Before moving on to the list and recovery options for Google Penalties, it is important to understand what exactly the term Google Penalty or Google Penalties means.
Google Penalties are served and imposed where there is a violation of guidelines of the webmaster. WebMaster rules and guidelines are a set of marketing rules and procedures which are set up and structured by the search giant so that a comfortable and delightful experience (UX) in search results can be ensured.
Google Penalties can be highly problematic and troubling for those who are engaged and dealing with works in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and also the works related to it. This can lead to various problems like loss in traffic, issues with the ranking part of your pages, and also because the domain may become de-indexed.
There are different types of penalties. For example, if you have been fined with Google Algorithm Penalty, it means your page has a problem with regards to the algorithm. If you get charged with a manual penalty, it means that Google Human Reviewer has found your page or site to be used by someone with black hat search techniques or someone who is non-compliant.
The most important and critical step is to submit a request for recovery. This is unfortunate that most, or we can say, almost all of the webmasters skip this important part for their page or site. It is believed that around 400,000 penalties are fined, and out of that, hardly 5% of them get attention and are also applied for recovery.
Now, let’s have a look at the list of algorithms and manual penalties, along with a few recovering techniques.
- Google Manual Penalties
Google Manual Penalties are those which are handled by Google employees to check on the websites which are going against or are violating the terms of Google’s services.
If we try to list out, there are ten types of Google Penalties. They are listed below with brief information about them along with recovery methods.
- AMP Content Mismatch
There are differences in Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and the canonical version. The canonical version acts as the web page’s master copy which is different. In case if both the versions do not match or are mismatched, then the services would also be a slowdown and would not deliver smooth services, which will result in affecting the consumption experience negatively.
Recovery: To recover from this penalty, ensure that both versions are essentially the same text should not be identical, but the users should search for the same topic and perform similar actions.
- Cloaked Images
Cloaked images are referred to those search engines where different content appears from what the users see. Examples of this include blockage of an image by other images or texts and mismatched thumbnails.
Recovery: Display the same image to both Google and users unless and until you want your images to be either minimized or excluded from the search results.
- Sneaky Redirects
This penalty is imposed on those sites or pages where both search engines and users observe differently, which is contradictory in many ways. There is also a possibility that users see the content differently, manner, and format, which was completely unexpected.
Recovery: Conduct an audit for the technical SEO for your web pages or sites if there is a difference in what users see and what search engines see. Ensure that there is no redirection of pages to the users with the spam domains or to the contents they never asked for. In such cases, it is always considered advisable to hire a company that offers Google Penalty services which will be highly useful in saving time, effort, and money.
- Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to something where the hidden texts and links are visible to computers and search engines but not to the site visitors. It is also referred to as the excessive use of keywords which is used for manipulating search rankings.
Recovery: Conduct an audit for your site or page to search or look out for invisible text. After completion of the audit, remove the instances where keywords are repeating exceedingly. It is also advisable that documentation of errors should also be carried out so that its repetition would not take place again in the future.
- Pure Spam
Pure spam refers to aggressive spamming where techniques like cloaking, scraping, and automated content generation are used to spam the sites and pages for the site visitors. Google takes this penalty very seriously because it ruins and penalizes the entire site.
Recovery: To achieve removal of pure spam penalty, one has to purchase a pure spam label for its domain. If possible, also submit your reconsideration request along with details of how you will avoid such penalties again in the future to Google so that you can earn back the trust of Google.
- Sneaky Mobile Redirects
In this case, it involves the redirection of users to different contents, which is contradictory to what was expected to what is made available to search engine crawlers. It also diverts the visitors to spam domains in the place of the URLs which were promised to us in the search results.
Recovery: Conduct an audit for third-party scripts and elements and, along with that, also ensure that your site is not hacked before requesting a review and a recovery from Google.
- Spammy Free Host
In this case, free hosting services offer support to spam websites that perform in violation of Google Webmaster guidelines. Such matters are handled by a search giant who takes strict action on the sites which are spammy and such spam sites that are hosted by the service providers.
