It’s not surprising if you’ve encountered a Google penalty at some point, if you’re a website owner. Google only represents the most popular search engine in the world today.
On average, over 1.17 billion unique searchers use Google to find what they’re looking for on the net. And recently, Google has realized the need for streamlining the results it gives to users. This new user-centric program deals with helping users get more relevant results out of their search.
In order to do this, Google has started inspecting the things that make up a website and comparing them to what it considers a useful website.
Here’s a complete guide.
Understanding Google Penalties: How To Fix Any Google Penalty
In keeping with the model that Google is aiming to perfect regarding relevancy of search results, a set of guidelines were given to webmasters for them to understand what Google looks for in order to rank a site well.
How Do They Happen?
Penalties occur when a webmaster ignores one or more of these guidelines, either willfully or inadvertently. If your site is hit with a penalty, it becomes quite obvious when you look at your recent web traffic. At one point you’ll see your web traffic decline.
What Makes Them Really Bad?
If the decline is significant enough then you may have a really big problem. This can put a damper on your lead generation and significantly curtail it. 57% of B2B marketers state that search results make up a majority of their leads, so you can see how damaging a penalty is to a site or domain.
The thing is, the penalties are supposed to be damaging. They’re aimed at managing and preventing abuse of resources while at the same time trying to keep website owners honest in their dealings with searchers. They try to balance searches to deliver the most relevant results but in order to do so they might hit sites that might be perfectly above board, except that they break one or two rules that Google has said delineates a site as good. It’s a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it’s true, but until there’s a better, more efficient algorithm, it’s a chance the search engine giant is willing to take.
“Hold on there, sir, you got yourself a penalty.” – Google
Major Signs You Got Penalized
One of the key things you need to understand before we go any further is this: just because you had a decrease in traffic doesn’t necessarily mean that you were hit by a penalty. Many webmasters give in to their confirmation bias and jump to conclusions about their site being hit by Google for not conforming on some little detail when it really wasn’t Google’s fault at all that the numbers were just bad for one particular week due to some obscure technical detail such as:
- issues with crawling
- poor redirects
- issues with the server
- bad robots.txt configuration blocking access
These are a few of the more common reasons why a site’s traffic may be affected through non-Google means. Decrease in traffic is one of the ways you can tell that your site MAY have been hit with a penalty. Other telltale signs of a penalty occurring may be:
- traffic drops on individual pages or regarding specific keywords
- A significant number of your pages get de-indexed
- Your entire site becomes de-indexed
There is no surefire way to tell if you’ve been hit with a penalty just from looking at your traffic. That’s why, to ensure that you’re dealing with a penalty, you need to employ other means.
Looking At Algorithmic & Manual Penalties
In the penalties category, Google can hit you with one of two types of penalties. Manual penalties are usually given if your site obviously operating as though it’s a suspicious site. They can curtail quite a lot of your traffic. Most webmasters won’t ever get hit with one of these, unless they’re knowingly doing something underhanded and get caught by Google. Algorithmic penalties come from algorithm updates. As Google upgrades its algorithm from version to version, some users get hit with a penalty if they don’t conform to what Google expects to see when it runs its algorithm on the site. Algorithmic penalties are much harder to find than manual penalties, and usually requires you to do a bit of digging.
Detecting Penalties
If you assume you have a penalty of some sort, the simplest method to figure out if it’s true is to log in to Google Search Console (which was formerly Webmaster Tools). Once there you can unroll your messages to see if Google detected something untoward about your website. Alternatively you can check the Search Traffic Heading under Manual Actions and you will see if you were hit with a manual penalty.
Algorithmic penalties are a bit harder to put your finger on. There’s no flagged message or heads-up in any console screen that tells you that you’ve been penalized by the algorithm. One of the more effective methods of testing to see if your site was hit by an algorithmic penalty is to determine when your traffic dropped and manually determine if any important Google update occurred on or near that date to mess with your traffic. The Panguin Tool is an automatic method of doing that that saves you time in the long run. It is also important to remember that this is not a 100% effective method of determining if you’ve been hit by an algorithmic penalty, but only serves as a rough guideline.
Understanding the 5 Major Google Penalties
There are quite a large range of penalties that Google can possibly hit you with. These include, but are not limited to penalties that deal with spam, weak content, backlinks and a hundred other small algorithmic updates that can affect your traffic to varying amounts. The most common penalties you’re going to encounter can be classified into a few major categories such as:
1. Unnatural links: Unnatural links come in one of two flavors:
- Links To your Site: These links originate outside of your domain and direct traffic to your site. Google sees this as suspicious and although it doesn’t actually affect your search results, it might raise questions as to why shady sites are linking to you. If there is a large enough volume of these links then it will force Google to change your site’s profile to “untrusted” because of the nature of these links.
- Links from your Site: Outgoing links from your site that head to suspicious locations or spam sites can get you hit with a penalty. Be careful of where you’re linking to and how you’re linking to them.
2. Thin or Duplicate Content: We already know that Google penalizes content that it deems to be duplicate of existing content. The exact statement Google gives to sites that have thin or duplicated content is that the site has “little or no added value”. Google’s aim is to be user centric and part of delivering this promise top users is to make sure the pages that it gives them is unique and helps the user answer their problem. Penalties for this problem may vary depending on how much of the content on the page can be termed valueless.
