What is a Google Penalty?
A Google penalty is a punishment a website can receive for violating Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. Within Google’s documentation classified as “manual actions”, Google’s penalties can result in pages or websites being removed completely or lower rankings.
While reductions in rankings can result from algorithm updates, this is not classified as Google penalties. Google penalties are manual actions taken by human reviewers who work as part of Google’s web spam team.
Google’s machine learning models detect about 99% of spam content, which in totality amounts to 40 billion spam pages per day. The remaining 1% of spam sites are handled by manual actions, which are the final filter in Google’s goal of reducing spam.
Why are Google Penalties Important?
Google penalties are to reduce the visibility of websites that are deliberately manipulating search rankings. When your site isn’t showing up in the search results, the obvious affect is less traffic, conversions and credibility. This is why it is important to understand what can cause a manual action, what the penalty looks like, and how to recover.
Many companies outsource their SEO to freelancers or agencies. When choosing your SEO provider, it’s key to make sure they are also aware of Google’s penalties so they can avoid them.
Best Practices for Avoiding Google Penalties
Steer Clear of Paid Links
Backlinks or links to your site from another, are used as a ranking signal for Google’s algorithm. Due to this, there are many services that offer ‘free’ links. However, deliberately increasing the number of backlinks to your site is considered a black-hat SEO tactic, and is thus penalised by Google.
Avoid Auto-Generated Content & Article Spinning
Generating high volumes of content can be beneficial for SEO, however, is the content is of low quality and doesn’t provide any value to your users, it can have an opposite effect on your rankings, and put you at risk of being penalised.
Two of the most popular low-quality content writing tactics are auto-generated content and article spinning.
Auto-generated content is content that’s been generated with some sort of software with very limited human input. Although AI content generation tools can produce what seems to be ‘human’ content, it is very easy for both users and Google over time to pick up that the content has been generated by a bot.
Article spinning, is where a piece of content has been spun into one of more variations by using synonyms or changes in sentence structures.
Focus on Quality Content For The Long Term
While Google’s AI-Assisted system and web spam team are getting better and better at catching black-hat SEO tactics, some spammy sites still slip through the cracks. However, the gains from being manipulative and using black-hat tactics are typically short wins. Google will eventually catch on and penalise these websites.
The best way to avoid Google penalties is to focus on creating quality content and quality, natural link-building.
