I watched another Google video on YouTube recently where Matt Cutt’s discusses when Google penalties are lifted. During the video there are certain parts of what he said which really made me think more in depth about how Google deals with the sheer number potential penalties. Matt mentions (0:30) that there are automatic methods of detection and processing, which include content spam and keyword stuffing etc.

Hearing this made me think of one of my affiliate websites I had setup a few months ago and a problem I had encountered. The website has 100% unique content, affiliate products from TradeDoubler and a premium CSS template to make it look a little fancy with minimal effort. Now the website in question is an exact match domain and I was specifically targeting a keyword group with around1-2k monthly visitors, using just unique content and a few directory links I’ve found this method to work extremely well in the past.

The Problem

I’d used this particular premium CSS template 2/3 times before for other very similar products but had customised ever so slightly (i.e. different colurs + logo). The problem however was that although my other affiliate sites ranked in the top 3 continually for the target keywords this particular site was not. In fact it was bouncing in and out from position 4 to position 93 – bit strange..

I’d not bought any links for the site in question so I knew that things were all “white” externally so thought there must be something within the site causing one of these automatic penalties. Looking at the code I noticed 2 H1 tags, one being highlighted below as an image:

The other H1 was just highlighted in a standard way – this was the only element I could think Google would pick up on as potentially “Stuffing” or something similarly nagitive. I proceeded to remove the text in the code and waited, anticipating a return to index in a high position.

As predicted a few days after I’d removed the second H1 tag the site moved from position 90+ into the top 5 . Bear in mind I’d changed absolutely nothing else at this point and just to proove it was the H1 tag causing a problem I added it back, then removed (see second arrow). As well as rankings increasing to a position I thought it should be at the traffic also duplicated the rankings:

Although this is only one site and I’d like to test more it seems quite certain that either having 2 H1 tags triggers an automatic Google penalty or the method of using <h1 id=”logo”><span></span></h1> is not liked by Google.

Some might argue that it’s just common good SEO practice to have only 1 H1 tag but if this test is anything to go by it culd be more costly than you first think!

If anyone else has any more data on this I’d be interested to hear?

I was reading a great post on Bruce Clay about paid links last week that tied up really well with a current client that is constantly battling against competitors with glaringly obvious paid link profiles. For those individual SEOs and agencies that have complete ethical and risk free link building strategies its always a challenge but even more so when paid links appear to go unpunished.

There are a few techniques which I see still work very well in manipulating rankings which perhaps avoid automated detection by Google. Hopefully by highlighting them here people will know what to look out for when looking at ways to get ahead of competitors that pay for paid links. These methods are by no means new or groundbreaking but can sometimes get missed when looking for paid links:

Paid links within CSS style banners

This is something that I’ve seen systematically work time and time again for competitors over a multitude of industries (although most common in finance and travel verticals). The process would usually work by providing a piece of code to the site selling a link(s) – this code consists of a CSS style, made up of colour, boarders, widths and fonts, then at the location of the “banner” the <div> calls the CSS class making it look like a normal banner. In reality the text in the visual banner is search engine readable as are any links too. So to many (and seemingly search engines) this goes usually un-noticed.

Drop Down Boxes with Paid Links

I’ve seen this become more popular within the last few months. Works on the same princible as the CSS banners but instead of appearing visually like a banner it looks like a harmless drop down box. Again the coding is unique to the drop down box so doesn’t interfere with any existing site style sheets. The links dont look external and again seem to go unnoticed.

Blogroll Paid Links

A couple of years ago I talked about how and if Google would ever discount blogroll links as so many blogs sell links in these locations. I guess the answer is no (for now), but it’s the easiest location for bloggers to sell links and it’s a genuine area of a blog that would usually contain external links so to Google it probably appears “normal”. This happens most effectively on blogs that link out to relevant websites in their blogrolls - even for manual paid link reviewers there’s no way to distinguish paid and natural links here.

Personally I feel that blogrolls are part of blogging and help people share genuine resources and useful related websites, just on occasions this is used for paid links.

(NB – I do not sell blogroll links on this site, I’m just using an example of a blogroll)