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Here are a few examples of content that can cause you to receive a penalty:

Spammy or low-quality content aka Panda penalty – Google expects unique content that adds value in some way. A few examples of low-quality content include scraped content, copied content and sneaky redirects. These practices can degrade the quality of your website, and Google will call you out on them.

Keyword stuffing – When your site receives a penalty for keyword stuffing, it means you’re using a lot of irrelevant keywords. This creates a bunch of “SEO static” that makes your website look unprofessional and spammy.

Garbage links – Garbage links are links on your website that have no recognizable value. Google can hit your site with a backlink penalty for Spammy links. Suck as ones from many link directories, are a good example of garbage links. These links often point to disreputable websites and are used to boost search engine rankings artificially.

Malicious software/code – Placing malicious software or code on your site is a good way to obtain a penalty. In addition to the Webmaster Guidelines, Google also has an Unwanted Software Policy. Google takes security very seriously. Violating the unwanted software policy can land you in serious hot water.

Too many spammy or low-quality backlinks – Here is a prime example of how yesterday’s SEO practices can get you a penalty today. Once upon a time, your website would rank just by getting as many backlinks as possible. However, as Google has evolved its search engine it only wants to ‘see’ high quality links that are relevant to your website. Nowadays, less can be more, and you will get better rankings with fewer links if they are high-quality backlinks.

Paid Links – If Google believes you paid for a link they will penalize you.

The fact that Google penalties are unique to each site makes it difficult to identify a universal duration for all penalties. There is no consistent formula for recovery. Major brands tend to recover faster because it is easy for them to identify and address errors while rebuilding their rank through clean SEO tactics. Small businesses and mom-and-pop outfits tend to suffer for longer.

Google Panda updates are focused primarily on ensuring that low quality and poor content web sites are pushed farther down the search results so that higher quality sites can receive priority exposure. It was first released in 2011 as a one off algorithmic update, but has since been incorporated into the Google’s main search algorithm.

Google Panda penalizes sites that do not meet their high quality standards. This encompasses a lot of different things and can even include poor spelling and grammar. As it is now active at all times it’s imperative that the quality of the content you publish is excellent at all times.

The Google Penguin updates primarily seek to prevent various types of search engine spam (also known as spamdexing or Black Hat SEO) from being rewarded in the form of higher-placed search engine results.

Search engine spam penalized by Google Penguin can include things like keyword stuffing, link spamming, the use of invisible text on web pages, duplication of copyrighted content from high-ranking web sites and more.

Some of the most common reasons Google issues a link penalty include all the following:

Bad neighbourhoods

A bad neighbourhood refers is a collection of interlinked websites or link directories that have been penalised in the past. Sharing your server with a large neighbourhood of websites that have a penalty history could put your site in jeopardy of being demoted, no matter how ethical your own links are.

Similarly, backlinks that point to your website from a bad neighbourhood can harm your site’s authority, so keeping an eye on who is linking to you is a must.

Paid Links

Buying links to manipulate your site’s position in SERPs includes exchanging goods or services for links and trading money for links. Such actions are classed as a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and are likely to result in a penalty.

Link networks

The phrase ‘link networks’ refers to multiple websites that exist with the sole intention of increasing the ranking of websites in SERPs. The content found on link networks is rarely high quality as, by their very nature, most link networks are built purposely to dupe Google.

Google does understand that webmasters cannot always control who links to their site, and have a link disavowal process. Google’s link disavowal tool allows publishers to tell Google that they don’t want certain links to their site from external sites to be considered when Google’s searchbots are indexing their site.

This is a tool that should be used carefully, and there is no guarantee that Google will remove a link simply because you ask them to. If they feel the link exists because, for example, you participated in a link exchange scheme, they may choose to refuse your disavow request and issue a penalty instead. As this is a manual system you can, however, submit a statement with your redetermination if, for example, the links were placed by an outside party without your knowledge (eg: a Black Hat SEO agency)

Google will allow those penalized – either manually or via an algorithmic update like Panda or Penguin a chance to recover, and many sites do. Often the penalty has the effect Google intended it to; force the webmaster to clean up their act and better adhere to the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Unfortunately, in the event of a Google penalty, many webmasters panic and start ‘fixing’ things that aren’t actually broken, often making things worse.  In order to form a recovery plan, it is important to first diagnose the source of the penalty. This can be a difficult process as there are so many factors to examine and the ‘fixes’ required to recover a site to good standing vary from site to site. But, in the right hands, almost any site can recover and be better than ever before.

De-indexing is when for whatever reason, a website, webpage, or content of some kind is removed from Google’s Index and will not show in search at all, for any keyphrase, or even, sometimes, for the name of the site. It is the harshest form of censure Google applies.

De-indexing is a manual action, so a message is sent via Google Webmaster Tools to inform the site owner of the action. This can be a very sudden thing and a site’s traffic can – and is likely to – drop rapidly. It is not the end of the world though – even if it feels like it at the time. A de-indexed site can be restored to the SERPs once the reasons for action have been addressed. These sites can even regain their previous rankings or better with a disciplined, white hat SEO strategy in place.

Algorithmic penalties – those ‘handed down’ by Google Penguin, Google Panda or one of the other algorithm updates Google issues on a regular basis are tough. There is no notification sent in the way that it is when a manual penalty in place and there is no way to request a redetermination. It can indeed even be hard to be sure your site has been penalized at all.

The best way to check if your website was penalized by an automatic penalty is via a detailed review of Google Analytics, your traffic patterns and the content of your site.  A drop in traffic during the dates that Google released an algorithmic change is a good indicator you were hit. If you believe you have been affected, but are not sure contact us. our expert SEO team will conduct an extensive analysis on your behalf.

The visibility index is an indicator for the visibility of a website in the Google ranking. The visibility is determined on the basis of rankings of the website within a certain data set from keywords. However, the visibility index is only one out of many that are important for SEO.