Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
For the last few years, Google has released wave after wave of algorithm updates.
Without going into the details, Google is penalizing low-quality sites and rewarding high-quality sites.
Just like Page Rank, Google gives a ‘quality score’ to every single website on the Internet. We first saw this when Google panda was launched. Some massive websites had an instant drop in traffic. Others had a huge increase.
Generally, the higher quality sites (that were both high quality internally and externally with high quality backlinks) shot up in the rankings.
This quality score, I believe, is hidden from sites. It’s not a score that is publicly displayed in webmaster or SEO tools like Page Rank, it’s used as an internal score to rank your sites.
Most probably there is a quality score threshold, and if you go below it; your site tanks. The majority of sites that get hit by updates never really recover. It can only be because they were built to such a lower standard or quality score that Google rules them out altogether.
We all know it happened to hundreds of thousands of micro-niche sites across the web. With that said, even if you’ve been hit; there is hope. You can slowly recover and boost your rankings. If you’re not penalized, you can simply use these strategies to hedge against future updates and increase your traffic.
Step 1: Internal Linking
One of the biggest differences between a high-quality themed site and a content farm/low-quality site is internal linking. Think about sites like article directories, they got destroyed, wiped out; FINISHED.
Every single article page is simply an article and an author resource box with a link out to a money site. No internal links whatsoever. These kinds of sites are known as content farms, sites built solely for the purpose of link building. Google penalizes these kinds of sites. Sites that have page after page of content with a single external link.
One crucial step to boosting your rankings and protecting your site from being labeled a content farm is internal linking. Linking to internal pages contextually within your content. There are plenty of plugins that will do this for you automatically, to name two:
If you’d like super targeted internal links, it’s easy to manually place a few internal links when writing blog posts. Internal links also provide your site with relevant internal backlinks and they drastically boost time on site as well as average page views per visitor (people like to click contextual links).
Step 2: Stop Targeting Keywords
Obviously you want to target keywords in most of your site’s articles. However, Google knows when you’re targeting a keyword, and it doesn’t look good when you have 1000’s of articles all targeting a specific keyword.
It tells Google you’re writing the content for the sole purpose of ranking for the specific keyword. Just like Google penalized exact match domains that were built to target single keywords. It’s very common for low-quality sites to do this. They generate a list of 500 keywords in their niche and outsource an article for each one.
High-quality sites don’t always target exact keywords in their content. Instead, you should often write high-quality themed content about a topic, instead of a keyword. Google will naturally boost your site’s authority for doing this as well as reward you with a ton of long-tail keyword rankings.
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 →When you naturally write about a topic, you will inevitably rank for dozens or hundreds of long-tail keywords if your site has any authority. Also, visitors who are searching exact keywords generally don’t stick around for long. They find out the exact information they were searching for and leave.
Visitors who search more general topic-based keywords are the kind of visitors who stick around and subscribe to your email list.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below!
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Patricia Strano, April 19, 2013, 15:20
The ONLY BEST WAY for YOUR SUCCESS – thank you Dave’s – been with/around u guys since 10/31/11 and will never leave. My company name is Feels Right Marketing. So very appropriate – as Empower Network – FEELS RIGHT! Feeling Right is – to me – going with basic, trustable instinct. We are all born with this ability – but it is life that has often caused many to not TRUST this basic instinct – it is a proven, reliable instinct – Empower Network FEELS RIGHT – my WHY I have and will always be with Empower. Great site by the way – glad I found this!
Mustapha Barki, April 19, 2013, 16:05
hi david I want to work.
Emily Johnson, April 20, 2013, 09:15
I appreciate the emphasis on starting with something you’re passionate about. Makes a big difference.
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‘Most probably there is a quality score threshold’ — that’s the load-bearing claim in this whole post and it’s stated as a guess. What’s the actual evidence beyond correlation between backlink quality and ranking recovery? Without a control group of similar sites that didn’t change anything, ‘sites that improved backlinks recovered’ and ‘sites recover over time anyway’ look identical from outside.
I think what’s being missed in the pushback on the quality score idea is that you don’t need Google to confirm the mechanism for the advice to be sound. Internal linking, writing about topics instead of stuffing a single keyword — these are good practices for readers first, ranking second. Yuki and Philip are right that the causal claim is unproven, but the underlying behavior change holds up even if you strip out every theory about why it works.
We called this ‘link juice quality’ back in 2009 — different words, same panic. Every cycle produces a new internal scoring theory nobody outside Google can verify.
Gus, fair, though I’d say the panic is doing something useful even when the theory behind it is shaky — it pushes people to actually clean up thin content, which was overdue regardless of what Google’s internal scoring does or doesn’t measure. I left this world unconvinced by most of the specific mechanics, but that part held up.
What the post is circling without naming it is basically a proxy metric problem — Google can’t directly measure ‘quality,’ so it infers it from signals like internal linking structure and keyword distribution, and website owners then optimize for the proxy rather than the thing it’s meant to measure. Goodhart’s law shows up constantly in SEO for exactly this reason. The interesting failure mode isn’t content farms getting caught, it’s that the proxy itself becomes gameable the moment enough people understand it, which is presumably why Google keeps changing it.
If the quality score is hidden by design, what would falsify the theory that it exists at all?
Philip, that’s basically why I stopped trying to manually manage internal linking and wrote a script that maps every post’s outbound links and flags orphaned pages with zero internal links pointing at them. If Google is scoring internal link structure the way the post claims, at least I can see my own site’s structure the way a crawler might, instead of guessing.
Trina, that’s the corporate instinct too — measure the thing you can measure and hope it correlates with the thing you can’t. I spent eighteen years signing off on dashboards for exactly that reason. The orphaned-page script is a genuinely good idea regardless of whether Google’s scoring theory holds up; an unlinked page is a bad idea on its own terms.
Worth separating what happens to the site that gets everything right here from what happens to the median site that tries. Most sites hit by an update never fully recover their old rankings even after fixing internal linking and keyword stuffing — the post says this itself in passing and then moves straight to the hopeful part. Internal linking and topic-based writing are good practice regardless, but ‘you can slowly recover’ is true for some sites and simply false for others, and there’s no way from outside to know in advance which one you are before you’ve spent months finding out.