October 9, 2013
How to Scan a Site for Google Penguin Problems
When people call us about SEO problems, we invariably hear two names: Panda and Penguin. When we scan a site we look for problems related to Panda such as low quality pages like pages with high bounce rates and low server speeds. However, when we scan a site for Penguin penalties, we look for things that other companies have done in the past that might be penalizing the site now.
This how to scan a site for Google Penguin problems:
- Get your site registered on Google Webmaster. They will tell you if there is a problem with indexing your site and potentially if there is a penalty that has been assessed.
- Take a look at your source code. You can do this in most browsers by selecting view source. Google looks at only the source code, so you should as well if you want to see what Google sees. Use the control F function to look for title tags, meta tags and body. Look for keywords that are repeated over and over again or seem to have lots and lots of keywords.
- Look at your site map. Are there multiple welcome pages that don’t conform to your natural site structure? This is misleading and Google considers it a bait and switch
- Again – look at your site map. Are their multiple pages with the same content, but different locations? Another no no
- Using the same keyword over and over again as your anchor text that you link to both internally and externally. One of the better tools to do this is MajesticSEO which can show you the percentage of keywords that are part of the anchor text. Anything north of 60% is begging for a penalty.
- Links from sites that are way outside your industry. If your site is about toys and you are getting links from blogs about climate change, chances are your links are spammy. Majestic SEO does a great job of looking at these links through a trust graph.
Once you have taken a look at your site using these various tools, you can start to formulate a plan to recover. However, the best plan is to provide your customers and Google with a website worth visiting. This is done by having good content, fast load speeds and easy navigation.