Google Spam Update - How to Recover Your Website Rankings

Google Spam Update – October 2022 that has came into effect on October 4th, 2022, has really caused devastation and de-ranking to many websites. Fortunately for me, a lot of the best practices that I’m going to talk about right now are those that I was using for the past six or seven months when I was originally hit by the May 2022 October Update.

Google Spam Update is intended to reduce low-quality web pages in the search results.

Google’s John Mueller – Webmaster Trends Analyst

1. SEO Gurus Disappointed Us

The update was devastating, but a lot of people were using strategies that are outdated, and they maybe the following advice from SEO Gurus, that honestly were just trying to sell their courses, and even the courses would have outdated information. And with SEO you don’t want to use outdated information because Google is changing drastically. And it’s consistently making those changes to its algorithm and so you need to continue evolving your strategy because that’s the only way that you will rank high and you’ll continue to rank high.

2. Why these Steps Are Important?

Let’s move to the topic of recovering from the Google 2022 October Spam Update. Before I go into the exact steps, it’s important to talk about why these steps are important. And why have so many websites been penalized now? You might have remembered that there was a Google Helpful Content Update on Thursday, August 18, 2022 that focused on ‘People-First‘ and not many people were affected by that update.

Some of those affected websites were mine, so I was able to test exactly what Google was doing, and I came up with a strategy and I recovered those websites.

3. Remove Low Quality PBN Links

If you have been buying links on Fiverr, I would say right off the bat that they were cheap links. Just go ahead and disavow them. You do not want those weak links, linking back to your website. PBN links work but those PBN links needs to be very good.

Honestly people are buying links from Fiverr or those who are selling links from Fiverr are those that are not really good Private Blog Network (PBN) links, and cost anywhere from forty dollars right up the way to 100 a link.

PBN links are created in order to increase the search visibility by creating dummy sites that links to more websites, thus creating a network of site. As this manipulates the search engine algorithms thus such practices are considered Black Hat SEO technique and will be dealt bitterly by the Google Inc. For more details you may read Are PBNs Safe?

4. Comments Links Are No More Effective

If you’ve got comment links that are linking back to your content, regardless of how good the comment is. In most cases, it’s just automated comments with links, you should disavow all that as that is something old-school practice.

Back in 2019, Google had one of the Spam Updates that devastated websites that were getting comment links. But people still use this technique, and a lot of people that have reached out to me have comment links, linking back to them. Disavow those links.

5. Remove Links from AI-Generated Websites

If you’ve got a backlink from a website that has AI-generated content, even if it’s not a page, even if it’s not that specific page that’s linking back to your website, that has AI-generated content. You need to disavow those links.

5.1 Reason for Not Linking to AI-Generated Content Website

You should not take a link from that website, not because it’s a bad link, but because Google would have most probably penalized that website and may be penalizing your website too. That means credibility that is being passed down to you has less credibility. Your website has less credibility even with all your content on your website is human written.

6. Remove Links from Poor Content Websites

Badly written content is also just as bad. If your website written by someone you have known, probably someone you have on fiver or five dollars a hundred words, or even ten dollars for 100 words, that depicts that’s going to be poorly written content. Always hire someone who’s a Professional Writer. Your content should be great, grammatically correct, and research-wise correct, and that should be linking to the source. Make sure that you’re linking to the source of your information.

7. Check your Anchor Text Ratio

Also, check your anchor text ratio. If you have backlinks from a website or if you’re buying backlinks or if you’re doing Outreach you probably don’t have a save at this, but if you’re buying backlinks which is also fine. I buy backlinks too. But if you’re buying those backlinks then you need to check the anchor text ratio. You shouldn’t have more than a five percent exact match anchor text ratio.

Reach out to the webmaster from where you got the link ask them to change it to a naked URL or any other any other types of URLs.

Google does not look at anchor text ratios as percentages. I mean it doesn’t have to be precise ratios in Google. Google is really looking at link spam, and so Google wants to see if the backlinks coming in that have been purchased or if there are real backlinks. Google has this profile of what it sees as real links and what’s called unnatural link building.

So it can tell if your linked profile is unnatural, that tells Google that you’re using an unnatural backlinking tactic that is not acceptable to them. And even though they might not flag you or send you a message, that you’re using this. You’re still going to be de-ranked.

8. Emphasize More on Naked URLs

Also you need to emphasize more on naked URLs, as a general rule of thumb so when you went out just make a URL or a partial branded URL text. For example, if your brand is XYZ and you’re trying to target car sales as your keyword, so you can do XYZ Car and then the city, NYC New York, the Dubai, or whatsoever. Just use a partial key phrase now hooked up with your brand name.

8. Remove all AI Generated Content and Thin Content

The next thing you should do is remove all AI-generated content and poorly written content from your website. If your website has been hit, it’s most probably one of these things;

1. Content that is AI-Generated
2. Content that is Poorly Written

If you hired a cheap writer to do it for you. Probably redo all of the content.

8.1 Exceptions to AI Generated Content

There are places where AI-generated content would work fine, for example, you could have AI generated content in the ‘About Us’ page, in the ‘Cookies’ Page, in the ‘Terms of Service’, ‘Legal Agreement’, etc. Usually these are pages are those that people don’t read as much. Google knows that so if you have AI-generated content on all these pages then that’s fine.

