How to Recover from 5 Common Google Penalties by Aaron Aglus #352

Welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. I am Charles Lewis, your client results advocate. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 352. Thank you guys for tuning in. As always, we do have a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is use cross-channel marketing for specific campaigns. Do not limit your campaigns to one specific channel. Take that campaign and spread it across. Your social, your website, your email campaigns. If you're doing any radio or TV or anything traditional, use that campaign in those areas too. Just make sure all the messaging is relevant and consistent. Boom. Please remember, we are your, well, first, we're filmed here live in Houston, Texas. And Chuck and I, we actually are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. And our mantra is, do not be a douche. All right, so we had a question or a request a while back to talk about Google penalties. Yeah. And you found? Found an article, Punch in the Face to the Good Guy, Aaron Aguiz. He used to do like a third article we done from him. And the good folks over at Search Engine Journal posted this article, Five Types of Google Penalties. There's like a whole bunch of them, but five main ones, right? Five types of Google penalties and what you need to do to recover. We'll dig in and see what he's talking about. That's going to be pretty good. All right, if you have some sort of electronic device in front of you, you can do something with it, what should they do, Chuck? Tweet us. That's what we want you to do. Tweet us. Use the hashtag BestSEO Podcast. Tag us in it. At eWebResults, at BestSEO Podcast. That way we can follow you back and do all of our social networking stuff. Very cool. If this is the first time you've listened to the podcast, howdy. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. We're going to be getting into the

meat shortly. This is the Potatoes. If you've listened to this podcast before, then you know what we're about to skip. Yeah. I'm tired of following people, dude. I'm following people back from last week who didn't get followed. Yeah. And lots of retweets happening. It's like killing my iPad, which when I upgraded, it's old and is dying anyway. So, yeah. So, we don't have to tell you exactly how to write the reviews. The way this little contest works is if we get 10 shikos. The shiko is the eWebResults branded term for social engagement. It stands for shares, likes, and follows. If we get 10 of those. 10 shikos. And we get a review, then we skip the section where we tell you exactly how you can leave us a review. All the platforms, all that stuff. Just go leave us a review so we can avoid that altogether. It's been working good so far. We will tell you how you can shiko us. Yes. Right? Share, like, or follow us on all of the platforms. We do have a profile. And the way that works is you just need to go to something like, I don't know, facebook.com slash eWebResults. Twitter.com slash eWebResults. YouTube.com slash eWebResults. Instagram.com slash eWebResults. Or maybe linkedin.com slash company slash eWebResults. All of those will take you to our profile on those platforms. Please do the needful. If you've heard that before, you're probably working with people in another country. All right. And if you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we are probably looking for you. We are looking for you. Yes. No problem. Go ahead and leave an audio resume. The phone number for leaving audio resumes is 713-510-7846. We have a free comprehensive website profit analysis. Keyword comprehensive. And profit. Like, both. It's like, so you can get a website analysis anywhere. This is a comprehensive website profit analysis. And you can get that by going to our website, eWebResults.com. You click the green button. You can't miss it. It says free analysis. Click that. And there

you go. Boom. And then, do we have any AlgoCat? No AlgoCat. We do not have any AlgoCat. We're going to finish off the year. Well, we could still squeeze in some news. The next two podcasts are going to be our 2016 year in review. And so, we could squeeze. Maybe we could squeeze something in. We'll have some news there. But, frankly, you know, like I said, Panda and Penguin are now running part of Google's core algorithm. Right. And so, there is no release. There is no update. There is no, you know, the only time we'll have AlgoCat moving forward is when they add something new. Yeah. You know, or make a change to, like, the search result page or something like that. Maybe, like, a Google puppy. It needs to all be with the P's, right? Yeah. Puppy. My other animal starts with a P. I don't know. Oh, besides Panda and Penguin and... Puppy. Yeah. Pig. Which is actually, yeah. Pig. Yeah. I'm not good at that. Hey, we've got some news for you. I thought this was pretty interesting. Uber has their self-driving vehicles in for San Francisco. That's great. That's really good. Oh, I had an interesting conversation with Nolan about San Francisco. And he was talking about how San Francisco has their treat, right? This rice-a-roni. So, when you're in San Francisco, do you just call it the treat? Because you call it... We could easily call it the San Francisco treat. And you're like... So, is that real? I always thought that was just a marketing ploy by Rice-a-roni. It's a marketing ploy. Man, I bet no one in San Francisco eats rice-a-roni. Yeah. No. Yeah. This one, there is a... It's like malware for Android devices. It's actually called Gooligan. That's awesome. Gooligan, right? Roots... This is amazing. It roots up your device. So, it's installed on other apps, quote-unquote legitimate apps. Then it actually roots your device and then installs apps. And those apps that it can do will maybe install an app and rate it so that

