Google Penalties – Prevention and Recovery

Imagine that you are setting up a new website. You worked hard on it, and you want everyone to see it as fast as possible on Google. You might have limited on time, or you might just be ignorant of the SEO process. Either way, you hear that there is a guaranteeable way for your website to be at the top of Google search results within days. At first, everything turns out great! You are at the top of the search results for keywords you want and more people notice your site! Then, you wake up one morning to find that your site is gone.  None of the results are panning out. Y What happened?

Google is a search engine site that exists primarily for the purposes of helping people find what they need when looking for something specific. It relies on a system of indexing that requires accuracy and ease of access for people who are searching for information. If a site is indexed properly, they get higher on the search result list. If a site uses tactics that appear to be “cheating” or playing the system, it will suffer Google penalties. I suppose Google giveth and Google taketh away.

What are Google Penalties?

When Google penalties are afoot, your site will be much lower on Google search results. It is sort of an ironic punishment for people who are trying to “game” the system or take short cuts. Since Google was first created there are countless ways for people to try and cheat the system. At the same time, there are multiple ways that Google penalties were enacted and developed in response to cheaters.

So, what are the ways that Google penalizes cheaters?

There are two ways that Google serves penalties: Algorithmically and Manually.

Algorithmic Penalties

An algorithm is basically a program that runs one or more tasks automatically, based on a set of pre-written instructions on the behest of the person or people who worked on the code. Google is famous for them simply because it is much faster and efficient to use when it comes to checking the integrity of related links vs human intervention. Of course, algorithms still suffer from limitations due to the hyper-specific nature of the code. An algorithm can only work within the parameters that it is given in the first place.

For instance, If an algorithm is supposed to crawl all over the internet for signs of a broken link, then it will only catch and penalize broken links, and not any other violation, like a misdirect. A few famous ones over the years include:

• Panda: Google Panda is all about vetting content. In this scenario, it checks websites to make sure there is enough relevant content on a website. If the content is not relevant or just bad quality, they will push it down the search result list. If the content is informative and relevant, the site gets more priority on the search results list.
• Penguin: The Penguin update focuses on the “black and white” viewpoint of policing the internet.  It was released to catch sites that were keyword and link spamming its search results, either through buying and spamming people with unrelated content.
• Hummingbird: Hummingbird is an algorithm focusing on each word in a query. It contextualizes the definition of words and applies them to the query. This adds a level of nuance to the search engine.
• Pidgeon: Much like it’s animal counterpart, the homing pigeon, Google’s Pidgeon algorithm focuses on filtering search results based on location.

These algorithms along with others do their jobs with impunity and impartiality.

Manual Google Penalties

Of course, machines alone can’t run Google. There needs to be a level of human oversight in case an algorithm comes across a function it does not understand or people are contesting with their judgment. This is where manual penalization or “manual action” comes in.

The impact a manual action has on your site can vary. It often depends on the severity of the website misconduct. Also, just a side note for those who think large corporations get away with doing said misconduct…they really don’t. Surprisingly, sites like Overstock.com, BMW.com, and even its own company Google Chrome, got penalized for behavior that didn’t seem on the up and up. No one is immune from search engine scrutiny.

There are ways for you to rectify the things that they are looking for. It all boils down to whether or not you are willing to make the changes necessary to fix it.

Google can penalize your website for :

• Unnatural Links to Your Site

 This would be most likely a scheme on the part of the web developer. Basically, an unnatural link is an outside link to your site that appears unrelated or just exists to artificially inflate your page ranking. If you get caught, they will penalize you for it.

• Hacked Site

This wouldn’t be the fault of the site owner. However, the measure is a precaution to prevent the spreading of possible malware and computer viruses to visitors to your site. Once you repair the website and you tell Google, they will take back the penalties.

• Thin Content

Naturally, this is exactly what it sounds like. If you have little in the way of written content or text, you are not going to be prioritized. This is due to the fact that visitors are just likely not to stick around a page that long with little content.

• Pure Spam

This one is also self-explanatory. If you are sending unwelcome messages to people and are blocking content access behind advertisements you are harassing users, plain and simple. Just avoid this practice altogether if you want your website to not suffer a Google penalty.

• User-Generated Spam

 This one is more for large messaging formats like forums or comment sections. Basically, when users are trolling or are offering inane or dangerous commentary for no reason but the “Lulz”,  your website will pay the penalty for it. If you aren’t up to date on the security behind the comment section or the forums, your site will pay the consequences.

