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Dealing with Penalties
By Julie | June 15, 2007
Rand over at SEOMoz did a great job of putting together a flow-chart of dealing with Google penalties the other day.
He was more polite about one topic than I often want to be relative to a site owner claiming penalty: He refers to the alternative as losing rank to competitors. In many cases, the unvarnished truth is that the site was not very good to begin with, and maybe never had rank, or only ranked because there was no competition. Or, to borrow from the dictionary, I offer two definitions of ‘rank:’
Rank (noun): relative standing or position; a degree or position of dignity, eminence, or excellence
and
Rank (adjective): offensive in odor or flavor; RANCID, PUTRID, FESTERING
Some sites benefit from the first definition. Some really deserve to be described with the second. When a salesperson tells me that a prospect is looking for help to overcome a ’search engine penalty,’ I’ll take a brief look-see — I don’t believe in giving away expertise, but if the potential client’s really gotten themself in a stew, I’ll want forewarning. In a lot of cases, the ‘penalty’ is really just the price of having a bad site full of duplicate content, weird flashing jpegs straight outta GeoCities 1997, and no inbound links (because who wants to point to THAT except to mock?).
Failure to rank is not always a penalty. Sometimes failure to rank is merely a sign of sanity in a world full of better content.
Topics: SEO, content strategy, dumb techniques, google, marketing, nostalgia, rank, search results, spam, zrong |
