Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hi there, welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson.

Speaker 1: 0:32

As usual, I'm your host, and today we're on to part 19 of our SEO A to Z, where we're going to cover page to penalty. So we're going to start with page now, yeah, a page is a short name for a web page. Simple as that. Now, yeah, a page is a short name for a web page. Simple as that.

Speaker 1: 0:45

Now, google doesn't really consider pages as a thing. What they think about are documents and they consider a web page to be a document. And this is because Google doesn't just crawl, index and rank web pages. It also includes things like PDFs, other file types, images, you know. So under, you know, in the broad trend in computer science and information retrieval, a document is just a generic term which is used to describe any item of data that can be indexed or retrieved, so a web page is a document. As far as google is concerned, it's probably the most prevalent, most prevalent of all the different document types that it looks at and indexes. Um, but yeah, it is just a document because we've got page speed. So page speed is the time it takes for a page to load. So, from being requested by a web browser to the page being returned into the browser and then rendered, yes, the page speed time. So it's the time it takes the page to load. So, in seo terms, the faster the better, as google does prefer sites that descend this extravaganza to be um loaded, to load fast. You can improve your page speed quite drastically by using things like content delivery networks we talked about in an earlier episode. Um, if you're not using a content delivery network, then I do highly recommend it because it can really speed up your website without you having to do very much work at all. But in general, yeah, anything you can do to make your page load faster, better.

Speaker 1: 2:13

Next, we've got page rank, also known as pr, so page rank is an algorithm that was invented by google co-founder, larry page, back in 1996, and it's the original algorithm that google used to set them apart from other early search engines in the quality of its search result under Larry Page back in 1996. And it's the original algorithm that Google used to set them apart from other early search engines in the quality of its search result. So, in very basic terms, pagerank considers that a link from one web page to another can be considered a citation or a vote as to the quality of the page receiving the link. And links have value and pass value through the pages they're linked to. So web pages can then be scored not just on the number of links they have to them but also the value of those links. So now google's ranking system is no clue. Many other algorithms to determine how web web page will still rank. Page rank is still a key part of it. Page rank itself has changed. It's also a lot more nuanced nowadays. There's plenty of other things to do with, like where the link on is on a page. Obviously, things like nofollow came along, which altered how page rank flows, but the the very basic fundamental system that links from other web pages to your web page are going to determine how well it ranks as a key part of the algorithm, is still key, even though what google says sometimes oh, links don't count very much. That's just, as far as I'm concerned, misinformation. They still rely very strongly on links and that can be demonstrated just by how the effect that having building feelings over a site can actually have.

Speaker 1: 3:35

Next, we've got paid link. So a paid link is a link that you've paid a third party site for. So if, if paid links are not flagged as no follow or sponsored, then they violate google's guidelines and they can lead to your site being penalized. Lots of people buy links, lots of people pay for links. That's not to say you should do it just because everyone else is understand the risks. The risks are if you get caught or do google deems that you're buying links and they will penalize your site, and they do it all the time it it happens a lot. They'll either do it algorithmically or manually, so just be careful if you're gonna go out there buying links. I used to buy links many years ago. I've said this many, many times. I used to buy links years ago until we got hit by Penguin, which we'll come to in, I think, the next episode. We'll talk about Penguin.

Speaker 1: 4:19

Next we Now normally when I talk about paying for things, google doesn't like people paying for things, but paid traffic is very different. Google loves you paying for traffic, so paid traffic is any traffic where a website pays the site sending them for the visits, commonly on a cost-per-click basis. This traffic will then be shown in your analytics services as being paid or advertising traffic. And obviously the most well-known paid traffic is Google AdWords, where you pay Google for the traffic that you want on the keywords and the terms you want, although it's a lot more complicated than that nowadays. And, yeah, that's the whole reason that Google is so rich is because of Google AdWords. So, yeah, they don't like you paying for links, but they love you paying for traffic. Next we've got Panda, so you might hear people talk about Panda sometimes Now.

