If you haven’t heard Google and a few other websites have reported on the recent Google Bomb changes. In short, many keyword phrases, such as “miserable failure” no longer return a top result for the White House website. This modification to the Google Algo has many Webmasters and Mr. Bush wondering, wtf just happened to my SERPs!
Well, not to worry, the recent Google changes all continue to point in one direction. The true need and importance of building strong related and relevant, backlinks with proper anchor tags …. and properly built, linked, and structured Websites.
That’s it! The key that most Webmasters missed with the last few rounds of updates. “Properly built, linked, and structured Websites“.
From what I can see websites that have lost rankings had two things in common. First, the Website did not have a strong hold of relevant backlinks compared to non-relevant backlinks. This is why some city/town websites went poof in my opinion.
The second issue, and by far the largest, is general website errors. I’m convinced that the most recent Google upgrade added in better factoring of websites with general errors. From improperly formatted HTML, href links, 404 pages and images, bad html headers, improper robots.txt file, and even broken links in the SERPs – I’m convinced they are penalizing Webmasters more for the mistakes.
Now add in a mixture of general site errors or setup tossed in with non-relevant backlinks – and you have created your own self Google Bomb.
How to rebuild after your own Google Bomb!
The key is to start now – when you finish reading this post, open your website and start doing a full Quality Control Check on the entire domain. This is the hard part, where practice and experience come into play. Not only should you click every link / image on the Website, you should continue to surf it. Make sure all pages have a proper home link, internal pages should link to other internal popular-relevant pages, correct length and different title, description and matching body subjects. A proper and working robots.txt file, and make sure all linked images and hrefs have a subject related alt tag or title tags applied to them.
We aren’t done yet. From here open google.com and pull up your site:yourdomain.com
Click every listing you have under your domain. If you find a broken link (404 error) then setup a 301 redirect so Google knows where the new page is and will properly update its ranking.
Using a text based browser will allow you to view a Website the same way the Bots would view it. Viewing most websites with a text-based browser will often return a broken look, hard to read, use, and understand pages. Often alt tags are heavily repeated and the links generally go to the same source file. (ie signup form) However when viewing properly formatted and built Websites in a Text Editor, it returns a different feel. The websites can often be used, surfed, and contain a readable format that even a cell phone could correctly display. The hardest part of site optimization can be the HTML. Knowing how to read and write proper HTML and CSS really makes site optimizations easier and quicker.
I hope that this will help put some webmasters back on track. The first step to getting your listings back should be to improve your sites layout and errors. Now work on building quality relevant backlinks from older trusted sources and everything “should” return to normal.
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Talking About: Rebuilding after your own Google Bomb!