Bharat SainiLast Updated on May 17, 2019 by Bharat Saini
Everyone wants top rankings for their website in search engine result pages (SERPs), and webmasters often resort to wrong tactics in order to gain competitive advantage, in this, they end up penalizing their website for all the wrong reasons. If you too have recently been stuck by Google penalty, then you need to read further to know the reasons behind it. We have provided you key reasons for which your website may be penalized in 2019, and also the methods to fix them.
Every now and then, Google releases algorithmic updates that may hit some websites adversely. No matter what the reasons for the penalty, you can fix them by taking appropriate corrective steps.
We will begin our discussion with first understanding the Google manual penalties:
These are:
• Manual Penalty
• Penguin Penalty
Manual Penalty: When this penalty is imposed, you will receive a notification in your Google Webmaster Console. It means, someone at Google manually reviewed your links and did not find them to be of up to the mark. You will also be sent a personalized message by Google explaining the issue.
Penguin Penalty: This penalty may be imposed due to the following reasons:
• Many spamming links are present on the website
• Anchor text is over-optimized
• Your website has duplicate or thin content
Your website may be penalized by Google for a variety of reasons, including the below ones:
Link schemes: Your website should contain only authoritative and quality links. If you are involved in link spamming activities like link swaps and link circles, your website is likely to attract Google penalty in the year 2019.
Cloaking or sneaky redirects: This happens when you show different page to the user than what was shown to Google. This covers partial matches affecting the portions of your website and the sitewide matches that affect the whole of your website. Cloaked images: This includes serving images that:
• Are different from the image served
• Are obscured by another image
• Redirect the users away from the website
Hacked website: Hackers may exploit your website with WordPress and other content management systems to fill your website with malicious content and links. This will affect your organic search rankings. When this happens, you will receive a notification by Google stating that “This website is hacked”.
Spams: This includes the websites that aggressively engage in spammy techniques including scraped content and cloaking.
Here are some more red flags that you need to prevent penalty for your website by Google in 2019:
• Irrelevant and off topic backlinks
• Keyword dense content
• Repeated targeting of the same pages and anchor text
• Buying links from the websites with high page rank
Each penalty situation has its peculiar reasons and as such must be tackled with due care. If your website was penalized due to linking, remove the low-quality links pointing to your website.
Some link clean up tools that you can use for this purpose include the below ones:
• Link Detox
• SEMrush
• Kerboo
If your website was penalized due to duplicate content, stop accepting the content of other people.
Fixing the penalty issues:
Track down on the specifics on the algorithmic changes that affected your website. Google often doesn’t provide much information on such algorithmic changes. So, to get information on these algorithmic changes, review the sources of SEO news and the information provided by the experts over there. Also, review your website’s technical structure and fix issues related to robot.txt files and structural markup and mobile optimization issues.
After fixing the issues that resulted in the penalty on your website in the year 2019, submit it for reconsideration to Google. A Google employee will manually check your website and inform if you have done the needed changes and the penalty may be removed thereafter.
