Excuse me while I step up on the soapbox today. It's been a while since I've had a
Rant of the Week and a recent experience has given me the perfect opportunity.
We acquired a new client last month who had been having trouble gaining good rankings in Google for their major keywords. They have a b2b wholesale site where they sell raw materials to retailers in a particular industry. I'm not going to mention their product, but let's just pretend they provide shoe laces for shoe manufacturers.
Now, this client had a website that had been developed by a designer who obviously thought they knew a lot about SEO. They were wrong. Sure, it consisted of flat HTML pages and had plenty of body text on each page, a text navigation menu and a decent site map. But the site was absolutely stuffed to the brim with excessive keywords. Let's pretend their main keyword phrase was "blue suede shoelaces". This was repeated ad nauseum within the navigation menu, stuffed willy-nilly into nonsensical sentences in the visible body text, shoved into the Alt Tags and of course, obsessively repeated within the Title and META tags of each and every page. And to top it all off, the web designer had decided to integrate a Free For All link directory within the site, swapping links with everyone from pet hair removalists to wooden toy sellers - all having zero in common with the actual product sold by the client.
The designer had since left and their site rankings and PageRank had taken a nose-dive on Google, the site having obviously triggered some spam filters. Feeling sorry for them, I agreed to take over the SEO of their site, get it cleaned up and submit a re-inclusion request to Google to ensure any manual penalties (if any) were removed.
No sooner had I started cleaning up the site code when the client told me that they had been "reported to Google by WordPress for spamming". Digging deeper, I discovered that the client had another domain with almost identical content (!) and had been using multiple blog accounts to promote both domains. I immediately asked for the blog addresses and was absolutely amazed at the huge mess of blogspam I found. There were over 10 different blog accounts posting nonsensical paragraphs with links back to their sites. What a disaster!
[soapbox]
Where on earth do webmasters get the idea that having multiple blogs and posting nothing but keywords and keyword phrases would help their search engine rankings? Sure, this type of search engine spam might help for a very short time, but it was always doomed to fail once the search engines and readers figured out what they were doing. Do they take advice that this is a good way to promote their site? Because that's very poor advice. I just can't believe the ridiculous lengths people will go to in order to "game the search engines". For Pete's sake, even elegant black hat spam is classier than nonsensical blogspam. It proves my point that a little bit of SEO knowledge is a very dangerous thing.
[/soapbox ]
Now if I had known about the severity of the spamdexing at the start of the project, I almost certainly would NOT have taken it on because it is very difficult to regain a good standing in Google if you have conducted serious spamming. I'm surprised the spam didn't earn my client's site a manual penalty in Google. As it stands, all the blogs have been given PageRank zero penalties and their main site has suffered - guilt by association. As I explained to the client, WordPress were right to report them to Google because what they had been doing goes WAY against Google's webmaster guidelines. It is the worst case of blog spamming I have ever seen.
Now all we can do is try to get the site re-instated in Google's good books, but I honestly don't know if we'll be successful in this. Here's the process I'm following:
1) Having the client delete ALL of the blogspam, including any old posts and shutting down the blogs completely.
2) Delete the site containing the duplicate content and shutting down the domain (removing contact details at the registrar level).
3) Deleting the FFA directory and asking participants to remove any links pointing to the client's site.
4) Cleaning up the main site to meet
Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
5) Creating a new XML sitemap for the site and submitting it to
Google Sitemaps and
Yahoo Site Explorer.
6) Having the client submit a
Re-inclusion Request form to Google detailing the above history and site clean-up.
7) Undertaking a long term link-building campaign for the site, seeking out only high-quality link partners or one-way links from sites in the same industry.
I'll keep everyone posted with progress.
Labels: blog spam