you actually increase your ratings. That's weak. Yeah, and then it's got, like, adware so that they can generate... Grab hackers, man. Yeah. It's a great hack, but come on, dawg. Really? I can get you a million five-star reviews. All you've got to do is convince people to install this. I'm just... You know, there was a while where I was playing around with rooting my device. And it was kind of a pain in the ass. It's a little upsetting that you could just download something and... It automatically roots it. It automatically roots it and installs stuff on it and all that stuff. That's kind of crazy. Yeah, when I had to watch four or five YouTube videos trying to figure out how to root my old... Yeah. And then I couldn't get it unrooted. I actually went through a couple upgrades. You had to go back to default. Wow. We're going to skip this one because that is actually going to be... What? News. Amazon did their first drone delivery. Yeah, I saw that. It took them, what, 14 minutes? Yeah. That's kind of some goal of five minutes. Now, this is totally unrelated to anything. When you go outside, where does most of the heat escape from your body? When you go outside... And it's cold. Your breath. So, have you heard, like, most of it escapes out of your head so you need to wear a hat? I have heard that before. Yeah. So, it doesn't really make any sense because it's not actually hotter on your head. Like, how is there more heat transfer? And I just read an interesting article because I think these kind of geeky things are interesting. So, it turns out that the research that they came from is, if you bundle up and don't wear a hat... It's like... And then they're like, well, if you bundle up and don't wear pants, most of the heat goes out of your legs. Yeah, exactly. Your bottom half will be sweating, though. It's, like, kind of crazy. Anyway. You know

what I thought back to the drone situation with Amazon? I kind of thought it was interesting. I could totally see that rural. Yeah. All right, rural areas? Yeah. Great. Perfect. Downtown Houston? That's going to be a problem. Yeah. That's my part with the logistics. I think it will be a problem. I'm like, man. Like, we're going to have drone wars. Yeah. Like, uh... Deliver it faster. Or not just that. Like, maybe too much... Too much, what is it? Interference? Right. Because the radio interference and things like... Potentially, yeah. Yeah, if you got, you know, a hundred people on one block place an order, which is possible in downtown Houston during Christmas shopping time. Yeah, yeah. You know what I'm saying? And they all want three-day delivery or whatever the delivery... Five and ten-minute delivery. Yeah, ten-minute delivery. Yeah. You're thinking December 24th. That's what I'm saying. It's like, come on, Amazon. Are y'all open? Get it here, because I got in trouble at home and I need to... Or Black Friday or any one of these days, you know, that could cause for an increase in shopping. Yep. All right. So, you got some news? Yeah, got some news, got some news, got some news, some more industry-related news. Let's talk Bing. So, Bing is making changes to their search results page. Google's already been doing a knowledge graph, so Bing has a knowledge panel. Right. That's what they call it. But, cool thing about Bing's knowledge panel... That's so sad. This is so sad, man. Could you call it something else? Like, information panel would be better than knowledge panel, given your competition. Anyway. Yeah. So, cool thing about the Bing knowledge panel is, if you search a company... Right. You may see Facebook, the most recent Facebook post from that company in the knowledge panel. That's cool. Yeah, I thought that was kind of cool. So, I tested it on us. I didn't see it, but I tested it on Nike, and I did. So, what's up? What's up with that, man? Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway. We do talk about Google a lot. We post a lot. Like, we had plenty of posts to pick from. More news. Well, you're not an IG user. I use Instagram. Shout out to a bunch of the face to everybody on Instagram right now. Who's used Instagram Live? If you have, let me know. I haven't tried it yet. I've seen it. Yeah. I just clicked it. I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. Took y'all long enough, and then I haven't tried it yet. But I probably will, I'm going to test it Wednesday on the radio show. Okay. And kind of see which one gets the best engagement for me. Yeah, because that's all that matters. Well, the thing is, Instagram Live works similar to the stories. So, it's basically like the Snapchat feature, like a live Snapchat. Right. Okay. So, consider that, right? So, it's not recorded and then going to Snapchat or then going to your Instagram stories. It's actually recorded live and then going to your stories. So, once they watch it live, it still goes away just like the Snapchat. Right. So, the engagement level is probably going to go down. Yeah, yeah. Because the benefit of this Facebook is it's going to stay posted or it'll stay live. And you can share it on other walls afterwards, all that good stuff. Yeah. Exactly. My last piece of news since we're at the end of 2016, here are Google's top 10 worldwide searches. Okay, cool. In 2016. Yeah, cool. Right? Pokemon Go was number one. Wow. Wow. But that was only in like the last three months of the year, right? Wow. iPhone 7 was number two. Donald Trump was number three. Prince was number four. Rest in peace to Prince. Yeah. Powerball was number five. I would have loved to hit the millions and millions of dollars. Baby Bowie was number six. Deadpool was number seven. Everybody tells me I need to go see Deadpool. Me too. Yeah, I've heard that too. I heard it was an awesome movie.

