SEO is a complicated game with a lot of twists. Even if you spend money on SEO with the best of intentions, your site could still be hurt by a Google update or a manual action.
If you see a sudden drop in the number of people visiting your website or a drop in your SERP ranking, your site may have been hit by a Google penalty. Fixing these penalties should be your top priority, since a drop in your search engine ranking can cause you to lose customers and sales.
You can appeal and fix these penalties, but you need to know why they were given in the first place before you can fix them. In this article, we’ll show you how to find out if your site has been penalised and tell you exactly what to do to fix your score. You can contact to the Affordable seo reseller for Advanced SEO Reseller Services.
What is a penalty on Google?
A Google penalty is what happens when a site doesn’t follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Google’s algorithms can give penalties automatically, or one of Google’s human auditors can do it by hand.
Some penalties are caused by changes to Google’s algorithm, like the Panda and Penguin updates. Google penalties are like being sent off in soccer. You did something wrong, says the referee (Google), so you have to sit out the rest of the game.
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When you get a penalty, your website has to sit out until a solution is found, just like a soccer player. This usually means that you won’t show up in search results anymore or that your rank for targeted keywords will drop.
Google penalties are meant to stop people from using black-hat SEO and breaking other online rules, but they can also happen to sites that just made a mistake or didn’t do anything wrong. Sometimes, Google has made a mistake that needs to be fixed.
What are the most common reasons Google penalises a site?
Google penalties are often caused by the following:
keyword stuffing \shidden links
duplicate content irrelevant keywords
poor reroutes
Trying to hide spyware, ads, and viruses
data issues
bad links
There are many ways to get a Google penalty, but they are often triggered by black-hat techniques or tactics intended to fool search engine bots.
How long will it take for Google to stop punishing my site?
Your site will recover from a Google penalty once all of the errors are corrected.
For manual penalties, this can be anywhere from 10 to 30 days, depending on how quickly you fix the problem, submit a request to reconsider, and get your request approved.
Algorithm penalties can make it take a lot longer to get back on track, with some companies noting damage up to two years later. Most sites will take six months to get back to normal.
How to Get Back on Track After a Google Penalty?
Businesses can lose traffic and money if they get penalised by Google, so it’s important to find and fix problems as soon as possible.
Most penalties are caused by bad SEO techniques, but some are caused by Google mistakes and may need to be talked about with the Google team.
If your site is penalised because of mistakes or errors in the content, you can often fix the problem by changing the content on your site.
Here are a few easy steps you can take to get back on Google’s good side.
- See if you have a problem with your rank.
- The first thing you need to do to get out of a Google penalty is to make sure that’s what’s wrong.
- You can use the Website Penalty Indicator to see where and how your site may be affected.
- google penalty indicator
- You can also use tools like Ubersuggest to find SEO mistakes that need to be fixed. With these tools, you can find problems like bad backlinks, duplicate content, indexing errors, or changes to the algorithm.
Check out the latest changes to the algorithm
To find out if you’ve been hit by an algorithm penalty, log in to your Google Analytics dashboard and compare drops in traffic to any known changes Google has made to its algorithms.
If your traffic drops at the same time as a known update to Google’s algorithm, it’s likely because of that update.
To find out more, go to the Google Analytics dashboard and choose your website. Then, click Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
Google will punish you if you use Google Analytics
Choose Google/Organic from there. This will give you a report of how many people come to your site from a Google search.
Next, go back a year or more by selecting the reporting period in the upper right corner. Compare any big drops in traffic to the dates that Google changed its search algorithm.
Use this cheat sheet for the Google algorithm to help you figure out what to do. Or, you can look at the Moz guide, which lists all of the changes Google has made to its algorithm in the last 16 years.
Once you know which update caused your penalty, look up that update to find out how to fix the problem.
For example, if the Penguin update is hurting your site’s ranking, you should work on improving your backlinks and how you use anchor text.
If the Panda update hurts your site, it could be because your content isn’t as good as it could be.
A page experience penalty may require UX/UI updates to improve user experiences on your site.
Run an SEO Audit
Auditing your SEO should be a regular part of your marketing plan. It can also be used to figure out why traffic is going down.
If you think your site might be getting penalised by Google, a technical SEO audit can help you find any SEO mistakes that are hurting your site.
You should pay attention to these three things when you do a technical SEO audit:
-hosting and indexing on the back end
-front-end factors such as content, keywords, and metadata
-outside sources and quality of links
To find spam links, SEO audits should use a link tool like our Backlink Checker.
This SEO Audit Checklist can also help you do a thorough SEO audit if your site has been penalised by Google.
Bad or spammy backlinks, keyword stuffing, and sitemap errors are some of the most common SEO mistakes.
-loading speed
-pop-ups
If you fix your SEO mistakes but your website still doesn’t do well, your penalty could be because of a mistake in the content or something else.
Run a Content Audit
A content audit looks at how well all of your current content is doing and can help you figure out why you got a penalty from Google if it was because of content problems.
Remember that your online content needs to be updated and improved on a regular basis if you want it to keep doing well. Google looks for content that is up-to-date and has a lot of information. This means that great content from two years ago that hasn’t been updated won’t do as well today.
Use Ubersuggest to see how well your site is doing overall and to find content that needs to be updated. Just go to Search and click Site Audit.
google penalty – content audit
Tools for content inventory like Blaze and DynoMappe can also help you find content problems.
Also look for content that is already there. Duplicate content can hurt your search engine rankings in a big way. Businesses that let people make their own content, like blog comments, should be especially aware of this.
During your content audit, look for: -Old content -Gaps in the content
-Content that never changes and needs to be updated. -Metadata
-image data
-counts of words
Depending on the tool you use, you might get suggestions for content that will help you make your site better.
Issues are ranked on Ubersuggest from “Low” to “High.”
Take care of the most important problems first to avoid Google penalties, and then make a plan to update your content regularly to keep Google happy.
Clean up your list of backlinks.
SEO depends on campaigns that build links in a healthy way, but bad backlinks can have the opposite effect.
Bad backlinks can get you penalised by Google in two ways: manually and automatically.
Google’s Penguin algorithm is made to find bad backlinks and punish sites that were thought to be manipulating search engine results pages (SERPs).
Managing your links can be a hard job, but there are many tools that can make it easier.
Apart from that, if you are interested to know about Don’t Overpay for a Website: Finding the Right Cost and Value with a Web Development Company in UK then visit our Digital Marketing category.
