strategy
• Make him stay as much as possible on your website
and make him leave to useful resources (NO, not
ads)
• Make your content likeable and shareable
• Make your website popular (For real)

37. Link cleaning
By order of priority:
• Spam comments
• Automatic Link Exchange
• Satellite sites network
• Abusive widget links
• Off-topic footer and Blog Roll links
• Obvious Bought links
The worse it is for indexing, the hardest it is to catch,
the strongest penalty will be.

38. Disavow links
 No reason why Google would not use this data
 No reason you would not clean your link profile if you want to move
forward…
 Yes, use it …. Cleverly !!!

39. Reconsideration request
Only when you have cleaned or disavowed every spammy techniques
• Mention all you efforts
• Show why you are worth your ranking (articles about you, super
services…)
• Mention that you have added value and content for the users
 Negative answer is not the end of the world…
 Positive or neutral answer is not always the end of trouble…

40. MAKE
GOOD CONTENT
LOVE
NOT WAR

41. International SEO – International Linkbuilding – International PPC
THANK YOU
french-seo.woptimo.com
@woptimo
@smonnier