Olympics was number eight. Punch in the face to the people in Rio. That was the great Olympics. Michael Phelps for being the fourth largest country in terms of earned gold medals. Yeah. Shout out to Simone Biles and those people. He's talking about H-Town. Yeah, H-Town stand up. And Suicide Squad. So, I almost kicked Will Smith in the shin for Suicide Squad. Yeah, is it bad? No, he just chose not to do Independence instead of that. And I was like, it's like Independence Day, bro. Yeah. That's one of your movies. Dude, that was classic. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? We can't do another Independence Day without you in it. And that's why it failed. Yeah. And we're like, Independence 2? Oh, you know Will? Nah. I'll go see Deadpool. Yeah, not even going to see Suicide Squad. I mean, you lose both ways, Will, for not doing it. So, anyway, top 10 searches. I was surprised that, well, surprised but not surprised. Right. The fact that Donald Trump was not number one and surprised that he actually was after Pokemon Go. Yeah. I think that's kind of legit that he should be after Pokemon Go. That's the part that makes sense. See, exactly. There's got to be a Pokemon Go thing with a little hair thing going. With a little orange thing sometimes. You're like, catch them all. I'm like, no, I don't want that one. All right. That's cool. All right. So, we do have some review. Well, we have one review with a question. Okay. And then we may get to another question. So, I am going to have to read these fast because they're pretty lengthy. The first one is from Lilith Dorsey. And it is, of course, Fastos. It says, here's five stars for these wonderful guys. They consistently provide valuable information and amusing entertainment around a topic that can be difficult to navigate. Yes, it can. By the way, that was the title. It continues, my name is Lilith Dorsey and I am an author and filmmaker. I've been working

hard to improve my online presence and these guys have all the answers. That's nice. Shout out to Aaron Agrius and all of the artists and all of the content we pull will help develop these answers. Since they asked in the podcast, I'll let them know I'm in the Guinness Book of Records twice. And kudos to them on their efforts to get in this month. Punch in the face to you, Lilith. What's the first we've got? What are you in the records for? Hit us up. Let us know. Did you win it? Well, she said she's in it, so I guess you did. Well, yeah, that's true. She's in the Guinness Book of World Records. That's awesome. Yeah, hit us up. For what? Yeah, podcast or hit us up on Facebook, podcast.ewebresults.com. Let us know what you're in there for. Let's see. This month, I do have a quick question for us. If I have a blog post or video promoting my new book, Love Magic, is it best to post that on social media or promote the book directly? My sales figures only come in quarterly, so I have no real way of tracking things. As for now, I have been promoting both the videos and the book individually, but sometimes I feel like asking people to watch a video and then buy makes too many steps before I get folks to the actual product. Please let me know what you think on your podcast. I'll be listening and keep up the great work. Punch it in the face. Punch it in the face. What's her name again? Lilith. Lilith. Lilith. First off, punch in the face to you. Phenomenal questions. Awesome. Two-time. Two-time world record holder. Let me give you a legit answer then. First off, congrats on your book. Anytime you take the time to actually write a book and publish it. Love Magic. Love Magic. That's what's up. Your question entertained how you promote it, socially or via video. Or do you put the video, say, hey, watch the video, and then

