The main aim of business owners is to improve the website visibility and get a better position in the search engine ranking. But spammy work and unethical practice will ruin the whole effort and create a risky situation for your website. Also, Google holds complete rights to add penalties on websites that violate Google’s guidelines.
Such penalties result in affecting the search engine ranking, visibility based on the manual action found. For this reason, getting penalties notifications from Google is the worst nightmare for every digital marketer. Google clearly delivers its issues related to the website via Search Console to website owners. Google describes these notifications as the warning sign and requires the Webmaster to take action as soon as possible.
So what are you supposed to do as the website owner?
Its answer is simple. You have to consider the bigger image of Google penalties so that you can avoid them from your website. Being a website owner, you will be the only one who will be knowing the risks associated with your website and ways to avoid them.
In this article, we are going to discuss Google penalties and the right way to fix them.
Common Types Of Google Penalties
We can categorize google penalties into two major categories, namely algorithm penalties and manual penalties. Let us talk about it one by one.
Algorithmic Penalties
Google algorithm works on complex set patterns to fetch out the most accurate information to users to address their searched query. From time to time, updates are done in the Google algorithm to improve the quality of the search results that is related to the user experience.
But it is unpredictable when Google will release its algorithm update, which adds complexity to the website owners and digital marketers. Whenever such types of updates take place, then the web pages that are not fulfilling the specified parameters experience an algorithmic penalty.
However, you can say that an algorithmic penalty is not a penalty. It causes changes in the ranking of the web pages that are not fulfilling the latest standards.
Does algorithmic penalty last permanently? Its obvious answer is NO.
If your website is experiencing some negative impact with the latest SEO algorithm changes, then it does not mean you can’t recover your webpage from that.
You can follow the desired measures from your side to analyze and fix such issues. However, you should try to avoid using the black hat activities to level up website ranking. Instead, follow ethical methods to improve the website ranking.
Manual Actions
Most digital marketers try to improve the search engine ranking by hoodwinking them with various activities. As a result, other relevant search queries get wasted under the influence of irrelevant results. For this reason, Google continuously fights with spammers to improve the user’s experience. The webspam team of Google keeps on checking that all websites should follow the quality guidelines. If they find some spammy work then, they have all the power to take manual action against such websites. The website owners get communicated with such action via Google search console.
Google employees check out the website against manual penalty and start delisting from Google as they are not fulfilling the guidelines.
So how can any website owner know if their website is marked for manual penalty?
There will be an email notification to the website owner from the Google team. Also, by logging in to the Google console, individuals will come to know that their website is encountering manual action. The top of the report will include a green tick mark regarding such information. After fixing the required issues, you can request Google for reconsideration.
After that, the team will properly review the consideration request. Once they get confirmed that your website is following all desired guidelines, the ban from the website will be removed. It is a little time consuming process as your reconsideration request will be accepted for review after a week or two. Also, you will be informed when Google receives your request and is done with the review work.
List of Google Penalties and Ways to Recover them
The list of manual actions is very long. But it is necessary that you should remain aware of all types of penalties that come under manual actions.
Cloaking/Sneaky Redirects
When users get a different web page on search engine results for their searched query, then it comes under cloaking. It is the straightforward violation and ignorance of the webmaster guidelines that causes a manual penalty. This type of penalty is observed in two parts: one is the partial match that affects a certain portion of the website and the second one is the site-wide match that affects the entire web page.
Way To Fix
To fix this issue, you need to go to Google Search Console, then Crawl, and then Fetch as Google. With this step, you will know about the affected section of the landing page.
You can compare the section that is highlighted by Google and the remaining part of your website. You have to identify the difference in both of them and have to work until the affected section comes in line with the unaffected portion. No one, either a user or Google, likes to get directed to irrelevant pages as per their search query. So there is a need to cross-check all redirects, and you should ensure that they are directed to the right web pages. After making all the desired changes, you can submit a reconsideration request to Google.
First Click Free Violation
Websites that force users to subscribe, register, or log in to read the full content violate the Google First Click Free policy. This also comes under the cloaking that may lead to the Google penalties. It can be categorized in two different forms, such as partial match and site-wide match.
To remove such a penalty, you should ensure that whatever content is displayed on Google and to the other Google services should be the same. After fixing the issue, you need to submit a reconsideration request.
Way To Fix
To remove such a penalty, you should ensure that whatever content is displayed on Google and to the other Google services should be the same. After fixing the issue, you need to submit a reconsideration request.
Cloaked Images
You might be misled if you only know that cloaking happens with the content of the webpage only. But in reality, it applies to images as well. In view of Google, image cloaking happens when another image overshadows or redirects users to other irrelevant web pages as per search query.
Way To Fix
For removing such a penalty, you need to display the same image everywhere, whether it is Google or other search engines. Then, after removing all cloaked images with the relevant ones, you have to submit the reconsideration request.