Speaker 1: 5:05

Panda was a series of Google updates that rolled out over several years, starting February 2011. Panda targeted thin and low quality sites and pages and then combined with the Penguin algorithm of 2012, which we'll talk about in a bit the two updates together, or she did significant changes to how sites ranked and how SEO had to evolve to reflect it. Now, these were back in the day, similar to how the helpful content update has really shaken the industry up more recently. So I think you know, prior to helpful content update, panda and penguin combined with the two biggest changes we saw in SEO. We had big trouble with panda on broadband okay, uk back, you know around that time and we had to make a lot of changes to the content on our site because at the time it was just too thin. So we got hurt by panda. We fixed that and then got hit by penguin for buying links, but we'll talk about that more when we get to penguin. But yeah, if you hear people talking about panda in regards seo, it's not anything to do with the black and white chinese bear. It it is a yeah, this named Google update at the time which made big changes to how the quality of content you needed to rank.

Speaker 1: 6:12

Next we've got Parasite SEO. So Parasite SEO is a technique way to rank content by posting on a third party website which has more authority and will more likely rank quicker and higher than on your own website. So the third part of website might be one which charges you to post on it, or it might be a site which allows user-generated content, such as reddit. The content people most often monetize is by posting affiliate links within the content, so it's just a technique where, basically, people are trying to shortcut away to the ranking and they do it by piggybacking on the other site's high reputation. Google announced in March 2024 that they would take action on sites that took payment in return for price, like content which was posted without full editorial oversight, and they have done this, but it appears at the moment to only have been done manually. They haven't really got the algorithmic way of it done sort of sorted out properly yet and we are seeing people talk less about Parasite SEO content sort of on Twitter and stuff. It's still happening and it's really a technique people have been using for a long time.

Speaker 1: 7:18

I don't really like the name Parasite SEO because it sounds really seedy and it doesn't have to be seedy to post content on other people's website. I think it became a problem for Google and they saw, especially when people just said oh, I'll just buy an article on the Times of India and rank for whatever term I want really quickly you'll find that when people start calling Google out for how easily they're manipulating them, that's when Google starts to take action. If people could just get quiet about it then maybe Google never would have taken action on it, but I think, yeah, this is what it is. So the term parasite means to use a third-party site to try and rank on there, rather than trying to do it on your own website.

Speaker 1: 7:58

Next we've got PBN, which is short for private blog network. So a private blog network is it's a black hat link building technique, where a person or a company builds a network of outwardly independent websites that really are built purely for the purpose of linking to other websites in the hope of manipulating search rankings. So PBNs are often built on expired domains, as these often have their own backlink profile from their original incarnation and if these links haven't been discounted by google, they'll increase the value of any links built from them. Some pbns are kept solely for the private use of an individual or a company, but some pbns are built with the intention of selling links to third parties. Now, when google discovers a pbn, it will usually penalize both the websites in the pbn and also, often, the sites linked to from the pbn as well. So well, they can work and people do use them. If you get caught, there are obviously the risks with all of these sort of link manipulation schemes that you're going to end up with a penalty. So just be careful if you go out buying links, especially as there's lots of links builders who just take money will. You will might end up on pbns and then if pbn gets taken down, then you're going to have issues.

Speaker 1: 9:08

Finally, today we've got penalty. So we've talked about penalties already in a few of the things we've just talked about. So if penalty occurs to a web page or an entire site where google determines you've broken their guidelines, there are two types of penalty manual penalties that's where someone from google has come along, looked at your website, looked at the backlinks your website, looked at everything they know about your website and decided that you've violated one of the guidelines and manually puts a penalty on your website. Other penalties are done algorithmically and that's where the google algorithms themselves automatically have been flagged. You've tripped some kind of threshold and they've decided no, they're going to penalize you because they think you have broken some guideline. So if you hear people talk about penalties, this is what they're talking about the risk of your site being negatively hit so that you will not rank where you would do normally without a penalty being applied. So that's everything for today. So we've gone from pages to penalties, so we've still got plenty more P's left.

Speaker 1: 10:03

So the next episode we'll start with Penguin. And yeah, if you've got any things that you think we've missed that should have come up already before penalty, then do let me know. And, as I said in the last episode, if you're enjoying these, you're finding them useful, please do subscribe, please do write a review on whichever podcast listening platform you're using. It really helps. It helps us reach new people. Um, and yeah, other than that, all I've got to say is thanks very much and see you next time.

Speaker 1: 10:33

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywords people use, that you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Speaker 1: 11:11

Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.