try and sell them or not? You do both. Video is going to be the easiest way to sell your book. I think you do that video in two places. Here's your pro tip. Put it on YouTube. While you have that video on YouTube, go ahead and add an annotation to that video. Go ahead and link to your site, and guess what's on that site? Where they can purchase the book. They can pre-order. They can click over to Amazon. Wherever your purchasing happens at, it needs to be on that page, and you need a link to that page in the YouTube annotation for that video. That's YouTube. Take that same video and upload it to Facebook. Like, upload it to Facebook. Don't share the YouTube link. You can, but don't do that. Upload the video to Facebook. Why? So, it can automatically play when people begin scrolling, having to decrease your engagement rate. More importantly, Facebook doesn't necessarily have those annotations like YouTube has, but you can post that link in the comments. You can post that link right aside the video and take the extra space to tell people, click the link and make the purchase. It's okay to do that in Facebook, and then I would even tag your top 10 people in that Facebook video and literally ask them to share it, because they probably will. Yeah, well, with a title like Love Magic. I'm in that same situation. I sell music digitally, like on iTunes and Google Play and things like that, and yeah, iTunes sends me my reports quarterly, and so it's definitely a challenge trying to understand which channels are working. And so, I would say it's definitely stick to one. Well, stick to both of those. Push it consistently. Don't be afraid to be aggressive. It's on social media. It's okay. And then just look at the numbers in three months and make some choices. Yeah. Make some decisions and get focused. All right. Next question. Wow, I didn't get this guy's name. Sorry about that. We'll maybe get

it next time. Guy. It says, hey guys, nice podcast. You should have an ask a question form on the website like some other podcast. I looked up the podcast. It's a WTFFF3D podcast. I couldn't really find the form, so it's not a bad idea. But we do also say in the podcast, regularly send us an email, podcast.edu. And this actually turned into an interaction on Facebook. Anyway, might use you for services at some point. Not right now, but wondering if you have an opinion on this. I have a WordPress press blog, and I see some blogs in viewers. I guess there's guest. In guest post requirements. Yeah. Say they will do a no follow on any links in their guest post. My site is set to do no follow by default. But a guest who wants to link to their site is insisting on a do follow. I think in an episode you said that's a bad idea, but they seem to think that it won't get any traffic and it's not worth the link without it. Personally, I'm new to WordPress, so I was wondering about your opinion. You can reach me best by email. Hopefully, we can reach you through the podcast as well. Punch in the face to you. Guy. Guy. So, Guy, I appreciate your question, homie. Hit us up and let us know what your name is because we'd like to address you a little bit more directly. Yep. But dig this, though. So, that logic is kind of like 22,000, 2005 logic. First off, in regards to the guest post, if you want to allow this guest post, make sure this guy is relevant, not a competitor, and not in your target area. Right? Do that first. Do that first. Do that first. And then, if the content is good, he didn't scrape it or rewrite it or jack it from somebody else, then it's probably okay to go with it. Stick to your ground. No follow that link. Now, contrary to what he was thinking back to that

old logic, 2000, 2005 I was talking about. Back then, Google explicitly said, do not, oh, no. Back then, follow links definitely had more value than non-follow links. They totally did. They passed link juice and everything else, which is why he wants it. But, as of Penguin, as of these changes within the last four years, it's a reason Google has came out and explicitly said, no follow links. And so, I want to encourage you to do just that. No follow the link. Understand, and you can share this with him, that that link will still get indexed. It'll still get passed. It just won't have the follow, and that actually saves you headache in case he does something weird on his site, and then you've got to follow a link to that site that's doing something weird. You don't want to do that. So, go ahead and add the post. Let them link out. Tell them it's going to be no follow. And if it's that big of a deal, then don't accept the post. Don't accept the post. All right. Good stuff. Punch in the face again to you, Guy. Yeah. All right. That is the potatoes of our podcast. It is time to get into the meat and a talk about our five types of Google penalties. Yeah. Punch in the face to Aaron Aguas and the good folks over at Search Engine Journal. He posted this article, five types of Google penalties and what you need to do about them. Right. Well, and what you need to do to recover more importantly. And so, he starts off by asking, what is a manual action penalty? Right. A manual action penalty. Literally, a map. But he says, manual actions are the most common type of Google penalty you can get. If you have one, you should see a message in Search Console about it. He's right. Those are the ones you get. Luckily, we don't get them frequently. I have gotten them before. And it just sucks when you get one of those messages. And

