Search engine optimization matters the most for small businesses. To earn your online identity and make your name popular among all the competitors out there, it is necessary to achieve support from expert digital marketers and earn the name in the market. And as SEO is the primary one helping businesses out, it is required to be performed with extra care.
What is a Google Penalty?
With Google aiming at providing the best quality of search facility to its users, the ranking algorithms of Google are being updated continuously to find out the faults and eliminate the frauds right away. Therefore, to rank high and ensure no penalties are applied, it is necessary to follow every guideline and ensure no mistakes are made. As failing at which attracts Google Penalties and which results in a significant loss of website traffic and puts your reputation to harm. And hence, it becomes necessary to eliminate such conditions and occurrences.
How to Know If You Have Been Penalized?
There are two possibilities for being penalized: Automatic and Manual. The occurrence of a manual penalty is easy to find as Google most probably notifies about it. However, in the case of the algorithmic penalties, it can not be said the same. Therefore, keeping an eye for all the penalty is required to correct the mistakes, get to the solution as soon as you can.
Things to Avoid to Eliminate the Risk of Being Penalized
Here are some tips to help you avoid the basic mistakes and keep the essential factors in mind to proceed with your SEO tasks successfully.
Duplication of Content
Unique content is the king when it comes to SEO. Therefore, excellent content can help you to a great extent when it comes to search engine optimization. However, the same can affect your ranking and can become a cause for attracting a penalty from Google. As Google does not take up lightly the duplicate content you have added to your website from others, it makes your website look instead of fraud as you have not produced any original content of your own which is of no use for viewers and readers. Therefore, it is better to avoid the duplication from any sources and also check for the content every time you update it in proficient tools which can ensure you are not using duplicate content, intentionally or unintentionally.
Excessive Use of Keywords
The excessive use of keywords is not at all encouraged by Google-nor by any experts of digital marketing. Google takes keyword-stuffed content as low-quality content and may penalize you if your website is full of it. As the content quality is making a difference for ranking your website, it is a must to ensure your content is well-written and also user-centric. As your content becomes more keyword-stuffed, the quality degrades, and the usefulness of it decreases, and it can lead you in grave danger of attracting a penalty from Google.
Hidden Links
Never make a mistake of keeping the link colour the same as the background colour of your webpage. Google notices it too!! As it is not considered as a good practice, avoid making this mistake even if you are only concerned about the design of your webpage. Even an expert, SEO services provider, can help you out with it as Google cuts out for hidden links and we certainly don’t want that. The links on your page should be visible and useful to the readers who are here for information.
Slow Speed
Google doesn’t want its users to wait. The loading speed of websites and apps matters, as the faster loading website is given higher preference by Google to rank high instead of the one which consumes more time comparatively. Hence ask developers to build an app and website that loads speedily on users devices.
Even if your website contains all the necessary parameters but is slow when it comes to loading, Google itself might give up on you and rank your website lower than the one loading faster. Therefore, using appropriate measures and identifying the reason behind the lag, you can improve on your rankings and also impress the viewers, search engine and webmaster.
Hacked Website
If the website has been hacked, Google will remove it from the SERPs in no time. As it wants to protect the users from possible frauds, the hacked content or hacked website will get fired right away. And we certainly don’t want that. Therefore, it becomes essential to eliminate the risks of being hacked by implementing necessary security measures.
Concluding Note
There are a lot many reasons why Google may penalize your website, and it is essential to consider taking precautions in advance to avoid the chances of getting penalized. However, if penalized, your website can recover from it, there is nothing to worry except the loss of traffic due to the applied penalty. Google takes much time to remove the penalty and requires even documentation mentioning what changes have been made to correct the mistakes. Therefore, it is best to eliminate the chances in advance to achieve the rank you have been dreaming about with appropriate and legal efforts as there are no shortcuts to success!