9. From Where to Start – Systematic Improvement

So you have to go step by step. Start with the home page, that’s the first thing that a search engine sees, and you the people see. So start with the home page, fix the home page and the service page.

And then once you’ve done all the Service Pages and the Home Page, then go ahead and start working on your blog post.

10. Content of Review Websites

If you are a Review Website, then work on the reviews on your website. Start with the most reviews that used to get the most traffic on your website. Fix that and then go from there go to the ones that did not get enough traffic. Just go ahead and start working your way and improving.

One of the things that I’ve learned is that if you’re redoing the content on your reviews for instance; if you have a review website or as an affiliate, make sure that you mentioned right at the top that this has been updated. And then the date it was updated. That tells Google hat this page has been updated, and this is the latest information. And if there is new information about something, then make sure to mention that in the page.

Hire a writer, or do it yourself, it’s really up to you. If you’re on a budget, probably just do it yourself. If you’re a good writer do it yourself.

11. Review Websites with Affiliate Links

The next thing you want to do is make sure that your reviews are especially true for affiliate websites, and that people will run review websites with the affiliate links. You should have a bio at the bottom of each review.

You don’t have to have like four different buyers. You can have a single buyer; you can have your own bio. Just make sure that whatever you buy try to mention a short description about you in the footer of your blogs. And it should have your real picture, and then don’t use AI-generated pictures. Google can tell the difference. I’ve tested this and Google can tell the difference so you do not want to mess with that. Just make sure that your bio looks real.

12. Identify Who Your Writers Is

So the next thing you’d want to do in the bio, is you should identify who your writers are on your website. Have a link from the bio to your social media profiles. The writer should ideally have a Facebook profile, a LinkedIn and Twitter profile. If they don’t have a profile, they can create a profile. It’s free. This tells Google that this is a real writer who’s doing this, and this adds bit of credibility.

My website that that did not have a bio, lost rankings; they went from page one to page two, even though it was human written content. And then all I did was I added the bio, then boom it was back to where it was. So, I think this was a pretty easy fix and something that can be very easily done and to recover your rankings.

13. Focus on Adding Infographics

The next thing you would have to do is to add infographics to your posts. Testing shows that Google will prefer a website that has infographics, as compared to one with not, even if everything is equal. It is because Google sees that as it has been helpful to readers; people coming to your website and find that useful, stay on your website longer, and find the content useful.

If you’re human written content is losing rankings, in addition to adding the bio, make sure that you also add infographics because you know it’s an important part of encapsulating all the facts and figures on your website, product descriptions, comparisons, specifications, etc.

Fortunately, programs like Canva will make it easy for you to design infographics. It just takes a few minutes. Make sure that you encapsulate the ‘alt text’ and just make sure that you mention that this is an infographic. You can use infographic colon, and then write about the infographic like infographic colon Car Sales, statistics infographic, Poland City size statistics, etc.

14. Add Personal Images of Products You Review

Also, you have to add real images of your products. If you’re reviewing an iPhone, make sure that you have a picture of yourself with the iPhone in your picture. It can be with your hand even. But you know this can be doctored, I’ve not seen I don’t have enough data to tell you if Google can for sure say that a picture is real. But Google has a database of pictures that keeps matching those pictures against this database.

Sooner or later if you’re just using someone else’s pictures, Google can pick that pick up on that, and then that would de-rank your review. Because Google wants people to write Real reviews, and ‘real reviews’ means that you had the real product, and you use a real product, and it’s a user review. So if it’s not this update and it’s the next update and you could be hit. Plan for the future and you know just get your hands on the product, buy it of Amazon and review it.

15. Internal links are Important

Internal links are now more important than the ever were before. Most people just you know they don’t really think too much about their internal linking, and they use outdated methods. And that’s why you know many of them don’t rank. So think of building internal links that identify your entity.

Google sees websites as entities, and it looks at the data as an entity. It’s not very successful right now, but it’s becoming better at this. So what you want to do is link to articles and parts of your website that readers would find useful.

Now the most common strategy that I’ve always heard here people talk about, even some of the SEO gurus is just you know, link to parts of your website that pass links; You should link to what readers will find useful, and obviously, you should write for readers, so use the anchor text that does not elicit an action, so usually anchor texts like ‘click here’ or ‘go here’ or instead illicit action.

So instead of telling users to ‘click here’ or ‘go here’ motivate them to do it. So ‘learn more about this product’ or ‘you can find out more about this here’ or ‘our data of this product suggests this’, to use this as your anchor text, instead of your ‘click here’ or ‘go here’.

Google sees this as just being internal linking spam. Google can tell you’re not building internal links for Bots, because of the bot will come in and then they can tell that whether you’re building links for humans or you’re building links for them.

16. Conclusion

Folks follow these steps and you will not have a problem recovering your website from Google’s algorithm update. It has been a brutal update; I would not go to pledge my words here. But most of the sites that were hit, were hit because they were following outdated tactics. Google has been warning about these tactics and people have still been following this. If your website has been following these tactics you know you will be surprised that it’s going to be hit. I hope you guys found this guide helpful, if you have questions, leave it in a comment below.

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