you just have to deal with it. And you will see those messages in your Search Console. Ladies and gents, that's your old webmaster tools. Right. They changed the name to Search Console. And so, understand why they call it manually. So, this is not an algorithmic penalty or anything like that. This is a manual penalty. You know, Google has engineers and buildings full of people who just look at sites. And then they decide if this site's cloaking, if it has spam, if it has bad content or whatever it is. And then they apply a manual penalty if necessary. That's what a manual penalty is. So, with that, let's get started. One of the first manual penalties. Number one is unnatural links. I've actually seen this one before. If you are right now, I don't know, clicked on one of those ads that said, you know, get a thousand links for $10. Yeah, you probably have unnatural links. Or if you are participating in some link scam. I don't care how long ago you clicked that. Yeah, you still have unnatural links. You need to take care of that. Yeah, if you've done something like that, if you've responded to that email that some lame webmaster sent you that said, hey, I'm going to link to you. If you link to me on this site right here with this page here, you probably have unnatural links. Look, he says there are two kinds of unnatural links. Penalties that Google has. You've got unnatural links from your site, right? These are, you're hosting them. Or then you have unnatural links to your site. It's a little bit out of your control, right? Right. Unless you're paying for them, then you can definitely go and fix that. But the key here is to fix them, right? You try wondering why your ranking is dropping, why your traffic is getting low. You log in to analytics and everything looks okay. You just see your graph going down. And so then you log in to search console and you get the

little notification that you have a new message. You click the message and it says manual penalty added. Unnatural links. Don't panic. Just deal with it. If these are links from your site, good news is Google has identified them. And so you can click on the link and figure out what pages they're talking about where these links exist and either go in and replace them, fix them, get rid of them, whatever it is, but fix the links. Now, that's the easy part. Links on your site. You can just fix those. That's in your control. Links that are off your site. People linking to you. It's a little bit more of a challenge, especially if you have a really old website and been doing SEO for a long time or worse. Or worse, maybe dealt with several different agencies and several different SEOs and everyone was using a different strategy, right? Then you may have some paid links. You may have some press release links. You may have some poor directory links. You may have all kind of unnatural links. Now, this is going to take some time and some really just time to go back and figure out because you can't just go and disavow them. Disavowing them is part of the process, but Google wants you to make contact first. They want you to make a request. They want you to try and clean up the internet. They want you to try to get those links removed. And if you can't, then send a disavow file to them saying that I tried to do it. I contacted them here. This is how many times I contacted them and it still isn't removed. Google, please disavow this link. Long, tedious, and time-consuming process. But if you've been hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural links, I'm going to suggest that you get started. Yeah, clean your links up. Check search console, fix your outbound links, and disavow those. Number two. Two. Number two is user-generated spam. Oh, man. This is not as much of a

problem as it used to be. Yeah. I believe that's the origin of the term don't be a douche, the phrase don't be a douche. Yeah, exactly. And so user-generated spam is, so he says if you've gotten a user-generated spam penalty, it doesn't mean you're a spammer, but your site users are. And as far as Google's concerned, it's up to you to clean up spammy content people post to your site. Yeah, so let's say you've got a form, a blog, or something like that, and you're allowing people to post comments. Right. And these comments are loaded with spam and links to all kinds of crazy stuff and porn and everything else. And you're not moderating these comments. You're just letting people post them and show them. And now these comments are public. Not only are they public, but they are on your web page. So it's like yourdomain.com slash blog post. And on that page, in your comment section, there's a whole bunch of user-generated spam. You've got to clean that off. Turn on Ask Amit. You're using WordPress. That's kind of the first thing you want to do is use some sort of plug-in. Even if it's not Ask Amit, which kind of works with the WordPress comments, you may want to use another plug-in. I frequent Disqus. Disqus will replace that with its own kind of comment management. But it filters out. Either that or take it a step further and like. Moderate it. Moderate it is a good way. Or you want to be really proactive depending on the type of industry you're in. Use a social plug-in. Like Facebook comments. And that way, those comments actually show up on Facebook. And that way, they're already moderated. This person is already logged in. And you've got a lot more ease of use, more shareability, and other benefits from doing that. One benefit you don't get from that is that it is user-generated content, but it's not really on your site. It's on Facebook. Yeah. That's the only difference there. But if you have

