What Do You Know About SEO and Google Penalty?

When developing a website, most business owners often focus on some specific things that make a good website such as designing, slide bar, and suitable color scheme. But, they avoid focusing on content and search engine optimization of their website. The appearance and interface of your website create the first impression and engages your users to read and dive into your site. But, content also plays an important part in engaging your users as well as make your site SEO friendly.

Being an SEO expert, you must know the power of original content on your web pages and blogs. Duplicate content on your website is one thing which every professional will suggest you avoid using. Apart from content, there are several other things that can make your site penalized by the Google.

You must understand that Search Engine Optimization is a simple way of drive web traffic to the website via search engines. In this post, you will find some significant things about Google penalty and search engine optimization.

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Google Penalty

Google has been updating its algorithms since Dec 2000 while releasing its toolbar extension. This update showed a major change in website ranking and evolved the SEO industry. With the time, Google kept refining the quality of its search results and updating algorithms. Moreover, it started eliminating poor quality content and raising the engaging yet unique content to the top of the result pages and this is where penalty comes in. Over time, the Penguin update was introduced in 2012 that wiped out some websites (with poor quality content) out of the Google Search completely and made expert careful about their content strategy.

Recognizing a Penalty

The Google Penalties can be manual or automatic. With manual penalties, you’ll generally be informed, but you might not know that you’ve been targeted if the reason is algorithmic.

• If your site is not ranking well and frequently losing its positions.
• Any page of your website is slipping back to 2nd or 3rd pages without any action from your side.
• All the web pages have been eliminated from Google’s cached search results in a day.

If you face one or more of these difficulties, you can be assured that a Google's penalty has influenced your website. In this case, you should use a reliable penguin penalty checker.

Why does Google Penalize Your Site?

Google is constantly updating its algorithm and way it indexes your website. But, it doesn't provide any kind of details about the changes and their solutions. Here are some of the reasons that might become a reason for the penalty:

• Buying links: If you’ve been creating or buying bad links, your effort could be considered as an attempt to manipulate PageRank.
• Duplicate content: Undoubtedly this is one of the most obvious reasons that can make your site penalized. Any duplicate content on your website makes it less valuable in Google’s point of view, and that might result in a penalty.
• Unique content: Make sure your content is 100% plagiarism-free and written in a professional way. The properly structured content help you with SEO.
• Internal 404: Google wants to know that you provide useful content to your users without any errors and problems. If you’re getting 404 error on your website, it’s a clear signal that your site visitors aren’t getting the information they are looking for.
• Keyword stuffed content: There are several kinds of rules or perception about keyword density in your content. All these rules aren't proven but a high keyword density is a remark of poorly written content. If Google detects keywords stuffing on your website, it may penalize you anytime.
• Overused H1 tags: The H1 tag helps Google recognize what the page or website is about. But, Google considers excessive H1 tags as an attempt to manipulate PageRank.
• Backlinks from websites in other languages: If you are getting a legitimate link from a site in another language, it might be counted against you.
• Hidden links: Every link on your site must be visible and valuable to visitors. The hidden link is considered as a suspicious backlink.
• Broken external links: You really need to keep your links up-to-date. Check all the web pages and backlinks on a regular basis and assure that they aren't giving 404 error.
• Dealing with Google's Penalty: So, you have already penalized by Google but don't worry. Most of the penalties may be fixed with a little effort. With some easy solutions, you might get rid of it.
• You can use Disavow tool to ask Google to remove the troublesome links that may be harming your website.
• While disavow is a widely-used option, it’s not the best. You really need to put some efforts to get some of the links taken down manually.
• You should also update the content of your website while eliminating keyword stuffing.

Sometimes Google takes a while to re-crawl your site and disavow requests. Experts also recommend abandoning a site instead of fighting a Google penalty.

About the Author:

Ankur Purohit works as a project coordinator at Baymediasoft – a WordPress Development Company. Passionate about the technical writing; Gaurav Mali has been involved in the cutting edge landscape of App and mobile app development for three years.