Has my website been penalized by Google?

In some circles it's commonly accepted that if you over submit your website to Google, or any search engine, that you will be penalized for it. In other circles, it's accepted that you can actually submit your website to Google everyday if you like, and that you will never incur any penalties whatsoever for doing so. Google claims that there is actually no penalty for repeatedly submitting your website to them. That's true, and yet, the penalties for over submission are very real indeed.

Why the complete contradiction? Is your website being penalized, or is it not? If it is, by whom? Why? And what are the penalties? All very good questions, and yet the answer is so obvious that it's hard to believe anyone would miss it. But miss it they do, in their thousands every day.

Who is Penalizing your website when you over submit?

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" -Google Mission Statement

What does this mean to us? Perhaps not a great deal on the surface. However, we all use Google everyday, and rely on it to find the content we were looking for. Google quite rightly prides itself on finding search results faster, and with less fuss, than any other means of search on the internet. Google has invested vast resources in their infrastructure. Estimates are that Google maintains over 450,000 servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world, in order to achieve their goal of providing the best search service on the net. Few people would deny that there's is not the best search service.

Googlebot, the Google crawler, enjoys nothing more that juicey, new, unique content. It's always hungry for more and more new content; eager to analyse it, index it, digest it, syndicate it, and generally consume it. It just can't get enough. We must feed it, and feed it often. It has an insatiable appetite for content!

The more content we give Googlebot; the more it wants. The more pages you publish on your website; the more you update and add content to your website; the more often Googlebot will come back to index it. The same is also true if we would prefer that Googlebot not visit us so often. Just feed it less. That means publishing less content. Fewer pages and less frequent site updates. The less we do to feed Googlebot new content, the less interested Googlebot becomes in our website.

Every webmaster, and business owner, hopes to have top search results on Google, and lots of site visitors from the search engines in general. It's when the success we wish for isn't forthcoming that we start to turn to "the dark side", and do things we wouldn't normally consider. Such as repeatedly submitting, and resubmitting, our website to Google in the assumption that doing so is the way to achieve what we want. Some webmasters even attempt to manipulate the search results in more deceptive ways, rather than just impatient ways. However, the deceptive ways, will only lead to your website's demise.

Does Google penalize websites for over submission? No, it does no such thing.

Who is penalizing your website when you over submit then? You are!

It's clear that all Google wants is content. Unique, genuinely intersting and engaging content. The more content you offer on your website, the more Google is going to visit your site. The more content you have indexed by Google, unique and interesting content, the more likely your site is to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). This in turn brings more site visitors and traffic.

Conclusion

Have you ever wondered how much more successful your website might be if you dedicated yourself to it's content?

Google doesn't penalise websites for over submission. However, better to avoid such non-productive tasks and spend all available resources and time on writing or improving the website content.

Think smarter and reap the rewards that a better website will bring for you quite naturally.

Article by: BSolve It (www.bsolveit.com)

3 SEO Traps to Avoid During Your Redesign

I receive a lot of SEO questions from business owners who want to spruce up their aging websites, but are dead afraid of losing their existing search engine traffic. And for good reason. Going live with a redesigned website without considering the SEO implications is like being ensnared in a nasty trap that you cannot escape from. It's hard to make monéy while stuck in a trap!

With that in mind, here are a 3 SEO traps to avoid before, during and after you develop your website:

SEO Trap #1: Your Content Management System

If you are switching to a different content management system, (CMS) it often means that the URLs from your current site will have to change to something that fits with the new system. It's likely that the new URL naming convention will not match your old one.

The Escape: If this is the case with your new back end, then 301-permanent redirect all of the old URLs to their new counterparts if you can. If this is a practical impossibility, then review your analytics to find the landing page URLs within your website that receive direct search engine visitors, and redirect those. Also redirect any URLs that have links pointing to them from other sites. While it's best practice to redirect all URLs, those that don't receive any direct search engine traffic and don't have any external links are less important.

SEO Trap #2: Your Site Architecture

Your new website is likely to be sporting a brand new navigational scheme as well as an overall change of its site architecture (how each page links to each other). This is a key element in determining whether pages from your website will show up in the search results. For instance, if you take a page from your website that is currently featured in the main navigation (meaning that every page of the site links to it) and you feature it less prominently within your new website, don't be surprised if it doesn't show up in the search results for its targeted keyword phrases as it used to.

The Escape: You can tell the search engines which pages are the most important ones on your site by how you link to them. Be sure that the pages you are optimizing are linked from your main navigation so that they will receive the internal link popularity they deserve. They'll stand a much better chance at bringing you targeted visitors than those that are deeply buried.

SEO Trap #3: Your Content

If you hadn't previously optimized the content of your old site, I highly suggest doing so with your new site. This means that you research the keywords that people use at the search engines to find products or services like yours, and then use them strategically within each page of the website. Doing so will likely boost the targeted visitors to your site fairly quickly after going live.

On the other hand, if your existing site was fairly well optimized and already bringing targeted visitors, you'll need to be careful about the content that you change. While you shouldn't be afraid to make your content better, it may not be a good idea to completely rewrite old content that was working for you. You'd be surprised how many marketers decide to change their website messaging without even realizing that it was previously optimized to bring in targeted visitors.

Still, your website redesign is a good time to work on increasing your website conversions. All the targeted visitors in the world are of no use to you if they don't take any of the actions you'd like them to take. Rewriting some of your content to convert more visitors into buyers is a good thing as long as it doesn't decrease the number of those visitors. Again - this is where you'll need to review your analytics reports to determine which pages were your best performers.

The Escape: If you find that your existing page content was bringing in search engine traffic and conversions, think 10 times before changing it! If you're certain that your new content is much better and more in tune with your company's message, then try testing it against the old copy through a tool such as Google's Website Optimizer. You may be right, but you won't ever know for sure unless you test it.

The Booby Trap!

Don't forget that title tags are an important part of your content as well. Sadly, one of the most common mistakes during a redesign is to inadvertently lose all the previous title tags.

The Escape: Don't go live with your new site without proper (unique, relevant and keyword-rich) title tags in place on every page. You will absolutely take a huge traffic hit if you do. Make sure that your new CMS allows you to customize the title tags of every page as needed. If it doesn't, then find a new CMS that does. I can't stress this enough because title tags are so important to SEO. It's fine to dynamically generate them based on specific rules, but some pages may need their titles to be customized for best results.

These 3 traps are just a few of many you may face as you redesign your website. Don't be one of the many who wait to go live with their site and THEN call an SEO consultant for help. Bake your SEO into the new site from the start to avoid any loss of search engine visitors, while ideally increasing them. There's no reason why your visitor count should take a hit with a new design -- but only if you are prepared to avoid the traps!

Article by: Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings (www.highrankings.com)