• Cloaking and Sneaky Redirects

If you disguise your link that will send the user to the wrong spot on a website, then you are cloaking. Just avoid doing this altogether.

• Hidden Text and Keyword Stuffing

Before Google was mainstream enough to start looking into security and algorithms, people would try to cheat the system often. One of their favorite ways to do it was to spam as many keywords as possible, relevant and irrelevant. These days, the algorithm catches it. Every time. This is so old that not even twelve-year-olds try it anymore. Just don’t disguise or spam your content.

• Spammy Freehosts

No website host is free. And if they say they are, they are obviously lying. They just surround your sites with as much ad space as possible to the point where there is too much spam. Just pay for a simple drag and drop site if you need one cheap.

• Spammy Structured Markup

If you have too much incorrect information, missing data, or broken links, the site will look like the user stopped maintaining it. If you want to be visible again, clean up the site and make sure everything leads to the right place.

www.purpletieguys.com

Facebook Marketing: Where is the Line?

Facebook has seen a tumultuous time for the last couple of years. There has been hearings, investigations, interviews, accusations, apologies, and drama. So, it is understandable that the idea of marketing on any social media platform, including Facebook, would not look appealing. Especially for smaller businesses who do not have a lot of money on their hands for paid forms of advertising. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about marketing your business on Facebook, or Facebook marketing. If you know what to expect from the attitudes of Facebook users, you will start to get more comfortable with using the platform. So, let’s talk about the climate of Facebook, its users, and what is okay and not okay when it comes to Facebook marketing.

How Facebook Works

On the user side of Facebook, information is freely offered to the platform to create an account. This way, people who may have a pre-existing relationship with this person or may have a similar interest can connect. The amount of information that exists on the profile is determined by the amount of information people are willing to give.  Once they connect with others, they will have them on a friend’s list with recommendations based on mutual friendships.

Facebook also pays attention to the things you like, offers you click on, and what you share. Then, it uses this information to make recommendations or delivered sponsored content. This money that is paid to Facebook by advertisers is what keeps Facebook free charge for users.

When it works, the companies that advertise of facebook makes advertising revenue and everybody wins. Users have a fun, “free” product to use that offers them stuff they actually like, Facebook and its shareholders get money, and Advertising companies get a profit from advertising online to enough people who want to buy their goods and services.

All in all, it looks like there is a three-way symbiotic relationship between the user, Facebook, and third-party companies.

So, what is the problem? Why are users so concerned about privacy and what makes the Facebook marketing landscape more difficult for small and large businesses alike?  The answer to that question has to do with the ethics of data collecting and social media interactions.

Facebook Marketing and Gathering Data for Company Use

If an advertiser or someone in Facebook Marketing isn’t satisfied with just making money from ad generated leads, they will try to compile their own data for ways to make more money. The more information that they can get about the people that buy their products or use their services, the better they can outdo their market competition. After all, what company wouldn’t want more success than their competitors with insider knowledge of their demographic?

Due to the sudden boom in technology,  new situations are presenting themselves that haven’t come up before. This leads to a few questions about the role of technology, how much data third parties should be allowed to gather, and respect for user privacy.

The best that lawmakers and ethicists have to go off of comes from the concept of personal autonomy and consent. If someone gives information freely to another person and knows where the data is going, that is an ethical form of data gathering. If someone is taking information from an unknowing party, whether for the purposes of Facebook marketing or for identity theft, it is an unethical move.

Consensual Information Gathering

Sometimes, they go through routes that are clear to the users like outright asking them questions about their preferences in surveys and polls.  This is perfectly ethical among marketers and businesses. This is because surveys and polling rely on the informed consent of the people participating in the survey. If a user doesn’t want to participate or wishes to remain anonymous, they have the right to refuse. There is no foul because the users have been given a choice about what information they are willing to share.

Non-Consensual Information Gathering

The polling and survey process has its drawbacks. Sometimes it is inefficient or too slow for companies to gather everything they need. So, they take it without asking. They do this by scraping. Users take a personality quizzes or some other amusement set up by these data collectors. Then, while that is going on another program that is attached to it gathers the private information of that user and their Facebook friends. Then that data is sold for profit to advertisers or any other willing buyer.

A scraping program that was intended for the purposes of academia gathered all that information and instead of applying it for their personal studies, they sold it to a political firm hired by President Trump.

