Introduction. Why does it matter how Google identifies these SEO black hat tactics?

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2 Introduction A lot of what we know about Google s algorithm updates are based on Google patents that are published. We understand the basic purpose of the updates, specifically the major ones - they are meant to do away with SEO practices that Google frowns upon. Basically, any practice that attempts to exploit loopholes within Google s algorithm in order to obtain a higher search engine ranking. Google penalizes websites that do this because it usually results in the content being provided to users on their search result pages suffering in quality, which means that in turn, their search engine is suffering in quality. Anyone that s been playing the SEO game for at least a short while is familiar with the major black hat tactics that Google penalizes, such as link farming, link spamming, keyword stuffing, article spinning and cloaking. Why does it matter how Google identifies these SEO black hat tactics? Because you don t want to accidentally make SEO mistakes that result in Google penalizing you. They will think that you are trying to take advantage of the system - when in fact you simply made a few costly SEO mistakes because you didn t know better. To get a better understanding of how Google s algorithm identifies bad SEO practices - and thereby get a better understanding of how to avoid making SEO mistakes - you ll want to go through Google s patents pertaining to some of the more common SEO black hat tactics. So let s do exactly that... While you re probably aware that these are SEO no-no s, there s a good chance that you re not too sure how Google detects these practices, or how they penalize websites that engage in them. 1

3 Private Blogging Network and Link Farms Google Patent: Determining quality of linked documents (May 8, 2012) The use of private blogging networks and link farms are very similar in their goals. Basically, they are both platforms used to implement the black hat tactic of building external links. A private blogging network is a separate page with a different domain name set up by a marketer or blogger in order to post links to their main website, thereby artificially building up their links. Private blog networks include free blogging sites such as livejournal, tumblr and wordpress. Link farming is the method in which a website obtains external links by trading links with another website, whether the content is relevant to their site or not. Link farming is often automated, which can result in thousands of external links from websites whose content usually just consists of directories full of hyperlinks. While there s nothing wrong with using any of these sites in general, it s the intent to build links through their use that is frowned upon. 2

4 Private Blogging Network and Link Farms The Patent Google s update, according to the patent that was published in 2012, helps to curb these methods of obtaining a higher ranking. It s important to understand that the patent doesn t explicitly state methods for deterring the use of private blogging networks and link farms in order to obtain higher rankings. Instead, it explains how it determines the worth of the links earned to your page, which can be used to suggest how Google s algorithm might be able to identify the use of private blogging networks and link farms to artificially boost rankings. The patent suggests that Google ranks the links that your page earns differently based on how affiliated the pages that are linking to your page are to one another. For example, say that another blogger has written four different articles on their blog. They have linked to your page in all four articles, so you have earned four links in total. Now, say that three different authors have each written one article that linked to your page (the same one that the individual blogger linked to four times). The question would be, should those four links from that one blogger be worth more than the three links from three different authors? 3

5 Private Blogging Network and Link Farms The patent doesn t explicitly say that it doesn t, but it does mention in the abstract that it takes into account links from affiliated pages, which strongly suggests that it does - The ranking score of a particular document is based on the ranking score of the documents which link to it and based on affiliation among the documents. Keep in mind that this doesn t mean you ll be penalized for having affiliated links leading to your website. Google may have a cap on affiliated links to simply prevent you from trying to use black hat strategies, but without punishing you for accidentally going over the threshold. Now, you might be wondering what Google considers an affiliated page. The following are examples are ways that Google can determine an affiliate page: Interlinking The act of using internal links obviously shouldn t be punished, but since they are links leading from one page of the same website to another, the source of the links are considered affiliate pages. Having a few inter links on each page is okay, having dozens or hundreds of internal links simply listed on each page is not. Domain Name Any pages that share a domain name or are on a subdomain are considered affiliated. This is similar to interlinking, except many websites will use subdomains for their blogs or e-commerce sites. IP Addresses Google can recognize when two separate domain names are being used on the same IP address. This can technically allow them to spot potential private blogging network black hat tactics. 4

