A Guide on How to Remove Google Penalty

At the time of writing this article, there were 1,228,526,495 websites online and the number was increasing as fast as a count up timer. All of them are competing for their share of the views. People no longer type web addresses into their browsers but instead search what they need by writing keywords into search engines, Google being by far the most popular one. It gets approximately about three times more traffic than Bing, which is the second most popular search engine. This explains why everyone is trying to please Google and work under their terms. It is crucial to be within the first several results shown by Google under a certain category. Google can choose to make this hard for you if you misbehave and do not fulfill their standards so you can get either an algorithmic penalty or a manual action penalty. Algorithmic penalties can be avoided by regularly updating your algorithms and are not particularly alarming. This doesn’t apply to the manual action penalties where Google recognizes standards other than technical which haven’t been met. These faults can cause you a bit of a headache as they can damage your website’s reputation as well as ranking. This is what you are dealing with and the damage control.

Unnatural links

The links can lead to and from your website. Naturally, you would like to be seen in a good company and avoid bad company. The same applies to your website, you want it to be linked only to other related, reputable websites. In a lot of cases, this happens as a consequence of non-ethical SEO namely buying and selling links which can get you up the Google ‘adder’ quickly. On the other hand, it can happen accidentally and the website owner may not be aware of the fault. Also, an excessive number of unnatural links may be an attack on your website plotted by your competitors. Whatever the cause may be, In order to resolve this, you need to make them invisible to Google ranking.

Analyze the links, inbound and outbound, and either remove the ones you may think are causing the issue or keep them if you honestly want them but chose the ‘nofollow’ tag. This way your page will comply with the Google guidelines and it will be safe to ask them to kindly review their decision on your website’s status.

Spam

Nobody likes spam, and luckily neither does Google. All types of spam (user generated, hosts, markup) are seen as unwanted contact with a social purpose of aggressively promoting a service or a product.

The best way to get rid of spam is to, first of all, chose not to post it to your website, and second, keep your eyes open and search for any content that may be seen as spam. Browse through reviews and comment sections on your web site, check everything where you think someone else could have interfered and remove it. Once you are done, inform Google and wait to see if they will revoke their decision.

Cloaking

Cloaking would simply be hiding your spammy content from Google. For some reason the content shown to Google doesn’t match to what the viewers can see, it is either different or users are asked to create an account in order to ‘see more’ that is all. It can also mean that there are links redirecting viewers away from your page to something they have probably not asked for and is most likely advertising popups.

Find a tool to see the content which is shown to google and compare it to the one available to a visitor. Locate the discrepancy and make sure the content shown is the same for both parties. Identify any links that may be throwing the visitors of your site and delete them. Again, ask Google to confirm whether they are satisfied with the fixes.

Hacking

Your site may be hacked. This is a threat to visitors and potentially their personal data. Google will warn them of what they suspect (that you’ve been hacked) and this will lower your traffic significantly. Hackers may affect your site in various ways, they can delete or change the content, add malicious adware and thus jeopardize your viewer’s devices and data. Backup your website regularly so you can replace any missing content.

Take your website offline until you can resolve the issue and protect it from further attacks. Identify the hacks by the use of search console and fix it. Plug the hole which allowed the attack and do not let anyone else in! Request a review from Google.

Thin Content

Thin content is the content of little factual value. It is either not engaging or duplicated. Google detects it by recognizing unoriginal text or by measuring the time viewers spend on a page. It is very likely that most people will navigate away from a page if the page does not contain any or relevant information. Some of the pages with thin content have been created with a sole purpose of accommodating links to other pages.

Quality content is a key ingredient of a good website and that is the only kind of website a successful business can afford. Make sure that the content you post is engaging and relevant to the industry you’re in and a product or a service you are offering. It doesn’t have to be liked by everyone but by doing this you are ensuring that not everyone will bounce off the page quickly.

Keyword stuffing

Have you noticed that certain Youtube videos have every single tag under the Sun? The purpose of it is for a video to come up no matter what you type into the search box. This is what sometimes happens to websites. Intentionally or accidentally there are a lot of unrelated or ‘ill-placed’ keywords within one page. This means that the website will come up a lot as a search result and may have both increased traffic and ranking due to this, but often it will lead to visitors quickly navigating away and a Google penalty.

Pay attention to your keywords and make them a natural part of a text. Make sure that the keywords are actually related to the topic you are covering and the industry you are in.

All of the penalties are implemented to try to keep the web a safe and a fair environment. Do your best to avoid them and remove them. If you do not have the time or have insufficient training on web design or SEO, Look for web design experts and hire a professional SEO service agency to maintain your website and your good reputation as your business may depend on it. I ended with a website number 1,228,570,060.