What to Do After You Have Been Penalized By Google?
3 min readGoogle performs periodic updates of its algorithm and database. Their engineers are quite responsive an agile in changing the algorithm, based on present demands and needs. Often, people abuse the algorithm, making it more challenging for Google to deliver highly relevant and accurate results. New rules are designed to defeat blatant SEO tricks and punish any website that has violated the commonly-accepted SEO standards. Many websites owners are eager to avoid any kind of penalization. Google has been quite clear about their policy guideline and there are things to consider if we want to promote our website. If we have been penalized, we should be honest to ourselves and do a number of things to get back on track. It is quite possible that dishonest SEO professionals have implemented inappropriate SEO tricks in our website.
First of all, we should stop using the cloaking attempt or presenting an invisible version of website only for the search engine bots. We should also remove any kind of hidden link from our website. This is a cheap and outdated trick to fool the algorithm of search engine. If we do this, it is quite likely that we will end up inviting a ban from Google. Another thing that we should avoid is sending automated quesries to Google. There are tools that are designed to send automated queries to various major search engines, including Google. Even if Google doesn’t catch us doing this, the SEO benefit is still quite limited or non existent. We should also check our website for any kind of irrelevant word. It is not a good thing to use padding text, just to make our webpages appear to be content-rich.
Many website owners don’t realize that they have violated the duplicate content rule. Content creators could pick a few paragraphs from other sources for each page and they write only some unique content. Google can easily detect any plagiarized sentence or even phrase. So, copying the whole paragraph or article can cause penalization. Websites that have doorway pages can be penalized immediately. Doorway pages have little original content and created only to attract search engine bots. Problems could also happen if we have pages that have only affiliate links. It is acceptable to have some affiliate links in our website, but the main focus of our website should only be unique content in our webpages.
Excessive link trading could also cause problem with our SEO campaign and it could be possible for Google to penalize us due to excessive link trading. Temporary ban can be enforced to websites that have this kind of SEO strategy. A ban mnay extend for six months or more. When it happens, our website will have much lower ranking and in some more serious cases, our website can be de-indexed. Permanent ban is used for very severe offenses and when it happens, it’s better to abandon our website completely and have a fresh start. Google ban is a big problem in SEO effort.