Google penalties are punishments against a website whose contents are not in line with Google’s marketing policies. There are two types of Google penalties namely manual penalties and algorithmic penalties. Whichever penalty is levied against your website, penalties can still have detrimental effects on your website. Let us get into 10 Google penalties and how to avoid them. By the way, I recommend this local marketing agency for all your local business’ SEO and marketing.
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Link Purchase
This is probably one of the most significant penalties. This is a tactic of buying links to build a fake reputation and rank higher on search engine result pages. An algorithm called Google Penguin runs in real-time to detect spam links. You mustn’t buy links to build your website. Always keep it real and organic. It is much better if you get reviewed by bloggers or vloggers.
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Stuff Keywords Into Your Page
Another penalty Google Penguin looks out for is stuffing keywords into your content. Keyword stuffing has to do with inserting too many keywords to cheat the ranking system. You should make sure to always use quality and relevant keywords.
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Content Duplication
A separate algorithm called Google Panda penalizes content duplication. Google has an objective to provide users with good content. Therefore, if you copy another content, Google will penalize you. To avoid this penalty, you can use plagiarism tools like Grammarly or CopyScape.
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Content Of Low Quality
Google Panda searches websites with a lot of pages with content of low quality. Google wants to make sure that people who visit your website are provided with valuable content. Monitoring the bounce rate on your pages will help you avoid this penalty.
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Cloaking And Distorting Your Contents
Google Webmasters refer to cloaking as the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking can get you removed from the Google Index completely. The best thing to do is to focus on developing valuable content for your visitors.
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Slow Loading Website
Believe it or not, Google will penalize you for having a slow-loading website. This is because no one wants to wait for the page to load anymore. Rather, they’ll go back and look for other rival websites. Using a content delivery network or caching plugin if you use WordPress will increase your website speed.
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Penalty For Broken Links
Google algorithms will always check if your web content is up to date and ensure that you have no broken links. Also known as A 404 error, having a broken link will make Google think you do not update as often as you ought to. Always scan your website for broken links and fix them to avoid getting any penalty from Google.
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Penalty For Not Being Mobile Friendly
We are in a time where the number of mobile searches exceeds desktop internet searches. This is why in 2015, Google began to reward mobile-friendly websites and penalize the ones that are not. The best way to avoid this penalty is to build a mobile responsive website.
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Not Using Outbound Links
Outbound links help you prove to Google that you are a credible business. Not using outbound links may not always penalize you but it can hinder your ability to rank higher. Therefore, always use outbound links.
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Overusing Anchor Texts
Overutilizing anchor texts is a common problem for many websites. Anchor texts are those texts that hold the hyperlink that redirects you to another page or website. These links are supposed to look as natural as possible.
All the Google penalties discussed can be easily avoided if you are very diligent with your website. You should also know that whether your SEO practices were intentional or not, Google can still penalize you. Therefore, always monitor your SEO metrics and fix an anomaly.
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