Beware: Dodgy SEO - Blackhats, Penalties & Bad Rankings

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Man, I love that music. It's just uplifting, isn't it, Arthur?

ARTHUR: Very, very uplifting. You sound uplifted. I'm very full, actually. Too much Korean fried chicken. Yeah, you did eat five tenders and some chips. No regrets.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I did the same thing, so it was pretty good. Fired us up, it's fueled us up to talk about dodgy SEO, black hats, penalties, and bad rankings.

ARTHUR: One of my favorite topics, black hat SEO.

MICHAEL: You like getting our websites penalized?

ARTHUR: I've never gotten a website penalized. Thank you. And you know what?

MICHAEL: That's a good thing, but it's also a bad thing because my little point of view is that if you're doing SEO, you need to penalize a site here and there because you're sort of pushing the limits and testing things. Don't let our clients hear that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you're doing SEO, you should be doing stuff on sites that aren't client sites. You know, just seeing what works, what doesn't. Playing around with Google.

ARTHUR: I must've been very fortunate. Knock on wood. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So anyway, what are we talking about penalties? So what is that? I'm going to give a little intro to, you know, maybe a history of Google and a history of penalties. So we can jump into that and then talk about the types of penalties. So basically let's give you the lay of the land. The late nineties or, you know, whenever Google came about say 97 or so, the very early prehistoric caveman type SEOs were including yourself. Hey, I was, I was a teenager, young teenager then. So not, not me, but, um, my predecessors, my elders, they were basically doing all sorts of nasty things with their websites, like keyword stuffing, where they just jam keyword after keyword after keyword into a page, or they'd make text on a page, the same color as the background. So the user couldn't see it, but search engines could see it. Very sneaky. Very sneaky. Or they'd spam their meta keyword tag with keywords. And back in the day, search engines used to look at that. And all this stuff worked because the search engines were simple, very rudimentary back then. But around 2003, again, I wasn't doing SEO at this point, although I was out of school and officially an adult, but I wasn't doing SEO. But at this time, the first major update or sort of penalization type thing happened, which was the Google Florida update. This knocked out most of this really dodgy keyword stuffing and sort of very old school SEO stuff out of practice. But SEO still was pretty much the wild west for many years after that.

ARTHUR: What did the Florida update look at? Cause it's keyword stuffing and keyword stuffing and all that kind of old school obvious stuff like that.

MICHAEL: So it got sort of brought the hammer down on that so that it was like a warning, you know, a shop fired across the bow, the bow of the SEOs in the industry that you can't just spam and get rankings basically, but you still could because you could go and blast out links and spin content and all that sort of stuff for many years. And it continued to work, but around 2011, That's when things got serious. They got very serious. Very serious. Panda was launched in 2011 and then Penguin was launched in 2012. So it got even more serious.

ARTHUR: That's, yeah, that's roughly around the same time I started doing SEO was around when Penguin was released. Yeah. 2012. Yeah. So I have fond, fond memories.

MICHAEL: Yeah. It was a wild time, you know, back at the agency we worked at, at the time clients sort of one minute doing okay. And then next minute penalize.

ARTHUR: Penalizes panic stations.

MICHAEL: And it wasn't through anything that had been done wrong. The goalposts were just changed by Google overnight. But anyway, the point we're making here is that Google regularly launch changes to their algorithm or they regularly penalize websites for doing the wrong thing to discourage certain behavior that they don't want people doing and to encourage putting more money in Google's back pocket. Their very big back pocket that's already filled with billions of dollars. They want more. They always want more. They always want more. So that's why penalties exist. So if you're doing SEO, you need to be aware of this and you need to make sure that the work you're doing is not likely to lead to you falling foul of these penalties. So, you know, we've been throwing around terms like Florida, panda, penguin, animal names or location names. What is that stuff? Well, basically there's two types of penalties that Google can apply to a website. What are they?

ARTHUR: Algorithmic penalties and manual penalties.

MICHAEL: All right. So algorithmic, that's all done by Google's algorithms. It's all automated. It's not got any involvement from a human looking at a website. Manual is when Google's web spam team. So they actually have teams of people. I like to imagine like rows of cubicles of all these sort of depressed people that have to look at people's websites and figure out if they're up to no good and then penalize them.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I always wondered how they did that and how they operated. If they get tip offs from people as to which sites they should look at or. Yeah, they do.

