G00gle bitchslap, how to recover
 

So I was bitch slapped yesterday

My main blog got hit hard, The site was ranked in the top 3 for many keywords over the past few years. The articles were all original hand written content with less the 2% max. keyword density for any keyword.

So, I am now somewhere on page 6 for my best keyword phrases. My site was not spammy but probably "over-optimized" for some keywords and I lost rankings. WTF is over-optimized anyway, as long as your content helps the visitor, I don't see the problem. How the hell are you supposed to go deep into a (micro) niche, write weekly reviews / articles without "over-optimizing" your site???

Anyway...so now I am thinking, what will I do after the update has settled down and my site is still on page 6? (this is what I expect)

It's not completely banned, so I must have done something right at least the last couple of years :S

I am thinking obviously: if google thinks I am over-optimized for some keywords, I should de-optimize my site for those keywords. In a very weird way that makes sense right? Removing a part of your SEO for a keyword in order to rank higher for that particular keyword ??!!?!?!? On the other hand, why should your rankings improve for a keyword if you de-optimize your site for that keyword a little?? It is a bit confusing...

What do you SEO guru's think about how to recover from "over-optimalization?

Such a good question. I wish I had the answers, but I'm not as savvy as Wired Guy.

Anyway, I had the same experience. I was on page one for a specific sponsors product, but after google laid it's pimphand down, I'm on page 3. Complete bullshit.

Maybe its your offpage SEO that is over optimized, maybe all you backlinks got devalued.

Yes, I'd say remove some occurences of the keyword, especially any in sentences that sound artificial. Google just bought a natural language processing company and they have a couple initiatives to better understand how humans naturally put sentences together.

What Google is trying to find is pages where people write about a topic without knowing what the keyword density is. Everything they do tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year will be all scout trying to find pages that seem to cover a topic well rather than pages from SEO guys. They are building quite an a arsenal of heuristics. For example, did you know you'll rank better for "green" if you also mention red, blue, and purple? People writing about a topic naturally mention other related things. People focused in leyword density etc. don't.

Turn it into a tube steal content make number 1 and 2 Rankings and make millions.

thanks for the input, in my case I don't think my offpage SEO is over-optimized, I always tried to link to my main page with several different keyword phrases, so my guess is it has to be an onpage keyword problem...

thanks man, sounds like pretty solid advice... will think about how to put it to good use

I will start reviewing all my articles today and delete "over-optimized" keyword phrases

I think I did make the mistake a few years ago to write some "unnatural phrases" in articles in order to rank higher, so maybe g00gle is punishing my site for some very old articles.... so that is something I can start fixing right now.

If I were you I would consider only some small changes to a few sites and see what comes from it in a few months time. Large changes to many sites might only make it worse unless you are at the point where you either have nothing to lose or are sure as to the cause.

tbh i think it is too early to be sounding too many alarms

yes everyone so far is being hit hard but alot is still moving around and I dont see anything "settling" until monday.


Todays results for one keyword is totally different then the huge change yesterday

it was all spammy sites yeterday with the new " udpate" and now today it is all new sites that look legit


so just give it a few days :-)

I would suggest you leave things be for next few days and see how things settle :2 cents:

Tempting as it may be...I'd wait to make any big changes until after the dust settles from this update.

Edit: Looks like a few posters above beat me to it. :)

:2 cents:

I have had blogs that got bitch slapped... And I left them alone... and Google put them right back to where they were...

It would seem that when they put up an update and it backfires they see the backfire. They write more code to cover the special examples and things go back to normal within days to a week or two...

That said... In the future start using Raymor's idea of expanding your topics to include normal associations.

+1 for not doing any changes at least a week or so

Let's see if google comes up with patches for it's buggy algorithm, and maybe your site will be back to top3 happy and sound without doing anything.

That's what I've decided to do anyway

thanks for your advice,

won't make any big chances until monday, but will take this opportunity to review my posts (delete dead links etc), that can never hurt

best advice yet :thumbsup

We're going to wait and see. serps are in flux it seems...
I am hoping Google realized they've fucked up in some areas.

A note from Japanese search market....
IN Japan people are speculating a few things...
One is about predictions...you know, the text strings that come up as you type a search query? Recently, now in fact, there is a fairly huge scandal over an idol's (mainstream) mother banging a minor...regularly.

The story showed up for first 2-3 days of scandal breaking...but now reference to idol, mother or minor are all gone, although the story has gone viral in Japan.

Its evidence, to Japanese people anyway that Google's results are bought and paid for. Perhaps through adwords. I see the spam and scam sites in our serps also have bought ads.

doesn't webmaster tools give you any clues?

Leave it as is now. Wait for a month at least to see how it's going. Don't do anything crazy.

Blatantly steal content from everyone but major movie studios and recording companies. For that shit, you'll need to host torrent files. Aggregate everything you can find whether its relevant to your site or not. Spam Facebook and Twitter.

You will win. Google will love you.

