Pessimization

There are many reasons why your site may sag in search engine results or stop indexing altogether. One of these reasons is pessimization.

Pessimization is a deliberate underestimation of a site’s position in search results. The reason, as a rule, is that the site shows signs of “black optimization” or other violations of the rules. Thus, search engines cleanse search results from useless sites and control relevance.

Pessimization is carried out in two ways:

• Automatic. There is a specially designed algorithm that tracks the degree of page optimization. If too many keywords were identified per text unit, then the coefficient that affects the ranking is underestimated. In search results, a page can be lowered by one, several or even all keywords at once.
• Manually. An “abuza” (complaint about the site) may come to the search engine support service with a claim that the search engine rules are not being followed. As a result, the site will be checked by specialists who will decide the further fate of the resource.

Pessimization symptoms:

• The positions of the site or individual pages began to drop sharply.
• You were promoting and the position of the site was growing steadily, and then the rate decreased or stopped altogether. At the same time, there is no reaction to any “revitalization” measures.
• The result of pessimization may be a seemingly insignificant drop in positions by 5-15 points.

Reasons for pessimization:

There are many reasons for pessimizing a particular site. All of them are associated with “black optimization” and violation of the rules set by the search engine. What should you look for and what should you avoid?

• Uniqueness. The issue of uniqueness of content is more relevant than ever. If a “copy-paste” is posted on the resource, it will be severely punished. In the best case, such a site will be located below the source from which the material was taken. At worst – getting into the “black list”, exclusion from the index.
• Spamming. The text has too high density of keywords, which makes it unreadable for the user.
• Tags. Previously, keywords in the text were highlighted with b and strong tags. Now search engines do not welcome abuse of this method. The information that really requires the user’s special attention should stand out against the background of the rest of the text.
• Doorways. These are sites that are created solely for the sake of generating traffic from search. From the doorway, the user gets to the target site for which everything was started. “Doorways” are recognized as a “black” optimization method.
• “Like a site”. Sites with meaningless content (filled with special scripts, for example). Sometimes such sites can take high positions, but it will not be possible to hold out on them for a long time.
• Link Explosion. When at one moment there is a huge number of links to the site. If a search engine finds this fact, all links that appear during this period will transfer either a very small or zero share of the weight. Link buying is discouraged by search engines.
• Directories. “Run” the site through catalogs. Links are automatically added to them, and this is done at a time. An unnaturally large number of references to the site in a short period of time. The essence is the same as in the previous paragraph.
• Link Washers. Having too many outbound links is detrimental to the site. Pages of such a site are often marked as spam in search engine results.
• Advertising. An excess of advertising on the site is a minus both for the user – it is inconvenient and annoying – and for the site owner, since search engines react negatively to this. In some cases, due to advertisements such as teaser ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, rich media, etc., search engines can flag your site as malicious.
• Windows. When opening a page of the site, other windows additionally pop up (in fact, this is not prohibited). But if, to close such a secondary window, you need to go to the task manager or send an SMS to the specified number, then the site will be regarded by the search engine as a site with malicious content.
• Hidden text. Primitive, but still pretty common. The user does not see such text, but the search engine robot reads it.
• Satellites. Satellite sites are created to promote the main site or to score several positions in the search results. If the satellite and the main site are indexed at the same time, then, as a rule, there are no problems. If only the satellite is indexed, then the main site may be marked as spam.
• Aggregators. If the site is a kind of catalog, for example, cafes and restaurants, then it should provide the ability to filter by any parameters, be it: type of cuisine, location, rating, availability of some additional services, etc. If the search engine finds only a list of organizations, the site’s position in the search results decreases.
• External links. Now it is not so much the number of links to your site from other resources that is important, but the quality of the resources on which these links are located. If these sites are of low quality, for example, these are “sort of sites” or link-washing sites, pessimization is quite possible.

What do you need to know?

• If your site has dropped out of the search engine index or got blacklisted, contact the search engine support service. Describe your problems to them. If the rules of the search engine were violated, the errors need to be corrected. The support service can tell you which way to dig. After all the shortcomings are eliminated, you need to submit an application to re-check the site.
• If there is pessimization, and you think there is no reason for it, find the search engine rules and look at your site in terms of those rules. Remember, the reason can be hidden in external factors. A safe bet is to order an SEO audit from specialists.
• The absence of your site in the TOP does not always mean that this is the result of pessimization. It is possible that your competitors are more actively working on content, design, behavioral factors, link mass and its quality.
• Be sure to fill your site with unique content. It is not difficult to check the uniqueness, for this there are quite a few specialized online tools on the network.
• Competently place links in articles on information resources, as well as order press releases and articles. Due to this, the attitude towards the site and external links will be more loyal.
• Make sure that the layout on each page of the site is neat and unnecessary ads removed.
• Check that the meta tags and titles match the page content. For example, if you are advancing on queries with the word “real estate”, then it really should be discussed on the page.
• Remember, a newly created site will not make it to the TOP in a week. This will take more than 12 months, especially if the promotion is based on highly competitive requests. But this does not mean that you need to sit and wait for a positive result. You also have contextual advertising.

Conclusion

Perhaps the most important thing is that you don’t have to try to cheat the search engine and make websites for people. Transparent promotion takes a long time, but it is reliable and beneficial for your own reputation. If you are still faced with pessimization, remember, this is not so scary, everything can be fixed.