How To Avoid Google Penalties

Here’s the scenario: Your traffic is moving along steadily and all of a sudden you notice a sharp decrease. The next thing you know, your website isn’t ranking for any key terms. It’s the dreaded flat line that results from a Google penalty and it’s a nightmare for all webmasters.

Don’t Let This Happen to You!

Google penalties are the ever-lurking threat that webmasters have to face. They serve as a reminder to partake in SEO tactics that are white hat and honest. The good news? By using these white hat tactics, you can avoid a Google penalty! However, while some may be familiar with the standards for ethical (white hat) and unethical (black hat) tactics, sometimes it’s tough to distinguish that foggy ‘gray’ area. So we’ve outlined the full spectrum from white hat techniques to black hat techniques for some of the most basic SEO fundamentals.

But first, a quick refresher!

White Hat White Hat – Ethical SEO techniques that enhance user and search experience and are condoned by the search engines.

Gray Hat Black Hat – Unethical, deceitful techniques with the intention of manipulating search engines in order to receive higher rankings, or manipulating users to spread viruses and spam.

Black Hat Gray Hat – Tactics that toe the line between white hat and black hat techniques.

Black Hat No Hat – Not doing any SEO could be costing you business, reducing your brand awareness, and worst of all allowing your competition the spot light.

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Keyword Density

White hat: Utilizing key terms sparingly and strategically in content, title tags and meta descriptions that help searchers and search engines better determine what your webpages are about.

Gray hat: Redundant use of the same relevant keywords throughout your title tags, meta descriptions and content or using keywords that aren’t necessarily relative to the page.

Black hat: Excessive use and/or stuffing of keywords into content, title tags and meta descriptions especially if the text is the same color as the background.

Link Building

White hat links: Building links naturally by providing great content that users want to link to or reaching out to affiliates and clients to link to your website using natural anchor text.

Gray hat links: Obtaining multiple links with the same anchor text.

Black hat links: Buying links, selling links or reciprocal link schemes.

Redirects

White hat: Utilizing redirects to consolidate pages or redirect URLs of pages that no longer exist

Gray hat: Using meta redirects or JavaScript to redirect users can be a red flag. Just make sure to follow Google’s guidelines.

Black hat: Using redirects that show users one thing and search engines another aka: sneaky redirects

Anchor Text

White hat: Using keyword rich anchor text is fine if it is relevant to the link landing page, otherwise, natural anchor text both for internal and external linking (like content with embed codes) is best practice.

Gray hat: Using the same anchor text multiple times throughout your website or on articles with backlinks to your website, including embeddable content. Note: Rotate anchor text on content with back-links if it is receiving a significant number of shares.

Black hat: Saturating your website content with anchor text specific backlinks as well as distributing or placing this type of content on other websites.

New Pages

White hat: Creating new pages solely for the purpose that it will provide your users with more unique information about your company or offerings.

Gray hat: Creating quality but possibly unnecessary pages that use multiple keyword phrases in the content for ranking purposes.

Black hat: Duplicating pages for the sake of having a larger website or creating low-quality pages optimized for specific keywords aka: doorway pages

Content

White hat: Creating unique, relevant and informative content with your users in mind.

Gray hat: Creating content that includes multiple keyword phrases and links with keyword specific anchor text.

Black hat: Duplicating or scraping content, creating content that is keyword stuffed or full of links, or creating content that is irrelevant to the page.

The search engines are getting smarter every day and continuously roll out algorithm updates that aim to stop manipulative, black hat tactics. Instead of taking short-cuts, adopt a holistic SEO approach by creating a user-friendly website that is optimized to help the search engines rather than manipulate them. Google penalty-free is the way to be – so make sure to stay on the white hat side of the spectrum, you’ll be glad you did! Contact us today if you have any questions or need help with your SEO approach.

Submitted by Erica Machin, Titan Growth

Titan Growth Named A Finalist In 2016 Bing Agency Awards

Less than 100 agencies have been invited to partake in the 2016 Bing Agency Awards, and Titan Growth is thrilled to be named one of these finalists!

