Google constantly update algorithms to improve their user experience. The major reason for its constant updating is to provide the best possible answers to any of the search queries.
To claim the valuable attempt on the first page, many large scale business or even small scale industries started implementing tactics designed to improve the search engine ranking with the expertise of SEO. As of now, Google is the biggest search engine that handles billions of searches daily. It is a huge source of potential organic traffic.
As the popularity of Google grew, businesses and marketers quickly realized how valuable it is to be on the first page of the search engine. Some tactics used by expert marketers are perfectly acceptable by search engines, but some of the tactics are unethical in the digital marketing world, this is known as “Black Hat SEO”.
There are many ways to detect and uplift the Google penalty caused by the violation of Google webmaster guidelines. Check out the full list here – https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/webmaster-guidelines/
It is well aware and accepted by everyone that Google is smart enough to track unethical and deceiving practices and its algorithm and manual actions start issuing penalties to websites who tweak with its quality guidelines.
Let’s discuss further in-depth all about Google penalties.
Impact of Google Penalties
Google penalty impact negatively on ranking of the website based on the update of the Google search algorithms and manual review. It results in the drop-down of a ranking of every page of a site. Any drop in ranking brings a major loss in traffic for the site. Sometimes it wiped out organic traffic overnight.
Violation of Google’s guidelines will decline the ranking of the search engine and lead to a penalty.
A traffic drop doesn’t always mean penalized. The penalty can be caused by various reasons and comes in different types. Most of the cases, traffic drops can be caused by technical issues:-
- Server issues
- Crawling issues
- Improper redirects
- Robots.txt blocking access
Drop down in traffic is also caused by a seasonal niche. It will vary dramatically at the time of the year.
There are many things that indicated penalty on a website. It should be like:
- Page rank zero-on a really old site and PR is no longer updated
- Drop-in traffic on individual pages
- Drop-in traffic on specific keywords
- A site gets de-indexed
- A significant number of pages de-indexed
Penalty caused by Black Hat SEO
Some penalties are caused by factors that can’t be controlled and are called Negative SEO or Black Hat SEO. Read here for black hat seo – https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/black-hat-seo. It refers to the practice of using unethical techniques to drop down the competitors ranking in search engines.
Appearing on the first page of Google is of vital importance in business growth but doing in a wrong way is like playing with the search engine algorithms rather than providing the user experience.
It includes keyword stuffing, cloaking or using private network links.
Penalty by Keyword Stuffing
It refers to when the content is filled with irrelevant keywords or over-optimized target keyword in an attempt to manipulate the page rank in search engines.
Penalty by Cloaking
It involves showing one content to the users and different to the search engine in order to rank for a variety of terms irrelevant to their content.
Penalty by Private Links
A redirect link or called private links involves sending someone to a different URL than the one initially clicked. It redirects the links outside for the purpose they are intended for.
Kinds of Google Penalties:-
- Manual Action
- Algorithm Penalty
- Intrusive Interstitial Penalty
- Payday Loan Penalty
1. Manual Penalty
Manual Penalties are those that are given to sites when breaking the Google quality guidelines. These actions are given manually by Google. Manual actions are Google’s way of removing web pages or websites as a whole. It is not related to Google algorithms and it is simply a way to punish a website for spam behaviors.
Some silly mistakes can be done while developing a website. While developing a website, links are included in the bottom of the right-footer. When looking at the webmaster guidelines, it should never be done like this and most likely caused a reason for penalty.
How to Track Google Penalty?
After figuring out the type of penalty, go through with a tool Google Search Console to analyze and take action. If no messaging is indicating there, it means it is not likely to be an algorithm penalty.
There are various tools that can track the penalty of a website. ’’Google Search Console’’, “Fruition’s Google penalty tool” (3rd version), Google Analytics traffic reports have the ability to track the penalty and comparing the traffic with the dates the Google update occurred.
How to Remove Manual Google Penalty?
Below is an example of Manual Penalty:-
By updating the footer of each website to remove the anchor text like “Web design company in Brisbane’’ or “Web design company Brisbane”.
To fix up these issues, a Docs file is created that includes the URL of each website along with the changes made so that it could include in the next reconsideration request.
