Can low quality parts of your site impact other areas of your site?
22SHARESFacebookTwitter I brought this question up with John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, who hosts a weekly Webmaster Hangouts video where he answers webmaster related questions. I was going to attend one of those hangouts, however, you can simply create threads on the Google Webmaster Central forum and ask questions there and PM those questions directly to John Mueller — if you want an answer from Google. Not a lot of people know that. How did John respond to this question? His response to this question was just as I had thought. It’s obvious, but it’s good qualifying this and confirming this. They do look at websites on a domain level and if one section of your site has low quality content on it, then that may even impact the rest of your website, regardless if the quality on those other pages are of a high standard. JohnMu said: In general, if you host the content on your site, and it’s indexable, then Google will count that as a part of your site’s content. If you’re blindly posting user-generated content, then that can certainly affect how Google’s algorithms view your site overall. We have a few tips in our help center on this topic: [on user-generated spam] and [on ways to prevent comment spam]. In general, I’d recommend making sure that you’re comfortable hosting what you’re providing to search engines (and users!), and if you feel that the overall quality isn’t what you’d like it to be, then take appropriate measures to either restrict low-quality content from being published, or to prevent it from being indexed. I’ve responded and am attempting to discover if whether the core algorithmic updates this year (the quality update and very recently the largest updates recorded by MozCast and Algoroo in June) have given more weight to domain level signals. John has said in the past that their algorithm attempts to process websites on a page-by-page level, but clearly updates such as Panda have sitewide implications. I’m of the belief, at the moment, that Google’s core updates that occurred on May 3rd and the 16-17th of June were quite possibly changes that put more weight on sitewide quality aspects. Looking at examples of websites that suffered after these updates gives a good indication. And the sorts of sites that did suffer were sites that find it difficult to control the quality of the content that gets uploaded their site – due to user generated content. An example of where this has occurred is with HubPages.com: To quote the CEO of Hub Pages: 22% of Google search traffic disappeared! — Paul Edmondson http://pauledmondson.hubpages.com/hub/May-Day-2015-Google-Update Hub Pages suffered as...
Should You Pay Webmasters To Remove Links?
12SHARESFacebookTwitter Today’s discussion comes from a forum that I used to frequent called Admin-Talk. In the discussion, one webmaster stated that he charged those who spammed the comments section of his website to have those links removed later if they requested — likely helped by the fact their site had been penalised by Google. He stated that if they’ll pay people to spam his blog, then they’ll have to pay him to fix it by removing the links. And so I’d like to give my opinion on this. First and foremost, I’d like to address this by saying that these links that he is allowing to appear on his website could be affecting his website. If you have a ton of spammy links that have not been editorially cleared by a human being then that’s just asking for trouble. Google may penalise you and mistakenly identify your site as a link farm or as part of a network. Google have been cracking down on networks, and link farms — you certainly don’t want to get caught in the crossfire. Secondly, they don’t have to pay you anything. They can add your website to a disavow list. That just highlights the fact that you’re allowing any link to appear on your site and your site will either come under an algorithmic penalty or a manual penalty if you’re linking out to too many spammy webites. And hey, you might say that your site is still ranking well in Google, but why would you jeopardise this fact? I like to think of Google as a never ending minefield, and that you have to be extremely careful not to tread on any mines. Don’t let this be a mine that will blowup in your face. Thirdly, you’re extorting those who have made the mistake of hiring a cheap SEO service that has likely promised the poor business owner to rank them #1 in the search engine result pages for every keyword you can think of. It’s plain and simple extortion, which I believe most of the SEO world would say is unethical. The simple answer to this is no. You should not pay a dime to have your link removed from a certain website, and Google agrees with this. In a September 2013 video, John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google stated: But, essentially from our point of view when it comes to unnatural links to your website we want to see that you’ve taken significant steps to actually remove it from the web but if there are some links that you can’t remove yourself or there are some that require payment to be...
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