The first-ever Bing Agency Awards will be held in New York this September and “aims to recognize and reward outstanding creative, effective and passionate work by Search Advertising individuals, teams and agencies working with Bing Ads.”

Participation for the Bing Agency Awards is by invitation only, and the list of eligible participants currently includes only 96 agencies worldwide. As a long-term Bing Ads partner, the Titan Growth team is excited to be selected for participation and will be submitting their own Bing Ads case studies for consideration at this year’s award ceremony.

For more information on the Bing Agency Awards, and to follow along with the list of finalists, visit bingagencyawards2016.com!

Google Gets Serious About Mobile 

Changes to mobile search algorithm will penalize sites that aren’t mobile-friendly.

If mobile hasn’t been on your mind lately, it should be now. More than ever, internet users are turning to their smartphones to surf the web and now Google is making it mandatory to give them a good experience. With Google’s recent changes to the mobile search algorithm, websites that aren’t optimized for mobile users now risk losing rankings in the mobile search results. Do you already have a mobile site? You’re still not in the clear. Common mistakes with redirection, unplayable media and 404 errors can still wipe out your rankings. Here’s what you need to know to prepare for the changes.

  1. Check if your site is accessible to mobile users – If you don’t have a mobile site, you’ll want to check your current website across different devices to make sure your content and media are compatible for mobile and tablet users. You can test your site here to see what it looks like on a smartphone. It’s also a good idea to access your site from different devices to see if everything functions properly.
  2. Create a mobile site – If your current website does not convey across the different devices, then you should consider a mobile compatible site. Google supports these main options for serving your website to mobile users:
    • Responsive web design – This is Google’s recommended method for serving content to mobile users. Responsive web design is the most seamless option, showing the same HTML to users on all devices, using only CSS to change how the pages render across devices.
    • Serving different HTML to mobile & desktop users – This option serves different HTML and CSS for each page depending on whether the user is searching from their phone or desktop.
    • Using different URLs for desktop & mobile users – You can also choose to have your mobile site on an entirely different URL like m.example.com and use redirects for users who access your original URL from a mobile device.
  3. Check your mobile site for any of these common mistakes – Whether you have a mobile site or not, you need to check for these common errors. These are the factors that will be taken into consideration for Google’s algorithm and sites with these errors will risk penalties.

Incompatible Media

Some media, like embedded videos on your website, may not be compatible with smartphones. Specifically, media that requires Adobe Flash. Make sure all embedded media on your current website is also playable on smartphones by using HTML5 standard tags.

404 Errors

Some websites that work for desktop users may not be compatible with smartphones, showing users a 404 error when they try to access your site from their phone. Check to see if your website serves mobile users 404 errors when they attempt to access to URL. If so, you’ll want to redirect them to a smartphone-friendly page or even the desktop page rather than serving the 404.

Unrelated Redirects

For those who use a different URL to serve users on a mobile site, make sure your pages from your desktop site are redirected to the exact page on the mobile site. For example, your server may be configured to redirect all mobile users to your mobile site’s homepage. In this case, you’ll want to redirect users to the equivalent mobile page, taking them to the page they expect to see.

Mobile Redirects

Page Speed

Just like page speed is a factor with regular desktop sites, it’s also the case for mobile. If your mobile site is taking a while to load, it could cost you your rankings. It is recommended that a mobile site should take no longer than 5 seconds maximum to load. You can test the load speed of your site here.

For those who have put mobile optimization on the backburner, this may be the kick-start you needed to get things going with a mobile optimized site. Providing a great mobile user experience is that much more essential now that rankings are also at stake, so check your site thoroughly and take the necessary actions to make it mobile-friendly.

If you have any questions about the algorithm changes, how to check your site for mobile compatibility or which steps to take to avoid mobile search penalties, feel free to contact us!

Submitted by Erica Machin, Titan Growth