To fix up the issues tell Google that:-
- What all had been done to rectify the issue (Docs file needs be attached)
- This would not happen again.
- To minimize the risk of certain things can be followed
Use brand anchor text the majority of the time. It looks a lot more natural to link back using a brand name. The best example is the best one is “web design services RankSnack’’ and the bit riskier be “Web design by Ranksnack’’.
Mixing up the anchor texts by using different variations and no anchor is overwhelmingly common.
Do not use site-wide links especially with an exact match on branded anchor text.
An apology letter
Name / other contact details
Reconsideration for Manual Penalties
Submit a reconsideration request for hitting by the manual action. In effect this means sufficient action has been taken to fix the problem and to ensure it won’t happen again.
Once the request is sent to Google, a new manual quality radar is assigned to revisit and re-evaluate the site, If they are satisfied, the manual action will be lifted.
Read this post to write reconsideration request – https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-write-reconsideration-requests-that-work/303043/
2. Google Algorithm Penalties
The penalties that are simply a drop in ranking with a result of a change in Google’s algorithms using (Panda, Penguins). Take the Required Action for an Algorithmic Penalty.
Reason for Google Panda Penalty
Google Panda focused on on-page content quality The major reason for the panda penalty is that if there is an issue with only one part then the whole site gets penalized. The main reason for Panda Penalties are:-
- Not a worth Content
- Too short Content
- Thin Content Penalty
- Duplicity in Content
The content penalty has been given usually when a site has a large number of thin or similar pages which means it can lead the users to multiple similar pages. These are counted as a lower quality page by algorithms.
Reasons for Google Penguin Penalty
Google Penguin algorithm has been designed with off-page signals in mind. Penguin update was released to remove the websites that are engaged in manipulative links scheme and keyword stuffing. Now, Penguins are a part of the Google core algorithm.
Websites affected by the algorithm neither provide static value nor the public domain.
Penguin targets these two specific practices
- Link Schemes
- Keyword Stuffing
For link- Based Manual Actions
Link Velocity – In link velocity, a site should gain link naturally by time. It happened very rarely for a site that has a sudden large influx of links and then a drop off to very few.
Link Quality – A website is having a mix of high and low-quality backlinks. And an unnatural site could have a strangely high number of low-quality links or a strangely high proportion of very high-quality links.
Link Diversity – If 90% of backlinks come from blogs or articles it is unnatural. Similarly, backlinks should have the same anchor text. Having all the links with the same anchor text, it is likely trying to manipulate the search engine to rank for that phrase.
If a penalty is link-based, then perform a full link audit to identify the troublesome links. If Google detects that a website is buying or selling links, negotiating link exchange or in any kind of unnatural linking, it should get penalized.
Also if organic traffic drops suddenly, it could be due to the link-related penalty.
Tips To avoid Penguin Penalties
Cleanup the backlinks regularly
Identify those links and remove them from the site as soon as possible. If the links are in low-quality blogs or in forum comments, remove that also. Google provides this information in the Google search console and in all the data tools like Aherfs or Majestic.
Penguin is a page specific penalty and it may affect the overall traffic because those strong pages no longer pass authority but other pages still can grow.
Some unnatural links are easier to spot they are:-
- Contain “SEO” words in the URL – such as “links’’, “SEO’”, “directory’’ etc.
- Blog comments with anchor text other than a real name
- From a site that’s very generic and doesn’t look like a real brand
In most cases, you won’t control the linking site, so you will ask the owner to remove it for you. For that, contact the owner in a friendly and polite way. If its intention was not to hurt the site then he will remove it soon. Since this can damage the site’s reputation with Google.
A list of all the links should also be there in a spreadsheet that has been removed. Now, find out the contact information, ideally at least the name and email address of each site owner.
It can be done manually by visiting each site and finding a contact page or e-mail address or you can use a fairly inexpensive contact finding tools like contact finder, hunter.io.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is considered an unethical SEO technique to raise a website to the Google penalty. Google considered this ineffective when we manipulate keywords for ranking. Very often these keywords appear in a list of groups or out of context.
