Have you ever been in a situation where you need answers to solve a problem? Or you are looking to advertise your business online. You pick up your phone or laptop, open your browser, and input the keywords inside the search engine. In less than a minute, the answers are in front of you. Problem solved!!!!
Google is a search engine that has saved lots of lives and businesses, established on the 4th of September, 1998. Google has gone on to be one of the biggest tech companies in the world.
But I’m not here to give you the history of Google, Am I?? No. I’m here to talk about the penalties for violating Google’s Terms and service for owning a website or blog.
Every website owner’s dream is to rank first on Google search pages as it brings more traffic to your site. It also means more engagement on your blog post, etc.
Firstly, we have to understand what “Google Penalties” means. It’s an action taken on one’s Web Page for violating Google’s terms of service. You will notice that your website has dropped from the ranking table or you have reduced traffic on your page.
The action is divided into two, which are the “Manual Action” and “Algorithmic Action.” The manual action is carried out by a human who has discovered a violation or breach of the Google term of service. The algorithm is a result of a Google update leading to a drop in traffic on your page.
The difference between the two actions is that for a Manual action, you get notified about the action via your email address, and you can solve the issue faster. The algorithmic is trickier as you don’t notify when a penalty is placed on your website. The only way around this is to check your Traffic table to see if the drop is a result of an update.
The following are reasons why a penalty could be placed on your website:
1. Hacked websites
2. Facile content
3. Spam
4. Keyword padding
5. Cloaked website
6. Redirection
7. Comment spam
8. Impact links
9. Hidden text
10. Paid links
11. Creating pages for fraud
12. Doorway Pages
13. A structured Data Problem
Hacked website:
Most websites, after being hacked, contain some hostile content that goes against Google’s terms of service. The web owner has to ensure that the website’s security is strong. This is to avoid putting users in danger of fraud or other personal information theft. A hacked website will be penalized by Google if discovered.
Google takes its security seriously; you should remove all forms of hostile content from the website. You also have to carry out proper cleaning after recovery from the hack.
Facile Content:
Having good content will always bring traffic and organic growth to your web page. So, creating content that has little value to the visitors could make Google penalize you.
It is advisable to create content that is engaging and helps to answer a lot of questions. Content that could bring penalties is promotional links or duplicated content etc.
Spam:
Spam-like cloaked pages, and Scrapped content will bring fast punishment to your website. It saves you a lot of stress when you follow the proper terms of service of Google. There is nothing like having a website that provides users with reliable information and experience. Sometimes, it can be annoying when you open a website and see links jumping here and there. It doesn’t pay to deceive your visitors and put them in a state of confusion.
Spam doesn’t help your website grow. In the long run, you might lose the web page.
Keyword Padding:
The use of too many keywords could also attract punishment from Google. The usage of words should sound natural and easy to read by visitors. You won’t like to open a website to read about something and end up confused. You should use words that are easy to understand. There is no meter to guide your word usage. You just have to control it yourself.
Be careful with your keyword usage. It will go a long way for your website. If you need to target keywords for ranking purposes, hire a professional keyword research company to help out.
Cloaked Website:
It is an act of creating multiple versions of a particular web page. This act is used to manipulate a website on search results to bring more traffic. Google takes this act seriously, and the punishment is severe.
If a website is caught carrying out this act, the person could get a full ban.
Redirection:
This is another act that could make Google punish a website. Redirects are used to carry users or visitors to another content or website.
This act tricks visitors who click or search for a particular content but see something different from what they searched for. More like a clickbait
If Google spots such an act, they could carry a manual action on such a website.
Comment spam:
Comment spam is an act whereby irrelevant comments are not needed in a blog. Most times, this comment comes with links to another website.
This act is dangerous and bad for one’s website. Although it is used to boost the traffic of the page, Google can take action on such acts if seen.
Web owners can prevent such acts on their websites by using some plugins that will help block such acts.
Impact links:
Impact links are links that are artificially created by the web owner or someone else on the website. When Google sees such links on your website, they could penalize the whole website and collect all links.
Google believes that such links are ill-gotten.
Hidden text:
Hidden text is an act of hiding text from readers by changing the fonts to color to blend with the website’s background color. Web owners also use other techniques to hide text from their visitors or users.
