Google-Risk Management (en)

03. 2008, Easter Sunday: Crazy Google Juggernaut algorithm runs mad again and crushes yet another bunch of innocent websites wearing white hats, if any ... ^^

SEO and Google-Risk Assessment: Challenge the Juggernaut

Google finally goes democratic. Every site now is at risk of becoming invisible in organic search results over night and thus lose up to all of it's natural traffic, no matter how compliant it may be with the ever changing rules of the 'good guys' and regardless of quality or relevance of it's content. SEO becomes nothing but GERM - Google Erratic Risk Management.

Beyond control

We are seeing fine sites that ranked well for years being warned, downgraded, penalized, sandboxed, quarantained, kicked, temporarily or eternally banned and otherwise de-valued by 'do-no-evil' for any other reason you might think of, or, often enough, apparently for no reason at all. Other, new, websites are being ignored for months or only crawled sporadically, nobody ever understanding why.

Beyond your own control loom sudden adaptions of ranking algorithms with unforeseen effects, fuzzy random and nonsensical ranking on SERPs, bugs in databases and crawling schedules, crazy manual flagging by Google-borgs in Mountain View, Mumbay or elsewhere around the globe ('10.000 human evaluators'), sandboxing for any 'money key' unknown to anyone but the machine, position-grabbing by content-mirroring sites that Google suddenly falsely identifies as being 'more important' than the original, loss or 'downgrading' of inbound links (e.g. paid links, link networks) and other incalculable oddities this chaotic system may produce at any moment.

Do what can be done

Fortunately you can do at least something to minimize the google-made risk of not getting found anymore. Buy adwords or do any or all of these (list open to further aspects):

- try to get some new external links from time to time to avoid weak linking history
- update old and add new content at reasonable rate
- detect different possible problems after changes in server and system configuration
- don't use bad or weird redirects, intros, frames and other funny or unnecessary things
- avoid renaming of files without intelligent redirecting
- avoid changes in internal link structure (use 'permalinks', use 'speaking URLs')
- avoid too hefty changes of content (e.g 'unnatural' growth)
- look into possible occurrence of unnecessary 'money-keys' (e.g. 'hotels')
- dont link to sites possibly marked by search engines as 'bad neighbourhood'
- don't use links and other content believed by search engines to be 'cloaked'
- don't ever sell links, stick to adsense and patiently wait for the day of revenge ;-)
- repair or remove weird URLs or redirecting and broken links, 
- avoid too many affiliate- or other external links
- avoid too many reciprocal links (link exchange)
- avoid weird links to sites that have totally different content
- use valid xml- or at least 'good' html code and doctype-declarations
- repair weird or bad code, get rid of unreadable content (e.g. flash)
- repair weak, faulty or maimed internal link structure, use html-sitemap 
- check for and as far as possible avoid any kind of external DC ('duplicated content')
- repair wrong use of title and metatags (e.g. site-wide repetitions)
- always use more than just a few unique words on each page
- don't use weird document structure (e.g. <h3> without <h2> and <h1>)
- use external files for style and script-codes to keep style and content apart
- use compliant sitemaps, robots.txt and www-non-www url-rewriting
- use multiple domains for different parts of your content to distribute risks 

(A bigger view of this list is available here)

Other things to consider in asessing and avoiding google-risks may be the following: allegedly bad for your site are 'unnatural' external linking history, incoming links from banned sites ('reverse bad neighbourhood') and buying links. In reality all of these should not have an influence on your positions in the index. Not necessarily bad is internal DC. Unfortunately not bad is the extensive use of 'nofollowed' outbound linking.

Good luck :-)

The "Juggernaut" is any literal or metaphorical force regarded as unstoppable, that will crush all in its path. The word is derived
from the Sanskrit Jagannatha, "Lord of the universe" (Krishna). Fame has it that fanatic devotees of Krishna threw themselves under the deadly wheels of immense wooden chariots carrying statues of the juggernaut in order to attain salvation from the wheel of existence.