The backlash was insane when people found out. Facebook some revenue and the number of users dropped quite a bit worldwide. Not enough to end the platform completely but certainly enough to gain attention to the stock market.

The Gray Area

When you make a new account for an app, you get a long contract of stipulations. This is a Term of Service Agreement.  They are made up of long paragraphs with sections and subsections with what the user is agreeing to the moment they sign up for any social media platform or software program. These paragraphs often state things about the information users agree to share. It also usually contains a promise from the user that they will not copy any of the code to make their own version of the program. It also grants the social media provider the right to use and profit off of user content whenever they see fit without compensating the user.  Wait, what?

Most of the time, people don’t bother to read the entire thing, and on some level, it isn’t their fault. The average American reads at an 8th-grade level.  That is about sufficient for reading labels for medication directions, but not for legal and binding contracts.

A lot of those contracts are written at a reading level of at least a college sophomore.  The use of the confusing language in these contracts is outright manipulative on the part of these social media creators. But it is still technically legal. They had a chance to inform themselves and didn’t. At least in the eyes of the law.

But people still agree to it without knowing what it says anyway just to use the platform. The contract is still considered legal and binding. It is still seen in the eyes of the law as legal and binding.

Conclusion

This combined with the Cambridge Analytica incident has created a lot of mistrust between users and the Facebook platform. This is the hurdle that Facebook Marketers will have to overcome. So, what can be done about it? How do Facebook marketers put users at ease? I will explain the series of steps in the next article.

www.purpletieguys.com

What is Google Guaranteed Business?

We know that a lot of people use the internet more than ever before to make purchase and service decisions. Hell, we already know thanks to data available to the public that on average “the number of daily searches on Google – 3.5 billion, which equates to 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.” Google has changed the name of the game when it comes to gathering information and sharing it with the world. However, it has had its hiccups in the past. For instance, a lot of people weren’t thrilled when they were forced to make accounts on their social media just to comment on Youtube videos. Also, does everyone remember what happened to Google Glass?

Despite their failures, that does not mean that they aren’t going to try new ways to make money as any good company would. Their latest venture proves that they are still ready to move forward to help their business, and the ones affiliated with them, grow. Google Guaranteed Businesses have been popping up in local maps. They are characterized by a small green shield, almost portraying a sense of endorsement towards this particular business.  It raises a couple of questions, “What is a Google Guaranteed Business?” “Can anyone become a Google Guaranteed Business?” “What sort of benefits and drawbacks does it have?” So, we are going to dig deep and find that out.

Google Local Service Ads

Before we start talking about a “Google Guaranteed Business” we need to understand the context that the term is framed. Without any context, it sounds like a Google-run business. While that sounds like the case and could possibly appear like an endorsement, this is farther from the truth.

It means that the local business has paid for advertising space under Google.

Google has been playing the advertising game for a good while. They launched their Adwords back in the year 2000, with 350 customers.  Adwords is a program that would prioritize businesses that used specific keywords on the top of the search engine page, providing that they paid for it.

Eventually, they started integrating their own map program. This both provided direction for users and offered recommendations based on a cross-section of keywords and what was in their local area.

This expanded into a service known as Google Local Service Ads. Businesses were pushed on the top of the search list for local maps provided that, yes, they paid for space with a specific keyword.

This is a sound business practice on the part of Google. Why? Because it has made them billions of dollars in revenue every year. However, these programs were not without its faults. This lead to frustration for the businesses that paid a lot of money for advertising, only for it to not pan out.

Flaws of Google Advertising

Google ads, at the end of the day, is a PPC (pay-per-click) system. This means that the advertising business pays money for each time a person clicks on their ad. While it does not initially sound like something that could be flawed, it needs to be understood that the customer pays for every click, not every conversion. This means that it is too easy to waste money, paying for people who click on the site. Regardless of the fact whether the business makes money from it or not.

Another issue that crops up with Google advertising is the fierce competition over the same keywords. If you are a small business and the term you are aiming for ,or the area you are advertising in is too broad, you will most likely be swallowed by the competition. The playing field is available to everyone, including multimillion-dollar corporations that can out easily out buy the competition.

It also doesn’t help that the best way to get any sort of ROI is to constantly watch, experiment, and gamble with a lot of time and money.

These have been consistent complaints through many Google Ad users, to the point where smaller businesses just don’t bother or walk away from sheer frustration.

But not only businesses have been frustrated.

