Beware: 12 Things That Will Cause Google to Penalize Your Site
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 9:34 am
Most website owners would like to see their website in the top five Goggle search results for relevant keywords and terms (or at least in the top 10 sites displayed on the first page of search results). To achieve this you need to invest in SEO , conduct keyword research, research the competition, develop a strategy that will enable your website to achieve the desired ranking, and then perform the required work in the most efficient and professional manner.
SEO is an extremely dynamic field, things that work well today may not work tomorrow, but every SEO professional can list several basic things to pay attention to, things that will help improve your website's ranking and others that can hurt it. Goggle openly states that its policy is to penalize websites that have taken unacceptable SEO measures or have been deemed inadequate in one way or another.
In this post we have gathered for you 12 things to keep in mind, things to avoid in order to prevent your website from falling in search results rankings or even disappearing from them altogether.
Duplicate content and unauthorized use of images
Original and high quality content is one of the main pillars of SEO, anyone who makes use of content published by others is not only infringing copyright but also risks causing serious damage to their website when it comes to Goggle rankings.
The need to oman phone number library continually add new, high quality content leads many website owners to turn to professional content writers. It is vital to ensure that the content you purchase is original, you can search Google for excerpts of the text to check if they already exist on another website. Using someone else’s content is called “plagiarism” and there are tools you can use to avoid falling victim to it such as SmallSEOHools , CopyScape and Quetext . It is also important to avoid republishing content that already appears on another of your website’s pages.
Check out this excellent resource guide for more information on plagiarism .
Unauthorized use of images is also a big no-no as far as Google is concerned. It is critical that you avoid using images without the consent of the copyright owners. Sometimes permission is granted to anyone who posts a credit directly below an image or infographic – be sure to give such credit where appropriate. In one of our previous posts we provided a list of high-quality commercial image stocks.
Hidden content and links
In the past, it was possible to publish content that Google's robots would take into account while keeping it hidden from the eyes of website visitors (these actions are known as "black hat SEO"). One simple way to do this is to paint the text fonts the same color as the background they appear on.
Links can also be cloaked, for example, anchor word links painted the same color as the text around them or single pixel links. A website on which there is cloaked content and/or hidden links will eventually be penalized, so it is essential to ensure that what visitors and search engines see is the same.
Spam links
Inbound links give your website credit and contribute to it getting higher rankings. This is because such links prove that your website is considered some sort of authority. SEO specialists work to build banks of inbound links but it is important to remember that links can differ greatly in value and there are links that can even be harmful. Google identifies spam links and penalizes websites found to be contaminated by them. At Google there is a “manual spam action” division that works to detect and punish websites with “unnatural link patterns”.
You can track links to and from your website using the Google Webmaster Tool. There are also tools designed especially to detect spam links, using the best ones requires payment but there are free trial options.
Affiliate sites with no real value
Affiliate marketing is effective and popular. There is nothing wrong with creating high-quality websites that refer visitors to other sites where they can make purchases. Google identifies such websites and will give them high rankings only if they offer content of real value.
Low quality content
In one of our previous posts we discussed the importance of high-quality content. It is essential that the need to add new content does not lead you to compromise on quality. Google hates content with no real value, as well as poorly written texts with grammatical errors, long and incoherent sentences, etc.
Excessive and unnatural use of keywords
It is natural that anyone searching Google for a certain word or term will find web pages containing them. SEO is based on promoting keywords and phrases that are identified as those for which high rankings are sought. Once we have established a list of keywords and terms that we want to promote, it is essential that we incorporate them in the most effective way on the relevant pages of our website. It is essential to refrain from using these keywords and phrases unnaturally, adding them where they are not needed, or unnecessarily emphasizing them over and over again.
Pages with abundant outbound links
SEO is a three-sided pyramid: one is the overall quality of the website (content, code, loading speed, etc.), another is visitor traffic patterns, and the third is the quality of incoming and outgoing links. The value of a link is determined by several parameters such as the authority and trust rank of the web page they are located on, where on the page they appear (a title, by relevant anchor words, where in the text, etc.), whether it is a link exchange, etc. The number of outgoing links from a given page greatly influences the value of such links. An incoming link from a page that contains too many links can even harm your website.
Links to malicious websites
Google has very early on become known as a search engine that follows a strict moral code. This does not mean that Google acts as some sort of web “police force,” but there are websites that Google considers unscrupulous – pornography or gambling websites, for example. Links from such websites can harm your website’s ranking.
punishment-google
Covert
Cloaking – Showing One Version of Content to Search Engine Crawlers and Another to Visitors
We have already discussed the bad practice of displaying content on a website in a way that causes search engine bots to be exposed to one version while visitors see another. Cloaking (or hidden text) was widely used by SEO professionals in the past; hidden text was used to stack a web page with keywords without overloading visitors. In addition to using text that is the same color as the background, it is possible to hide text using hidden divs in CSS, hidden elements using javascript, and more. It is essential that you ensure that your website does not contain hidden text because Google bots will eventually unravel such attempts and your website will be penalized accordingly.
