Semalt Advice On How To Recover From Google Penalties
Google continually updates its search algorithm and constantly keeps most of its users satisfied by providing the most useful results. No wonder they are the most popular search engine out there. To this end, Google also has its Webmasters Guidelines, so everyone from SEO professionals to web Developers is properly guided on the rules governing how Google operates. Of course, some people would like to bend or break the rules to win in the game; such actions are what we refer to as black hat SEO.
Common Reasons Why Google Will Penalize A Website
Buying Links
Link building is one of the fundamental ranking factors of Google. It isn't a surprise that web practitioners will want an easy way of getting inbound links. Having high-quality links to your site is a big win as it directs traffic to your domain and indicates to Google's algorithm that you are a trustworthy website.
Good backlinks also help Google's bots map your website, giving it a better idea of what your website is about, giving you a better chance to rank in the right SERPs.
With all these benefits, it's no surprise that websites are willing to buy links which is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Google also claims that buying links doesn't work. If a website is caught buying links, it could get an automatic or manual penalty which can be targeted at a specific webpage or, in some cases, the entire domain.
Google has a way of tracking links that are likely to have been bought and links that are earned. Buying links is a bad idea also because of the nature of the link itself. Many of these websites that sell links usually sell low-quality links. It is also easier than you think for Google to realize the unnatural patterns in the linking activities of such sites.
Hidden Links
Sometimes, websites try to hide links by making them the same color as the background or by hiding the link in the website, but Google will notice and penalize you for trying to outsmart the system. If you also include irrelevant links on your site, you will be giving Google fewer reasons to direct traffic to the targeted audience as more irrelevant links dilute your relevance.
Using hidden links deceptively is a violation of Google's guidelines.
So you should avoid having:
- Hidden texts behind an image.
- Keeping text off-screen using CSS.
- Using font size of 0.
- Making one little character like a punctuation mark, a link.
Malicious Backlinks
Some "bad" SEO practitioners use Google's Penalties to their advantage by having a website that you wouldn't want to associate with link your content as a strategy to drag down your page ranking. Instead of trying to be better, they use malicious backlinks to beat down the competition.
To punish the perpetrators of such an unprofessional act, Google created a form that helps you disavow links. This method helps websites disentangle from any undesirable domain. But to do this, you must conduct regular link audits to see which websites link your content so you can disavow any links you do not wish to have.
Keyword Stuffing
This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. When search engines were first introduced, all a website needed to rank was to have as many keywords as possible. Then, you could find content with a keyword phrase repeated over a hundred times, but the content wouldn't make any sense.
Since Google wants to offer the very best service to its users, it looks for content that is rich in semantically linked keywords. What this means is Google doesn't look for only the number of times a keyword was used but also how it relates to other words in the content.
That way, Google's algorithm stands a better chance at providing high-quality content rather than content stuffed with certain keyword phrases.
Hidden Content
Hidden links and hidden contents are similar. Hidden contents are contents that are made the same color as the background. This is a tactical black hat scheme to include as many keywords, semantically linked words, and long-tail keywords as possible on a page without making it look unnatural to a visitor.
Google's algorithm can easily tell the difference between keywords within the body of a paragraph and keywords which are hidden in the background. Sometimes, hidden content can find its way on your site even when you aren't responsible for putting them there consciously. Here are some cases where you can publish hidden contents unintentionally:
- When you publish a guest post that contains hidden content.
- If you have an insufficiently rigorous commenting system that fails to pick up hidden contents.
- If your website gets hacked and the hacker puts in hidden contents. This is known as parasite hosting.
- When an authorized user copies and pastes a text with CSS styling from a different source that carries hidden contents.
While not all forms of hidden content are forbidden, it is best you only use them when necessary and following the guidelines set out by Google.
Article Spinning
As a website that publishes new content regularly, we understand the difficulties you might face when keeping pace with web content. Similar to duplicated or plagiarized content, article spinning is an easy way to "create" content. Article spinning is the process of rewriting copied content by substituting synonyms, changing the sentence structure, or rewriting the text completely while spreading the same information as your source material.
Article spinning can be done with specialized tools or manually; however, Google will still penalize websites with spun contents.
Doorway Pages
This is a form of cloaking that is designed to rank for a particular keyword, but when clicked, it redirects visitors to a different page. These pages are also known as:
- Portal pages
- Gateway pages
- Bridge pages
- Entry page
- Jump pages
Hacked Websites
Having a vulnerable or unsecured website isn't typically an offense, and it wouldn't get you penalized. What it does is that it makes it an easy target for hackers, which can cost you valuable rankings. If your website gets hacked and injected with malicious code and Google finds out, they have the authority to block your website for people using their search engine.
Clearly, this will cause users to lose trust in your brand, and it will cause your website to drop in ranking just like what a Panda or Penguin penalty does to sites. While you may be lucky to receive a message notifying you that your site has been hacked, you could still face a penalty if Google notices malicious codes on your site.
Recovering From An SEO Penalty
Recovering from Google's penalty will most likely take time. The first step you need to take on your path to recovery is to discover why you were penalized. Once you know why you are being penalized, you can remove or change that factor. To ensure your recovery efforts are effective, you must first eliminate the cause of that penalty. If your site was penalized for going against one of Google's policies, you should reverse that action. You can do this by deleting or modifying whatever is causing the problem so that it falls in line with Google's policy.
Sometimes, you may have to reach out to Google and explain that the error on your site has been corrected so they can run an analysis with either a bot or manually to determine if your site is qualified to be indexed once more. If you pass, it's only a matter of time for your website to return, and gradually, you will resume climbing ranks on SERP.
Conclusion
If you accidentally get penalized, kindly contact our customer care on how you can rectify the issue. If you've also been using any of these black hat techniques, you now know better, and you have a chance to change your practice before it costs you more than it already has.
Interested in SEO? Check out our other articles on the Semalt blog.