In order to increase search traffic, SEO measures are extremely important. However, excessive SEO measures may result in a Google penalty, causing a sharp decrease in the number of accesses.
Additionally, even if you take appropriate measures, the possibility of receiving a penalty will not be zero, so it is important to understand the types of penalties and how to deal with each. In this article, we will explain what Google penalties are, what to do if you receive a penalty, and what you can do to avoid being penalized. Please use this as a reference to increase traffic from organic searches.
What is Google penalty?
A Google penalty is a penalty imposed for violating the ”
Webmaster Guidelines
” provided by Google. If a Google penalty is imposed, the search ranking will be severely lowered or the content will be removed from the index.
As a result, the traffic from
search engines
will be greatly reduced, and pages that have been penalized will have no chance of getting any traffic. Web developers must thoroughly avoid receiving Google penalties, as this will have a significant negative impact on customer attraction and sales.
Two types of Google penalties
There are two main types of Google penalties. Here, we will explain two Google penalties.
manual penalty
A manual penalty is a penalty that is imposed when a human directly looks at the site and determines that it violates the guidelines. If a manual penalty is imposed, you will be notified in the “Manual actions” section of Google Search Console. Manual penalties have a significant impact on a site, resulting in a drastic drop in search rankings and removal of indexes.
If a manual penalty is imposed, you will be notified in Google Search Console along with the cause, so you can take immediate action. Although the impact of penalties is large, it is easy to discover the cause of the penalty itself and take corrective measures as soon as possible.
automatic penalty
Automatic penalties are penalties that are automatically imposed by Google’s algorithm. If an automatic penalty is applied, it will rarely result in de-indexing, but it will result in a drop in search rankings. Unlike manual penalties, you will not be notified when an automatic penalty is imposed.
As a result, your site may be subject to an automatic penalty without even realizing it. In order to notice automatic penalties, you need to check the rankings of sites one by one using a search ranking tool, etc., and find sites or content that are suspected of having automatic penalties.
If you feel there is a risk of automatic penalties, check your site against Google’s guidelines, investigate the cause, and make improvements. Automatic penalties do not allow re-examination requests, so after you improve your site, you must encourage crawlers to visit your site and have the algorithm re-evaluate it.
You can determine that the penalty has been lifted when the search rankings you lost have returned.
Main causes of Google penalty
Google penalties are imposed by the two methods mentioned above and various causes. Among the many causes, we will explain two typical causes.
Content that lacks originality
Google values content that is unique and informative. This is because Google aims to be a search engine that helps users find the information they want. Google Search Central lists four types of content as unoriginal and low-quality.
- Automatic content generation
- Affiliate pages with little content
- Unauthorized content
- Guidance page
If you are being penalized and believe that the cause is low-quality content, check to see if any of the above applies and make improvements. We will discuss the details later, but please be aware that “automatic content generation” and “duplicated content” may occur unconsciously.
unnatural link
Google evaluates sites with many backlinks, but if the backlinks are malicious, they will be subject to a Google penalty.
However, it is very difficult to manually find out what kind of sites are receiving backlinks from. Therefore, if you receive a penalty due to unnatural links, check with a third-party tool such as the one below.
If you find a malicious backlink, there is a “link disavow tool” provided by Google. By using a link disavow tool, the target backlink will be disapproved and treated the same as nofollow.
On the other hand, you should be careful because posting irrelevant links in your content is also subject to penalties.
How to remove Google penalty
No matter how careful you are, there is still a chance that you will receive a Google penalty. Here we will explain how to cancel manual penalties and automatic penalties.
For manual penalties, send a request
For manual penalties, you can submit a request for reconsideration. Therefore, once you have corrected the causes listed in the manual penalty notification, please submit a request for reconsideration. After submitting your request, it will be reviewed again within a few days to weeks.
If your search rankings return to normal, you can consider that the penalty has been lifted. However, if the penalty is not lifted, you will receive a notification along with the reason, just like the first time. In this case, please try to improve your site to get the penalty lifted.
For information on how to improve each cause, please refer to the “Manual Countermeasures Report” in Google Console Help.
In case of automatic penalty, wait for re-examination
With automatic penalties, it is unclear why you were penalized or if you were penalized in the first place. Therefore, you need to refer to Google guidelines on your own and correct any suspicious parts.
The first thing to check is the latest algorithm update. If you find a site that seems to have been penalized immediately after the update, improve it so that it complies with the updated algorithm.
Also, unlike manual penalties, automatic penalties do not allow you to send a reconsideration request after site improvements. So you have to wait for it to be crawled and re-evaluated.
How to avoid receiving a Google penalty
I hope you understand that the damage caused by Google penalties to the number of site visits is very large, and that it takes a lot of effort to improve them. Here are five ways to avoid receiving a Google penalty.
- Create high-quality content
- Do not post unnatural links
- Block malicious links
- Delete low-quality content
- No redirects that deviate from the search intent
I will explain each in detail.
Create high-quality content
Create high-quality content to avoid Google penalties. High-quality content is content (pages) that include the following elements:
- Content that matches the user’s search intent
- Content that satisfies users so they don’t have to search again
- Content that is posted in advance of information that users may want in the future.
In this way, it is important to create content from the user’s perspective.
Do not post unnatural links
Backlinks are important from
an SEO
perspective, but as mentioned above, malicious links are subject to penalties. If you get backlinks from unrelated articles or buy backlinks from vendors, you are likely to be penalized.
Also, posting links to unrelated content is also subject to penalties.
Block malicious links
In rare cases, you may receive malicious backlinks. Malicious backlinks include links from spam sites and links from unrelated sites. If you receive these backlinks, you may be subject to penalties even if there is no action from you.
Use the third-party tools mentioned above to frequently check where you’re receiving backlinks. Malicious links can be blocked by using the above-mentioned “link disavow tool” provided by Google.
Delete low-quality content
Low-quality content refers to content that is automatically created or copied. You can check automatically created content by searching Google for “site:domain name”.
Check for duplicate content, empty content, or content that only contains images. If you have such content, please delete it as you may be subject to penalties.
No redirects that deviate from the search intent
If there is a page that redirects away from the search intent, you will be subject to a penalty. Typical examples include sites that are unrelated to the search term, or pages that redirect users to pages that are completely unrelated to their goals.
If there is a page that is redirecting, be sure to check whether it is redirecting to the page that matches the search intent.
Remove Google penalties before your search rankings change.
Be sure to remove Google penalties before your search rankings change. If your site contains content that has been penalized by Google, the search ranking of the entire site may drop as a result.
Additionally, in the case of automatic penalties, even if you try to improve your search ranking after it has changed, it is difficult to judge whether or not it has been improved. In order to notice penalties as soon as possible, it is essential to check them daily using search ranking checking tools as well as Google Search Console. If you find a site that is suspected of being penalized, take action immediately.
summary
In this article, we explained an overview of Google penalties, how to deal with them, and countermeasures. When a Google penalty is imposed, the number of accesses decreases significantly, resulting in a significant loss in customer acquisition and sales via the web. If you receive a Google penalty, make improvements as soon as possible based on this article and Google’s guidelines.
Also, to avoid receiving Google penalties, it is important to create high-quality content from the user’s perspective. Instead of trying to increase the number of accesses by force, try to create content that matches the search intent.