Slapped by Google — How a top SEO performer fell from grace

Oct. 6, 2012 - PRLog -- What can you expect when you get busted by Google?

Standing in front of the presentation screen, our speaker urgently told us, "Penguin was devastating to me. And there are many animals in the zoo."

This was indeed one the best talks given in a certain SEO club recently in Chicago. The expert was telling us the story of how he woke up one morning and discovered that his telemarketing company had slipped from its coveted first-place ranking on Google, for many of his keywords, into obscurity. His business calls almost stopped.

Punished by Penguin

He was a smart fellow, judging by his knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO) software tools and experience with keywords. But now he was losing business by the minute. He was suffering from Google's latest search algorithm, called Penguin, which was released this past spring. He explained that sometime earlier, Google had released Panda, and that who knows what new animal-versions were in store in the future?

Penguin was Google's way of squeezing out those who have learned to game the system, and had raised the bar as to who would gain the greatly-desired top rankings of Google. And after all, don't we all trust the top-ranked business as being the best? So we need a digital policeman here. Since this search giant has two-thirds of the search market, every SEO marketer watches carefully as the geeks at Mountain View, CA hone their techniques.

Link structure no-no

What had our speaker done wrong? Well, each month he submitted twenty different articlescentered on keywords for which he wanted to rank high. For each of these articles, he hired a company to "spin" two hundred versions of it. Spinning software replaces words with similar words. For example, "marvelous" will be changed to "fantastic." Search engines are thus tricked into thinking that there are two or two hundred different articles out there, instead of what was really one.

Each article, of course, has links which provide the coveted link juice which raises the target website higher in its search status. When asked why he was slapped, our speaker didn't claim that it was the four thousand articles pumping his SEO system, but that the linking term structures were exactly the same on each article. In other words, he would have on each article, "Read a great article on telemarketing tips on this website...." Something obviously that the spinning software wasn’t watching for.

So our speaker went from savvy-SEO expert to black hat villain in one day. Or would you consider him black hat from the beginning, since he was obviously gaming the system? I tend to think so.

To some degree, an SEO strategy can never be completely white hat — pure as the driven snow. When an SEO firm posts numerous original, but similar articles on the internet, isn't that a bit artificial, too? There are a hundred other tricks, too. Since Google sets the standards, to some degree we are only guilty when we get caught. And yet it's best to be as genuine as possible.

Beware of search claims

Think of this the next time you get that unsolicited email saying, "We can get you to the top of search engine results for cheap!" Don't fall for this and get yanked off of Google's site index, because your search marketing will vanish.

We at TreeFrogClick web marketing use only white-hat techniques, providing real authority to your website and what it has to sell. If you want SEO or reputation management that is effective and honest, contact us at http://treefrogclick.com.