In Google’s Penalty Box: How to Recognize, Prevent, and Recover from Google’s Sanctions

Why Does Google Penalize?

The penalties Google imposes range in consequence from barely noticeable to a complete loss of the website’s ranking, which is very unpleasant in any case. Google will penalize a page for violations of the Google Webmaster Guidelines, the use of black-hat techniques, or for negligence, such as insufficient website security, unstructured data markup, or other technical issues.

In general, Google will penalize a page for trying to deceive the search engine or providing a poor user experience.

Google’s penalties can be divided into two different groups: manual actions by Google’s spam team and algorithmic penalties.

It might be worth mentioning that Google, in its communications to the outside world, no longer talks about ‘penalties’. According to Google, there are no penalties they impose on websites. They either refer to ‘manual actions’ or ‘algorithmic demotions’. This seems to be a PR move by Google, as Google has received a lot of negative publicity in the past regarding ‘penalizing’ websites.

Particularly with the first rough versions of the link algorithm called ‘Penguin’, there were many casualties. Some companies that perhaps relied too heavily on organic search traffic even went bankrupt in 2013 and 2014. This is a controversial topic. In some cases, Google has successfully eliminated spam sites that add no value to the internet, but as the saying goes, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, so ‘innocent’ websites have also been affected by such an algorithm. Not to mention so-called ‘negative SEO’ where competitors make life difficult for each other by directing bad links at each other. For a publicly traded American multinational, these are not pleasant stories to be associated with, hence this change in terminology. In this article, I don’t want to pay much more attention to semantic games, what to call something. Whatever Google calls it, there are indeed millstones that can hang around a website’s neck, delivered by Google.

Manual Penalties

If you suspect that your page has been penalized by Google, the first place you should look is Google Search Console, the tool Google uses to communicate with webmasters. If your page is subject to a manual penalty executed by a Google employee, this will be clearly communicated to you via a message through this medium (if you don’t receive this message but experience a severe impact on ranking, it could be an algorithmic penalty, which is discussed next). This message will include the reason(s) for the penalty, as well as a nudge in the right direction on how to solve this problem and have the penalty lifted. If you believe you’ve resolved the issue, through a cleanup of potentially ‘spammy’ links, improvement of structured data markup, or fixing insufficient security, you can request a review.

In this request for review, you should indicate why you think your page received a penalty, what you’ve done to solve this problem, and how you’ll ensure it won’t happen again. If a particular SEO service provider was responsible for the error, include this in the request as well. If the request is accepted, good, then you’ve found the error and managed to solve it correctly. Of course, the request can also be rejected; don’t let this discourage you, it simply means you need to do some additional cleanup of the page or that a reformulation of your request for review is needed.

Algorithmic Penalties

In addition to manual penalties, there are also algorithmic penalties, which are a bit more complicated. An algorithmic penalty will occur after an algorithm update, and you won’t receive a notification about it, but you’ll only notice its impact on ranking by reviewing the data. A significant drop in ranking (multiple pages to complete disappearance from search results) are strong indicators that your page is affected by an algorithmic penalty.

If you believe an algorithmic penalty is the cause of the decline, you’ll need to investigate which part of the algorithm conflicts with your page. Based on this, clean up your entire page and remove or resolve the elements you think are causing the problem. There is no possibility for review, and you’ll have to check the page statistics after a new update to see if the problem is resolved. Fortunately, since the inclusion of the so-called Penguin and Panda filters in the core algorithm, it updates itself twice a day (almost real-time), so you won’t have to wait long.

A handy free and non-committal tool you could use to analyze algorithmic problems is the so-called Panguin tool.

The Panguin tool overlays known algorithmic penalties, for example, those communicated by Google or noticed by the notorious SEO expert Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, onto a graph of organic traffic obtained from Google Analytics. This way, you can see if your organic traffic suddenly starts to decline as a result of a publicly known change. You can then consult the corresponding literature presented by Panguin to actually start solving the problem.

Major algorithmic cleanup

It’s important to do the aforementioned cleanup meticulously and certainly not rush it; make sure it’s done properly.

If you think the problem is link-related, you need to scrutinize the links of your page. It’s important to get a good overview of the backlinks pointing to your website. You can use tools like Ahrefs, Majestic, SEMrush, and Link Research Tools for this. Don’t forget the list that Google Search Console can provide you. Once you’ve compiled this list, determine which links are good and which are bad for your website. This is a challenging task, and recognizing good or bad in this case requires some experience. Ask for help from someone with more relevant knowledge when needed.

Links from spammy Chinese websites, for example, is a problem I encounter quite often in practice.

Eventually, you’ll have a list of bad links, and you’ll start a Disavow procedure. You place the list of links in a text file, name it disavow.txt, and upload it in Google Search Console. This lets Google know that you’re disassociating from any connection with the (bad) links mentioned in this file, and they will no longer have a negative influence. Then try to actually have the links removed from the respective websites; for this, you need to contact the individual pages.

However, if you think the links are fine, and you notice a drop in ranking for a specific set of keywords, the problem might be content-related. Google probably believes that the content linked to those specific keywords is of low quality. This can be due to poor or duplicated content, or the presence of spam (unnecessary excessive repetition of keywords in your text, or invisible keywords through white text on a white background). First, run the content through a plagiarism checker, especially if you’re not the author of the text. If plagiarism is the case, rewrite the text. The ranking will soon recover if this was the culprit and the new document meets the requirements.

Finally, Google might find that a certain link structure on your page comes across as spam. Review how links are placed on the page and clean this up. This includes updating linked text and cleaning up unnecessary and duplicate links.

Avoiding the dance

Dutch websites have experienced a milder approach in the past than, for example, American websites in lucrative markets during an algorithm update. But we won’t remain completely unscathed. Especially the use of link portals like Startpagina (clones) and the paid links on these pages will be a stumbling block for Google, as is already the case in America.

Prevention will always be better than cure, so it’s not a bad habit to always be on guard for spam-like link structures, polluting backlinks, and subpar content. Not only will this make your website much more user-friendly, but you’ll also avoid a lot of unnecessary stress by staying ahead of sanctions instead of having to solve the problems in question.

This guest blog is written by SEO specialist Romano Groenewoud, alias ‘SEOgeek‘. Worried that a Google penalty is hanging like a millstone around your website’s neck? Request the free, no-obligation custom SEO check. Especially for Contany blog readers, I will analyze your website’s situation free of charge and without obligation.