What is a Google penalty

A penalty in SEO is when a site has been manually or automatically sanctioned by Google, or, speaking broadly, by other engines. This means the degradation of the positioning in the search results without any visual indication for the Internet user. Here are some pointers on what a Google penalty is and how to avoid it in your SEO strategy.

The Panda Penalty

This algorithm is from 2011 in the United States, because too many webmasters and SEOs were abusing low quality content. Basically, the Google Panda filter was designed to fight against duplicate content, content farms, cloaking, scraping and content spinning.

The manual penalty

As its name suggests, the manual penalty, which Google calls more precisely “manual action” is often the result of a human decision. A member of Google’s Quality Team decides to apply a penalty to a site that has violated the rules. This type of penalty generally concerns the presence of artificial backlinks or a questionable netlinking strategy.

The Penguin penalty

Implemented since April 2012, the Penguin algorithm is responsible for analyzing the link profile of a website and assessing its quality, relevance but especially its authenticity. To identify a site that abusively uses netlinking for the benefit of its ranking, the Penguin algorithm combs through the site’s link profile, its anchors of the links and its backlinks.

Is there a way to know?

How to know if your site has been penalized by Google? Several clues can alert you to a possible Google penalty: The positioning of your site which falls sharply and you have no more traffic, your site does not appear in Google on your main keywords, some of your pages have disappeared from the SERPS (Google results pages). Depending on the type of penalty applied, you will find information in the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT).

A few tips to avoid risking it:

Don’t abuse aggressive and easily identifiable unnatural buying techniques. Do not over-optimize, write for the readers and bring information. Do not make empty content, choose quantity. Respect the users and their navigation. Don’t try to fool Google with aggressive techniques that may work for a while, but will be detected sooner or later.

Remember: Google has enacted rules of good practice for referencing. To enforce them, it does not hesitate to punish sites that would like to ignore them. So, it’s best to play along.