MICHAEL: You can, if you're unscrupulous, you can go and dub people into Google.

ARTHUR: Yeah. You don't want to piss off the wrong people.

MICHAEL: No. So these people, basically they have these things, webmaster guidelines, and they, if someone at Google is taking a look at your site, they're going to look at these webmaster guidelines. They're going to look at your site and they're going to try and find things that you've been doing wrong that they can penalize you for. So they're the two types. Typically we've found, you know, with algorithmic penalties to when you get hit by them to fix your site, you need to make changes to the site and then wait for the algorithm to update again. With manual penalties, you need to make changes to the site and then submit a reconsideration request and sort of go there on your hands and knees and like beg to Google and plead, can I please go back in the search results? And often they'll say no, and you have to do a bit more work and you know, it can be tougher to come back from.

ARTHUR: They're pretty rare these days, aren't they? Manual penalties. We don't see that many of them. No, we don't see many penalties, if any, but manual penalties, penalties, sorry, would be super rare. You really have to be doing something wrong to receive a manual penalty.

MICHAEL: Cause I guess penalties used to be, you know, Google would bring the hammer down in a blaze of publicity and that would get all sorts of coverage and stuff. Whereas now what they do is update their algorithm a lot throughout the year and they don't really let you know what's going on. So they're sort of trying to keep people in this state of confusion. Whereas in the past they used to say, all right, we've launched Panda and Panda looks at onsite stuff. All right, we've launched Penguin. Penguin looks at backlinks. So you sort of used to know what you needed to fix. So I guess they've just changed their approach a bit.

ARTHUR: Yeah, the only manual pen, I can't say manual, manual penalty that I can remember working on was eBay's manual penalty with the content. If you wanted to talk about that for a bit.

MICHAEL: All right, well, you know what? We'll finish wrapping up on what penalties are, and then let's talk about some famous penalties, even penalties we've worked on in the time. So anyway, we said, yeah, they're rhythmic, all automated, and then there's also manual. But these penalties can also be applied in different ways. So they can be applied at the keyword level. So let's say you're ranking really well for digital marketing agency and then all of a sudden your traffic drops from that keyword, your rankings gone. You can be penalized for individual keyword. Or the next level up from that is a whole URL or directory. So maybe if you're a lawyer and one of your services is family law and you've really spammed that family law page with bad SEO, then maybe you will drop for that as an example. Then the next level up from that is the sub domain level. So sub domain is just, you know, www dot. So anything on that sub domain is going to get penalized. The next level up from that is your entire domain getting penalized. So any page on your website would lose traffic in this case. And finally the real nasty one safe for the most egregious offenses pretty much is being totally DN indexed from Google. So basically penalties can hit you at any one of these or, you know, even multiple combinations of them. So let's talk famous penalties famous in the SEO world. They're probably not that famous.

ARTHUR: Which one do you want to start with? Well, you said you already mentioned eBay. Yep. So let's talk about that.

MICHAEL: Yeah. All right. Well, give us a recap. That was a wild time back 2014, 2014, 2015, something like that.

ARTHUR: So it was a manual penalty and they had, it was basically around the content on the site. They had a lot of duplicate pages. So whenever someone would add or create a category, I think the way that the site was set up would create different category pages. So basically they ended up with- Search pages. Search pages. That's right. Yeah. So there'll be dozens, if not hundreds of different search pages, all basically targeting the same keywords. So one day, yeah. Google got pinged. A lot of these pages got de-indexed and then it was up to us to kind of go figure out which pages were the ones that were worth keeping and then setting up redirects, writing content for them. It was a huge, huge job that kind of rolled out over almost a year, if not longer. Yeah. Um,

MICHAEL: So in this case, let's give an example, I guess. Like if you are selling, we've got some, um, we've got some disinfectant wipes on the table here. They would have a search result for 10 pack of disinfectant wipes, 12 pack, 120 pack.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Yeah. Or similar results. A good example would be clothing. It was a lot of clothing, like size eight dress, size 10 dress, um, different variations of that different colors. So just thousands upon thousands of pages. Yep.

