Avoiding Google Penalties
While one will find numerous SEO experts in their circle, making sure that the website is keeping up with everything that does not get flagged by Google is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Sometimes people don’t even realize that their site has been penalized. Well, some obvious factors can help identify whether a site is penalized by Google or not. Articles not getting ranked, page one positions going down to page two or even three, no result on running a site search are a few of them.
And once any site is penalized by Google, the struggle that follows to revert it can be quite an ordeal. So, along with making sure that one’s content is engaging and correctly optimized, there are a bunch of factors that one ought to take care of.
Something About Those Links
An SEO specialist might say that buying a few links is actually of the easiest ways around for improving the site ranking. But, what they won’t (many don’t agree though) is that it has the potential to get your site penalized.
What happens is whenever anyone buys links, Google considers it as an act of manipulating the Page ranking. So, it is also essential that one buys healthy links for their site. According to VM Interactive One bad link can do substantial harm. Therefore, be very careful in picking the links for a website.
Another critical factor is the reciprocal links. For those of you who do not know, reciprocal links are when the two sites exchange links with each other. That may be a smart move but only up to some extent. Excessive reciprocal links are always bad. The God of Algorithms (Google of course) might see it as an act of manipulation. So, beware of that.
Many times, when the site is not being regularly checked or updated, broken links accumulate. Many high traffic sites are always removing and changing links regularly. One should always keep track of the broken links (if any) and make sure to remove them as soon as they are detected. Also, make sure that the links provided are not hidden as it might even become a reason for suspicion and end up doing damage to the site.
Even Google Has No Tolerance For Plagiarism
Well, this one was obvious, wasn’t it? Google has no patience for duplicate content just like any other university professor. Use content spinning tools, change phrases but the gist of the content will still be intact. A single duplicated article on your site can make the months-long hard work go to waste. So, refrain from using duplicate content at any cost. Better leave the site as it is than using duplicate content, take our word for it.
Keyword Stuffing
As much as one feels the urge to use as many keywords as possible for improving the ranking of the site, we hate to break it to you that this is a suicidal move. And that is the reason for a plethora of sites getting penalized by Google.
Loading time of the site
This might take one by surprise, but Google too hates waiting. If a site is taking a good deal of time to load and visitors end up going back instead of waiting, consider it penalised already. Using large files (for many sites, it is their image files that are large) can substantially increase the loading time of the site. And it is not just that, some factors yield to the slow speed of a website. Troubleshooting right away is the best way to go about it. Using a caching plugin will also do.
Mobile-Friendliness Of The Site
With an ever-increasing number of users using their phones to do things once imagined to be only done through a laptop or PC, creating websites that are mobile friendly is now a norm. Make sure that the site’s mobile version is also user-friendly. A poorly designed site for the mobile is frowned upon and can’t get away with it for long.
Excessive Ads
If a site has way too many ads on a page, it has dug its own grave. Excessive ads are never a good option for any website. Avoid overdoing them and stay clean.
There is a myriad of other reasons for Google penalty. The ones I have mentioned are a few of the common ones. Make sure that you are at least not committing these cardinal sins and you’ll do just fine.