6 Link Spamming Google Patent: Ranking documents (August 14, 2012) Link spamming is the attempt at building links to your website by posting links yourself throughout the web. A popular way to spam links is by posting links to your page on various forums and message boards, including on other blogs as well as on social media. The Patent The patent that deals with the link spamming tactic also indirectly deals with numerous other black hat strategies. Google accomplishes this in a very interesting way. Basically, instead of just providing each page with a single ranking, it uses two rankings - the old ranking and the new ranking. It keeps track of the old ranking of a page in order to see how drastically the ranking changes. This doesn t, however, signify that you are involved with link spamming or other black hat practices. What Google does, however, is use a time-based rank transition function. If the ranking of a page goes up due to modifications made on the page, then a time-based rank transition function kicks in, causing the new ranking to be delayed. 5

7 Link Spamming In some cases, the ranking of the page may even decline. If the person who made the modifications quickly goes back and makes additional changes (such as reverting back to the old page), in order to deal with the perceived decline in ranking, then Google has a good idea that they were using a black hat tactic. For example, say you are link spamming to boost your page. If you see that the ranking has dropped, then you may go and delete the links that you have posted throughout the web in order to revert your page back to its normal ranking. Google will pick up on this and realize that you were link spamming. If you weren t link spamming, then it means you earned those links legitimately, which means you can t delete them - and your ranking will eventually go up since the transition function is time-based. 6

8 Keyword Stuffing Google Patent: Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system (December 13, 2011) One of the oldest black hat practices around, keyword stuffing is just what it sounds like. It s the act of using way more keywords than necessary in your content in the hopes that Google will rank the content higher on their search engine results pages. In fact, some pages had barely any meaningful content at all - just a string of keyword phrases. It was a strategy that was rampant until Google finally updated their algorithm to deal with it. 7

9 Keyword Stuffing The Patent They way that Google indexes phrase based information is incredibly complicated. Making your way through the patent (and this is just one of the many that deals with keyword phrasing and indexing) is basically like jumping into the rabbit hole. At its most basic, Google s system for phrase identification can be broken down into three steps: 1. The system collects potential and good phrases as well as the frequency and co-occurrence statistics of those phrases. 2. It then classifies potential phrases as either good or bad based on the frequency statistics that it collected. 3. Finally, using the predictive measure that the system derives from the co-occurrence statistics it gathered, it will prune the good phrase list. 8

10 Keyword Stuffing The specifics on how Google accomplishes these steps might require you to pop a few Tylenol, so let s get straight to the point. How is Google able to identify the act of keyword stuffing through this system? Basically, in addition to being able to determine how many keywords are being used in a given document (a document containing a keyword density of 50 percent is obviously guilty of keyword stuffing), Google will also measure the amount of phrases related to the keyword within a document (known as LSI keywords). A normal document will typically have between 8 and 20 related phrases according to Google, whereas a spam document often has between 100 and 1,000 related phrases. So by comparing the statistics of documents using the same keywords and related phrases, Google can tell which ones are using way more keyword phrases and related phrases than average. 9

11 Keyword Stuffing Keyword stuffing is one of the biggest SEO mistakes you can make, but it should be relatively easy to avoid. Don t concentrate on the inclusion of keywords and focus on the quality of your content instead and you should avoid being penalized for keyword stuffing. 10

12 Article Spinning Google Patent: Identifying gibberish content in resources (October 8, 2013) Article spinning is a strategy often employed for link building purposes. A website will rewrite a piece of content hundreds of times in order to build more links and obtain more traffic without being flagged for the use of duplicate content. Some websites are even able to generate revenue by spinning content through the use of advertising and pay-per-click links. However, since rewriting content is a pretty time consuming task, many websites that engage in this tactic will use a software that automatically replaces nouns and verbs. This usually results in horrible content, more often than not filled with gibberish. So how does Google deal with the act of article spinning? The patent explains how Google s system identifies potential article spinners by identifying gibberish in the content of a webpage. 11