There have been plenty of customers who have outright trained themselves to not click on the ads. Middle-aged to younger users are kids who have grown up with the internet. They have learned to associate the ads with scams or unwanted offers. There are even some businesses that advertise that aren’t even fully licensed. All a business needed to advertise, after all, is pay for it.  So, to avoid any risk of a virus or any unwanted misinformation, people don’t bother clicking.

But Google has taken notice. Most of their money comes from ad revenue. If local businesses are getting too frustrated by being possibly pushed out by the system, they would need to fix the system in order to get that money from revenue back. This is where Google Guaranteed Business came in.

Google Guaranteed Business

A Google Guaranteed Business is essentially business advertising insurance. This is a way for Google to step in and prevent too many advertising losses and service fraud.

How it Helps Customers

• How it works is that Google vets the business that pays for their AdWords to make sure that the local business provides legitimate goods or services. They do this through” a strict screening process by Google including a background check, license, and insurance check as well as a screening of reviews and ratings.”
• Any customer that works with a Google Guaranteed business and is not happy can submit a claim to Google.
• Any job booked with a Google Guaranteed business has a money back guarantee. The work done by the businesses is guaranteed for up for $2,000.
• Upon its initial launch, the services were only available for locksmiths and plumbers, the industries where past business fraud hit the hardest.

How it Helps Local Businesses

• If businesses make it through the screening process then they are qualified to receive even further priority over Google’s traditional ads in the results list.
• Google compensates any business dispute for up to $2,000. Businesses won’t always be out of pocket if a service goes south.
• This form of advertising service is a pay per lead model. While businesses are responsible for turning them into customers, businesses are paying for direct results.
• It creates a level of trust for customers. Google is staking their money and reputation on the behalf of the business.

www.purpletieguys.com

Over the course of this 48-ish minute rant, we cover cold-calling companies (say that 3 times fast), hiring people from overseas and all over the US, and inevitably, we talk about *sigh* “laptop life.”

I’ve got my own very different views of laptop life and cell phone life that I won’t get into here. You should put your head into the culture for just a minute or two and gather your own opinions. Needless to say, but I’M GONNA SAY IT ANYWAY, I despise the fantasy that people portray as the digital nomad / laptop life / cell phone life.

Also, beware when hiring people using services such as Upwork. Upwork, by and by, are a pretty good company. They make finding, hiring, and paying people to do your freelance work very easy. They also make you, and your freelancers, pay for that ease. To the tune of 7% from the client and 20% (20 f#*$ing %!) from the freelancers themselves. It’s outrageous. It’s also super easy to use.

Have you ever had your Google My Business listing taken away? Happened to me. It was very stressful, and it took a full 3 days to get it back. All be it without (spoilers) our reviews. Yep. Our wonderful, well written, glowing reviews that all of our satisfied customers have left us, gone. Blinked out of existence by an angry Google.

Oh, and an Apple (possibly, we’re not 100% on this yet) employee decided that taking a dump on one of our paid advertisements was a good idea. Do you think it’s a good idea? Here’s a hint: It’s not. There’s no reason for an employee of a company that we do repairs for should ever interact with our advertisements. Especially not to do what he did. Listen on and be amazed.

Today we discuss the client/customer who’s never happy, no matter what you do. And we get interrupted about half way through by a phone call from my Mom. Stay tuned! Also, happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We hope you’re having a safe and wonderfully awkward family dinner with that one aunt that no one likes. You know the one.

Guys and gals, we’re still trying to hash out this whole Mac Mini situation. And we detail portions of it in this episode. We also obtusely discuss the scammer situation in the after market sales arena. To sum it up for you here: It’s bad. Like, real bad. To the point that I ended up just taking my listings down because I never got any legitimate offers from actual local people. So, beware scammers when trying to sell your used items.

We discussed Apple. Again. A lot. Sorry not sorry.

And we bought a Chromebox! Having a full fledged, fully functional browser on your TV is kind of surreal. Something that pre-teen me would have salivated over.

Enjoy!

It’s interesting when you’re trying to purchase a used Apple product. People tend to have an overblown sense of what the price should be for something. A 6 year old computer, even an Apple computer, isn’t worth several hundred dollars. But I digress.

We get off to a great start complaining about a review for the Mac Mini. And we made some truly insightful things about the Mac products gained through this terrible review.

There’s a brief discussion about why you’ll never see Mac OS X available for purchase without Mac hardware.

Later we also talked about the differences between Microsoft’s business model versus Apple’s business model.