90 replies to this topic

[qwerty]

I've been researching this subject of misspellings, and the reason it's come up is because my site suddenly disappeared from Google's index and the consensus on the Google webmasters group was because it contained "spammy" lists of misspellings at the bottom.

Did anyone from Google indicate that they were part of that consensus?

The words were all completely relevant to the topics, and the reason I put them on the page is because it's also claimed that if you put keywords in the meta tags but not in the page content you'll get penalized. One SEO company's page says there's no evidence of that claim, however. I've had searches on Google return for information in the meta tags, so I'm pretty convinced that Google DOES still take them into account to whatever degree.

I don't see any reason to believe that's true either. But are you referring to the meta keywords or the meta description (or both)? I haven't seen any evidence that Google so much as looks at the meta keywords, but I strongly believe in the importance of the meta description, whether it's used for ranking or not. And I have no problem with using words in the meta description that don't happen to appear on the page. I do use the page's main keywords in the tag, but apart from that, I consider its purpose to be separate from that of the on-page content.

[Randy]

Just to clear up a few cobwebs...

and the reason I put them on the page is because it's also claimed that if you put keywords in the meta tags but not in the page content you'll get penalized.

This is not true.

Now if you were crazy enough to load up the metas with 20,000 words it might attract a penalty, but it wouldn't be because of the words not appearing on the page. It would be because of the spam attempt and total misuse of the meta tags.

As I've also said elsewhere, I've received no email saying my site was going to be deindexed; nor have I received a violation message in my Google webmasters console. According to my understanding of what Matt Cutts said in response to a recent fracas involving a big, old "authority" site that was hacked with obscenities and removed from the index, that's Google's typical procedure in the case of violations.

Do not ever expect Google or any other search engine to send you an email to give you a heads up about a violation. The only time I've heard of them doing that is when the site is a known authority that would make Google themselves look bad if it didn't return the site as it normally would if everything was kosher. It happens very, very rarely. They do not send out email, pre- or post-violation, to normal sites though.

I'm not sure how much you can trust what you see in the Webmaster Tools these days. In the early days they said the panel may show when a site has been penalized. Conversely it may not show any sort of penalty message. They may have changed this now, but if they have changed the policy I've certainly not heard it from the horses mouth.

[Jeri2012]

Just to clear up a few cobwebs...

This is not true.

Now if you were crazy enough to load up the metas with 20,000 words it might attract a penalty, but it wouldn't be because of the words not appearing on the page. It would be because of the spam attempt and total misuse of the meta tags.
Do not ever expect Google or any other search engine to send you an email to give you a heads up about a violation. The only time I've heard of them doing that is when the site is a known authority that would make Google themselves look bad if it didn't return the site as it normally would if everything was kosher. It happens very, very rarely. They do not send out email, pre- or post-violation, to normal sites though.

I'm not sure how much you can trust what you see in the Webmaster Tools these days. In the early days they said the panel may show when a site has been penalized. Conversely it may not show any sort of penalty message. They may have changed this now, but if they have changed the policy I've certainly not heard it from the horses mouth.

Thank you, Randy. FYI, I just submitted this question to SEO Book author Aaron Wall, who recommends this forum.

I asked, "Could comma-delineated page-relevant keyword lists in gray font get my site deindexed?"

His response: "...if an editor saw it yes, but you may have other issues as well."

I don't think I've got other issues, but that one apparently might be enough. If an editor saw it, I wonder if my site was reported as "spam" by someone. That would stink, obviously, since it was almost all original and valuable content.

Here's the next question, should I admit guilt to some sort of transgression and submit a reinclusion request, or should I just wait, having removed the offensive material?

Oh, I was also wondering about the fact that SEOs recommended putting site-relevant keywords at the very bottom of the page, since that's the last thing the bots see. I've had them on my other "authority" site for a long time, just a few, not comma-delineated, and it's still going just fine. It all makes the head spin - like the cabbage on the monitor!

[qwerty]

His response: "...if an editor saw it yes, but you may have other issues as well."

Well... maybe if an editor saw it after receiving a desperate email from an AdWords rep who got a complaint from a customer who spends a lot...

[Jill]

Here's the next question, should I admit guilt to some sort of transgression and submit a reinclusion request, or should I just wait, having removed the offensive material?

