Don't Get Stuffed!

For those of you that rely on your Google ranking to bring in the trade SEO is more than just an interesting exercise, it's a essential element of your business plan and discovering that Google has penalised you for over use of keywords can quickly move from an irritation to a disaster in terms of visits. I am aware of at least one PC repair firm that which habitually was in the top 5 for certain search strings suddenly vanishing only to reappear 50 entries down from number. For the company involved and given that people seldom search after the first or second page, this was a disaster. This disaster takes on 70s all star movie proportions when the webmaster tries to put things right only to find that they are still way down the lists.

Background: The site has excellent content when I looked at it, but past version of the site definitely suffered from more than a degree of keyword stuffing. Competitors were close but could not match this site's content, but on checking out the backlinks, I was surprised to find that there were very few. I trawled through the site pages and quickly found although the company had tried to deal with the key word stuffing, some pages still held examples and urgently needed to be cleaned up.

The site's initial reputation was built on some excellent content but the over-optimisation of the site using key words, specifically using the same key word too many times - key word stuffing had resulted in the Google bots taking a dislike to the site which in its turn had caused it to sink down the rankings.

Once the site was penalised, the reputation of the site was effectively negated and the next ranking consideration were the site backlinks, the competition had more backlinks and so they rose while our company sank. The practical result of this will be that for an unknown period of time the company's will fluctuate wildly in the rankings - there is no limit for the amount of time this penalty will continue to be imposed.

So what do you do if you and your company find yourself with a similar problem?

1. Get rid of key word stuffing and make sure you clean the entire site and not just the index page. This will means that that there will be an end in sight to the penalty eventually.
2. Build ongoing links, these links will be the foundations of your new credibility, incoming links from quality site will also help.
3. Check out Google Webmaster Tools and look at the errors/alerts/warnings for your site, also build a new sitemap so that new content and the lack of keyword stuffing will be clearly flagged.
4. Freshen content - write some of the article and add others - this will provide activity which Google cannot ignore.
5. Be patient. It could take a while, something to remember the next time you are tempted to do a little keyword stuffing

Good luck.