MICHAEL: And all of those pages would rank in Google. If people typed in the search term that eBay page would rank, they'd get traffic. And it was awesome for them for a time until Google put the hammer down. And then, so basically at the agency we worked at, at the time eBay were a client and we as the SEO team had to sit there and manually categorize pages as like ones that should stay, ones that should go. And it was a laborious, painful process. But this is the sort of, this is what happens when you get penalised like that. Like, you know, these tactics that work, you can benefit from them, but if you go too far, it's a lot of work, effort and expense to clean it all up. So that was one of the more well-known, I guess, on-site penalties. Just another example, JC Penney, way back in the day. This is so old now, this is back like 2011, like pretty much in the early days of me doing SEO, but they were basically involved in link schemes where they were doing dodgy link building. Around the time that Google Penguin came out, it picked up that JC Penney were doing this stuff. Because what Google does is they like these big famous brands getting hit because it drives publicity coverage. It puts the fear of God or the fear of Google into people. Definitely.

ARTHUR: If a big brand like that can get penalized, what chance do you have as well?

MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly. So in this case, JC Penney were doing dodgy link building stuff and they got blasted out of the search results and then had to beg and plead their way back in. What sort of dodgy link building were they doing? Link schemes, I think, where they basically were getting all unrelated websites, many that just had links only, and they were linking back to the JCPenney site. And the links just had like an anchor text term, like target exact match anchor text term. So pure spam, which you used to be able to get away with until Penguin came along. So anyway, like there's been numerous big sort of famous penalizations like this, but maybe it's worth looking at what these penalties actually look at. Because we've just touched on one of the things there, well actually two of the things, but There are quite a few main areas that these penalties will look at. Links. Like with most things in SEO, links are the biggest part. It's very easy to get yourself penalised by doing dodgy link building.

ARTHUR: I think that would be one of the main ways people get penalised these days is through dodgy link building. Yeah. So using PBNs or just linking from spammy websites in general, besides that are just not relevant to the client or the website that you're linking back to, using over-optimised anchor texts is just an easy way to get penalised or at least ring alarm bells for Google.

MICHAEL: Yep. And if they don't get you algorithmically, if you're doing dodgy link burning, it's very easy for manual review, like a human in the web spam team to say that you've got all these junk links.

ARTHUR: Easily. And I was kind of thinking about PBNs recently, and I noticed back in the day, a lot of PBNs were built by interlinking to one another, right? These days they've gotten smarter and they don't do that because they don't want to leave a footprint. So finding out if a site's a PBN is a lot more difficult.

MICHAEL: Just something I recently kind of- If they run the PBN the right way and put the effort in to set it up and keep it all split out and avoid footprints.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Because back in the day, Google could just have a look, find the footprint and just devalue all those sites in one hit.

MICHAEL: So that comes back to where we spoke about before with the penalty, you know, your website, if it's really penalized, can be de-indexed from Google, which means if you search for your brand, you don't even exist in Google anymore. You're out in purgatory. Now with PBNs, so when we say PBNs, Private Blog Network, these are just websites that are controlled by one entity for the purposes of building links on to boost a website's rankings. A lot of SEO agencies will create their own PBNs and put links to their clients on them because it's cheap, fast and easy. Google can easily find PBNs and it's just game of cat and mouse. So you want to stay away from PBNs, but when Google does find them, it will just de-index them. So they don't even exist in Google anymore. So the links that are on them have no value for the websites they're linking to. The really obvious one in link building is just super over-optimized anchor text. So Google's, you know, if you think of its algorithm, it's a mathematical formula. It can look at websites and what the anchor text pointing back to them are and get a sort of understanding of no brand and URL and exact match. And if it does that for every website in an industry, it knows sort of what the average is. And if it suddenly sees that one website just has, you know, 400% more exact match anchor text links pointing back to it, it means humans have been out there link building, trying to trick poor little Google and get rankings right.

ARTHUR: Yeah. One thing though we did notice is that exact match, it obviously works, but we found a lot of websites have been doing a lot more exact match anchor text link building and seeing good results for now, for now, for now.