SEO is an extremely dynamic field, things that work well today may not work tomorrow, but every SEO professional can list several basic things to pay attention to, things that will help improve your website's ranking and others that can hurt it. Goggle openly states that its policy is to penalize websites that have taken unacceptable SEO measures or have been deemed inadequate in one way or another.
In this post we have gathered for you 12 things to keep in mind, things to avoid in order to prevent your website from falling in search results rankings or even disappearing from them altogether.
Duplicate content and unauthorized use of images
Original and high quality content is one of the main pillars of SEO, anyone who makes use of content published by others is not only infringing copyright but also risks causing serious damage to their website when it comes to Goggle rankings.
The need to oman phone number library continually add new, high quality content leads many website owners to turn to professional content writers. It is vital to ensure that the content you purchase is original, you can search Google for excerpts of the text to check if they already exist on another website. Using someone else’s content is called “plagiarism” and there are tools you can use to avoid falling victim to it such as SmallSEOHools , CopyScape and Quetext . It is also important to avoid republishing content that already appears on another of your website’s pages.
Check out this excellent resource guide for more information on plagiarism .
Unauthorized use of images is also a big no-no as far as Google is concerned. It is critical that you avoid using images without the consent of the copyright owners. Sometimes permission is granted to anyone who posts a credit directly below an image or infographic – be sure to give such credit where appropriate. In one of our previous posts we provided a list of high-quality commercial image stocks.
Hidden content and links
In the past, it was possible to publish content that Google's robots would take into account while keeping it hidden from the eyes of website visitors (these actions are known as "black hat SEO"). One simple way to do this is to paint the text fonts the same color as the background they appear on.
Links can also be cloaked, for example, anchor word links painted the same color as the text around them or single pixel links. A website on which there is cloaked content and/or hidden links will eventually be penalized, so it is essential to ensure that what visitors and search engines see is the same.
Spam links
Inbound links give your website credit and contribute to it getting higher rankings. This is because such links prove that your website is considered some sort of authority. SEO specialists work to build banks of inbound links but it is important to remember that links can differ greatly in value and there are links that can even be harmful. Google identifies spam links and penalizes websites found to be contaminated by them. At Google there is a “manual spam action” division that works to detect and punish websites with “unnatural link patterns”.
You can track links to and from your website using the Google Webmaster Tool. There are also tools designed especially to detect spam links, using the best ones requires payment but there are free trial options.
Affiliate sites with no real value
Affiliate marketing is effective and popular. There is nothing wrong with creating high-quality websites that refer visitors to other sites where they can make purchases. Google identifies such websites and will give them high rankings only if they offer content of real value.
Low quality content
In one of our previous posts we discussed the importance of high-quality content. It is essential that the need to add new content does not lead you to compromise on quality. Google hates content with no real value, as well as poorly written texts with grammatical errors, long and incoherent sentences, etc.
Excessive and unnatural use of keywords
It is natural that anyone searching Google for a certain word or term will find web pages containing them. SEO is based on promoting keywords and phrases that are identified as those for which high rankings are sought. Once we have established a list of keywords and terms that we want to promote, it is essential that we incorporate them in the most effective way on the relevant pages of our website. It is essential to refrain from using these keywords and phrases unnaturally, adding them where they are not needed, or unnecessarily emphasizing them over and over again.
Pages with abundant outbound links
SEO is a three-sided pyramid: one is the overall quality of the website (content, code, loading speed, etc.), another is visitor traffic patterns, and the third is the quality of incoming and outgoing links. The value of a link is determined by several parameters such as the authority and trust rank of the web page they are located on, where on the page they appear (a title, by relevant anchor words, where in the text, etc.), whether it is a link exchange, etc. The number of outgoing links from a given page greatly influences the value of such links. An incoming link from a page that contains too many links can even harm your website.
Links to malicious websites
Google has very early on become known as a search engine that follows a strict moral code. This does not mean that Google acts as some sort of web “police force,” but there are websites that Google considers unscrupulous – pornography or gambling websites, for example. Links from such websites can harm your website’s ranking.
punishment-google
Covert
Cloaking – Showing One Version of Content to Search Engine Crawlers and Another to Visitors
We have already discussed the bad practice of displaying content on a website in a way that causes search engine bots to be exposed to one version while visitors see another. Cloaking (or hidden text) was widely used by SEO professionals in the past; hidden text was used to stack a web page with keywords without overloading visitors. In addition to using text that is the same color as the background, it is possible to hide text using hidden divs in CSS, hidden elements using javascript, and more. It is essential that you ensure that your website does not contain hidden text because Google bots will eventually unravel such attempts and your website will be penalized accordingly.