There are two types of Google penalty and you don’t want to see any of those near your site as that means that your traffic will drop – probably running your business and or your reputation.
One of the penalties is Algorithmic penalty this type works by algorithms and it affects more sites at the time, wiping hundreds and hundreds of sites that are not responding to the basic rules set by Google – that means that those sites will be losing their traffic as many (majority) of people uses Google as their search engine.
Manual penalties are also responsible for wiping down lots of websites with almost half a million sites going down each month! That is a big number even for Google.
Many of the sites being wiped out are actually sites with spammy content and it is natural that Google reaction would be to return with a penalty, but as we have previously discussed, your site can be affected as well if you happen to become a victim of negative SEO attack. That is the case scenario where you can get a penalty or more of them for being linked to spammy sites due to attack and in that particular case, you can deprive for near or over 90% of your traffic. If you think Google is only on small business sites, you are wrong as even a big business with a huge name can and are affected if Google decides so.
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The most common penalties
The most common penalties given by Google are content penalties, link penalties, over-optimization penalties, and layout penalties. Each of the penalties has its own name and effects and you should learn something about the most common ones in order to recognize the symptoms of being struck by one.
Penguin
This is one of the most common penalties Google hands out if you are suspected to be linked with suspicious or spammy websites. It also recognizes generic anchor texts and suspicious backlinks that you might have paid. If Google considers your backlinks to be malicious or manipulative, you will get a Penguin penalty. You will get a note about from Google and you can also check your backlink performance in your Google Analytics. In order to lose the penalty if you get it, you will need to lose all the bad links that brought you in that situation.
Panda
This is a content penalty and you are most likely to get one and lose your traffic in case your written sources are not trustworthy, relevant, important, are copied or overlapped and if you offer no value through your content to your visitors. You can get rid of this penalty if you decide to change your content to be everything opposite form listed above and wait for Google to forgive you!
Layout penalty
In case your pages are overcrowded with ads and you have to scroll down to find the content needed if you are a visitor looking for the info you came for, then you will most certainly get this penalty. Google doesn’t like websites that look like ad banners. You can still have ads on your website, but try to keep the number of ads as low as possible.
Over-optimizing penalty
In case you have used your keywords more times than needed in a single blog post, you have just been nominated for getting one of these. In case you step up and make your site more crawlable, easier to use and navigate your over-usage of keywords will be overseen. You should also watch out and avoid exaggerating with SEO techniques. You want to add value to your site and not have it jump to the top by manipulating SEO techniques.
Now that you know what it means to have your ranking dropped, along with knowing how to avoid them and how one can get there.
