It’s that time of the week once again, where we look at some of the questions Google engineer, Matt Cutts has been asked and the answers he provided. Hopefully, this will give you some good insights into current SEO practices and what you can do to further optimize your website.
The first question had to do with someone wanting to buy a domain name that used to be full of spam and whether or not he’d be able to rank with new content. Cutts said that it largely depends on what kind of spam currently sits on the site. If it’s just manual spam, or bad SEO content, then the user could feasibly clean this up and submit a reconsideration to Google. It may take some time but recovery is totally possible. If algorithmic spam was used, however, where a bunch of spammy links point to this domain, it may be best to pass on it and look for a domain that hasn’t already been thrashed.
The second question has to do with how a site’s page rank changes over time. So, if a new page is published and ranks in the first couple pages of results immediately, it may drop a bit later on. This is largely due to the fact that Google needs time to figure out exactly where a particular page will rank within the current results. So while your page may rank on the first page of results immediately after it’s published because it’s optimized well, it may drop back to the third or fourth page within a couple weeks because Google finds that other pages are more relevant than yours. This just goes to emphasize that SEO is a constantly changing thing. It’s always in flux.
The third question had to do with unnatural links. A user said that he received a notice from Google about having unnatural links on his site but since he never paid for links, he was unsure which links this was in reference to. He didn’t want to remove perfectly good links. Cutts explained that Google is rolling out new features that provide examples of what links they’re talking about when they send out an unnatural links notice. This new feature will not include every link that you need to remove, but it will give Webmasters a better idea of the kinds of links that are no longer trusted by Google. Any little thing to make SEO little easier, right?