MICHAEL: Yes. I know this is a thing you can be when you're looking at what other people are doing with their SEO every day, you do see patterns emerge and we are seeing that. But this is what's happened in the past, right? Like things work and then it gets cracked down on. And yeah, at the moment we're seeing even in our space, you know, agencies doing really hardcore, exact match anchor text link building and getting results. Yeah. For now, for now we'll see, we'll see how many, you know, a couple more updates, what happens, but outside of links, what else is, you know, do penalties look at?

ARTHUR: Well, I guess we kind of touched on it already. Duplicate content. So in eBay's case, it was just having too many pages with similar content, which got them penalized. Not only that, we found as well that we've worked with big clients that had huge sites where they were targeting different different geographic areas using very similar content. A lot of those pages now are marked as not showing in the search results in Search Console because Google's picked up and found that the content was too similar. So really kind of making sure that the content you do have across the site is unique, not duplicated across multiple pages.

MICHAEL: And not thin. And not thin, yeah. When we say thin, like in the eBay example, these pages literally were, you know, an H1 tag, a heading tag with whatever the keyword was, the search term. So 120 pack of wipes. Just products. And then products. And that was it. So these pages barely looked any different to Google. So, yeah, duplicate content, thin content, they sort of go together. Another thing that they can look at algorithmically is if your website is hacked or compromised. So we've seen a lot of this stuff in our time where websites get Viagra hacked. Viagra hacked. Nike Air Max always seems to be popular. Cialis like just different sort of spammy stuff. Pharmaceutical. Yeah. So their website, you know, let's say your site's built on WordPress. If you don't keep your website updated, then hackers or dodgy types can find exploits over time because, you know, the website just sort of falls behind in terms of its, um, It's, it's technical. What am I trying to say here? It's, it's, it's settings.

ARTHUR: It's, you know. Yes. They find vulnerabilities and can find a way into the site.

MICHAEL: Correct. So vulnerabilities get patched over time. If you're not applying those patches, you're back in the dark ages and your website will end up getting hacked. And we've seen it many, many times, many times on some extremely big, you know, massive business websites. So what happens when it gets hacked, basically dodgy people that are trying to make money through affiliate marketing or all sorts of different ways, Bitcoin, you know, like crypto, that sort of stuff, they will. inject thousands of pages into people's websites that redirected the visitors through to Viagra sites or they can like inject links into other people's websites that point back to their site to boost the SEO of their own site and if Google picks this up it's going to Disvalue that site it'll even show a warning in the search results. You know that this site has been hacked or compromised So this means you need to keep your website updated keep your plugins updated your themes updated if you're using WordPress Make regular backups of your site so that if this does happen you can easily restore it if you're not doing that It's like driving without a seat belt on

ARTHUR: Basically. Yeah. And it's alarming how many clients that we work with had out of their websites and they don't even realize. So very important to keep it all up to date.

MICHAEL: Very common that we find business owners don't even know about updating plugins or WordPress or themes.

ARTHUR: And that's, I guess, fair enough. They're not experts. But that's where we kind of hop in and help them out.

MICHAEL: Sure. So. Outside of those, you know, a lot of this stuff we've discovered there can be looked at algorithmically or manually. But coming to manual penalizations. Because this is a, it's not an algorithm that's trying to look at things on a, you know, a mathematical formula level. It's actually a human looking at it. Really, they can look for any obvious signs of manipulation. And that means you gotta be a lot more careful, right? Like if, if they're looking at competitors and seeing what they're up to, and then they have a look at your site and they can see that your backlink profile just looks dodgy, they can penalize you. If they see that you are building all of these really thin gateway pages, you know, like let's say a page for every suburb in Sydney to try and rank for it. And that the algorithmic penalties haven't picked that up, but they see it as a human, they can penalize you. So it's a lot, you know, once the web spam get their sights set on your site, it can be a lot tougher to come back from. Anything you want to add to that?

ARTHUR: I'm just trying to think of an example. Outside of eBay, I can't think of anyone.

