You're probably familiar with penalties in professional sports. If a player does something unsportsmanlike, or violates the rules of the game, they are often penalized for their actions. Depending on how severe the infringement is, they may even be removed from the game, or suspended from playing for a period of time.
Google penalties are very similar to sports penalties. At their core, they're designed to punish websites that have done something wrong. These penalties aren't always handed out manually, and they may impact websites built by those who had no idea what they did wrong, but they can still greatly impact a site's performance in search results—and beyond.
A Google Penalty Means Trouble
A Google penalty means your site is either no longer listed on search results, or that your ranking for your targeted keywords has dropped dramatically. When your site gets a Google penalty, your target audience can't find you. And when you are invisible to your target audience, your traffic, and ultimately revenue, drops.
It can happen to any website. A Google penalty can be the result of well-intended and honest efforts to improve your site's ranking. But once you receive a Google penalty, it isn't easy getting your good ranking back and getting back into Google's good graces.
WebpageFX can help you recover from a Google penalty. We have a dedicated team that will review your site and make the changes necessary to put you on the top of search engine results again. Haven't received a Google penalty but want to be safe? Our expert internet marketers stay abreast of Google's constantly changing algorithms so your site is always in good standing and not in danger of dropping out of the search results.
As a leading Google penalty recovery service, we know what search engines like to see. Our penalty recovery service is specifically designed to get you back into Google's good graces so your website can show up in search results and your business can keep growing.
Why Do Sites Get a Google Penalty?
Google's job is to provide the most relevant search results. From Google's point of view, any website that tries to manipulate the search results is harming the Google product. Google wouldn't be Google if it returned unhelpful results, or gave its users a negative exprience, would it?
A Google penalty is the result of a highly evolved, constantly changing algorithm that Google utilizes to crawl and inspect websites. While there are some specific actions that can result in immediate penalties handed down by a Google employee, there are others not publicly advertised, or some that can result in a reduction in rankings that happens over time. This is to protect Google from websites trying to outsmart it, or further manipulate its results.
Google Penalty Triggers
To ensure your site doesn't receive a Google penalty, make sure your site does not have:
- Spyware, adware, or viruses
- Hidden links or text
- Cloaking (displaying a different version of a webpage to the search engine robots)
- Deceptive redirects (when a visitor is automatically taken to another page without clicking anything)
- Pages loaded with irrelevant keywords
- Keyword stuffing
- A substantial amount of duplicate content
The list of Google penalty triggers is extensive, but they can easily be summed up: penalties are triggered by any action a website takes to fool a search engine or harm the user experience in some way.
Source: Webpagefx
