ScrapeBoss
Elite Member
- Nov 25, 2010
- 1,865
- 673
While what I am presenting here represent my experience after the major change by Google in their algorithm announced on February 24th, 2011. These are not set of rules. Neither do they represent the meaning of Google algorithm. Therefore, you might have a completely different view and experience from what I have here.
WORDPRESS THEMES
It is my belief that Google has started going after certain Wordpress themes and sites using those themes are going to suffer in the rankings. I would want to consider that to be a Google penalty because such sites would not have their pages indexed. Also, those pages indexed would not appear in the search rankings. That means those pages would be filtered from the search results. For many months before the algorithm change, I had some wordpress blogs with a lot of content and doing well. I noticed that from the first week of February, the traffic from Google was dropping, thereby affecting my daily income. More pages were getting de-indexed by Google. Sometime in March, I decided to change the themes of all those sites because I wanted the sites to look simple with few navigation links that would distract visitors. I just decided to use the default Wordpress Twenty Ten theme. Surprisingly, the indexed pages of those sites increased and consequently the number of daily visitors from Google. My conclusion from this is that there are some themes which are not in the good books of Google.
WORDPRESS MADE FOR ADSENSE SITES
I have noticed that Google is now going after MFA sites using the wordpress blogging platform. I have friends who are big spenders and risk takers when it comes to investing online. They are like the big Las Vegas gamblers. Those guys are very mad at Google now. One of these guys had 1,053 MFA sites all running on .com, .net, .org domains and hosted on different types of dedicated servers and virtual assistants to help keep the sites running 24/7. In fact, he was spending more that $20,000 per year to manage those sites. The first message he got from Google was that his adsense account has been disabled. Some days later, he got the second and final message that his adsense account has been banned and all earned income transfered back to advertisers. Of course, the guy used to maked far higher than his annula spening on domain names, hosting and other overhead costs altogether. There are also some other people with new adsense accounts on new wordpress MFA sites which also got the same hammer from Google.
AFFILIATE LINKS
Although Google has not always been happy with affiliate links, I have noticed this more in recent weeks. To be specific, this month, Google has been issuing penalties to sites and web pages containing words such as "CLICK ON THIS LINK", "CLICK HERE", "CLICK ON THE IMAGE", etc. Web pages containing words like this are no longer showing in search results as they used to. I have noticed this to be common with long tail keyword searches which are not involving stiff competition. I am saying these keywords are now attracting penalties because a lot of my affiliate products review sites are now being filtered or de-indexed from search engines and their results. Other review sites with pure articles without any of those words are still ranking and doing well. You might not have experienced this. But this is my experience. For those into link building, I would advise making less use of these words or their equivalents in order not to make your backlinks and link efforts worthless.
As I said, my review sites containing these words have been performing badly since March and more especially in this month. To solve this issue, I am considering making use of these words on images on my sites. But those words would not be indexed. The images would not be given names like clickhere.jpg or buynow.jgp. This is going to take a lof of work especially those having ecommerce sites with hundreds or thousands of pages. Even the alt tags should not contain words like CLICK ON THE LINK, etc. I am looking at a situation where the images would blend with the page design and content so that the image text would look like ordinary text but with the same call to action.
ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION
If you don't want to have trouble with Google, choose wisely the words you use in your articles. I now notice that by sites' article titles with words like SUPER HOT, MIND BLOWING, FREE SHIPPING, CRAZY OFFER, LIMITED OFFER, BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE, etc. are no longer ranking. Some have even been de-indexed. Those still in Google index are now filtered from Google results. By filtering, I mean if I copy a part of the page text and paste in Google search, my site should come up in the search results. But this is not the case. My own site, which own the content, does not come up again. Too bad. My problems with Google concerning on-page optimization come up when you are promoting affiliate products. Many words can get you into trouble. Therefore, it's a good thing you choose wisely. I have not deleted those "bad" articles from my site. What I have done is increased the number of articles which are not promotional. These are soft-selling articles which give good information but which at the same time encourages the reader to check out whatever link available for more information.