The hidden text could bring punishment from Google as they would see the text as spam.
Content Theft:
A lot of people go about stealing content from different blogs or websites and uploading them on their own. It always pays to make your content original rather than just going about stealing ideas. It is necessary to have content that brings value to the visitor or user. An engaging post will drag more traffic to your website.
One could be punished for content theft by Google if caught.
Paid Links:
This is another activity that could make a web owner be penalized by Google. A lot of people believe that paid links are a cost-effective way to boost search rankings, but if Google discovers you’re doing it, you’ll face a penalty. The law is no one is allowed to buy or sell links in such a way there will be an increase in the ranking. We have seen a few companies being banned for violating such terms of service.
If you need quality links to your site, go and buy guest post services, instead. Even in today’s disposition, guest posting still works very well.
Creating Website for Fraud:
This act is a no for Google. Google takes its security very seriously, and creating a website to carry out such an act will bring a penalty. Users are in danger if they go to such a website as they drop most of their details without knowing the consequences.
You will notice certain weird behaviors on the web page, such as injecting new ads or pop-ups onto pages or replacing existing ads on a page with others, or promoting or installing software.
Doorway Pages:
A doorway page is created on a website to link visitors to other pages that have zero or no meaning to the user. They are used to add extra keywords to a website and increase its ranking.
Doorway pages are often easy to spot because they were generated mainly for search engines rather than humans. A doorway page may be copied from another high-ranking page, but this is likely to cause the search engine to flag the page as a duplicate and remove it from the search engine results.
Doorway pages are also commonly used by sites that keep a blacklist of URLs known to be spam-infested, such as Facebook.
If Google spots this on your website, you could be punished for violating the terms of service.
A Structured Data Problem:
Structured Data could bring punishment to a website from Google. Google needs to be able to read the data on your website. If they can’t, your page will be flagged. This is an issue because if Google cannot read your data, you won’t be able to get reviews and tags.
It also helps you to get a good display on the search engine. A lot of website owners tend to manipulate their data. They believe that it brings an increase in the search ranking and more traffic.
How to fix link related issues
Links bring a lot of problems to website owners. Links are very important when it comes to ranking on the search engine. A lot of web owners engage in the buying and selling of links which brings punishment to them when detected.
The following are ways to avoid link issues on your website:
Anchor text:
Web owner needs to check their anchor text. The clickable text in a hyperlink is known as anchor text. Although it is possible to change the color and underline through HTML code, blue, underlined anchor text is the most common because it is the web standard. Anchor text keywords are one of many signals used by search engines to determine the topic of a web page.
Web owner needs to check their anchor reports to know if they are not violating any Google policy.
Referring domains:
The Referring domains report can assist you in identifying websites that are specifically designed to sell links. The main feature of such websites is the large number of sites to that which they link (related to the size of a website).
The referring domain is where your backlinks come from, and backlinks are links on other websites that point back to your site.
If you have more backlink numbers than domain, it is going to get the attention of Google. This is why it is very important to check your domain report.
How to resolve a penalty on your website
Most website owners do not know they are violating some terms of service. That is why Google sends alert messages to their respective emails. This is to inform them about being carried out by Google on their website. It is important for users to check their mail and also their reports to know if there is an issue.
The following are ways you can resolve Google penalties on your website:
To solve a manual action, the following are the things you will have to do according to Google:
1. Expand the report’s manual action description panel, For more details.
2. Look for the pages that have been flagged by Google.
3. See what type of issue it is and why it has been flagged by Google.
4. Try to fix all the issues on all the affected pages.
5. Ensure that Google can access the affected pages.
6. Select Request Review in this report once all of the issues listed in the report have been resolved on all pages. Describe your fixes in your request for reconsideration. Your request must explain the issue on the website, you have to tell them how you fix the issue and document the outcome.
7. When you send your request, you will receive a review confirmation message to let you know that it is being reviewed; do not resubmit your request until you have received a final decision on your outstanding request.
Reconsideration reviews can take several days or weeks, though in some cases, such as requests for link-related reconsideration, it may take longer than usual. When Google receives your request, they will send you an email to let you know it’s active. When the review is finished, you will also receive an email.