Massive Google Penalties Start To Roll Out
Remember those Google ‘over-optimisation’ penalties we warned you about last month? They’ve begun rolling out in the last 24 hours, causing huge rankings shifts for a wide range of SERPs.
These aren’t just rankings moving a few spots. This is deindexation of entire sites that once ruled the top of Google. This is sites that play by the rules being rewarded with huge surges to the top of the first page. This is big.
One of our clients had two of their very well ranking pages dropped from the index entirely thanks to some link spamming tests they had been running without our knowledge. The rest of their campaign received a ranking boost while the two pages that had employed link spam techniques dropped entirely from the index. Back to square one for these keywords.
One of our employees runs a few sites on the side that he uses to test different SEO techniques and woke up to some interesting results today. A site he had optimised on my instruction was performing relatively well, ranking high for a few of his keywords with the rest not too far behind. Another site he had built as per an affiliate marketer’s instructions that relied on webspam to generate backlinks and rankings had developed some great rankings for most key phrases and was performing far better than the first site.
This morning when we decided to check his rankings we saw some huge shifts. The first site that had been optimised the right way was now ranking on the first page across the board, with many ranking at number one for high competition key phrases. However the second site that relied on forum and blog comment spamming didn’t fare so well. The pages that had been ranking so well before were either entirely wiped from Google’s index or dropped deep into Google’s results.
Today’s penalties are a great reminder of why making SEO an organic part of your marketing strategy is the only way to reliably build long-lasting successful Google rankings. Sure with the spammy methods you’re likely to see some results in the short term (at least you used to), but unless you’re planning on your business being short term, it’s best to stay away.
Have you checked on your rankings? Now might be a good time! Let us know if you’ve been hit by Google’s latest penalties and we’ll advise you on the next steps you need to take to get back on top!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