If it was actually a hand edit by an editor (which I tend to doubt if that was your only "transgression" since that's not actually anything spammy), then yes, you will need to request a reinclusion request. The editor isn't going to keep visiting to see if you cleaned up your mess.

[Jeri2012]

Well... maybe if an editor saw it after receiving a desperate email from an AdWords rep who got a complaint from a customer who spends a lot...

Yes, that would make sense, but not in my case. My site is well written with good, original and useful content. I employed no black hat techniques, no links to bad neighborhoods, no keyword stuffing, no trashy writing, no content duplication, no scraping, no junk at all. The keywords lists in question were all page relevant - they were basically meta tag keyword lists in the content itself, because I'd read that having keywords in the meta tags that aren't in the content can get your site penalized. Randy and others say otherwise. I'm puzzled, because even Aaron Wall recommends putting misspellings in the keyword meta tags, so why if I included them in the content would they be a problem?

I've had a website since 1995; one domain has been online for about a decade. That site is, I believe, considered an "authority site," as it has almost five thousand links to it, from all sorts of places, including .edu (I wouldn't know about .gov, but it wouldn't surprise me). I had the misspellings on pages on that site, but I removed them out of fear - too bad for the bad spellers, I guess. I've got another site in which I used the similar method with the keywords, and it wasn't torpedoed.

What all this means is that I'm not all that inexperienced when it comes to websites and the net. In fact, I've got no. 1 rankings on a slew of keywords for my articles - my main site gets anywhere from 60,000 to 90,000 unique visitors a month. I'm a professional writer, having sold almost 50,000 hard copies of my books, which have been translated into two foreign languages to date. In other words, I don't write a bunch of crud that would get me penalized for "spam."

Well, I've be having a 15-minute Q&A with Aaron Wall hopefully shortly, with the following questions:

1. Should I scrap the site and begin again on a different domain?

2. If not, how long do I wait before filing a reinclusion request?

3. What do I do about the old site and all the links from decent and respectable domains?

4. Do I do a 301 redirect to my new site? Will that penalize the new site, if the old one is penalized. And so on.

As you may be able to guess, I'm not one to give up easily!

[qwerty]

I'd read that having keywords in the meta tags that aren't in the content can get your site penalized. Randy and others say otherwise. I'm puzzled, because even Aaron Wall recommends putting misspellings in the keyword meta tags, so why if I included them in the content would they be a problem?

Randy and I both said that this idea of having problems because there are words in the meta keywords that aren't on the page is wrong. It doesn't work that way. You should think of the meta keywords tag as a place to put the words and phrases you're optimizing the page for, and that can include misspellings, but that's really about all the tag is going to do. It's like a note you write to yourself. So I agree with both Randy and Aaron on that.

Including misspellings on the page is, in my opinion, only a problem in that it looks bad. A list of words on the page, without any context, looks bad, and so do misspellings. Combine the two, and you've got a chunk of text that looks bad. It's up to a search engine to decide if the color or size of that text is such that it looks like an attempt to hide it, but that's not what I'm concerned about. I'm just saying that sticking a list of misspelled words on the page is something I consider to be a bad idea, even if it gets you to rank for those misspellings.

[Randy]

Oh, I was also wondering about the fact that SEOs recommended putting site-relevant keywords at the very bottom of the page, since that's the last thing the bots see.

I'm not sure where you read that one Jeri, but it's another myth. Having those keywords at the bottom of the page is neither an advantage nor disadvantage. No more than having them at the top of the content gives some magical advantage for SEO purposes.

It sounds like you may have been reading and taking to heart some bad information. Not terribly unusual since there has been soooooo much totally bogus stuff being spouted off out there for so many years. If you've got a couple of hours you may want to review some of the docs Jill has compiled that tell you what has been tested and proven to be true and what hasn't. It'll give you a sounder foundation to build from.

[Srvwiz]

Today I saw a big PR ups and down for many of my sites, blogs and all....

[Randy]

No wonder we got a flood of PR Panic posts today.

See, I'd never know because I don't have the Google Toolbar running since I don't want to let them track me. Besides, Toolbar PR is completely and utterly irrelevant.

[Jeri2012]

I'm not sure where you read that one Jeri, but it's another myth. Having those keywords at the bottom of the page is neither an advantage nor disadvantage. No more than having them at the top of the content gives some magical advantage for SEO purposes.

