For most of the online business, the search engine is very important, but achieving a high rank in Google is not as easy it sounds. Therefore, many SEO companies are crossing the link-process to the limit. As a result, many websites and webpages get penalized for violating Google’s guidelines. According to a report, over 400,000 manual actions are taken every month by Google and myriad websites are being penalized by the algorithmic updates. The consequence of receiving a manual action is devastating which leads to lost organic search visibility, traffic, and revenue. Google penalty recovery is a difficult and complicated task, but it can help you gain your previous rank.
A penalty occurs when your website is being marked by a manual review team, or it gets negatively impacted by an algorithm update, which results in your website dropping in SERPs, seeing less traffic, or even gets completely removed in an extreme case.
1. Cloaking and/or Sneaking redirects: Cloaking is an act of showing different pages to the users than that have been shown to Google. Sneaky redirect also sends the user to a different page than is shown to Google. Hence, both actions violate the webmaster’s rules and guidelines.
• Partial matches that are affecting a portion of the site.
• Site-wide matches which affect the whole website.
2. Cloaking: First Click Free Violation- This Cloaking penalty is processed against those websites which show
full content to Google but restricts content which is viewable to users.
3. Cloaked Images: Cloaking applies to the images too. For example, images that:
• Are obscured by different image
• Are different from the image which is served
• Redirect the users away from the image
all these things would be considered as cloaking.
4. Hacked Site: Hackers are constantly looking up for the website so that they can exploit these websites through injecting malicious links and content. This is often cloaked and very difficult to find. Hence, when Google picks up on this, a notification that “this site is hacked” is sent into the Search results. This often leads to a demotion in the organic search results. Also, website penalty recovery is hard to meet the previous ranking.
5. Hidden Text: When Google picks up your website because hidden text then this leads to a penalty.
This penalty also comes in two types:
• Partial matches which affect a portion of your site
• Site-wide matches which affect the whole websites
6. Pure Spam: Unlike any other penalty, no one can ignore when it comes to pure spam. It is reserved for those websites that are engaged in spammy techniques, including the use of automated gibberish, negative content, and cloaking, which leads to violation of webmaster guidelines.
7. Spammy free hosts: There is no such thing like free hosting and Google has taken manual action against the entire hosting services working for free. Hence, there is no point to take that risk.
8. Spammy Structured mark-up: If you don’t follow the rich snippet guidelines and mark-up content is invisible to users or contain misleading content, then you will be penalized.
This penalty also comes in two types:
• Partial matches which affect a portion of the website
• Side-wide matches that affect the whole website.
9. Unwanted links to your website: This is the most common penalty. The main cause is always the same: buying links or participating in link schemes to boost organic SERPs. Doing this is a clear violation of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.
10. User-generated spam: User-Generated spam is usually found in the forum, comments, guestbook pages, and user profiles.
You can’t take advantage of Google if you want to build a solid web presence without having understood the Google webmaster guidelines. If you are also looking to open a website, then you must keep these Google penalties in mind that Google imposes on offenders.
