A Google Penalty is a punishment imposed by Google on a website for violating its guidelines or engaging in manipulative tactics to improve its search engine rankings. Google penalties can result in a significant drop in website traffic and search engine rankings
Penalities are the punishment drawn upon something or someone for breaching the implemented rules and regulations. Google penalty is implied upon the websites that contradict the marketing practices which is enforced the google.
A manual review about suggestions for a web page using “black hat” or update regarding the google rankings algorithm is how your google penalty can appear.
It is a manual action which is taken by google when any website violates their guidelines and tries to breach them. It can adversely affect your website in terms of visibility, organic traffic, search results etc.
Why does google penalise your website?
There are several reasons why google can apply web penalisation on your website because your website has broken the rules and guidelines which can be disturbing and violating in nature.
It affects your visibility on the search engine result pages (SERPs) and you can start losing your organic traffic. The following are some reasons why Google can penalise your content.
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Identical content
When you post your content on google and it originally belongs to you, it will be valued by Google, but vice-versa happens if you use duplicate content, which is second-hand data.
You will be penalised if the content you upload is not 100% authentic so before posting any content on google make sure that it is unique and original.
It does not work in a way that Google cannot recognise who is copying whom so if you are trying to copy from a website thinking that google would not know then it is not true.
In fact, you will be creating a more negative impact on the site than the one you are copying from.
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Landing page speed
When you visit a web page and it gets loaded quickly which gives access to it very easily is something that you as a visitor expect from a website, its page speed. But when you visit a web page which is taking longer time than usual to load then you end up wanting to leave that page.
A quick load makes it accessible, easy and more readable. Also, you can avoid it by uploading content with less weight, using the cache, compressing the content, dividing the content into subdomains etc.
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Unnecessary keywords
Keywords play an important role in search engine optimization and crawling up your website's name but this does not mean that you fill your content with those keywords only.
When you create content then try to insert the required keywords which can help you increase your visibility but you should not place the same keyword for hundred times because it is not directly proportional to the search algorithm and it can actually be a harmful practice.
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Acquiring links
Buying on links is a valuable thing for google because your website is being of use to some other website when you become the source for another website it is much appreciated by google but some people try to use it to a bad advantage to increase their views and traffic which can be penalised by google.
If you create a web page just solely insert the main link via your link it will get eligible for a Google penalty.
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Error pages
This is one of the biggest reasons for getting penalised by google. It gets disturbing when you try to reach a website and t constantly redirect your error pages, most common error page is 404 - file not found.
It will diminish your value in google if you attach too many error pages. You need to make sure that your website navigates the user to what they are seeking and should not end up on an error page.
This will increase your chances of having a Google penalty.
What are the types of google penalties?
When you own a website or you are a webmaster for a website you want to have a good google ranking and to obtain that you follow many hacks and steps like keywords, backlinks and promoting some go for an ethical method and some for unethical methods.
When you choose an unethical way to increase your ranking then google punishes you by charging a penalty which is of different types and are as follows
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An overabundance of use of reciprocal linking
It's an obvious step to return favours to the website that has provided sources to your website. This value exchange has become a more of link building strategy for both parties. You might be penalized if you provide too many reciprocate links.
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Manual link spam penalty
If someone from the Google webspam team reviews your site for its link profile and handles your manual penalty. The manual penalty can be a task in which a Google team member ends up on your website and penalise.
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Low-quality link penalty
The whole point of the building is to encourage the practice of justified link building. Earning your backlinks from low-quality websites will penalise you. If you get your links from a reputable website will help you to build value for their audience as well as yours.
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Algorithm link spam penalty
When your website is penalized for your actions by algorithm not manual it is called an algorithm link spam penalty. For example- Google panda update or Google Penguin Update.
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Unnatural links to and from your website
It doesn't matter how smart a webmaster you are Google always has its ways to find unethically links that may benefit your website in money-making. Every website that features links to your site or from your site has a natural inclination in relation to the niches of both websites.
How to avoid google penalty?
With the onset of digitalisation, all the webmasters have understood the value of rankings and visibility which is why they want their web pages to rank on top of search engine result pages (SERPs).
In order to obtain these many websites choose the wrong path to get desired results which leads to getting charged by google penalty. It can be avoided by simply following the steps
- Many small websites with limited audiences tend to buy links which will eventually result in a Google penalty. You should avoid buying paid links no matter how flashy jargon these established websites use in their sales pitch.
- All the search engine optimisation (SEO) experts know the value of keywords and how they can drive your web traffic but no good SEO expert will suggest you stuff that web page with keywords. And since the past decade, Google has been very vigilant about all these factors.
- With the latest update by google’s Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) that it can reach and comprehend the web page’s content better than humans do. Any foul errors found that break the guidelines for a website will be penalised by google.
- One of the biggest problems with uploading content on your web page is that it should not be plagiarised. You should create authentic content which originally belongs to you and is not copied from another source. There should be no duplicates and your content creation should be identical.
Conclusion
As every brand wants to promote its products and services on the internet, it has increased the quantity of content uploaded on the web.
This push also results in many frauds so if you do not want your website to get penalised by google then avoid these flaws.
This is all you should briefly know about google’s marketing policy and what are the consequences if you violate them.
