SEO Disasters: Preventing The Unthinkable

Is your site suffering from a sudden drop in traffic?

I was at a company offsite, and my phone had been vibrating with several calls. I left my meeting and saw that my good friend (let’s call him “Tony”) had called several times and left a message: “I think something bad happening to my website. Traffic is crashing. Some sort of SEO problem.”

Tony runs iFly, an extremely successful airport information site. Like many of us, he is very dependent on Google traffic; an SEO issue would be a big problem, indeed.

To give you an idea of how bad “something bad” was, look at this drop:

Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

“You found what on my site?”

When I first got the call from Tony, I suspected Panda because an update to the algorithm had just been released. Fortunately for Tony and iFly, it was not a Panda event.

The first thing I noticed was that the traffic drop impacted organic search traffic from both Google and Bing. That was great news, as it implied a technical problem. I took a look at the source, and lo and behold:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex“>

In the iFly case, there was a tiny bug that resulted in the meta tag above being inserted into every page in the site. This one line of code was the cause of all his troubles. Essentially, it told Google and Bing to ignore every page of his site. They obliged.

Violations & Search Engine Spam Penalties

SEO：Vt: “Thin” or “Shallow” Content
Responding to a drumbeat of complaints about poor search results, Google rolled out its “Panda” update in February 2011. Panda targets what is described as “thin” or “shallow” content or content that is lacking in substance.

This domain-level penalty targets sites with a predominant amount of so-so content and essentially treats it similar to overt spam techniques.

Today it’s no longer a question of whether the content is simply relevant but whether it is valuable to the user.


Vc: Cloaking
Let’s talk sophisticated hiding. How about rigging your site so that search engines are shown a completely different version than what humans see?

That’s called cloaking. Search engines really don’t like it. It’s one of the worst things you could do. Heck, Google’s even banned itself for cloaking. Seriously.

While most people are unlikely to accidentally spam a search engine, the opposite is true when it comes to cloaking. That’s why it’s such a heavy penalty, if you’re caught doing it. It’s a bait and switch and seen as a deliberate attempt to manipulate search results.

Vs: Keyword Stuffing
It’s one of the oldest spam tactics on the books, yet is still being used, and the search engines still don’t like it. Search engines say to use words you want to be found for on your pages. OK, I’ll give them those words over and over again! How about 100 times. In a row? That work for you, Google?

Actually, no, it doesn’t. But “keyword stuffing” could get you penalized.

How often is too often? There’s no correct answer here, but you’d really have to go to extremes to cause this penalty to kick in. It’s most likely to happen to non-SEOs who just don’t know better and might decide to paste a word many times in a row, typically at the bottom of a web page.

Vh: Hidden Text
Once you decide to keyword stuff, your next thought will probably be “Why don’t I hide all this text that no human wants to see.” You might make the text white, so it blends with a page’s background. In doing so, you will have spammed a search engine.

Search engines don’t like anything hidden. They want to see everything that a user sees. Don’t hide text, whether it be using styles, fonts, display:none or any other means that means a typical user can’t see it.

What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?

All major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.

Search engines “crawl” websites, going from one page to another incredibly quickly, acting like hyperactive speed-readers. They make copies of your pages that get stored in what’s called an “index,” which is like a massive book of the web.

When someone searches, the search engine flips through this big book, finds all the relevant pages and then picks out what it thinks are the very best ones to show first. To be found, you have to be in the book. To be in the book, you have to be crawled.

Most sites generally don’t have crawling issues, but there are things that can cause problems. For example, JavaScript or Flash can potentially hide links; making the pages those links lead to hidden from search engines. And both can potentially cause the actual words on pages to be hidden.

Each site is given a crawl budget, an approximate amount of time or pages a search engine will crawl each day, based on the relative trust and authority of a site. Larger sites may seek to improve their crawl efficiency to ensure that the ‘right’ pages are being crawled more often. The use of robots.txt, internal link structures and specifically telling search engines not to crawl pages with certain URL parameters can all improve crawl efficiency.

WHAT IS SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to activity that attempts to improve search engine rankings.In search results Google™ displays links to pages it considers relevant and authoritative. Authority is mostly measured by analysing the number and quality of links from other web pages.In simple terms your web pages have the potential to rank in Google™ so long as other web pages link to them.

A Simple 1-2-3 Guide to Getting Better Search Results

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the simple activity of ensuring a website can be found in search engines for words and phrases relevant to what the site is offering. In many respects it's simply quality control for websites. Having said that, if there was ever an industry that was little understood by outsiders it's SEO.

