The Google Bad Box

This year Google made many changes to the "algorithm" or method for determining inclusion in their index, as well as the order of the listings in their search results. The "search engine results page" or "SERP" is the one place anyone with a website wants to be seen, preferably on page 1 (or top 10 positions).
For many businesses, this year's changes caused a severe loss of traffic to their websites. When a site isn't "ranking" in the SERP, traffic plummets, and a site's value and the business's revenue may also plummet.

Google improved its algorithm to review sites for many issues, such as information with little or no added value (per Google's definition) and bad neighborhoods (links to or from questionable sites).

Google seems to focus on many issues. However, two particular issues stand out:

1. Duplicate content: Many sites use content from other sites. It's a common practice to help a site improve its offering. However, if the content on a website is an exact duplicate of another website, Google may choose to prioritize one over the other in the index, and unfortunately, the duplicate may be prioritized over the original content.
2. Poor quality content: Google wants websites to offer added value and a good user experience. Sites that duplicate content from other sites without adding anything extra are considered poor quality. Unfortunately, the definition of "value" is subjective and at Google's discretion. However, Google offers lots of advice about how to improve a site's quality. A recent NPR interview with Matt Cutts of Google explains the issue in a piece entitled, Google's Search Tweak Puts a Company at Risk.

Google penalized a client's site earlier this year during a very large search engine optimization (SEO) project. We watched as Google removed the very few pages already released into their main index. Our client's site went into the Google Bad Box. What were we to do?

Well, the answer isn't clear, and Google doesn't provide much assistance in the way of a list of a site's penalties and possible resolutions. The process is lengthy, investigative, and involves a lot of educated guess work.

Here are 8 key items to address:

1. Use the Google Penalty Checker Tool at SEO Moves to see if a Google penalty exists for the site. Any type of warning that comes back tells you if a penalty applies. However, this tool doesn't tell you anything about the penalty, and often the tool isn't available. On to the next step.
2. Run the Bad Neighborhood tool to see if the site links to inappropriate content such as gambling or adult sites. In our case, the tool stopped after 4600 pages, but it gave us some insight into a few issues that most likely haven't caused the penalty but need to be addressed at some point in time.
3. Check the Google Webmaster Tools account for inbound links. Check for penalties on the sites with the largest number of links to see if any of them are penalized by Google. If so, your site could be guilty by association. In my client's case, most of the links come from a "sister" site on the same IP block. And that site has one or more Google penalties.
4. Check for a Google penalty for the domain that owns the domain. In this case, a large entity owns our client's domain, and that domain has severe penalties.
5. Check this site for malware. We're clear!
6. Check the Google page rank—a gray bar is a bad sign. In this case, the site is new with no page rank expected. The home page is white, but the product pages are gray—definitely an indicator. However, many new pages were recently added to this site, so this condition is expected.
7. Check the link strategy. Using too many links with the same anchor text can trigger a Google audit. Our client's linking is fine.
8. Does the site include content that is an exact duplicate on another site? If so, Google recently changed its algorithm to focus on duplicate content. (See Matt Cutt's blog post, Algorithm Change Launched.) Herein lies our biggest issue. Duplicate content from a partner's site makes up a large number of pages.

We're creating a strategy to resolve some or all of these issues. The first task: create unique and valuable content for each of the product pages so that we're offering a unique and valuable experience for our client's visitors. This task was already on our list of to-dos, but now we're raising the priority. Our focus has been on the SEO for on-page elements such as titles, headings, and the meta descriptions. Now we'll shift our focus to unique paragraphs.

Once many of our issues are resolved, we'll submit a request for reconsideration to Google.

Is your site in the Google Bad Box for one or more Google penalties? Tell us about your experience and how you regained traffic to your website.