The Ultimate Guide to Google Penalties

Ever wonder why your website is being deprived of traffic from the masses despite your best efforts at advertising?

As intimidating as it sounds, you may be feeling the effects of Google penalties.

Google polices the internet to maintain a certain set of standards. Websites are often blacklisted and banished from search results if they aren’t in line with Google’s guidelines and policies.

In this article, we’ll learn all about Google penalties to help you avoid violating the strict rules, so that you can begin building significant traffic to your website the right way.

Types of Google Penalties

There are two main types of Google penalties:

• A filter or algorithmic penalty.
• A manual penalty created by a Google employee.

Let’s break these down to understand how you can troubleshoot your website traffic issue.

Google-Standard Penalties and Filters

A Google penalty is used to punish websites that are violating the Webmaster Guidelines, as set by Google.

Punishments may be delivered at the keyword, URL, or directory level, depending on what policy you break. It can also affect your entire domain, depending on the severity of the penalty.

The penalty levels are as follows:

• Keyword-level
• URL- or directory-level
• Hostname-level (Subdomain)
• Domain-wide (sitewide or the entire domain)
• Delisting (De-Indexing from Google)

The harshest form of this penalty is an exclusion of the full website from the Google index, otherwise known as “Delisting”, which as you can imagine, is the worst punishment you can receive.

Manual Penalties

These are the penalties a Google employee can give to website owners who have violated one of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

• Keyword-Level Penalty – A penalty on a keyword-level is when one or more keywords on a domain have been flagged. All other keywords that aren’t violating any guidelines or rules will remain unaffected.
• Sitewide-Penalty – This means that many of the keywords on the full domain will lose a huge amount of ranking positions.
• Delisting – This is the maximum penalty that Google enforces. In this case, Google punishes a website by removing the domain entirely from the search results indexing. The result is no content being shown on Google’s search results.

Difference between Algorithmic Penalty & Manual Penalty

While many people consider both these penalties the same, they do have their differences.

Google’s algorithms identify and pinpoint the content that violates Google policies or standards. The penalties are manual restrictions or temporary limitations created by Google in response to these violations.

Google algorithms such as Penguin and Panda, are not penalties directly, however, they can result in penalties indirectly. They rely on preset rules and calculations to generate specific outcomes.

Panda and Penguin algorithms are Google’s way of improving the quality of search results. The algorithms are designed to reward websites that meet their standards, and it will index all web pages in the most logical order according to specific user search queries. For any given query, the most relevant, current, comprehensive content will earn a higher position in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), while weaker content will be further down.

Penalties, on the other hand, are manual actions taken by employees at Google after a judicial process of considering the perceived violation. Google uses (real-live) humans to review and rate websites manually. This acts as a safeguard in case some web pages get through the algorithms but still don’t measure up to Google’s high standards.

So, what’s a Website Owner to Do?

Knowing the difference between having your website impacted by a manual penalty vs. triggering an algorithm is important. This determines how you should move forward in terms of creating a counter-penalty strategy for your site.

A website that has been penalized by Google will be sent a penalty report, which identifies the rules the website owner has violated and explains what needs to be amended in order to relieve yourself (and your site) of the penalty.

When it comes to an algorithmic issue, all you need to do is personally rethink your website content approach.

The Google Penguin Algorithm

Once upon a time, search engine optimization (SEO) was just about getting lots of backlinks to your website. A few keywords and a few links could have you ranking high in no time. As a result, lots of people found ways to game the system.

Now, Google is smarter.

It gets suspicious of manipulative behavior when a website’s backlink profile is stuffed with unnatural-looking links from shady sites that have a low domain authority rating.

Google Penguin initially landed on the scene to crush these blackhat SEO sites.

However, in the most recent update of the Penguin algorithm, Google doesn’t impose penalties. All it does is devalue the unnatural backlinks without affecting the overall ranking of the site.

That being said, you’ll still want to avoid the wrath of this algorithm, so make sure you continue to monitor and clean up your backlinks. If you experience a sudden drop in search traffic, you may have low-value backlinks on your site.

Here’s a list of the most common issues that will trigger a manual action from Google:

• A hacked site
• Spammy structured markup
• User‐generated spam
• Thin content with little or no added value
• Unnatural links to your site
• Unnatural links from your site
• Cloaking redirects
• Sneaky redirects
• Cloaked images
• Pure spam
• Hidden text
• Keyword stuffing

How to Avoid Google Penalties

All of this information may have you worried about your website traffic and feeling a bit overwhelmed as to what to do and where to start.

Don’t worry. Just follow our lead.

By following these tips on avoiding Google penalties, you’ll ensure your site stays in Google’s good books.

1. Don’t Buy Links

There are lots of people online who want to sell you links from private blog networks.  While the content may look useful, don’t buy into it. The sole purpose of these operations is to create backlinks for people who actually pay the network’s owner. This won’t look good.

2. Don’t ‘Stuff’ Your Keywords

Stick to the recommended amount of keywords per word count. While site owners think it’s better to boost primary keyword density, Google now considers this behavior manipulative towards the algorithm. Use your keywords naturally.

3. Monitor Backlinks

Continuously monitor your backlinks. Consider using a tool such as Google Search Console or Majestic to check the status of your backlinks. When you find spam links in your profile, delete them.

4. Avoid Sneaky Redirects

These sneaky redirect links send visitors to a different page than what Google displays in SERPs. This violates webmaster guidelines. This tactic can backfire, and harm your entire site. To avoid this, compare your webpage content to the meta title and description displayed in Google SERPs. Resolve any differences so users understand what they will get when they click on your link.

5. Address Your Subject ASAP

Content that doesn’t address the title topic at the beginning of the post doesn’t agree well with Google. Get into the meat of your subject right off the bat, using your keywords in the first paragraph. Also, you should offer insightful, practical content for all your topics.

6. Ensure Website Responsiveness

Make sure your site is highly responsive and user-friendly on any device. If your site isn’t mobile-responsive, the user experience will suffer. This will limit your reach as mobile visitors will have difficulty accessing or using your site.

Google Penalties Can Be Useful Red Flags

Every time you lose site traffic, remember that it doesn’t necessarily mean Google is punishing you.

It may be because of other reasons, such as a lack of relevancy, poor content quality, or something that is impacting the user experience on your website.

The best way to really understand what’s going on behind the scenes is to keep an eye on your website’s analytics. To do this effectively, use statistical analysis to identify key performance patterns. You can use our website content analysis report to stay ahead of the game.