Google penalties or penalties are sanctions or punishments by Google that result in a decrease in the positioning of a website. There can be several reasons why Google can punish a site, for example because it interprets that it has been using search results manipulation techniques. These techniques are often known in the SEO world as Black hat techniques and can include buying and selling links, using hidden text to attract traffic, exchanging links, copying content from other websites, putting an excess of keywords in your content. . But it can also be due to algorithmic penalties. For example, Google introduces an algorithm change and your site, by not following the best practices recommended by that new algorithm, falls in the search results from the first page to the fourth.
Normally when your website is penalized for using serious spam techniques, Google uses a manual penalty. This means that a natural person has reviewed your site and has found search result manipulation practices (such as those discussed above). After this, it will notify you through Webmaster Tools of the suspicion and the applied penalty.
In the event that Google penalizes you for an algorithm change, it will never inform you. These are automatic penalties. In theory they are easier to solve than the previous ones.
Let’s go by parts, First of all, what you have to know is if you are really being penalized. How to know?
- Organic traffic from Google is drastically reduced.
- You lose visibility or rankings for most of your keywords.
- Pages are deindexed in Google (Use the command site: or look in Webmaster tools)
- You search for your brand or domain name on Google and your website does not appear as the first result.
If you do not meet any of these requirements, it may be that your website has not been penalized. Keep in mind that there are many websites that may be competing for the same search terms, so fluctuations in rankings can be normal at times.
How to recover from a Google penalty?
Manual penalties:
In this case, as we mentioned before, your website will be informed through Webmaster Tools. Depending on the reason for the penalty, you should correct that problem on your website as soon as possible. For example, if you have detected that you have unnatural links to your website, check the links and remove them manually or use the disavow tool. Spam techniques can be very varied and here, depending on the case, some solutions or others are recommended. In any case, it is always necessary to send a request for reconsideration to Google, which we can access from the same section of Webmaster Tools from which we received the message from Google.
Algorithmic Penalties:
As we mentioned before, in this case your website could have been hit by one of Google’s updates. The two most important in recent years are Panda and Penguin.
It is characterized by penalizing sites that have artificially created links. That is, if you have been buying links and have detected a drop in organic traffic since April 2012, you have probably been penalized by this algorithm. The best thing you can do in this case is to check with www.opensiteexplorer.org the websites that link to you, see if there are any bought links (or someone has been buying links to harm you) and
It is characterized by penalizing sites with little or poor quality content. These can include websites that have a large amount of duplicate content, little content, too many ads on the pages, the content of the page does not match the search query, etc… To get out of this penalty, you basically have to apply the following actions:
- Remove duplicate content: If duplicate content is on your site with tools like www.moz.com you can spot it.
- Reduce the amount of ads or advertising.
- Be careful with the websites you are linking to: Check the websites you link to, they are of poor quality, they have to do with your site. Could they have pornography or inappropriate content?
- Do not over optimize your site with too many keywords, always try to write naturally, not for search engines.
What else should you do before a Google penalty?
- Don’t panic: Be patient, don’t look for quick fixes to compensate. A penalty has a solution, it’s a matter of time.
- Be transparent: If one of your clients has been penalized, the best thing you can do is inform them, explain what happened and, most importantly, explain the measures that are going to be taken.
- Investigate: Read posts, document yourself, it is very important to learn from other examples of websites that have been penalized, perhaps you will find new advice that you can apply to your website.
- Document your case: Save information, notes, details of what is happening. Maybe tomorrow you can write a super interesting post about how your website recovered from a penalty 🙂
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