Google Penalty: Check causes, limit damage, respond cleanly
What is meant by Google Penalty, which causes are typical and which steps are useful in case of loss of visibility.
With Google topics, it rarely helps to know only buzzwords. It is important to understand the principles behind it and to derive concrete test and optimization steps from them.
What is meant by Google Penalty, which causes are typical and which steps are useful in case of loss of visibility. This wiki page arranges the topic practically and shows, When priority arises, which mistakes are often and how you derive concrete measures from them.
The common term is “Google Penalty”. In terms of content, a distinction should be made today between manual measures, algorithmic quality problems and purely technical indexing errors.
Example: Traffic loss is not yet a confirmed penalty
The clicks drop after a relaunch. First, check tracking, demand, lost URLs, redirects, and manual action messages in Search Console. A time connection with a Google update does not prove a concrete sanction.
Only a confirmed manual measure has the related verification process. Technical errors, changes in search demand and algorithmic re-evaluation shall be examined separately. Keep evidence and hypotheses apart so that unnecessary link or content deletions do not follow.
What is a penalty for?
The penalty for any violation of the Webmaster Guidelines imposed by Google. They should know webmasters. They also help with better indexing, their compliance supports SEO. Penalties are imposed by the search engine operator in principle in the case of intentional (our) Black hat SEO, but also in the publication of content (violence glorification, drug trafficking, etc.), which are not allowed according to webmaster guidelines. The most common penalties mentioned by the Google team itself due to Black hat SEO relating to:
- unnatural backlinks,
- Cloaking,
- Doorway Pages and
- Spam.
With backlinks, Google algorithms pay attention to unnatural incoming and outgoing backlinks. Thus, page operators who buy backlinks, as well as the sellers, are punished. Paid links (links used for advertising purposes) that have not been marked also lead to a punishment. There are a few more violations, such as invisible content ( font and background in the same color) and a very unnatural accumulation of keywords. In our contribution about Black hat SEO Let us deal with such violations.
Does the Google team manually check the websites and then impose penalties?
First of all, violations of the Google bots and algorithms revealed. In the case of very serious violations, an employee of the search engine operator may also look at the page. After a delisting, the re-inclusion in the index (at the request of the webmaster) is checked manually. The Google algorithms are very efficient and automatically detect violations of the webmaster guidelines. The Penalties are very graduated, our above mentioned three basic stages are only a schematic representation. This means that minor violations result in a smaller penalty. The page is then slightly less visible than before. Webmasters should simply follow the Webmaster Guidelines as closely as possible.