This is an AWESOME post. I got on the content wagon for a while and did exactly what you say not to do: started creating very similar content to rank for lots of keywords. In the end, my rankings are very inconsistent, but I’ll be changing that now. I wonder if I can edit posts, republish them for a new topic so they are more helpful and 301 redirect the old url to maintain some link juice?

Also, just a quick question that you can maybe help out on…

I’ve noticed that sometimes when I publish or edit an old page (not similar to other pages on my site), it will rank very well for about 2 weeks. After that point, it simply drops off and stops ranking so high or at all. Is this due to freshness? or CTR? What do you recommend to keep rankings up and staying up?

Thank You
Chad Agrawal

Really great post! I’m reading up on Penquin a lot these days because a client has some problems regarding latest updates in Google, probably due to the fact of over optimization. It seems in my clients case, that it’s not so much due to on-site factors, but more to over optimization in incoming links that were build up in ‘the good old days’. Do you have some posts/information about that or is there anyone willing to provide me some info on that scenario?

Thanks!

Hi Dan,

Thanks! Glad I could answer some questions.

For tag clouds, it’s not so much as “I MUST remove this or get penalized by Google” as much as it is a:

1. Page Rank/Link juice waster – (why would you want to link to a bunch of relatively unimportant tag pages from every page of your site–maybe even from your homepage–and send that link juice around instead of keeping the juice on your money pages? If you’ve noindex/followed your tag pages (like most WordPress SEO plugins recommend) then it’s even more of a waste of link juice.

– Keep in mind that Google is smart now to the point of recognizing how common platforms like WordPress usually operate, and can account for it by allocating the flow of Pagerank properly regardless of tag clouds, etc. but there’s no reason to let Google decide what to do when you can do so yourself.

– Also, if your site architecture is based off of tags instead of categories (I’ve seen it before), than a tag cloud may be an excellent idea if the tags are limited to reasonable amount, and the tag cloud is located in a prominent area of the site and used as a form of user navigation.

2. Now tag clouds can be a risky proposition that may get you penalized, because Google will see all those links listed one after another (which look just like a spammy footer), all with exact anchor matches for the URLs on your site, and Google may decide you’re being spammy with your internal linking and ding you for it.

Tag clouds are not the biggest risk in the world, but they’re real easy to get rid of. Also, hardly anyone clicks on them anyway so there’s little redeeming value in keeping them.

Hi Felipe,

For checking broken internal/external links, and for seeing which pages are 301 redirected etc., Xenu (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) is great. I am not sure why this is not working for you, as it runs on the front end from your personal computer (not your server) and tends to work fine most of the time.

Xenu might be blocked from your site by robots.txt file (e.g., User-agent: Xenu
Disallow: /) but I’m not sure if Xenu even obeys robots.. 🙂

At any rate, here are some other great crawlers that are similar but better than Xenu:

Screaming Frog (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/)

Microsoft SEO Toolkit (http://www.microsoft.com/web/seo/)

One thing though: would having a tag-cloud really give Google grounds to penalize your website? I mean tag clouds are there on every single website I go to, some even PR6+. They seem to be doing pretty well, till now at least. (But it is true, people almost never click on tags!)

Thanks

Now I’m learning more about what Google are looking for, I’m altering my sites and am seeing a nice climb back up the traffic ladder.

Thanks