It sounds like you may have been reading and taking to heart some bad information. Not terribly unusual since there has been soooooo much totally bogus stuff being spouted off out there for so many years. If you've got a couple of hours you may want to review some of the docs Jill has compiled that tell you what has been tested and proven to be true and what hasn't. It'll give you a sounder foundation to build from.

I'm pretty sure I read that in Brad Callen's SEO Made Easy. If I can't count on Brad Callen, whew! That would be a problem. I will check out the docs Jill has compiled, assuming I find them.

[Jeri2012]

Randy and I both said that this idea of having problems because there are words in the meta keywords that aren't on the page is wrong. It doesn't work that way. You should think of the meta keywords tag as a place to put the words and phrases you're optimizing the page for, and that can include misspellings, but that's really about all the tag is going to do. It's like a note you write to yourself. So I agree with both Randy and Aaron on that.

Including misspellings on the page is, in my opinion, only a problem in that it looks bad. A list of words on the page, without any context, looks bad, and so do misspellings. Combine the two, and you've got a chunk of text that looks bad. It's up to a search engine to decide if the color or size of that text is such that it looks like an attempt to hide it, but that's not what I'm concerned about. I'm just saying that sticking a list of misspelled words on the page is something I consider to be a bad idea, even if it gets you to rank for those misspellings.

Thanks. I wasn't disagreeing with you, Randy and Aaron on whether or not having keywords in the tags but not in the content gets you penalized. It's fine with me!

There's no doubt it would look bad, but that shouldn't get my site deindexed - as I've said before, there are pages on .edu sites with discussions and lists of common misspellings. I don't see their sites being deindexed for including them. The "offending" material has been removed, but I'm still waiting to figure out whether or not the site will come back up, or if I should scrap it, take my original content and put it another site that's already indexed. I've got a decent amount of links from good "authority" sites, so that would be really a shame. For now, however, I'm engaging my attention elsewhere and will wait, as I read Aaron Wall's SEO Book.... Sigh. From that book, it appears that what one CAN do could fit into a thimble.

No wonder we got a flood of PR Panic posts today.

See, I'd never know because I don't have the Google Toolbar running since I don't want to let them track me. Besides, Toolbar PR is completely and utterly irrelevant.

Now, that's a new one! I won't ask "How's that?" because I'm sure you have an informative thread on that subject somewhere. Either SEO IS rocket science, or it is meaningless - that's what it's beginning to look like.

[Jill]

If I can't count on Brad Callen, whew! That would be a problem.

Umm...then you might have a problem.

[Randy]

Now, that's a new one! I won't ask "How's that?" because I'm sure you have an informative thread on that subject somewhere. Either SEO IS rocket science, or it is meaningless - that's what it's beginning to look like.

For the Toolbar PR schtuff, see this thread, or really several threads in the PageRank Discussion sections of the Link Building area of the forums.

As for the docs Jill has put out there, a good place to start is the Tips for Newbies, which links off to a lot of really good info. I'm not sure if it's including in that one or not, but there's also a Myths thread from some time ago too. (Some serious, some in jest.) I believe there's a Top 10 things that'll help your site rank and convert in the newbies list that you'll probably find quite helpful.

re: SEO is Rocket Science vs. Meaningless. I'd have to go with neither. SEO certainly isn't rocket science, but it's not meaningless either. SEO techniques that has been proven to perform over time simply require a large dose of common sense, some basic Marketing 101 thinking, a good amount of common sense and a willingness to test things to see what works for your site. Meaning there are definitely some things you can do over and over again with different sites that will serve you well, but there really isn't any SEO By Numbers strategy that will make every site the best it can possibly be. Being a webmaster of some 50+ sites now I can tell you that some concepts work wonderfully well with one site that targets one type of customer, but will fail miserably if you try to apply the same exact concept with another site that targets a different type of customer. By the same token, all of my sites make use of basic stuff like good page titles, (hopefully) compelling copy, sensible and diverse linkage, etc.

Definitely not rocket science. Anyone can do it. Not meaningless since on average I get 'round about 50% of my buying traffic from free search engine listings. But not SEO By Numbers either, since each site's message is tailored to the people I'm trying to reach.

[jojodwolf]

Well a lot of reading on this thread, for I too have been lost in google... Yahoo is still GREAT !! so I will just have to be patient.. I was hoping when google came around to my site again all would be back to normal, but it has not.. but I realize now Time is probably the only real solution..

Edited by Randy, 14 February 2007 - 06:12 PM.