13 Article Spinning Google s system looks at a number of different factors in order to generate a gibberish score. It is able to do this by using a language model that can identify unnatural language text strings, which it does by identifying and analyzing the different n-grams on a page and comparing them to other n-gram groupings on other pages across the web. An n-gram, in case you don t know, is just a contiguous sequence of items, such as words, from a certain sequence of text. Google then generates a language model score. It will also generate a query stuffing score, which is the frequency of which certain terms are repeated in the content. The language model score and query stuffing score are combined to calculate a gibberish score. The gibberish score is then analyzed in order to determine whether the ranking of the content should be modified. While the patent doesn t explicitly state that this system is meant to penalize article spinners, the fact that most content formed by article spinners is full of gibberish means that Google s system will affect them. 12

14 Cloaking Google Patent: Systems and methods for detecting hidden text and hidden links (March 5, 2013) 13

15 Cloaking Cloaking is meant to fool the search engine s algorithm into seeing something different than it is. This allows a website to be ranked as being something it s not. Think of it as a disguise that a website wears in order to sneak into the search engine results - it won t be found out unless a user clicks on it and finds that the website is completely different than what it appeared to be on the results page. How can you cloak your website? There are a number of different ways. You can use: white text on a white background place text behind an image set your font size to 0 hide links by linking to only a single character (such as a hyphen between two words) use CSS to position your text off screen By using any of these cloaking tactics you can artificially boost your ranking. For example, you could just type out a list of keywords unrelated to your content and place it at the bottom of the page in white on a white background. 14

16 Cloaking Google explains in its patent that it s system can discover potential cloaking within a document by inspecting the DOM (Document Object Model). The DOM of a page will allow Google to learn about the different elements of the page, including the size of the text, the colors of the text, the colors of the background, the positions of text, the layer orders, the text s visibility and much more. The system can go through the DOM and basically put two and two together if you are trying to cloak your website in order to fool Google s search engine. 15

17 The Penalties of Making SEO Mistakes The penalties that you can incur from making some of these SEO mistakes (whether on purpose or by accident) can be quite harsh. Google doesn t care if you re running a small personal blog or a giant corporate website - it will penalize anyone that doesn t heed to their rules. They ve even penalized themselves at one point! The following are a few examples of some of the penalties incurred by bigger brands due to SEO mistakes: Rap Genius The website that lists lyrics for rap songs, asked bloggers to link to their lyrics. They offered to tweet the posts of whoever linked to their website on Twitter. This is an obvious form of link farming, one that Google quickly penalized once it found out about the transgression. The website was removed from the first page of results for everything it ranked for - including its own name! The penalty lasted for ten days. BMW BMW made the horrible mistake of thinking that it could use cloaking to increase its rankings. This occurred way back in 2006, but Google still found out. Even a huge brand like BMW isn t immune from Google s penalties - they removed their entire site for three days. For a giant brand like BWM, this was a huge penalty and an even bigger hit to their image. 16

18 The Penalties of Making SEO Mistakes JCPenney JC Penney was found to be buying links after a New York Times investigator noticed that they were ranking extremely high for every part of the business for which they had a webpage. A huge amount of their pages were removed from the first page of rankings for a period of 90 days. Their search traffic dropped by more than 90 percent as a result. JC Penney were quick to fire their SEO firm and to clean up their website. Google Japan We weren t kidding when we said that Google has penalized itself in the past. Google Japan was found to be buying links in order to promote Google widget. The penalty? Their PageRank was demoted from PR9 to PR5 for a period of 11 months. As you can see, Google takes SEO very seriously and has no qualms about levying penalties on websites that are found to be participating in black hat tactics. Making SEO mistakes can result in penalties that include a PageRank demotion, removal from the first page of results and even the complete removal of your website, all depending on the severity of your SEO crimes. 17

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