Slapped by Google, Now what?

Earlier today I got an email about another Google Slap.? This was one of many emails or instant messages that I have received in the past month asking the same question…what do I do?

Most of the tips I have shared have been virtually the same, so I thought I would go ahead and share them with you here.? This is really not much of a list of recovering from or surviving a Google Slap, but more a list of best practices for your web site and SEO efforts and Pay-Per-Click campaigns.? If you have been slapped for poor quality sites, had your PPC campaigns shut down or SEO efforts derailed by being removed from the Google listings, these tips should help.

1. Make sure your contact page has the necessary components: phone number, email address, physical address, etc. Read my article in Issue 7 of FeedFront for more.
2. Reduce the number of outgoing links by about 1/3 or so.
3. Add more internal links. If needed, create more internal content pages and link to them.? This reduces the percentage of outgoing links.
4. Slowly get more links to your site. I realize this is easier said than done, but most importantly use different anchor texts than you have been using and vary them greatly.
5. Submit your sitemap XML to Google Sitemaps.
6. Update your site. Move content, change words, especially header text and bold text.
7. Use nofollow for all affiliate links in your robots.txt file.

Don’t treat your site like an affiliate site.? Treat it like a help site and make sure that you would trust your own site to offer informative content and recommended products.

What are your favorite tips?