Table of Contents
What is a Google Penalty?
Algorithmic Penalties
Manual Actions
How to Avoid Google Penalties
As an established web design and SEO company, we have been contacted by prospective clients inquiring as to why their website’s organic search engine rankings had disappeared, seemingly overnight. This sudden drop in rankings, lost visitors and decline in the number of phone calls, often points to a Google penalty. For all business website owners, knowing what these penalties are and how to avoid them, is crucial for their online survival.
What is a Google Penalty?
A Google penalty is a consequence for violating the best practices and spam policies of Google Search Essentials. These penalties come in two main forms, algorithmic penalties and manual actions.
Algorithmic Penalties
Algorithmic penalties are penalties that are automatically applied by Google’s algorithms.
Important Google Updates and Core Updates
Google has implemented a number of important algorithm updates over the years, to enhance the quality and relevance of their search results, which includes checking for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). Some updates are considered “core updates” which are those that implement extensive and wide-reaching change to Google’s search algorithms.
That said, such updates are also used to reduce spam and manipulation of their search results. In other words, to discourage and stop black hat SEO efforts.
Here are just a few of those updates.
Google Panda
Google Panda was introduced to fight low-quality content (spam). It targets websites with thin content, lots of keyword stuffing, or those that offer a poor user experience. It also flags websites that are difficult to read…offering a poor user experience.
Google Penguin
Google Penguin was built to stop tricky link-building (backlinking) schemes. This means it targets websites using an unnatural pattern of backlinks, paid links, and/or other link schemes. To this day, Penguin remains an important part of Google’s search algorithms.
To avoid Penguin issues, focus on creating content that is original, useful and reliable/accurate. This should result in attracting backlinks organically because your content is so valuable.
Topical Updates (Medic Update)
Some updates target certain kinds of websites. The “Medic Update” mostly affected “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) websites. These include health or finance pages. Such updates ensured that only truly expert and authoritative content (e.g. from websites of government agencies and authoritative organizations in technology, medical, finance and education, as opposed to low authority bloggers, etc.) would rank for certain YMYL keywords. Example of such keyword searches might be “How to Avoid a Heart Attack” or “What are the top 3 Technology stocks”.
Manual Actions
Manual actions are direct penalties from Google’s human review team. This type of penalty can occur when your website clearly violates Google Search Essentials. Here are a number of black hat tactics that may result in a manual action.
Link Schemes
Unnatural Inbound Links
This manual action often occurs as a result of shady link building practices. Examples include buying backlinks or receiving a large number of inbound links in a short period of time (that is unusual compared to your website’s history). Any plan to unfairly boost a website’s organic search rankings through black hat link building, can trigger a manual penalty. For instance, a website that suddenly receives thousands of inbound links from low-quality (spammy) websites, would likely face this type of penalty.
Unnatural Outbound Links
Believe it or not, your website can also get penalized for linking out to spammy or low-quality websites. This happens if your website sells links that pass Google PageRank.
If you do decide to link your website to another, always do so for the benefit of your website visitors. In other words, if you have a blog about technology, and you write an article about the latest iPhone, it would be perfectly acceptable for your article to link to apple.com.
Technical and Content Violations
Cloaking and Deceitful Redirects
Cloaking is when you show search engines one type of content while showing users something else. It is meant to trick Google into ranking your website for certain keywords.
Deceitful redirects send users to a different web page than what they expected. Both are serious Google Search Essentials violations.
Your website should always show the same content to both Google and your website visitors. Avoid any redirects that trick people or search engines.
Duplicate Content Issues
Having identical or very similar content (duplicate content) on many different pages can lead to penalties. This could be accidental or it could also be intentional, like copying and pasting content from other websites. If you have web pages within your website with similar content, use canonical tags to tell Google which is the main version. Never copy content from other websites.
Thin Content
Thin content means that your web pages have too little content to be of any value or use to a website visitor (Google user). Additionally, duplicate content and doorway pages can also be considered thin content.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is when there are too many of the same keywords “stuffed” into a web page. An example of this might be: “Dr. Smith is a dermatologist in Scottsdale. As a leading dermatologist in Scottsdale, Dr. Smith enjoys the trust of many patients in need of a dermatologist in Scottsdale.”
In the above example, “dermatologist in Scottsdale” is being keyword stuffed into just a few sentences. Not only is this awkward to read, but the frequency with which the keywords are being repeated, is unnatural. Thus, this type of black hat technique can lead to manual actions if done aggressively throughout a website.
Bottom line: always strive to create helpful, original and reliable content. Use keywords naturally, and only when and where it makes sense to do so. As any legitimate SEO professional should tell you, black hat SEO is simply not worth it.
How to Avoid Google Penalties
Content Quality Improvements
Utilizing high-quality content within your website pages is key to recovering from algorithmic or manual penalties. As such, you should correct your existing web pages, ensuring that they offer original, useful and reliable information.
Perhaps the best advice you can heed is to avoid getting Google penalties to begin with. That means you must focus on white hat SEO practices from the start.
Focus on User Experience (UX)
A good user experience can help you to avoid penalties. Make sure your website loads quickly. It also needs to be easy to browse on smart phones, tablets and laptop/desktop computers. Navigation should be clear and simple. A website with good UX makes it easy for visitors to find the information they are searching for.
Staying Informed About Algorithm Updates
Google’s search algorithm continues to evolve and change. You should stay on top of these updates to help avoid implementing SEO tactics that may result in a penalty.
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