Ask some SEO companies about SEO and they'll try and blind you with science and confuse you into thinking it's a black art. Say to some companies what is SEO and two hours later you'll be none the wiser. Not so here at Red Evolution. We love seeing the light bulb go on when our clients get it. We prefer our clients to not only know what we are doing for them, but why!

How Do I Get Links?

Links are important but don't confuse quality with quantity and don't think about links in isolation from your content. It's vital to understand that having great content massively increases your chances of securing natural links from quality relevant pages. These links will help you the most.

In simple language if you have something worth linking to you might secure links worth having. Great sites don't link to poor quality content, why would they?

In Summary

Do your homework and understand what kind of content your potential customers are looking for. Create a great site, create content people need and make it easy for them to share it. Do this and you'll start to see your website traffic increase.

How to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines (SEO)

Now that you’ve built a great site, you’ll want people to be able to easily find and visit your site.  One way to do that is to simply give them the address (like www.nameofyourwebsitehere.com or yoursite.weebly.com) so they can go there directly.  

car2tw

But, of course, that only works for those people to whom you have a close enough connection to provide the address.  Everyone else will find your site on Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.   How can you optimize your site to ensure you appear as high as possible in the search engine rankings?

Start with the basics.  Read our Description, Titles and Keywords article to learn how / why to add this information throughout the pages of your site.  

While you're doing this, keep in mind that keywords are not made out of magic (this is explained further in the Keywords help article linked above).  Just because you add a keyword to your site does not mean search engines are going to find you through that keyword.  If life were that easy, we’d all be rich and retired to our own private islands by now.   

Get a Google Webmaster account.  Google is far and away the most important search engine (it’s not even close) and a Webmaster account can give you more control over / insight into how they’re ranking you.  We show how to setup an account in our Google Webmaster help article. 

Use page names that are relevant to search words and phrases.  The name you provide to a page in Weebly is the name given to that page both in the site navigation and in the address of that page on your site.  Why is this important?  Because if a word is in your address it is seen as more relevant to your site by search engines.  More relevant means more likely to to show up in search results. 

Use keyword phrases in your links.  If you link from one page of your site to another, use descriptive text for the link.  For example this:

Read our How to Create Links article to learn how to do this on your own site. 

Is better than this:



Learn how how to create a link by going here. 

Use Titles to headline content in your site (when appropriate).  Search Engines see Titles (which are tagged as H2 -- don't worry about this if you don't know what it means) as generally more important than regular text.  You can add Titles to your site via our Title element and via the Title section of any Paragraph element that includes a Title.   

But don’t write all your text in a Title.  That will make things worse for your site.  You can’t trick the search engines like this, so don’t try.  

Is your site relevant only to people in a certain area?  Highlight that by Creating a Google Map that shows site visitors your location and by referring to the physical location of your business throughout the site where appropriate.  Writing “Visit our San Francisco showroom” is better than writing “Come see our showroom.”

Use alt-text for your photos.  This doesn’t work in our galleries or slideshows, but you can add alt-text to a regular picture by clicking on it and using the Advanced Option in the toolbar.  This should be used to add a short description of the image.  View our How to Upload a Picture instructions to see more detail on this option. 

Get other sites to link back to your site.  The more sites that link to your own site (as a general rule), the more Google trusts your site to be worthwhile.  Think of other people linking back to your site as word-of-mouth that tells not just other people to check-out your site, but tells the search engines to do the same.  

There is nothing more important to your ranking than other sites linking to you, but there is no get-rich-quick method to get links back to your site.  Build interesting content and let people know it exists.  Just as building a business takes work and time and effort, building traffic to a website takes work and time and effort.  

Link to your own site from any other sites you may have (like a Twitter or Facebook profile).  If you have an email newsletter, archive it via your email provider's site so that your own newsletter acts as another site linking to you. 

Maintain a Blog.  A blog enables you to continually add content to your site.  The search engines like to see new content on your site.   Read our Create a Blog article to learn how to build a blog with Weebly. 

可參考此：http://why1609.weebly.com/

Make reasonable goals.  If you're a photographer, you are not going to show up at the top of the search results for the word photographer.  If you're a florist, you aren't going to show up at the top of the search results for flowers or mother's day.  

But if you're a photographer in San Francisco, you can potentially get to the top of the list for San Francisco Headshot Photographers.  If you're a florist in London, you can work to get a good search ranking for Valentine's Day Flowers, London.  Focus on that.  Focus on getting your site to show up in a search for your own name.  Try to get the attention of bloggers who may write about your business.  Encourage visitors to review your business at places like Yelp.com.  

And if you want more tips, do a Google search for SEO Tips.  A lot of different people have written a lot of different articles on this topic.  This help article is meant to be a good place to start, but it certainly isn't the end-all, be-all of SEO.  It never hurts to research other sources of information.