Is the website penalized by Google? There are the types of penalties:
Algorithmic Penalty:
This type of penalty is automatic and occurs due to some change in the algorithm designed to classify websites with more excellent/lesser value or relevance. It is characterized by a decrease in the SERP, causing your website to drop positions and reducing organic traffic.
Google Penguin Penalty:
It is known as “Penguin” and focuses on inspecting external links that point to our website to increase our authority. In case they are harmful or purchased (unnatural) and do not have a good origin, we will be penalized (although google ignores toxic backlinks more and more).
These links must meet a series of characteristics:
- Link Quality – There should be a balance between high and low-quality links. They cannot all be of the same quality (exceptionally high). You must have a midpoint.
- Link frequency: not many links should be received in a short time, and, in turn, there should not be an abrupt decrease in relations.
- Link Diversity – Get links from all sources: forum comments, blogs, etc. This guarantees reliability, although most of these backlinks must come from sites with the same theme.
Google Panda Penalty:
Product of an update dedicated to monitoring content for quality.
The penalty is based on:
- Poor content, “thin content”: it offers a poor quality of content because it is short and superficial. It is not what the user is looking for.
- Lack of coherence in writing: it has grammatical, spelling, and syntax errors.
- The content is duplicated, or a copy-paste is detected, which is the same as plagiarism.
(Comparing both types of penalty, we can say that Panda focuses on the components that the website generates or acquires that prevent its correct use; meanwhile, Penguin is in charge of searching for those unnatural links, which were paid for or were built without the publisher’s approval.)
Manual Penalty:
This penalty has difficult decriminalization because it is the most serious. This penalty is carried out directly by a Google search engine worker once they receive a SPAM report, any warning signal that a user may issue, or simply evidence of a breach of Google’s Terms of Service.
It is characterized by sending a notification in Search Console notifying you that you have been removed from the Google index. When you receive this type of notification, you must correct the error and contact Google through the search console so that it can review your changes and, if approved, place it on the search engine results page again.
Google’s algorithm is getting smarter, so manual penalties are becoming obsolete.
How do I know if Google has penalized me?
The way to know if you have been penalized or not is by checking that:
Your domain has not disappeared from the Google index. To check it, place in the search “site:www.yourdomain.com.”
The Ranking of your website has not dropped to zero.
To find out if Google has penalized me, ironically, you must have met some of the criteria that are frowned upon by Google. Some of the most common and focal are:
- You have some duplicate content.
- You acquired poor-quality links.
- There are lousy user experiences because of comments or because they complained directly to Google.
- You have a high level of publicity.
- The loading speed is slow.
- You generate too many error pages.
- You overdid the proper use of keywords to gain notoriety.
- There is hidden content.
- You have made SPAM.
- You bought or sold links.
- You overdid the link exchange.
- You created unnatural links.
- You plagiarized by copying content from other websites.
- You did negative SEO (these are unethical techniques called “black hat,” whose sole objective is to sabotage the positioning of the competitor closest to our position so that theirs goes down and ours goes up).
You will receive a notification in Search Console if the penalty has been manual. One of the best ways to respond to how to know if my website is penalized by google.
In the case of the automatic penalty, you must pay attention to the level of traffic on your website. However, in both types of penalties, traffic is lost progressively and suddenly until it disappears from the SERPs.
Other signs that indicate that your website is penalized are:
- The keywords that you had positioned decreased in position in the search engine.
- Other pages of your domain do not appear in Google results.
On the other hand, an essential piece of information that can help you know if Google has made an update (which implies that it may have penalized you) is to verify the information on its official Twitter account.
Why might Google have penalized me?
The actions that Google will take on our website will depend on the infraction that we have committed. There are several reasons why Google can penalize us; the most common are:
Links:
- It is the most common cause of the penalty. It occurs when Google detects that there is an excess in links, both outgoing and incoming:
Outbound Links:
- Excessing outgoing links is considered a signal to buy or exchange them. In turn, creating many external links directed to another domain on the same website has the consequence of the disappearance of Google results, regardless of whether these links are of the no follow type.
Incoming Links (backlinks):
- It is pretty standard because they can link you to websites with some penalty with which they would penalize you. Therefore, we must be cautious with the links we get. Remember to adhere correctly to link-building techniques so as not to fall into penalties.
Malicious content:
- This malicious content is nothing more than a virus injected into your website. Whatever the reason, you will be penalized by Google because websites must be safe for users.
Outdated site:
- As we constantly change and evolve, if our site is made on an old and outdated CMS or has weak language, it will be penalized. The reason is that this CMS or content manager is prone to any risk since it does not have the necessary security measures for the user.
RichSnippets:
- When we use rich snippets in a misleading way (Black Hat SEO), Google can notice and penalize you for it. Microdata is a subject that Google looks at with eyes wide open and a magnifying glass.
Cloaking:
- If you show different content to the user than to the crawler and Google realizes it, it won’t let it go. Your site, in the most extreme case, will be penalized.
Hidden text:
- Something typical, old school. If we hide text on the web, we are implying that it is not essential, but perhaps for the user, it is. For this reason, it is essential to show all the content of our website and not camouflage it through CSS or tabs.
Duplicate content:
- Google requires original content, so when it detects a similarity in the pages or parts of them, it considers it duplicate content. To avoid this, you can cite by naming the source or creating original content.
Keyword Stuffing:
- Abusing the repetition of keywords makes the content lose value for the user because it is being inserted without any grammatical or semantic sense.
Advertising:
- When there is too much advertising to force the user to click, or the user is uncomfortable with tracking cookies, we will be penalized. In turn, many ads slow down the web, causing the user to have a bad experience and a rebound effect.
Conflicting websites on our shared server:
- It is essential to consider the neighbors of our website and the web pages with which we share an IP on the server. We share the server because if our neighbors are casino pages or pages with adult content, even if Google detects the presence of malicious software, it will link the websites on the same server and penalize them all equally.
If you want to check how to remove a penalty from your site, here: How to remove a penalty from my site
