Something Really Interesting About Recent Google Update (Look here for example)

Okay, so as I've been posting. Only 1 of my blog/site is penalised in this Google update. The entire blog is built on just one theme and so are all articles. Most articles written are 400-1000 words long, unique/non spun and written in proper English. There are no Ads above the fold and I'm using a neat theme. Everything is super and a reader would love to read a site like this.

What penalty I got?

Almost all the pages that were getting me traffic by being on page 1/page 2 were pushed down 8-10 pages. I checked for the most active pages and that is what happened.

What I found just now?

Some of the pages are still ranking near Page 2/Page 1. These are the same pages, articles that were written on 2007 and they were not touched when it came to onpage SEO. The keyword is mentioned ONLY once in the entire page making it very close to zero keyword density. Many of these pages were no where ranking on Google due to lack of Onpage SEO and I had edited several of them in 2012 begining to improve the onpageSEO factor and almost all crawled up in rankings post that.

When I enter this one blog post page that is not penalised, is of extremely low quality and I'll hate to read such an article. Its small without an introduction or conclusion. Very crappy content, I can't believe I even wrote such articles 5 years back lol.

What about the rest of pages that got penalised?

All the other pages that were hit by this update were all keyword optimised (No not keyword stuffed or low quality content). Keyword was targetted in the title/url/ couple of times on the article. I think I maintained a keyword density of 1% or sometimes 1.5%. Any reader would find it completely natural to read such an article. But yeah those were definitely "SEOed" since I knew about these stuff and had a live example that all pages that lacked onpage seo were no where in ranking and upon improving onpage seo, many crawled to 1st and 2nd page.

So what would a webmaster would do? If he sees improvement by doing Onpage SEO, would he say, no no what if google penalise me tomorrow? I better do no onpage and not rank than doing onpage, rank high and get penalised? What the hell is this?

Something Interesting I'd like to try.

I'd like to go back and reduce Onpage SEO I did on all the articles to make it look like a NOOB who knows nothing about SEO has written an article. Let's test out if this improves the rankings some day tomorrow. I'll give an update if it helps at all.

One guy and many others have also shared that they used some Onpage SEO plugins on their blogs and those were penalised too. Is this update heavily levied on those sites that used Onpage SEO to get rankings up? But aren't all high quality sites doing the same?

Anyone else has any relevant case study to share?

well you are 100% correct. Google should care only about the user experience not webmaster made seo or not. They keep decreasing their search quality.

so should we be removing seo pressor and all in one ? what are your thoughts

moose123 said:

so should we be removing seo pressor and all in one ? what are your thoughts

Click to expand...

All in one is fine I'm sure but it looks like the issue maybe keyword stuffing which appears to have a different definition now.

SEO Pressor may be causing people to over optimize on page factors now. It would be interesting to see someone run some tests on changing the keywords to all LSI keywords with very low density against single keyword optimized pages. Also do a test on just low density without LSI to compare.

moose123 said:

so should we be removing seo pressor and all in one ? what are your thoughts

Click to expand...

I really don't know, I'll have to run several Case studies to unearth the culprit behind penalising. I think you should also try to remove SEO presser on a couple of sites, do link building on them and see if they improve in rankings. Worth a try I guess. I'll give an update when Im done with them.

Is funny that my least optimized (crappy) websites kept their SERP, and the ones that I cared about (good content) were hit. This new update seems more like a witch hunt of anyone who uses SEO.

Still, regardless of the reason, the reality is that we need to adapt to the new google update. I am going to do a test with one of my sites, erasing any trace of onpage SEO to see if that helps.

From what I read, SEO Pressor was only using the words in the post into account when attempting to optimize the page which can easily create over-optimazation when you include everything else (tags, categories on the sidebar, your tag cloud in your sidebar... ) I use Easy WP SEO because it takes the entire page into account and I also keep my keyword density low - 1 - 1.5% - not of that 4-5% density garbage on my pages...

OldSalt said:

From what I read, SEO Pressor was only using the words in the post into account when attempting to optimize the page which can easily create over-optimazation when you include everything else (tags, categories on the sidebar, your tag cloud in your sidebar... ) I use Easy WP SEO because it takes the entire page into account and I also keep my keyword density low - 1 - 1.5% - not of that 4-5% density garbage on my pages...

Click to expand...

I also kept my keyword density to 1% in most posts and they were not garbage content. Some of my sites which had extremely low keyword density like even less than a percent have survived the hit it seems. The one that didn't is dead.

25/04
So looks like it wasnt related to on page seo, more keyword spamming.
Cutts is clarifying that now somewhat infamous over-optimization statement.

"I think ‘over-optimization' wasn't the best description, because it blurred the distinction between white hat SEO and webspam. This change is targeted at webspam, not SEO, and we tried to make that fact more clear in the blog post," Cutts told me.

26/04 On tweeter within the last few hours:
Matt - van Searchmetrics data is a weekly diff & includes a Panda data refresh, so sites going up/down mostly aren't due to algo update.
There was a further algo
Matt Cutts - yup, believe a Panda data refresh on 4/19. I don't think rustybrick asked us about it; we sometimes wait for him to ask.

That leads me to question. What exactly is keyword spam? Even 1% keyword density is wrong now? What if we write an article naturally without focusing on keywords and end up with 1% KD and get penalised tomorrow? There has to be some guideline for penalties :/

Keep us up dated. One my sites that was hit the hardest is exactly like you stated. Far from keyword stuffed...One of my competitors who wasnt effected, never done any on page SEO, hardly any backlinks, and is now ranking like crazy for all keywords.

Tatsuya said:

Is funny that my least optimized (crappy) websites kept their SERP, and the ones that I cared about (good content) were hit. This new update seems more like a witch hunt of anyone who uses SEO.

Click to expand...

Yep, I'm finding that some of my crappy sites that have terrible content that isn't optimized and have few backlinks are ranking better than my high quality content sites with backlinks and social signals.

I even have 2 sites where unbacklinked internal pages are drawing more traffic from better rankings compared to the homepages which went from page 1 to page 20+.

I believe the algo takes into consideration the website as a whole, not only the page. I was analyzing my sites, and the ones that got hit the hardest were the ones focused on a topic. For example, all articles related to "dog training".
The websites that had articles from different but related topics like "dog training, cat training, mouse training, etc." kept the SERP.
So, my assumption is that a website focused on one topic has to be even more careful with over-optimization.
I applied the same offpage/onpage seo techniques to all my websites, and is interesting that the ones with broad topics were not hit.