According to some SEO experts maintaining the density of keywords is also one of the best practices to rank higher in the SERP.
How to Recover from Google Penguin Penalty?
Once the bad links are removed, then go to the tool to give a check on the tool Google’s Disavow. Read more regarding Google Disavow – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487
Submit the unnecessarily links there and it’s a check to Google that these are unnecessarily backlinks.
However, now Penguin algorithms no longer give penalties instead of demoting a site in ranking with low-quality links.
3. Intrusive Interstitial Penalty
Intrusive Interstitial Penalty affects mobile searches. Uninvited ads pop up or standalone ads penalized by Google after a mobile search result.
In general, Google demotes web pages that easily block the searcher from seeing the content. Certain types of interstitials are not penalized, like login form or legally necessary gates like age verifications and others.
To avoid Intrusive Interstitial Penalty, avoid ads, pop-ups and the other images that block too much of the screen right after a search arrives.
4. Payday Loan Penalty
Payday loans are the short term high-cost loans for small amounts. Updation of Google in its algorithm specifically addresses the quality of results for heavily spammed queries such as payday loans cooking, and Plumbing related keywords.
Payday loans are quick-fix solutions for consumers in a financial crisis but also budget-busting expenses for families and individuals.
The trap of payday loan occurs when a loan has never been paid.
Can a Website get Penalty Without Notification in GSC (Google Search Console)?
No, without notification Google does not penalty a site. It should be displayed in the manual action section of GSC. The penalty may not reflect always in the message section, especially if there is a newly added owner to the GSC profile.
Reasons for Causing Most of the Penalties
These days the major reason for causing penalties is too much over aggressive attempts at optimization. If getting a manual penalty for unnatural links, it occurs usually because of buying links on a large scale.
Latest Google’s Algorithm Updates
Google search liaison announced the important algorithm also called broad core algorithm and is officially announced in June 2019 update. Unlike Manual penalties, Google does not disclose when a website is affected by the algorithm.
That is why periodic technical checks and Google webmaster guidelines should be followed regularly by a website. Google does occasionally update their webmaster guidelines. That’s why periodic audits should be a part of a company’s due diligence.
Checkout Google Algorithms Update History – https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-algorithm-updates
How to Uplift from Google Penalty?
Writing Articles for website’s blogs is also a great deal to uplift from Google Penalty. These revolve around Social Media, SEO and website launch for the clients.
Building quality content for the website provides a positive attitude. Once per week article is great to be published to give a positive attitude towards it.
After that build some SEO work
Document all the issues and fix them
At this point, one knows very well why a penalty happened and what to be done to fix the underlying issue.
The next step is to actually fix the issue and record the progress. When you submit a reconsideration request the manual reviewer won’t just take the words for it. It should be compiled with documents as proof that it had done in reality.
This is most important if the penalty is for unnatural links. If it is an on-site issue then the screenshots are not as important as the reviewer can see the final result.
Step by Step Procedure
Google wants to see the efforts done to fix the problem yourself.
If there are links on the sites that can’t be removed, you can use a disavow link tool. This is not enough to make a reconsideration request successful.
Removing links takes time due to requests in large volumes. Google won‘t see a request from this site for the next few weeks. So take the necessary time to remove unnatural backlinks to your site and then file another reconsideration request.
It is important to include the supporting docs that prove the effort done to remove the unnatural backlinks to the site.
It can consume a lot more time fixing up these penalties. There are major three main ways not to drastically reduce the chance of a future penalty.
- Perform regular audit which involves monitoring link
- Monitor SEO Sites
- Avoid Shortcuts
Best Google Penalty Checker Tools
- Google Search Console
- MOZ Algorithm Change History
- SEMRush (Sensor)
- Rank Ranger Rank Risk Index
- Fe international Website Penalty Indicator
- CognitiveSEO Signals
Some tools don’t show the accurate results except Google Search Console. If you have dougbt hire a Google penalty removal service provider.
To sum up, in a few lines
If a website has a penalty, it may be worth hiring an SEO expert to help. The need is to identify and fix them. Above mentioned guide proves to be very helpful in fixing any kind of penalties and also give a detail on how to protect a website in the future from any kind of penalty.
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