You use the internet as a business to attract clients and develop new relationships. That also implies that you rely on search engines, like Google, to display your site in organic searches for a variety of phrases. But what happens if anything really bad happens?
If your site visitors suddenly reduce or you see a dip in your ranks, you may have gotten a Google penalty. Google penalizes millions of sites every year for a lot of reasons, and you don't want to be one of them. Here's what you should know.
The Term Google penalty?
A penalty is a "punishment" issued manually on a website by Google's webspam team.
Source: Safalta
This is usually the case when a website fails Google's quality requirements. This penalty causes a significant decline in ranks and organic search loss. It's worth noting that the negative impact of Google's algorithm adjustments should not be misinterpreted as a punishment. In its documents, Google does not include the phrase "penalties." It refers to them as manual acts and algorithmic activities.In its documentation, Google does not use the phrase "penalties." It refers to them as manual acts and algorithmic activities. If your organic ranks and traffic suddenly decline while your website is not experiencing unscheduled downtime or technical SEO difficulties, you might be dealing with one of two concerns:
- A Google modification caused an algorithm activity that demoted your site.
- A person inspected your site and took a manual act.
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Manual by Google Penalties: A manual penalty requires a Google employee, such as one from the Search Quality- or Webspam Team, to actively take action against with a domain. If a domain is suspected of violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines, it will be manually examined by a Google employee.
The below scenarios might explain why a Google employee imposes a manual penalization on a website:
Spam at its finest.
Links to your website that are not natural
Links to your site that are artificial, have site-wide implications
Stuffed or Secret Keyword text
Algorithmic Modifications: Certain penalties are automated, which means that the manner your site is established or how you tackled SEO does not comply with Google's most recent algorithm. Penguin and Panda are the key algorithm punishments. Panda penalties are focused on the content quality of your site. Penguin penalties are mainly focused on the backlinks of your site.
Google Penalties Handbook:
Links to Your Site That Aren't Natural: When Google identifies unnatural connections on your site that were made intentionally by you or by someone else, it will punish the unnatural connections by discounting them. In this scenario, Google advises cleaning up the connections if possible, but this should not harm your site.
Rather, they declare that they will take specific action against any artificial connections going to the site that appears to be beyond your control.
Website Hack: If Google believes your website has been hijacked, it will punish it. Google penalizes websites where hackers have introduced harmful information without the owner's permission. Whereas the site owner is not responsible for acquiring malware to the site, Google deems them liable for failing to offer adequate protection, as users may also be in danger.
In this scenario, you must not only clean up any spam content left by attackers, but you must also identify the weakness and ensure that it is addressed.
Light Content: If you're familiar with digital advertising, you are aware that excellent content is critical for SEO. However, having low-quality or insufficient material might also result in a penalty. The following are some of the most typical grounds for this sort of penalty:
- Content generated automatically
- Content duplication
- Content of poor quality
- Stuff that does not respond to the user's query
Making use of organized data encoding: Structured data markup is a sort of coding that helps Google present your site more beautifully in search results, such as by displaying star ratings and the number of reviews. When Google finds that you are employing structured data that is unrelated to the article and visitors, you may be penalized manually.
Modifications Algorithm vs. Penalties: The automatic algorithms that drive search engine results are constantly comparing web pages to numerous ranking signals. Because Google's ranking signals are always changing, a web page's position in search results may change if it no longer matches the criteria of the core ranking algorithm. This is not a punishment, but rather a lack of indications that support ranking higher than other sites.
The solution to Fix Google Penalty:
- When Google imposes a manual penalization on your site for suspicious links. Google will send a sample list of suspect links via Search Console. Alternatively, you may use a service like Keywords to get your backlink profile and see each of your backlinks separately. The very first step is to eliminate any harmful links pointing back to your website. This is simple if you own a web of websites. If you aren't, you may need to write some embarrassing emails requesting that a backlink be deleted. The next step is to utilize Google's disavow tool to notify Google that these are unnatural connections. The quickest approach to accomplish this is to upload a file to the Google Search Console with the links you want to remove.
- When you've been penalized for keyword stuffing, the best thing you can do is remove all of the spammy terms. When you're finished, use Search Console's fetch and display tool to request that Google re-crawl your site.
- When you receive a Light Content manual action, the best thing you can do is eliminate or enhance the impacted pages. If the page is still required, consider adding more helpful info to it. Examine your website for identical material. Examine indicators like as bounce rate and time spent on site to find weak content. Erase or update the damaged pages. Make sure to 410 or divert the page if you delete it. If you're not acquainted with 410s or redirection, check out this page that talks you through the process of putting them up. After you've fixed the thin content on the site, use the review request feature in Search Console to request reconsideration from Google.