user-generated spam, check your comments and go delete them. And then go back to Google and resubmit so they can remove the penalty. Here's a pro tip. If it looks like a nightmare to delete all your comments, if you can find some commonality, you can usually go to a database programmer. And we could actually help you with this. And have them go into the database and pull out those comments or at least mute those comments. The reason he would say that because all my WordPress users out there know, if you have comments available. Man, when you were logged in, you ever logged in WordPress and looked at the comments and it's like, oh, you got 500 new comments? Yeah. And probably 90% of those are spam. Right. What I tend to do is go in and just select all. Delete. Well, I'll briefly scan names. I'll briefly scan names. Yeah. And if the name is anyone I recognize, then uncheck that one and then delete all. Right. User-generated spam was number two. Number three. Number three. Hacked site. Oh, yeah. Yeah. How many hack sites you had to deal with? Not many this year. Yeah. Remember last year, we could probably call 2015 the year of hack sites. 2014-15 was tough. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we're not afraid to admit that. Yeah. You know, it happens. We build on WordPress. And so, unfortunately, you can have the most secure password and setup you want. But if your clients and everyone else using it and their employees change the passwords and they're using the ABC123, you're vulnerable. Yeah. And you just have to deal with that. As a matter of fact, he's... That's the Michael Jackson password, by the way. ABC123, yeah. He says, hacked sites pose a threat to you and your site users. So, Google wants you to clean things up. Yep. He's right, man. At the end of the day, just getting hacked just sucks. I'm going to tell you the worst experience in the world. Right. Go do a site search on

Google, like site colon your domain name. Right. And do it for your site. Right. I promise I'll want my stomach filled to my feet because mostseries.com had got hacked. And so, I did the site colon mostseries.com. And the page count was? Search. Page count was 10,000. And it was mostseries.com slash cheap Viagra. Mostseries.com slash inexpensive Cialis. It was the whole... New Viagra. Yeah. I was like, oh, my God. Yeah. What makes it worse? Those pages aren't even real. Like, you click it, it redirects and goes to a 404. Yeah. So, anyway, hacked sites are not fun. Matter of fact... I think, I mean, Google does a good... At least specifically with Chrome, a good job of when a site is hacked and it's, you know, a potential phishing concern, then they'll lock out the site. They'll say, hey, are you sure you want to go here? Which is good and bad. If that site is really hacked and they got malware and it's dangerous, great. Thank you, Chrome. But, however, if it's just maybe a brand new site, right? We just moved the site from HTTP to HTTPS. And so, it's really secure. Everything's good. But Google hasn't updated. Now you're blocking my visits, Google. Yeah, you got to... That clear out process. You got to go... There is one concern. So, we've dealt with this a couple of times on... Actually, on behalf of clients, not hosted with us, where they... Their clients told them that they couldn't find... That they couldn't get to their website, that it was a warning. And then they would go type in their website and it was fine because the hack was sophisticated enough that if the traffic came from a browser, from a search engine, it would show the site. And if it came directly... I mean, yeah, it would show the hack. And if you came directly to it, which the owner is going to do, they're going to type in the site, not go through a search. Then it would show the site if the

owner went straight to it. So, a little bit of sophistication there. Just keep an eye out for that. And there's all kind of hacks, right? He talks about different kind of hacks. You got spam hacks, which is the kind of hack I was referring to, where they add all this fake content that you really didn't add. They got malware hacks, right? So, someone hacked your WordPress site or hacked whatever site you have and just installed something that's installing other stuff on other people's system. That's malware. Then they got phishing hacks, right? Where people install something and it's not really changing information. Hard to notice, but it's just collecting data. Yeah. You know, and that's what you don't want either. It may present itself as a bank and start collecting, you know, bank usernames and passwords. Exactly. So, check your site for hacks, man. Update your plugins. Keep your WordPress version updated. We actually done something internally for all the sites we host where there's kind of a server-level opt-in, login that you have to get to before you can even get to the WordPress login. And that is what I was referring to when he said two years ago we had a whole bunch of hacks. Because we didn't have that in place yet. We had that in place. And it's hard to withstand a WordPress brute force attack. Yeah. And we tightened up on our server so that if we get three or somewhere between three or five failed attempts on a website, then your IP address is flagged as a hack. And so, we've had clients who have forgotten their password, right? And then they call us. I can't log in. I can't. My site's down. I can't see it, right? Because as soon as we call them a hack, you can't even see the website. And so, we just got to whitelist their website and their IP address. Really secure way to kind of manage that process. Yeah. Take advantage, man. WordPress constantly gets attacked. Yeah. And hacking is a huge problem

