Know Why a Website gets penalised

Sometimes, small errors or mistakes may cost a lot. Most business owners suffer losses when their websites suddenly get penalised. That is why, it is important to take good care of websites.

What is a Google penalty?

According to Wikipedia, “A Google penalty is the negative impact on a website’s search rankings based on updates to Google’s search algorithms and/or manual review. The penalty can be an unfortunate by-product of an algorithm update or an intentional penalization for various black-hat SEO techniques”.

How to identify Google penalty?

• A website or web page isn’t ranking well.

• A website or web page attracting no traffic.

• Page’s rankings positions are consistently slipping.

• The website/web page has been removed from Google’s cache.

Here are a few reasons:

Auto Generated Content

Many marketers/webmasters use auto generated content and spin content in order to save time, money and efforts, unfortunately Google doesn’t like it.

Google recognises such pieces of content and penalises the entire website. So, write fresh, original and helpful content.

Tricky redirects

Redirection is the process of sending a visitor to a different URL due to some valid reasons. However, some webmasters use redirects to deceive search engines and display content to users that is different as compared to content displayed to crawlers.

This violates Google’s guidelines and eventually the site gets penalised. So, don’t use such deceptive techniques.

Duplicate Content

Copied content attracts penalty. Online marketers often make use of this technique; they copy content from another site, which is a wrong tactic. Google recognises duplicate content and penalises the entire website.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are designed to rank high for specific search queries. Most webmasters create doorway pages according to their keywords in order to rank high, which leads to multiple pages.

It is a deceptive technique. Stay clear of it.

Link schemes

This is the most popular way of obtaining tons of backlinks. However, it violates Google’s guidelines.

Most marketers use link wheeling, link exchange and link buying to get quick rankings, which is a black-hat technique. So, it is better to avoid unnatural links for your website.

Examples:

• Using large scale article marketing

• Buying and selling of links

• Using Link generation software/tools

Tips:

• Create unique and relevant content to gain quality natural links.

• Create informative and useful website.

Irrelevant keywords

Google doesn’t like keyword stuffing. That is why, it is important to use keywords naturally and wisely across the website.

Tips:

• Create content rich in information.

• Focus on optimisation rather than random stuffing of keywords.

• Create content for your targeted audiences.

Bonus tips:

• Create simple and intuitive websites.

• Use keywords appropriately .

• Always write original and informative content.

• Never try to deceive users and search engines.

• Never use link generation software.

• Follow Google’s guidelines.

• Never republish any content.

• Stay away from Cloaking (practice of displaying different content or URLs to users and search engines.)

Besides these reasons, there are also a great number of other reasons, which may lead to penalty. So, the best way to avoid penalty is to create user friendly website.