3. Spam: Spam is a wide category. It encompasses everything from automatically generated and/or “spun” content to malicious cloaking and scripting that run automatically from sites and could possibly harm your computer. Penalties such as “User generated Spam” can be tracked down to spam in comments sections and can be cleaned up easily, although this process may be time consuming. The “Spammy Freehost” penalty comes from an entire web domain being penalized because a large number of spam sites and mirrors are hosted on their free domain. It’s less likely you’ll get a problem like this if you had your own domain.
4. The Panda Algorithm: In 2011, Google made waves with the Panda algorithm, effectively shutting down a number of sites that relied on keyword stuffing and other underhanded SEO methods to increase their page rank without actually providing value to the searcher. Panda updates about once a month and deals with the quality of content on a site. What Panda does that is a bit illogical is penalize the entire site for problems on one particular page. All your pages must conform to Panda or else your entire site may suffer. Painting with this wide brush does manage to cause some problems in the long run for website owners.
5. The Penguin Algorithm: Another algorithm developed by Google, this one focuses on the quality of a site’s backlinks and will penalize you based on the quality, diversity and amount of links that exist within your site. First released in 2012, it formed a deadly tag-team combination with Panda, hitting low-quality sites hard and putting many of them out of business. Penguin is a bit more discerning than Panda, as it is page-specific and will give you penalties based on a page’s backlinks, not the entire site’s backlink information. Penguin usually takes a couple weeks to run, so after an update it may be quite a while before the algorithm gets around to running on your site and penalizing you for infractions.
This is how you’ll feel when you fix your penalty.
Fixing the 5 Major Google Penalties
So now we’re aware of the penalties that may or may not face our site, what do we do about it? Well, there’s a number of actions we can take in order to fix these problems and ensure that they don’t come back. In a logical fashion, here’s how we go about dealing with the penalties that Google saddled us with.
1. Unnatural Links: Unnatural links incoming to your site is one of those penalties that is horribly time consuming to deal with. If you want to get rid of that penalty and regain your traffic, however, it needs to be done. It is possible to catch many of them from SC, if you want a complete list you’re going to have to employ tools like Ahrefs or Majestic. If you’re trying to fix a manual penalty, a complete list is a must.
After getting that list of links, you can then export them for use in a link checker tool such as Linkquidator or Link Detox. These methods are not cheap, but considering the volume of traffic you’ve lost, they’re worth it. After you determine which links need to be removed, the next step is getting rid of them. If you own the linking site it’s simple. Most times you won’t own the site and need to track down the owner and ask them (politely of course) to remove your link on their site. If all else fails and the links aren’t removed you can submit a disavow file to Google which will inform them that you have no control over those links and that their future checks should ignore them.
2. Thin or Duplicate Content: The best way to deal with this is to do a content audit and get rid of all duplicate content on your site. After the duplicate content is removed you can deal with crafting content that is much more substantial and adds value to your site. You don’t have to remove all your thin content pieces, some can be easily reworked either by yourself or by a professional content creation company.
3. Spam: Fixing a “Spammy Freehost” requires you moving your domain. Paid domains are the best option, but not everyone can afford to maintain a website. If you can’t, then try to find a free host that doesn’t allow spam blogs on their server since this will affect your website’s search results in the long run.
4. Panda Penalties: Panda penalties can be fixed in much the same way that a duplicate/thin manual penalty can be fixed. You need to audit your site to figure out where the fixes need to take place. Content removal is optional in some cases (where rewrites are a viable solution). Do not become attached to weak or thin content however. If you need to throw out a piece because it brings down the quality of your whole site then so be it.
5. Penguin Penalties: Penguin looks at backlinks, so performing the same sort of checks on your links that you would do for a manual “Unnatural links” penalty should be done to deal with a Penguin penalty. If you purchased links in the past or were the victim of a hack, then Penguin will penalize your site and there’s nothing you can do about it. Probably the best way to deal with a penguin penalty is to attract more high quality backlinks to balance out the low-quality links you already have on your site. Links tend to decay with time so eventually those low quality links will pass out of rotation. High quality links are the currency Penguin deals in and the more of those you have, the less notice Penguin will take of you.
Reconsideration & Avoiding Repeating The Offenses
After you fix a manual penalty, you can ask for a reconsideration from Google. This will inform them that you think you’ve taken sufficient action for your site to conform to Google’s standards and would like them to reconsider your site to remove the penalty. It can be found in SC, under Search Traffic -> Manual Actions -> Request a Review. In the email-layout box that follows, outline how you fixed your problem and how you’ll prevent it from happening again.
Preventing a penalty from happening again is the most important thing that you can do from a webmaster’s viewpoint. Keep your content of a high enough quality, your backlinks above board and your SEO up to date.
Don’t be afraid to audit regularly in order to weed out bad or thin/duplicate content.
All of these things are minor annoyances, but they add up to keeping your site in Google’s good graces and at the end of the day that’s where your leads come from. It’s best to keep them satisfied for now.