Added correction :upsidedow

Like others have said: just leave it and don't change anything right now. Google will change some more in the next days / weeks. Just wait and see how it settles down.

Maybe they should invest a few billion in R&D so their crawler can figure out trailing slashes on URLs.

Good stuff. Taking it a step further, do you think it makes more sense to build links with sites which are in similar but not the exact same niche? I've been doing it that way with the mindset that Google will soon make the necessary adjustments and because doing so makes more sense from a business perspective.

If your blogs are all white hat and good original content.. write to the Google.. sometimes they'll put their mouth back on your dick manually. Of course, I guess you're really not supposed to make blogs just specifically for commercial reasons, right? I guess that is a bad idea? I don't know

I would not change existing articles; if I thought I was doing something wrong, I would modify my approach on the new ones.

I think I read that Google said exactly that - that many sites would drop and then come back up. Partly due to tuning the algorithm, and maybe also they've started having spamminess effect PR as well as relevancy, though that's hard to do without breaking the mathematical basis of PR. If PR is somehow weighted, a few iterations of the PR calculator worlds be needed to get everuthing right again.

This just reminded me I accidentally removed a page that has remained near the top for ".htaccess" and ".htaccess protection" for over a decade. I better bring that back to life somehow. This reminded me of it because though the page was made back when I was doing SEO, I paid absolutely no attention to SEO when writing it. I just put a lot of really good .htaccess information on the page and Google, like Altavista before it, has fairly consistently seen it as relevant.

Good advice here

Just for fun for the old timers who may remember this from the 1990s or so. Google used to show tens of thousands of links to it before I took the page down:

webmastersguide.com .htaccess guide

Last update: 2005

yeah I think so, even is your blog is all white hat but you are an affiliate site g00gle won't care much, is you also have multiple sites in a niche, and they see that..(they probably will if they are going to review your site) they care even less.

:2 cents:Also Back links should be organic... that is not very easy for adult

are still seeing a lot of changes in serps today? I don't see much movement for my keywords...

I still see shuffling of serps, my blogs gets thrown back and forth.. However nowhere near top where it was before

wouldn't it be nice if google didn't own the interwebs ..............

Yeah, write them a spun reinclusion request article with 3 links. See if that works.

Google rules are complicated. If Google showed all their listing rules, they would be easy to follow. However, Google hides some rules. Anyway, if they showed rules - a bot would be able to follow rules. It sucks to be labeled over optimization. Agree... keyword density should be less than 10% or something. But, it's not even about that. Your site might be on page 6.

The sites that are page 1 will probably be checked by a human worker from Google. What did you do wrong.. do you even know.. At least Google didn't black list you. You could ask to get removed from black list. Be on a white list. Anyway, the best hand-written texts should be ranked best. Otherwise, the search engine would not be doing its job.

I agree... it is just very frustrating that at this moment, (i am on page 6) all sites that rank better than me do NOT have hand written articles, it are all junk spam sites, crappy 1980 style sites with almost NO content and 5 (exactly the same) white labels...

rankings have improved a bit last two days... maybe coincidence, maybe our "de-optimalization" worked a little, I will update when it is stable

apart from a few good keyword phrases... in the end my google traffic increased...

*check your backlinks!!!
*cheap your homepage "spam" keywords
*review your articles

http://www.micrositemasters.com/blog...ways-to-do-so/

don't give up.. hope this will help some of you guys... :thumbsup

so what exactly did you do from those pointers?

Google wants you to make the site for the visitors. That's what i've done. Now it's over optimized. So now, ironically, i have to make my sites for google. The opposite of what disinfo agent Matt Cutts and google always say. Fuck that company.

Anyone that follows Cutt's gospel deserves whatever results occur. You have been doing this since G has been around and you are just learning this?

So basically that article says don't use the keyword you are trying to rank for as your anchor text for links use your website name or the domain itself as the link www,domain.com

and get links from same niche sites.

what if the keyword you are trying to rank for is your domain?:upsidedow

:2 cents:

:2 cents: just diversify

I will update as soon as I think I did some good things... right now I do see better results, but it is too soon to tell if that is me or just serp tweaking... or both

I am still in the process of changing stuff, I deleted / changed keyword categories on the homepage 5 minutes ago, if I see (positive results)... I will update

Man you headed straight to the top :thumbsup

Your site was ranked in the top 3, you say. This is a great achievement. Be careful to maintain your site at high quality otherwise you might lose your ranking. I think Google likes frequent updates. Micro niches - that could help. Worry about under optimizing or over optimizing. 2% keyword density should be okay. Rank higher. Read through more user replies about how to improve SEO.

That seems to be the winning ticket these days.

yea ..i agree

It's amazing that Google has so much control. They really need to issue strict guidelines for webmasters and then NOT CHANGE THEM. It's not my fault that I know how to use proper HTML and meta info and the people from Cheapo Web Design don't why should I get penalized?

i am doing great with my cam sites for over 2 years.

what the fuck is panda or penguin ?