Google Penalties – What Do We Know About Them?
Google Penalties – What Do We Know About Them?
Google has become the daddy of search engines over the last few years. In doing so, they have grown into an online ‘Big Brother’ style yellow pages where by you can find almost anything and everything, whilst keeping a close eye on all those much smaller than them to ensure no-one is cheating their system.
Google has had to adapt to different black hat approaches which have been rife across the web over the years. We all know that the Google spider has become increasingly intelligent so it is important that Google keeps on top of the web and, in order to remain at the forefront of offering the public the best quality search results, it does this by employing a system of rewarding and penalising websites based on what it thinks they offer their users.
However, no one really knows exactly what Google (or the big G) really considers, when it crawls through the billions of web pages, to determine which websites it rewards and which websites it penalises. There is tons of information out there that will recommend you use unique content, smart use of keywords, avoid duplicate content across your site and produce good content that gets linked too. Likewise, you should also avoid sneaky redirect tactics, cloaking, creating content that only the robots can see and bloating your webpages with too many keywords.
Google have kept secret their special formula for rewarding and penalising which is impressive, given the amount of things that get leaked across the web these days. All we can do is speculate by what evidence we have.
Working in the SEO sector and having seen Google’s reaction to different forms of SEO, I believe Google can penalise for the following wide-ranging reasons:
- Linking to banned websites
- Linking to bad neighbourhoods
These can include link farms, spam sites etc.
- Over optimization of webpages
There is some recent evidence that Google penalise if they believe you have over optimized a page for certain keywords or ‘keyword stuffing’. Avoid these techniques and stick to well written natural text. It will get you further in the long run.
- Cross linking and link schemes
Whilst this used to be how link building was done, Google has evolved and now will penalise if they suspect you are seeking links by offering links. They want to offer their users quality search results so they place high value on natural linking and reciprocal linking is now pretty much worthless. This can also have a detrimental effect as Google may decide to lower its trust value for these sites.
- Link buying or selling
Google can penalise both websites that buy links, if they specifically sell just text links without the nofollow tag, and the sites that sell them as they do not offer the either site any value.
- Hidden text or links
Any text, especially links, that Google recognises are hidden either in the code or by the text being the same colour as the background are often penalised and should be avoided.
- Anchor text distribution
Google may penalise if they believe you have a fully engineered link profile. A signal of this may be a low variety of anchor text.
- Spammy inbound links
A large quantity of poor quality links to your website can be a spam signal to Google, especially if the links are of a similar nature (e.g, from the use of directory submission software).
- Other Black-hat stuff
Any other way of gaming Google (e.g, cloaking) or attempting to manipulate the rankings in any way is likely to be open to Google penalties.
How to determine if you have incurred a Google penalty
If you believe you have suffered a Google penalty, because you have disappeared from the search engine results page (SERPS), do not panic. Google may have altered their algorithm or changed their crawling technique. There have been instances where domains have completely disappeared from the SERPS, only to appear back a couple of days later.
To test if you have been penalised, try searching for your company name and seeing whether you rank highly. Also test that Google still has all pages correctly indexed. To do this, type site:yourdomainname.com into the Google search box, and if no URL’s are indexed and no backlinks show up when you search link: yourdomainname.com, there is a high chance you have incurred a Google penalty.
Another good indication as to whether a penalty has been awarded is to take a passage of text from a popular page and search Google for it enclosed in double quotation marks (“). If Google does not return any results to your page, this would indicate a penalty.
So remember, when trying to improve your ranking within the SERP, stick to honest, ethical and natural means of link building and advertising. If you provide natural and unique content then people will read it, and Google will reward you for providing useful, helpful and occasionally interesting information.
