It’s that time of week once again where we sit down and talk about some recent answers Google engineer, Matt Cutts, provided to questions about common search engine optimization problems.
First up is a question about using the same anchor text for several internal links on a site. The user was concerned that by doing this, he’d cause his site to be penalized. Cutts explains that for the vast majority of websites, internal links with the same anchor text won’t cause harm to your rank. While there are exceptions to this rule, it’s generally not something you’re going to have to worry about.
The second SEO question has to do with launching a site with hundreds of thousands of pages at once. The user wanted to know if doing this would penalize the site or make it difficult for Google to crawl. Cutts explained that while there’s nothing wrong about doing this, it may require the webspam team to take a look at it before it can rank. Likewise, Cutts recommends rolling out the content over time to make it a bit easier on everyone. A few thousand pages at a time, perhaps.
The third and final SEO question we’re going to talk about this time is what users can include in a proper reconsideration request. Cutts answered by stating that users will first need to provide evidence that they’ve actually stopped the behavior that resulted in a lower rank. Paid links will need to be taken down. Spammy content will need to be cleaned up. You get the picture. Users also need to give the Google team the impression that they won’t immediately return to this sort of behavior once the site is restored.
Things you can include in your reconsideration request to convince Google that you’ve changed your ways include a list of the sites you’ve contacted to have paid links taken down and talk about who made these bad decisions (in-house or contractor) and discuss how you’re preventing this from ever happening again. Basically, do everything you can to make your request be as convincing as possible.
That about covers it for this instalment of questions and answers from Google engineer, Matt Cutts. We hope it was helpful to you and be sure to check back soon for even more questions and answers about every SEO topic under the sun.