Jul

Matt Cutt of Google Addresses Keyword Spam

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Matt Cutt of Google Addresses Keyword Spam

Web Designers do not need to learn about SEO to make it easier for Google to index a website. Many web design firms use Google’s free tools to optimize a website for small business clients.

Matt Cutts made a ten-minute keynote speech in 2008, at a Web 2.0 conference, called “What Google Knows About Spam.” This is a constant struggle for web design firms. SEO wants a website with balanced content. Small businesses want content that sells their product. Google doesn’t want to see anything that reflects spam. The video is available on his blog. It is an eye opening look into SEO and how hard Google hits spam. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/what-google-knows-about-spam/ I refer to this one, because it is easy for a non-SEO pro to understand. Most web design firms, and web design professionals spend very little time learning SEO techniques.
Matt Cutts has worked for Google for 8 years. He wrote hundreds of articles on search engine placement and the dangers of spam. Most web designers are unaware that Google uses 128 different elements to rank, or penalize, a page. Most web designers focus on linking and ignore the rest.

Black hat SEO is nothing new. Keyword Spam is nothing new. Web designer and black-hat SEO services have always used keywords with no relevance on a website. These spam pages are now easy for search engines to recognize. They use script-generated content, are full of spelling mistakes, and keyword phrases. Or, the meta tags are not reflected in the content. Keyword text spam is often blended with the background, invisible on browsers, but picked up by search engines. One common trick is to make 1 index page for search engines, and 1 for the website.

Matt’s reminds web designers that Google has a tool to help become relisted if you inadvertently make a mistake: google.com/web designers/. Any Web designer should register their website with this tool as soon as it goes live. If Google notices the website has been hacked, or the web designer, or small business, hired an unscrupulous SEO firm, then a notice is sent to the webmaster, and hopefully, the web designer. This addresses the situation before the web designer’s site is banned.

One of the most common complaints is that DIY web designers who follow all the rules, and their website are still excluded from indexing and Google’s rank. Cutts warns people that the secret to success is to write for people, not search engines, not for ad copy, and to make sure that you have a keyword density below 4%, and a keyword weight above 70%. This is not always possible, but it should be attempted. It is also important to run a website through a ‘search engine view’ SEO tool, to make sure that the keywords designated by the small business, are recognized by the search engine. In fact, it is common for search engines to consider Home and AboutUS as the primary keywords for a website.

Cutts says, new material falls into the common-sense category. It’s all about your small business. “If I’m a plumber in Iowa, I may want to write about some of the strange things that happen to me on the job, or the five most common ways to fix a toilet,” he says. “That kind of content can get really popular, and it’s a great way to get links.” Folks will post your piece on one of the social media sites. And with links comes higher Google rankings. (source: USAToday)

Here are a few tips to avoid problems.

Do not:
* build more than 50 inbound links to a website in one week
* pay for links
* put paid links on your website
* stack keywords
* Let Keyword Density exceed 4%
* Have a Keyword Weight less than 60%
* Use more than 75 links on a page including menus
* make sure you do not clone your web-pages
* Use doorway pages
* Use font the same color as the background
* Stack web pages with typos
* Clone pages
* Post a lot of reviews unless you use <no follow> codes

These should help protect your website from being banned and penalized. If the website/blog is already penalized, then fix the above problems. Sign into your Google Account and look on the right side of the dashboard. There is a ‘reconsideration’ link. Complete it, and then hopefully, Google will re-index the website and return the website’s page rank.

These tips are designed to help small business owners find a reputable web design firm who understands the balance between SEO design and web design techniques. Both are important if you want to rank on Google.