In the SEO world, the wrong approach can sometimes have a huge and costly impact on your website’s organic performance.
This can happen when you get aggressive with keywords optimization, anchor text over-optimization, or when you hire an SEO agency that uses shady tactics.
Whatever be the case, the situation can be scary — and you have to quick to remedy whatever happened.
Things Google frowns at
There are lots of things Google is against in their Webmaster Guidelines, they include:
- Creating pages with little or no original content
- Automatically generated content
- Sneaky redirects
- Participating in link schemes
- Scraped content
- Doorway pages
- Participating in affiliate programs without adding enough value
- Link cloaking
- Sending automated queries to Google
- Hidden text or links
- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
- Abusing rich snippets markup
- Creating pages with malicious behavior. This includes things like phishing or installing viruses, Trojans, and malware.
Unfortunately, people can convince themselves into believing that many of these shady activities are right. They assume that spinning content to escape duplicate content penalty that doesn’t exist is the perfect option – they hear of the benefits of link building, and suddenly start trading links with others.
All of the above are wrong SEO practices, which you must avoid.
Manual Penalties
Hearing the word “penalty” alone is indeed terrifying. You may or may not be responsible for what has happened on your website.
However, remember that Google has a list of common manual actions:
- Partial link penalties
- Site-wide link penalties
- Thin content penalties
When your website has a manual penalty, the message in Search Console usually provides you with some high-level insights on the issue.
Below is an example of such a message in Google Search Console focused on thin content:
Similarly, below is an example of a manual penalty focused on links:
The basic process of resolving a manual penalty is:
- Identify what caused the penalty (For instance, if you have a link penalty, you need to find out which links Google hate).
- Find a solution to the problems.
- Finally, submit a Reconsideration Request to Google requesting for them to remove the penalty
Conclusion
There’s a general misconception that generating search visibility for your website is reserved for established companies and big brands. But it’s not true.
Small business owners and online marketers can follow the advice on this guide to drive traffic and leads to their websites.
Though links are important, you don’t need 1000s of backlinks to rank a web page. All you need is compelling content and trusted links.
Above all, put the user at the forefront when creating content for your website. That’s what counts!
SEO Metrics