Hacked Site
It may not be a surprising word in the age of digital space. After hijacking the website, Hackers inject some harmful content or links into the CMS without the owner’s knowledge. Also, it is quite difficult to analyze these works as they are mostly cloaked. Once it comes into the eyes of Google, it adds “the site is hacked” on the pages that are coming in search engine ranking. To come out of such a situation, you should contact your web host.
Way To Fix
As soon as you realize that your website is hacked, you should start taking preventive measures to stop further damage. First, you should check the damages that a hacker has caused on your website with the help of Google Search Console. You need to get it into the root to stop the further hacking of the website. Do a complete analysis of your webpage and find out the way hackers enter your website. Add all desired strength and security features to boost the safety of your website. You should make it your habit to take the backup of data so that you do not suffer from great loss.
Keyword Stuffing
It is well known that content is the foremost reason behind the ranking of the webpage. If you are stuffing keywords in your website for improving its visibility and getting a good position on search engines, then you are only contributing to backfiring. Google holds power to add a penalty to your website if there is hidden text and overstuffing of keywords.
Way To Fix
To get the idea regarding the effect portion, you need to follow- Google Search Console > Crawl > Fetch
Check out the similar one and examine the hidden content using the CSS. After successfully finding the hidden content, you can restyle it so that it can appear properly or can remove it so that penalty gets removed. You have to remove all extra added keywords from the content.
The repeated words from the alt text and tags should be removed.
Once you are done with the required changes, submit a reconsideration request.
Pure Spam
It is a type of penalty that is imposed when Google finds that your website is indulging in spammy activities for boosting the search engine ranking. All black hat SEO practices come under this, such as content scraping, cloaking, link schemes, and other such activities that are not acceptable by Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Way To Fix
It is very simple to avoid such a type of penalty by following the authentic work process. You need to leave all the spammy activities. And then send the reconsideration request to Google.
Spammy Structured Markup
The set of codes that are required for structuring or organizing the website content are known as structured markup or schema markup.
If there is spammy structured markup present, then it will redirect to some misleading content that will affect the user’s experience. These things are not considered fair activities. Thus Google penalizes the website if it finds spammy schema markup on a webpage.
Way To Fix
There is a simple step to remove this penalty. First, you have to update the website schema markup and remove all spammy one. After implementing the changes, you have to submit the request to Google.
Thin Content
The type of content that does not deliver any value or information to the readers is called thin content. Various types of content come under this category, such as copied, spin, low-quality content, and much more. Google penalizes websites both in a partial and site-wide manner if it finds thin content on websites.
Way To Fix
You should remove all auto-generated and spin content from your website. Thoroughly check all content and if you find any duplicate content, then remove it. You should remove the doorway pages from your website if you find them on your website.
Unnatural Backlinks
One of the best ways to improve website visibility is to create good quality backlinks. But its outcome may get changed if you do not perform it in the right manner. Therefore, you need to be careful while creating the backlinks for your website.
Your website will experience a google penalty if links to and from your website are not natural. This is because such types of backlinks manipulate the ranking results, and Google never appreciates such type of work.
Way To Fix
You can easily download all the incoming and outgoing backlinks of your webpage from Google Console. Now you can quickly check the links that are not following the Google guidelines. You can either remove them or can tag them as no-follow attributes. Maybe with certain links, you will have little difficulty assigning the no-follow attribute, then you can simply remove them to eliminate the penalty imposed by Google.
Expired Jobs
If you are posting job posts on your website, then make sure that you remove them as soon as vacancies are filled. It is because Google does not approve such web pages that offer expired jobs as they degrade the user’s experience. Search engines want to direct the users to the right page so that their query gets solved. Thus having an expired job post on a website may lead to the manual penalty.
Way To Fix
There are two ways by which you can fix this penalty. The first one is that you can remove the job post schema from your website. In this way, users will get a 404 code that notifies the non-existence of job posts. The second method is not crawling that particular page of the website. After that, you can request reconsideration from Google.
Conclusion
No website owner wants to encounter the Google penalty. But due to some activity, if your website gets affected by the penalty, then you should not panic. Instead, you should start looking for its recovery option. Yes, the recovery process is indeed a little tedious, but you have to follow that to improve the website visibility and search engine ranking. You have to say goodbye to the bad practices that cause Google penalties.
We all are very much familiar with the aim of Google – to offer the best experience to the users. The query of the users should be answered by directing them to the most relevant page. If users appreciate your website, then Google will also love that website.
If you are experiencing Google penalties and want to recover those penalties, you can contact Marketing Sweet professionals. We have well-experienced and skilled professionals that are always ready to offer the best possible solution. We don’t do any work to hoodwink our customers. You will find transparency in our words and works.
You can easily reach us at 08 8337 4340 to know about our services.
