The black hat SEO world is afraid of Google penalties. And why not? Google penalties can destroy the organic presence of websites with sudden drops in rankings.
Many webmasters mistakenly assume Google algorithm updates and penalties to be the same. However, they are both different.
Let’s clear the differences between algorithms and penalties. Also, let’s find out what Google penalties are and how they impact organic rankings.
What is a Google Penalty?
A Google penalty is an action taken by the Google webspam team in violation of the Webmaster guidelines.
Google Search Essentials is a set of technical requirements, spam policies, and key best practices that websites should follow.
Failure to follow these guidelines and creating policy-violating content leads to Google penalties. An algorithmic action can also be taken for user-generated spam, unnatural link profile, hidden links, and other types of malicious content.
Google uses both automated systems and human reviewers to detect web spam. Sites that violate spam policies for Google web searches may rank lower or not appear in results.
What Are the Types of Google Penalties?
Google applies the following penalties:
Site-Wide (Domain Level)
The site-wide penalty is the biggest nightmare for a webmaster. What happens when you wake up one morning to find your entire website delisted from search results? This is what happens in a site-wide penalty. It means that the penalty has been applied to the entire site. In some cases, your rankings are reduced drastically, such as when your site is shifted from page 1 to page 10. Sometimes, your site is not found on Google, even when you search for your brand name.
Keyword-Level or URL-Level
Under this penalty, Google lowers the ranking of your website for certain specific keywords or URLs. Your site’s organic positioning for other keywords or URLs remains unaffected. This is a search engine optimization penalty that can be overcome quite easily once you fix the issues impacting the penalty.
How Does Google Apply Penalties?
There are two ways through which Google applies penalties on websites:
Automatic
Google constantly updates its ranking algorithm, and new webspam tackling programs are launched every year. Panda, Penguin, and EMD are all such Google updates where the webspam algorithm was revised to include more instructions to penalize websites not following the Google search guidelines.
Automatic penalties are less harsh, and you can overcome them once you know the reason behind the penalty and take steps to fix them. For instance, in the case of a Penguin penalty, you can examine your backlinks and filter the domains or links that are unnatural or coming from low-quality directories or bookmarking sites. All such incoming links should be removed. You can even submit a Google reconsideration request for irrelevant links you could not remove.
Manual
A manual penalty is a more severe penalty resulting in some or all of that site not being shown in Google search results.
A manual action notice against a site is issued by a human reviewer who is a member of the Google webspam team. The penalty is issued after it has been confirmed that the site is not compliant with Google's spam policies either due to content issues or spammy inbound links.
Most manual actions cause pages or sites to be ranked lower or excluded from search results without the user noticing any visible signs.
How to Detect a Google Penalty?
There are tools available to detect a search engine penalty.
If the penalty is manual, you can detect it with the help of Google Search Console. Go to ‘Security and Manual Actions’ in the sidebar.
Now click on ‘Manual Actions’.
If there are issues found, you will see a message like below mentioning the issue.
If there are no issues found, you will see a green tick mark.
If the penalty is automated, you should check the Performance page in your search console use an SEO tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs to detect any major drops in organic search ranking. A sudden and massive decline in organic search traffic indicates a penalty (not in all cases though, there are some technical issues that might cause such declines in traffic).
Once you notice a massive drop in traffic, first check your website for policy violations. Prepare a list of links using a backlink checker to ensure there are no bad backlinks. You should remove low-quality backlinks coming from private blog networks or other low-end websites like directories or social bookmarking sites.
Why Do Google Penalties Happen?
Google can take action on a site for several reasons:
Cloaking
When your site presents different content to search engines and users either knowingly or unknowingly (due to hacking), it results in cloaking. The primary purpose of cloaking is to manipulate search rankings.
Doorway Pages or Domains
Some black hat SEOs create several similar web pages or domains to maximize their reach for their targeted keyword.
Such pages or domains funnel users to the main site or the page. Such doorway pages are not as useful as the final page, leading to several low-quality pages.
Google explicitly warns webmasters to avoid creating doorway pages or sites that rank for similar search queries.
Expired Domain Abuse
You can find expired domains in domain marketplaces. Just do a Google search and you find an endless list of domains to choose from.
Some webmasters or organic marketers buy expired domains to leverage their existing authority to rank on Google. They use the domain to host casino-related, medical-related, or affiliate content that offers little value to the users.
Google strictly prohibits expired domain usage, and failure to do so might lead to a Google penalty.
Keyword Stuffing
You should not fill your page with keywords to manipulate search rankings. Keyword usage should always be natural and user-friendly.
Unnecessary usage of redundant addition of keyphrases so that they appear unnaturally or forced is known as keyword stuffing. It is a violation of Google search guidelines and leads to automated Google penalties.
Hacked Content
Code injection, content injection, or redirects sometimes lead to hacked content. In such cases, website owners do not actually engage in black hat SEO practices; however, they fall prey to Google penalties.
Hence, ensuring your website remains safe from hacking attempts is crucial. You should use site security seriously so that hackers are not able to manipulate your site content.
Hidden Text or Links
One of the oldest forms of web spam penalties is due to hidden text or spammy links. In the earlier days of Google, when spam detection algorithms were not so strong, people hid keyword-rich content or external links in the background to remain visible to the search engines but not to the user. The primary intent of such a practice was to quickly get the page ranked in Google for the target keyword.
Such a practice where you intentionally add content that is indexable by search engines but not crawlable by human visitors leads to Google penalties.
Scaled Content
Scaled content is one of the newest forms of low-quality content abuse, where people create lots of low-quality pages leveraging AI content creators. The idea is to quickly create large amounts of unoriginal content to get them ranked for different search queries and increase organic traffic.
Hence, producing spammy and duplicate content that adds little to no value for the readers is a violation of Google guidelines. You should always produce content that offers value and is EEAT-friendly.
Link Spam
You should not buy low-quality links or accept products or services from anyone in exchange for links. Automated link creation programs and excessive link exchanges are also banned.
The below image displays the primary types of link spam that website owners engage in:
Websites that engage in link schemes and buy bad links always fear Google penalties unless they use the ‘rel=nofollow’ and ‘rel=sponsored’ attributes when linking to paid advertisements.
However, not all paid outbound links are bad. Some paid links are actually good for your site and they help to raise your domain authority. Please read our guide on ‘Should you buy links’ for more clarity on this topic and to build a strong backlink profile.
These were the primary Google spam policies leading to Google penalties. For a complete list, please refer to this doc.
The TLDR in 2024
No website owner ever wants to face Google penalties because they can ruin your online business in a day. To remain safe from harsh Google punishments, you should follow the guidelines in the Google spam policies. You should always design a website for the user and prepare high-quality content.
There is no need to fear algorithmic penalties as long as you follow Google guidelines, prepare user-focused content, and stay away from building backlinks from low-quality domains.
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