with it. That's why they update all the time. Yeah. Number four. Four. Cloaking or sneaky redirects. And again, we're talking about manual action penalties that Google has. Number four is cloaking or sneaky redirects. So, cloaking is when you're like, you're showing a certain type of content to Google. But if people go to the site directly, content is a little bit different. Right. Right. That's cloaking. And Google says, hey, let's make no load. Do not do that. Show us what you're showing them. Yeah. Right. And then the other one was a redirects, right? So, you got a domain name and then you type it in and it loads. And then a few seconds later, it loads again and shows you a totally different site, totally different content, totally different everything. Yeah. That's not a good look. That's very douchey. Yeah. And it will get you a manual penalty. We'll talk. Redirects. Now, dig this about redirects. We're talking WordPress, right? A redirect could be a WordPress issue, right? So, it could be a WordPress issue. So, don't just think that you've been hacked per se or that you've done something shady. It could just be inexperienced with your WordPress account. Right. Because, for example, let's say you've turned on permalinks. Permalinks, yeah. So, you got your search engine friendly URLs and you have yourdomain.com slash I'm perfect. And then you decide to change it to yourdomain.com slash I am perfect. Right. Right. Right. Similar URL, similar target. Different URL. Different URL though. Totally different URL. But if you don't have your WordPress settings correct and then you go and create another page like yourdomain.com slash I'm or I was perfect. I was perfect. Whatever. It will redirect to the previous post that had that name. And then you end up with a sneaky redirect that you didn't even know about that's redirecting to a page that don't exist. It can be a problem. Yeah. So, check your WordPress redirects, make sure you're not spamming yourself or actually setting yourself up for a penalty without even knowing

it. And check your 404s. Yeah. That's a great way to go look at the 404s and see if people, your own site or people who have linked to you at some time in the past are linking to pages that no longer exist. Yeah. If you have an increase in 404 pages, check the console. Good thing about these manual action penalties is that all of them and the details of them could be found and will be found in search console. And so, log in there and you can see how many 404s you have. And you have, for example, a spike in 404s to a certain page, yeah, then the link to that page is probably broken or being redirected or something like that. Go fix it. Last one. Five. Number five. We're talking five manual action penalties. Thin content. Ooh, yeah. Man, look, he says, Google wants to deliver a variety of quality options in the search results. If your site is full of shallow duplicate content, you could get a manual action penalty to keep your pages in low rank. Yep. Yep. He's right. Google doesn't want to display you if you have a whole bunch of dupe content or thin content or content that's been jacked and spun from somewhere else or just not really relevant or doesn't have media, doesn't have images, doesn't have video, not providing any value. Who wants to see that content? Uh-uh. Google doesn't want to show it. I don't want to click it. Chris don't want to read it. Yeah. And so... I don't want to bounce off of it. I don't want to bounce. Yeah, I don't want to hurt your stats. Yeah. And so just take the time to not publish that type of content. Because if you do, you will probably get a penalty. Yeah. And that's just what happens. My recommendation for you is, man, take the time and invest in content. It just has to... We've never seen that penalty. We've never seen that manual penalty. Mm-hmm. So, you know, you take the

time to invest in content. Yeah. Like, when we're writing content, content is so important. Our two newest new hires are content writers. Yes. Boom, boom. Both degree content writers. Our next one, got a chance of being a content writer. It just depends. But content is that important. Yeah. I want to encourage you to write your own content. Stop jacking. Stop copying. Stop duplicating. Find what's relevant to your business, your industry. Put your personal spin on it and produce some quality content. Absolutely. Dude, punch in the face to you. Aaron Aguius. Five types of Google penalties and what you need to do to recover. A cool article, dude. I can dig it. All right. And we do know that we have some what news. So... Yeah. What? New... Oops. That was painful. Yeah. That was painful. This one here, man. Yahoo. This what news, blank stare, whatever you want to call it, goes out to Yahoo. So Yahoo says one billion... Billion. With a B. With a B. One billion user accounts were hacked. Yeah. Now, they just got hacked. Yeah. According to the New York Times, Yahoo is already reeling from its September disclosure that 500 million user accounts were hacked in 2014. Well, it disclosed this past Wednesday that a different attack in 2013, the year before that, comprised more than a billion accounts. The two attacks are the largest known security breaches in one company's computer network. The newly disclosed 2013 attack involves sensitive user information, including names, telephone numbers, dates of birth, encrypted passwords, unencrypted security questions that could be used to reset a password. Yahoo said it's forcing all its affected users to change their passwords. Yeah. If you have a Yahoo account, you should make just whatever you do, make sure... Don't just change your Yahoo account so that it has a different password from the rest of them. Assume that they have your password from Yahoo. And if you've got any other accounts, a Google account, a bank account, or whatever, and it has the same password, you need

