Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Earlier today I talked about 5 sure-fire ways to get your site penalized. After realizing how short the post was and how many penalty causes there actually are, I thought I’d shed some light on 5 others. Google penalties suck, and they’re becoming increasingly more difficult to repair. I still have domains with 2-year-old penalties—they won’t rank, no matter what I do.
The point is, avoiding Google penalties is far less of a hassle than recovering from them. Avoiding them and being the safest you can be just means it might take you a little longer to obtain the rankings you desire. But in doing so you’ll build up a far more natural link profile that’ll stand the test of time. So here are 5 more ways to avoid a Google Penalty:
In this guide
1. Steady Link Velocity
Link velocity is one of the most important factors in link building. Link velocity is the speed at which you build links. The majority of SEO’s build links moronically quickly. How can it be natural for a brand new site to start getting 1000, 500, or even 100 links a day?
It’s not natural at all. A new website should start with a steady 2-5 links a day for one month, 5-10 links/day month 2, 10-20 links/day month 3, and continue respectively from there. You can adjust the volumes to your site, its niche, and popularity. It all depends on how quickly you generate traffic. The more traffic you generate, the faster you can speed up your link velocity.
But in a small niche where the SEO competition is barely existent—slow & steady wins the game.
2. Social Media Justification
If you have no social presence, how the heck are you getting so many backlinks? How are people finding your site and linking to it on such a large scale?
If you want to build links quickly from the very beginning, you need to justify your links with a social presence. This means social shares, Google +1’s, Facebook likes, bookmarks, and Tweets (now x.com).
By purchasing real social shares, you justify your backlinks.
Google sees that your site is popular on social networks, so therefore the backlinks must be natural. Backlinks don’t naturally appear out of nowhere. Social presence is key for securing your position in the search engines and justifying your aggressive link-building activity. You can purchase shares & bookmarks via Fiverr.com (checked as of July 2024) or via services like SYNND (broken link).
3. Relevancy
Quality over quantity should be applied to every SEO campaign. You’ll rank faster and stronger by building relevant backlinks with content that relates to your site.
Building links from sites that aren’t relevant to your own is not only unnatural, it’s high risk. Google pays close attention to relevancy, if you’re getting links from random Chinese herb, gardening, and celebrity sites; you’ll eventually pay for it. In the short term, the links may well boost your rankings, but long term it’s only going to damage your site’s SEO presence.
4. Over On-Site Optimization
Over-optimizing your site on-page easily makes it onto the top 5 list. It’s equally one of the easiest ways to avoid a Google penalty or recover from a hit.
Nearly all webmasters over-optimize their sites. General SEO knowledge teaches you to optimize your:
- Title
- Description
- Meta Keywords
- Tags
- Body
- H1, 2, and 3 tags.
The reality is optimizing all those different metrics is completely unnatural. Write for people, not the search engines! It’s alright to have your keyword mentioned once in your title. It’s alright to mention your keyword once or twice in your description. It’s ok to mention your exact keyword once in your meta keywords and tags.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →The body is where most SEO’s go wrong. You do not need some crazy high keyword density of 5-10%. I personally believe in including the keyword once in the title, description, keywords, tags, and once in the body. After I know that I’ve included the main keyword once in the body, I’ll continue to write as per normal without thinking about SEO.
If the keyword happens to crop up twice, so be it. If it comes up 20 times, fine. The idea is to write your content without being “SEO conscious”. Just make sure you include it at least once and it should naturally flow throughout your body several other times.
Be natural, that’s all it takes. Including the keyword in your header 1, 2, and 3+ tags is absurd. Once again; it looks unnatural. I find that by paying less attention to SEO and ranking for my 1 target keyword; I tend to rank for many other related keywords without realizing targeting them.
5. Cheap Or Spun Content
If you’re building an information website and you want its articles to rank; don’t cheap out on the content. You need at least 500 words per page, preferably more. I’ve found the golden number to be anything upwards of 800 words. A lot of the time Google penalties don’t affect entire domains, but individual pages.
It’s especially the case for thin pages or pages with spun content. Google’s algorithm is advanced, it’s becoming increasingly more accurate at identifying the bad content from the good. Write or outsource GREAT content upwards of 800 words per page for best results. The same goes for spun content; Google can pretty much identify it.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right more SEO tips, tricks, and secrets.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Tyronne Ratcliff, August 15 2012, 05:13
Social shares and backlinks go hand-in-hand, you can’t have one without the other, and if you do Google has every right to be suspicious of your site, thanks for the awesome tips.
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I think what’s being missed here is that link velocity isn’t really about the numbers, it’s about matching your traffic. A site pulling 2-5 links a day while getting zero visitors is still going to look off to Google, no matter what schedule you follow. The velocity has to track the audience you actually have, not a fixed table.
The 2-5 links a day figure — per page, or across the whole domain?
What’s being described here, without the name, is Goodhart’s law: once social signals became a proxy Google trusted for authenticity, the proxy itself became the target, and people started manufacturing it directly rather than earning it. The interesting question this post doesn’t ask is what happens once Google notices the proxy is gaming-prone at scale — historically the response has been to weight it down or drop it, which means anyone who built a strategy entirely around it inherited the risk a year later.
The part where you’re told to build backlinks slowly and naturally, then two paragraphs later told to buy social shares on Fiverr to ‘justify’ them — that’s not natural, it’s staged natural. If the justification itself has to be purchased, the whole signal is hollow, however convincing it looks from outside.
Sorry if this is a silly question but is buying shares on Fiverr actually within the rules, or is it more of a grey area people just do anyway? I’ve been building my own links so slowly I’m worried I’m being too cautious, but this makes me wonder if I’m just being naive.
Bonnie, it’s not naive, it’s the safer end of a wide range. I’ve seen it work fine for a while, and I’ve seen it flag an account for review once the pattern got noticed. Neither outcome is rare. The honest answer is nobody outside Google actually knows the odds, they just know which side of the range they landed on.
That reminds me of a fella who used to come into my diner every Tuesday with a new scheme for getting the lunch crowd in faster than word of mouth would ever manage. Coupons stacked on coupons, a radio spot he couldn’t afford, flyers on every windshield in the lot next door. Some of it worked for a month. None of it built the kind of crowd that came back on its own, the way the regulars did after nineteen years of just cooking a good plate of food and letting people tell their neighbors. Hector’s right that nobody knows the odds going in. What I’d add is the slow way at least leaves you something real if the shortcut stops working.
We called this exact thing ‘social proof stacking’ back around 2010, except then it was forum bookmarks and PR9 blog blasts instead of Fiverr shares. Same theory, same eventual correction from Google. The tool changes every few years. The impulse to buy the appearance of popularity instead of earning it never does.
Hector, do you have any sense of the split? Even a rough range, half get flagged within a year versus one in twenty, changes whether this is a manageable risk or a coin flip. ‘Neither outcome is rare’ isn’t really a number I can plan around.