AUTOBLOGS
Autoblogs are one of the hunted targets behind the Google algorithm change. They scrape content from other sites in order to cheat the search engines for traffic and make money online. Well, I am one of those people who have autoblogs and I have them in their hundreds on main domains, subdomains and subfolders. These are the types of autoblogs I have:
- autoblogs with exact content scraped from other sites (no re-writing or spinning)
- autoblogs with re-written content (spinning with synonyms)
- autoblogs with content derived after translating content scraped from other sites (e.g. English > Spanish > German > French > English)
In order to avoid any problem with Google, I did a full restructure of my autoblog empire and planned out a new strategy. This was early last month when the whole talk was on the new Google algo change. What I then did was deleted all content scraped from article directories. Those articles were already on thousands of other sites on the internet and I thought they would be useless to my autoblogs. I then concentrated on two types of content for my autoblog empire:
- RSS feeds and news sites content
- video content from YouTube
I have one strategy for making my autoblogs rank well. I put keyword in from of every title of scraped content. For example:
Key plugins installed:
- SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 - to autocreate urls from search terms
- PC Robots.txt - to block google from discovering autoblog plugins and other footprints
- Robots Meta - to no-follow affiliate links to make the site look natural to google
- All in One SEO Pack - to boost SEO factors of the autoblogs
I am happy today that after the Google algo change, each of my autoblogs get hundreds of traffic from Google per day. Of course traffic was coming before the algo change, but the traffic this time has skyrocketed. I run autoblogs like a manually operated site before Google. The traffic is still increasing and more pages and getting indexed.
Another good thing is that I have more pages indexed by Google. I could remember that one of the autoblogs went from just 450 to about 8,600 indexed pages within four days after changing my strategies.
CONCLUSION
This is my experience with Google after the algo change. I may be wrong. You may even say all I have said here is bullshit. Like I said before - everything is based on my own experience. You may even have completely different things. Google findings depend on a lot of factors that the experience or findings of a particular person might never affect others. I just wished I should share what I have noticed with Google since the past few weeks.
WORDPRESS THEMES
It is my belief that Google has started going after certain Wordpress themes and sites using those themes are going to suffer in the rankings. I would want to consider that to be a Google penalty because such sites would not have their pages indexed. Also, those pages indexed would not appear in the search rankings. That means those pages would be filtered from the search results. For many months before the algorithm change, I had some wordpress blogs with a lot of content and doing well. I noticed that from the first week of February, the traffic from Google was dropping, thereby affecting my daily income. More pages were getting de-indexed by Google. Sometime in March, I decided to change the themes of all those sites because I wanted the sites to look simple with few navigation links that would distract visitors. I just decided to use the default Wordpress Twenty Ten theme. Surprisingly, the indexed pages of those sites increased and consequently the number of daily visitors from Google. My conclusion from this is that there are some themes which are not in the good books of Google.
WORDPRESS MADE FOR ADSENSE SITES
I have noticed that Google is now going after MFA sites using the wordpress blogging platform. I have friends who are big spenders and risk takers when it comes to investing online. They are like the big Las Vegas gamblers. Those guys are very mad at Google now. One of these guys had 1,053 MFA sites all running on .com, .net, .org domains and hosted on different types of dedicated servers and virtual assistants to help keep the sites running 24/7. In fact, he was spending more that $20,000 per year to manage those sites. The first message he got from Google was that his adsense account has been disabled. Some days later, he got the second and final message that his adsense account has been banned and all earned income transfered back to advertisers. Of course, the guy used to maked far higher than his annula spening on domain names, hosting and other overhead costs altogether. There are also some other people with new adsense accounts on new wordpress MFA sites which also got the same hammer from Google.