to go change it. Change them all. Change it. So Yahoo. Like, come on, Yahoo. I know it's about time to kick in the towel. I know y'all are struggling. Verizon bought you... Verizon, that's kind of falling on y'all's shoulders. I bet y'all ain't know about that. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Because the price y'all paid for Yahoo. Well, y'all got it a lot cheaper than originally, but y'all got to do better than that. Absolutely. All right. So, if you like this... This don't crash yet. We got, like, two more games before the fantasy football season is over with. I'm in second place, bro. I got a bye week on this first week of the playoffs. I play again Sunday. All my people are healthy. See, I've got Super Bowl in my eyesight. All right. So, yeah. Yahoo. Just give me three more weeks, and then y'all can finish crumbling. Boom. All right. And let me export my trophies. If you like this podcast, we're going to ask you... We know that you're probably watching it or listening to it on some device where you can do something. And we're going to ask that you share the podcast with three people, if you will. If you're watching live right now, go ahead and hit share. Tag your three favorite people who you know could benefit from this. Preferably business owners. Yep. Right? You're watching on Facebook, I mean, or on our website, then copy the link, tweet it out to three people, tag three random people on Twitter. Try something different. Usually email and share. You want to email it, yeah. Email it. Drop the link in. You can copy us if you want to. Podcast at eWebResults.com. But appreciate it. That's very cool. All right. So, if you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet... The internet. Go ahead and call eWebResults for increased profit in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. If you have a referral, that's somebody who's interested in internet marketing, whether it

be a website, social media, all the platforms on social media. Yeah, email marketing. Email marketing. Any one of those things. Paper click management. Custom website design. We marketing. That's always so sexy. Go ahead and send that referral to us. They pay their bill. We pay you. We have a referral program in place. We are doing the Guinness thing. I'm not going to talk much about it because by the time you listen to this... Yeah, we will have won. We will have earned a Guinness World Record. And that is for the most TV-style interviews in a 24-hour period. Please remember, we're filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. The transcript of... You do that too? A transcript, video, and audio of this podcast can be found at our website, eWebResults.com. You may have to dig a little bit, but you can find it there. No, you don't have to dig at all. Go to eWebResults.com. Click the SEO podcast link. It's in our main menu. Archive. Once you get there, you'll see the archives. Yeah. Scroll through them. Look at... You can see the tips. You can see old AlgoCat. You can watch the video. Yeah. You can read the transcript if I was maybe speaking too fast. Like, take advantage. All of that is there. You guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. We really appreciate you. We're really happy about that. You, you, you right there. I know you just logged on. It's kind of late. That's okay. Appreciate it. I'm going to, I'm going to actually go sleep now because tomorrow at starting at noon, I will be up for 24 hours and live, uh, not necessarily on screen all the time, but I will be, this is going to be cool. I will be the person who is interviewed first and last on the 24 hour stream. That's cool. Right. I can dig it. I'm, I'm the bookmarks for, uh, the Guinness world record. So that's, that'll be cool. The rest

of the time I'll be coordinating and networking and getting tired and drinking coffee. So, uh, until the next podcast, when I will be well rested, uh, my name is Chris Burr. So Louis, bye-bye for now. Check balance, check three, five, two, uh, SEO podcast three 52. The next episode is what we're going to do today. We're talking about five Google penalties. I'm feeling good today. Can you see the energy? Uh, it's CL and CB is YouTube and Facebook live. We on TV every week. You've seen nothing new. No repeats conquering the internet. Page one. Defeat Guinness book. Here we come. E web and vids, Inc. 24 hours. Most interviews on TV. E web results, SEO podcast three 52, 24 hours. Boom.