Due to rising internet spams, Google is on an uncompromising mission to penalize websites. It aims to provide accurate information to its users which are original and also spam free. This is the biggest reason Google keeps on tweaking and improving search engine algorithms and ensures to give the best exposure to its users.
What’s a Google Penalty?
Google Penalty : Since the year 2000, Google has been changing its search algorithm quite extensively. Initially, Google had to face tough competition from other search engines like Yahoo or Bing but over the past few years, Google has managed to capture its competition and has become a household name when it comes to searching anything over the internet. The reason for such high popularity of Google is its highly developed search engine algorithm that provides unique, quality and accurate content to users. The company has also been working to refine its search results quality and also eliminate poor quality irrelevant content from its search engine results. A term known as page rank has also been introduced to rank the pages in a more meaningful and usable form.
Google Penalties- How Google Recognizes A Penalty?
There are two main types of penalties from Google i.e. Manual or Automatic. The reasons for both penalties can be different. Google can levy manual or automatic penalties on a website if it is not ranking well. Under manual penalty, Google can send a notification to the website domain owner before kicking it out from search results. It is a lenient approach but in an automatic penalty, Google simply penalizes your website without prior notice and you suddenly experience a drop in website traffic. Here are some of the clues that indicate that Google search engine algorithmic penalty has been levied on your website.
- Running a website search, for example, site:domain.com doesn’t generate any search results
- Page rank of your website has dropped drastically within few days
- Your website page doesn’t come if you search it over Google
Reasons Why Google Can Penalize Your Website
There can be various reasons why Google can penalize your website and some of the reasons are mentioned below.
- Unnatural linking:Linking those websites that are not relevant to your website is known as unnatural linking. Many SEO experts and website owners try to force an unnatural link which is bad practice according to Google and can result in a penalty.
- Content duplicity: Duplicate content can quickly loose value in Google search. There are various websites that create duplicate copied content on their website. Copied content not only creates copyright infringement problem but also lowers search engine rankings. Keyword stuffing is also not welcomed by Google.
- Down Website:if your website is having bugs or stays down for a long time then Google can start suspending your website in search results for a while.
Conclusion
With the beginning of Google’s penguin update, many websites have been wiped out from Google’s search engine results. These search engines have been on the hit list majorly due to poor content, forced optimizers and use of wrong SEO techniques. Considering such facts it is important for online companies and marketers to understand why and how Google penalizes website and take steps to avoid it.