One of the website my team worked on got a Google Penalty. The possible reason for the penalty might have been external site-wide links. The first thing I did was to look for the rankings of the website in other major search engines Yahoo and Bing. The keywords were still on top on both the other search engines. The next thing was to avoid the panic situation which webmasters and SEO experts face when they see one of the websites their team work upon gets a penalty for some wrong action/wrong SEO practices. The penalty for our website might have been due to some sort of spam link building tactics done on the website. I tried to handle the situation as calm as possible. Below are the steps I took to remove the effect of the penalty.
Day 1: First thing I did on the page is to change all the file names to show new page URL thus removing the spam link effect of all previous off-page submissions done. I blocked all the old pages using robots.txt. I changed all the content in newly created pages.
Day 2: Created new Title and Meta Tags for the newly created page and uploaded the same. I also removed the old RSS feed. I then re-submitted the Sitemap.
Day 3: Send a reconsideration request to Google through webmaster tools account.
Day 5: The website has got all the SERP back and some keywords got higher SERP.
The first and the formost thing is to check whether your website is having a penalty or not. There are many ways to check the same. You can read about 10 Ways to Diagnose a Google Penalty .
Share your thoughts and experiences of avoiding Google penalty. You can a share the things you have done to avoid a Google penalty. You can get in touch with me personally through my Twitter Handle @cijoaj2003
Daniel Lew's post search engine result display made me think about the vertical search engines. Vertical search engines are entirely different from the general search engine's like Google,Yahoo and Bing. Vertical search engines know their visitor and they are made based upon the visitor's interest. You can easly find a lot of travel based vertical search engines like Kayak. There are search engine which go beyond the general search engine feature to provide results based upon word relation in context to search query. Truevert is one such search engine which provides true vertical results beyond general search engine niche intention based result. Another interesting search engine I came across was Bossy which provides single answer to visitor queries.
An example is
Question:: When did germany invade poland ? Answer:: Month: Sept Year: 1939
The latest computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha was intended to provide visitors with systematic knowledge on their queries.
Where is the search heading towards?. The search engine future might go beyond general search engines as new signals of relavance becomes important. Certain factors like user behaviour, speed of providing search results etc will play a much more dominant role in the coming years and this will make general search engines to start taking measures to understand about the user query signals to stay on top of the search industry.
Search Engines are trying to dominate Internet by learning and understanding how people use and navigate through websites. Lately all major search engine's Google, Yahoo, and Bing have started their attempts to track your website history. One of the reason that search engines show about tracking website history is that they are trying to improve the search results. The major question that comes to visitor is that are search engines going to far by creating customer based search results based on once internet activities? . The privacy of people who search on this search engines is getting affected. The one way to stop search engines from doing this is to switch off web history or to use a search engine that safeguards your privacy.
Has anyone of you using Yahoo search engine? For me, Yahoo was the first ever search engine I've used since my teenage years. I'm using Yahoo more on checking e-mails, searching, games and sports news. There are lots of features which makes Yahoo so unique than any other search engine.
Unfortunately, one of the Yahoo features called Geocities has been removed already courtesy of Yahoo themselves. Yahoo has been very successful since the birth of their search engine, but it's not what the reason they are running out of money for Geocities, it's only their personal decision. I used to go there during my spare time on the internet to check things out, till they closed their service in the internet.
What are the unique services which Yahoo have that others don't have. Here are some of the list together with Yahoo Mail and Messenger:
1. Autos - all about cars
2. Facebook - a social networking program
3. Finance - latest updates on forex, stock trading, etc.
4. Flickr - share your photos to the world
5. Games - play games online
6. HotJobs - search jobs online
7. Movies- all about movies
8. Personals - all about personal updates
9. Sports - all about sports
10. Updates - all about your family and friend's updates in your contacts
There's a whole lot more like Travel, Shopping, Best Deals, Search Marketing, Answers, Deals of the Day and Small Business. In these many features, Yahoo has been one of the top three search engines in the world behind Google and ahead of Bing. Although last year their market share lowered down, which is no match to Google's, still Yahoo was one of the best for me and for others.