MICHAEL: Well, I'll give you an example. Okay, one of your sites. One of my sites. I ran an affiliate website. So when I say affiliate, it means you have a website and if you send traffic to a product or service and that traffic ends up buying it, you get a commission or a percentage of that sale. So it can be a really good way of making money online, particularly if you know SEO and can get traffic to sites. So in the past I had an affiliate website in a certain space, it was promoting a certain service, and when a really big player in that space came into the market, My website was blasted out of Google. So I got a cease and desist letter from the big player in the space saying, you can't run this site anymore. And at the exact same time, I got a manual penalty from Google's web spam team taking my website out of the search results. Wow. And that was done by humans. It wasn't done algorithmically. And I feel it was done because this big player in the space spoke to Google and made it happen.

ARTHUR: Definitely. I mean, coincidence. Yeah. It's not a coincidence.

MICHAEL: So the thing with manual, then they're not common as we say, like, you know, in the past they were more common. We would see it happen a lot more, but they don't seem to happen as much these days. Or maybe our clients are just escaping the, uh, the attention of the webspam team, but we're not seeing it so much, but when it does happen. It just means that they can look at your side a lot closer and it can be tougher to come back from because it's a human looking at it and you've got to be, I guess, begging and pleading and making them okay with what you've done, basically.

ARTHUR: Did you try to fix your site or did you kind of just let it go? Gone.

MICHAEL: Gone. Gave up. I created a new one in a similar sort of space and moved on. Right. That's the thing with affiliate sites. If it's just something you run on the side, you can do that as a business owner. You can't just write off your website that you've had for 20 years. No. So you want to avoid penalties is the general gist of this conversation, right? Yeah. But. What if you've been keeping your nose clean, you've been avoiding penalties, you've been doing all the right things, you've been keeping Google very happy, but someone, someone comes along. and does negative SEO.

ARTHUR: Negative SEO. Negative. So what is negative SEO? Basically, negative SEO is when someone will go out of their way to deliberately try to harm your website and get it devalued or de-indexed from Google. So that could be, I guess the main way they try to do it is through link building. So what they'll do is they'll find really, really dodgy sites and link back to your website using either irrelevant anchor text or extremely optimized anchor text. And that will basically, it's a red flag to Google. And I guess the aim of that is to get you de-indexed or at least have your pages devalued.

MICHAEL: Yeah, and the general thinking is SEO works to improve a site, but if you do it to a website the wrong way, it can hurt a site because Google have these penalties. Yeah, that's right. So look, it is a problem. And it's very, very common. It can work if done aggressively. So often like what they might do, if you want to rank for, I don't know, learn to fly Sydney, someone wants to do negative SEO on you, they would build thousands of links to your domain that say, learn to fly Sydney. And then Google will say, Hey, they're trying to rank for learn to fly Sydney. This is obvious. We're going to penalize them. But it wasn't the website that did that. It was some dodgy pilot out there that's angry and doesn't want to learn to fly.

ARTHUR: And it happens when, if there's someone that's been ranking first for a particular keyword, and then they see someone just sweep in and outrank them, they'll start looking as to who it was and, try to get you devalued, basically.

MICHAEL: Yeah, potentially, but not in every industry, but we do see it a bit. Yeah. So to get around this, you just need to be proactively monitoring your website and then cleaning things up where relevant. So if you're on top of your site, if you If you're loving lovingly looking in your Ahrefs reports every night and just seeing what your backlinks look like, you will pick up on this stuff. Yeah.

ARTHUR: And it's pretty easy to see it. I mean, if you go into Ahrefs and you put your domain in, you'll see a big uplift in referring domains. If someone has done that, you're pretty, pretty certain that they're trying to do negative SEO.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And the good news is Google have a tool called the disavow file where you can basically just list all the domains that you don't want to have any impact on your site. So if you're keeping on top of this, you can just keep that updated and it won't have the desired effect. Like the person's just wasting their time. That's doing the negative better yet. You can pay us to keep on top of it. Well, yeah, well that's true. Not even us. It could be any, any, any SEO agency, ethical, good agency, go for it. But, um, you know, as a business owner, do you want to be lovingly looking at backlinks all day, every day and, and updating your disavow file? Probably not. That's why SEO agencies exist basically.

ARTHUR: Cool. Well, that was basically all that we have for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode about Blackout SEO and penalties. We'll be here next week to talk about more things SEO.

MICHAEL: And don't forget to like and subscribe. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Like smash that like button, hit that subscribe button. Anyway, we'll see you next time.

ARTHUR: See ya.

‍