With the advancement in technology, Google’s ways of upkeeping content quality and fairness are also taking new forms. While every business aims for stability in terms of its online presence, with the changing benchmarks, it struggles a lot as most of the strategies it employs to boost its online presence turn ineffective. This results in diminished visibility and decreased website traffic. If your site has also been the victim of Google’s penalties and changing policies, it’s time to make some amendments to your approach to crafting your online presence. In this blog post, we will learn how you can frame your SEO strategy to avoid Google penalties.
What is Google Penalty?
A Google penalty is a punishment for the website for using SEO tactics that violate the Webmaster’s Guidelines. Google penalty imposed on your website can result in:
- Ranking drop: A website’s ranking for targeted keywords may drop significantly
- Removal from search results: A website may be completely removed from search results
- Loss of traffic: A website may lose traffic, conversions, and credibility
Google’s penalty can be:
Algorithmic
Google updates its algorithm to offer the most relevant results to searchers. To fulfil this, Google releases updates to lower the ranking of pages that violate Google’s guidelines. Panda and Penguin are typical examples of Google’s algorithmic penalties.
Manual
Human reviewers on Google’s webspam team may manually review a website and issue a penalty.
Some examples of actions that can violate Google’s guidelines include:
Cloaking: Showing different pages to users than are shown to Google
- Sneaky redirects: Sending users to a different page than what is shown to Google
- Keyword stuffing: Using too many keywords
- Grammatical errors: Using grammatical errors
- Low-quality content: Providing low-quality content, such as thin pages or duplicate content
A manual penalty can last between 10 and 30 days, depending on how quickly the issue is fixed and a reconsideration request is submitted.
How to avoid Google penalties?
The idea of attracting Google penalties is a nightmare for any SEO practitioner or website owner. However, a change in the algorithm does not always mean you will be affected by it. There are preventive ways that you can follow to remain unaffected when Google brings algorithmic changes:
1. Gain Quality Backlinks
Google is becoming increasingly smart at identifying manipulative link schemes. It can surprisingly determine whether you have paid links, automated programs generating links in your content, excessive reciprocal linking, etc.
There are safer ways to earn a favourable ranking by acquiring natural, relevant, and high-quality backlinks from reputed websites.
To acquire such links you can try:
1. Guest blogging where you will have to write blogs for another websites in your niche and include link back to your website.
2. Find the broken links, form content to replace them and request webmasters to replace them.
3. You can try out unique and helpful content that ultimate guides, surveys, studies, etc.
4. Register your site on the online directories.
5. Write detailed testimonails for a product you love and send it to the brand for them to publish.
6. Use skyscraper technique where you have to find the content that is ranking high and has lot of backlinks. Now you have to identify where is the content lacking and create a superior content than it and attract more backlinks.
7. You can also choose to become source for the bloggers or reporters.
Regularly post helpful and original content
The purpose of posting high quality original content is to offer value to your website visitors. Duplicate content cannot do the same. So, while creating content for your website bear this in your mind that you have to bring something new that would be able to engage the readers. You will need a lot fo research and valuable insights to get into the topical themes.
Present your content in a degistable manner, for example, you can use bullet points or conversational tone.
Atlast, ensure you are timely updating your content with the changing data, studies, stats and industry developments.
Keep a check on the algorithm updates and ensure your SEO align with them
SEO is not set and forget practice. You have to regularly monitor the strategies you employed. Big SEO firms invest a lot on performance monitoring as this helps them stay informed of what are they upto. Google search console can come handy in helping you gain insights into the website performance and identify the potential risk area before anything goes wrong.
Avoid practices like creating doorway pages and thin content
Some website owners or SEO professional fall for the idea of focus on quantity rather than quality in their early days. There are plenty of content generating tools that can help you publish short form blogs or scrape content using other sources.
Now, this is not just solely bad from the SEO perspective but also reflect a poor image of your business in your audience’s perception.
In 2016, Google introduced Panda 4.0 algorithm to reduce the visibility of sites with low content quality and doorway pages in their search results. Did you know during this time Ebay lost of their organic rankings!
So, while creating content for your website make sure you are entirely outsourcing it or mass producing it as it could lead to off-branding.
To scale up both quantity and quality you should seek help of SEO Toronto professionals, they can work closely with you to understand the specific needs of your business and bring content that can provide high value to your readers.
They can also help you in keyword research, matching the search intent, optimla audience targeting and creating pillar pages or cornerstone content, etc.
Summing Up
Google penalties can significantly impact a website’s visibility and traffic. To avoid such penalties, it’s crucial to adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This involves creating high-quality, original content, building natural backlinks, and avoiding black-hat SEO tactics. By prioritizing user experience and ethical practices of SEO in Toronto, you can safeguard your website’s online presence and maintain a strong search engine ranking.