AFFILIATE LINKS
Although Google has not always been happy with affiliate links, I have noticed this more in recent weeks. To be specific, this month, Google has been issuing penalties to sites and web pages containing words such as "CLICK ON THIS LINK", "CLICK HERE", "CLICK ON THE IMAGE", etc. Web pages containing words like this are no longer showing in search results as they used to. I have noticed this to be common with long tail keyword searches which are not involving stiff competition. I am saying these keywords are now attracting penalties because a lot of my affiliate products review sites are now being filtered or de-indexed from search engines and their results. Other review sites with pure articles without any of those words are still ranking and doing well. You might not have experienced this. But this is my experience. For those into link building, I would advise making less use of these words or their equivalents in order not to make your backlinks and link efforts worthless.
As I said, my review sites containing these words have been performing badly since March and more especially in this month. To solve this issue, I am considering making use of these words on images on my sites. But those words would not be indexed. The images would not be given names like clickhere.jpg or buynow.jgp. This is going to take a lof of work especially those having ecommerce sites with hundreds or thousands of pages. Even the alt tags should not contain words like CLICK ON THE LINK, etc. I am looking at a situation where the images would blend with the page design and content so that the image text would look like ordinary text but with the same call to action.
ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION
If you don't want to have trouble with Google, choose wisely the words you use in your articles. I now notice that by sites' article titles with words like SUPER HOT, MIND BLOWING, FREE SHIPPING, CRAZY OFFER, LIMITED OFFER, BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE, etc. are no longer ranking. Some have even been de-indexed. Those still in Google index are now filtered from Google results. By filtering, I mean if I copy a part of the page text and paste in Google search, my site should come up in the search results. But this is not the case. My own site, which own the content, does not come up again. Too bad. My problems with Google concerning on-page optimization come up when you are promoting affiliate products. Many words can get you into trouble. Therefore, it's a good thing you choose wisely. I have not deleted those "bad" articles from my site. What I have done is increased the number of articles which are not promotional. These are soft-selling articles which give good information but which at the same time encourages the reader to check out whatever link available for more information.
AUTOBLOGS
Autoblogs are one of the hunted targets behind the Google algorithm change. They scrape content from other sites in order to cheat the search engines for traffic and make money online. Well, I am one of those people who have autoblogs and I have them in their hundreds on main domains, subdomains and subfolders. These are the types of autoblogs I have:
- autoblogs with exact content scraped from other sites (no re-writing or spinning)
- autoblogs with re-written content (spinning with synonyms)
- autoblogs with content derived after translating content scraped from other sites (e.g. English > Spanish > German > French > English)
In order to avoid any problem with Google, I did a full restructure of my autoblog empire and planned out a new strategy. This was early last month when the whole talk was on the new Google algo change. What I then did was deleted all content scraped from article directories. Those articles were already on thousands of other sites on the internet and I thought they would be useless to my autoblogs. I then concentrated on two types of content for my autoblog empire:
- RSS feeds and news sites content
- video content from YouTube
I have one strategy for making my autoblogs rank well. I put keyword in from of every title of scraped content. For example:
keyword | Title of scraped content
Key plugins installed:
- SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 - to autocreate urls from search terms
- PC Robots.txt - to block google from discovering autoblog plugins and other footprints
- Robots Meta - to no-follow affiliate links to make the site look natural to google
- All in One SEO Pack - to boost SEO factors of the autoblogs
I am happy today that after the Google algo change, each of my autoblogs get hundreds of traffic from Google per day. Of course traffic was coming before the algo change, but the traffic this time has skyrocketed. I run autoblogs like a manually operated site before Google. The traffic is still increasing and more pages and getting indexed.
Another good thing is that I have more pages indexed by Google. I could remember that one of the autoblogs went from just 450 to about 8,600 indexed pages within four days after changing my strategies.
CONCLUSION
This is my experience with Google after the algo change. I may be wrong. You may even say all I have said here is bullshit. Like I said before - everything is based on my own experience. You may even have completely different things. Google findings depend on a lot of factors that the experience or findings of a particular person might never affect others. I just wished I should share what I have noticed with Google since the past few weeks.