Recovery: Google always tries to do its best when it comes to handling spam sites, and you can also help Google by reporting spam websites in case you come across them. If you observe a manual action on your site, immediately report it to the technical support of the provider. If possible, also hire a WordPress Expert so that you can ensure fast, safe, and secure hosting for your site.
- Structured Data Issue
This is something that gives reference to the inappropriate structured data, which tries to manipulate the users by marking and showing them the content which is irrelevant, misleading, and hidden.
Recovery: Strictly follow-up the guidelines of Google for general structured data guidelines and perform the removal of markups accordingly.
- Content with No Added Value
The label itself gives the understanding that this falls under manual penalty. If we talk about examples, few affiliate sites come with a cookie-cutter copy and doorway pages with syndicated contents which you never or did not write.
Removal: This penalty can be easily removed by carrying out or performing the removal of the contents which are shallow and also which are of low quality. Try to add value to the content by originality, reviews, and also by adding up insights or new information from the research you carried out for the production of the content.
- Google News and Discover Policy Violations
According to the reports of Search Engine Land in February, Google pulled out a set of new manual actions which focus on Google Discover and Google News. It is also the expansion of the SEO Google Penalties Google List which earlier aimed and focussed on only searches.
In both Google News and Google Discover, we can find the following contents violative and abusive:
● Contents that involve hate, danger, and harassment.
● Content that belongs to manipulative media.
● Sexually explicit contents.
● Contents that involve terrorism, gore, and violence.
● Content that has sensitive and private information related to defense and medical information that is supposed to be private.
● Content that has vulgar language, inappropriate words, and terms along with profanity.
The type of contents that violate policy discovery violations are misleading and adult-themed.
The types of contents that violate news policy violations are related or are part of transparency.
Recovery: To recover from such types of penalties, you need to update yourself regularly with the recent additions of discovery actions and news. As this can be quite a complex and time-consuming process, it becomes important for you to hire a reputable digital marketing agency that is equipped with Google Penalty recovery services, especially for those people who are starters and are new and are at beginners level at such things.
Now, after learning about Manual Google penalties, let’s move to Algorithmic Google Penalties.
Algorithmic Google Penalties
According to the SEO Industry, Algorithmic Google Penalties are referred to as something where websites fail to live up to the expectations of Google Searches by manual spam actions and with no or low website rankings.
There are two types of Algorithmic Google Penalties, which are listed below:
- Panda
Panda, from the year 2016, played a big role in the formation of search results ranking part in the algorithm. This update includes the involvement to evaluate the quality of content across the sites. Our sites are assigned with a quality score, and the content issues will lead to a decline in the quality score of the site.
Recovery: If you want to recover your site from this penalty, check on the quality and originality of the content. Also, ensure that the experiences of the users are always the king, which will decide the experience of our contents and the sites. So, try to replace or rewrite the contents which add no value to the audiences.
- Penguin
In the case of Penguin, our sites are affected by unnatural or black links, which affect our sites and pages in the following ways:
● Lack of Diversity in the low-links. For example, the appearance of black links in the comments section.
● Presence of low-quality contents in the high volume along with the presence of plenty of high-quality links.
● Earnings of a lot of many black-links in a short period.
Recovery: Perform the removal of unnatural links which occur with keywords and pages. It would be better if you can plan out a white-hat planning strategy and also ask an expert to help you with all these things.
How to deal and Recover from Google Penalty Problems
● Hire a good and right SEO and reputed digital marketing agency which will not only monitor your site but will also help you with fast and speedy recovery from the penalties.
● To deal with Google manual penalty, explain the issue clearly with a detailed description of how you fix the problems along with documents that include the result of the fix.
● For Panda and Penguin Penalty removal, give some time to Google to resolve the matter once you have completed dealing with the issues of low-quality scores and also of black, bad, and unnatural links.
Never Let Google Penalties Bring You Down
Just because google penalties affect the working and productivity of your site, never let them bring you down. It is because everybody learns from the mistakes they make, and to get rid of these penalties, you can also hire a reputed SEO and digital marketing agency, which can help you out with recovery issues with a speedy process.
I hope we helped you in giving you information about types of Google penalties and their recovering techniques.
