Search Engines like Google always try their best to improve user experience by accurately responding to their queries. And for that, they keep coming up with new algorithms to serve their users in the best way possible. With the number of searches being made increasing every day, there is also a risk to the crucial and inherently genuine data. And in order to protect that data, Search Engines have laid out a ground set of rules. If you don’t follow the policy guidelines properly then get ready to be kicked out of the race or in Online World’s terms, get ready to be penalized.
How To Get Website Penalized in 2019?
In order to avoid Google Penalties first, you have got to know what the boundaries are that search engines especially Google has defined. Here are 14 Factors Collected by SEO Magnifier team that might get you penalized.
1. Bad Links
Bad or unnatural linking refers to the quality and quantity of links that are coming towards from your website and the ones that are going out of your site. This includes placing links in an unnatural fashion or connection to suspicious websites.
2. Content Manipulation
Content Manipulation is related to all the tricks that you try to pull on search engines. This includes
- Content Scrapping
- Shallow Content
- Content Spamming
- Content Spinning
- Automatically generated Content
These are just some of the content hazards that you need to watch out for. Violating these boundaries would surely get you penalized.
3. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is about unnatural placing of the keywords in your content as well as the Meta Data of your website. Keyword stuffing was supposed to be one of the most commonly used SEO techniques but it has become totally obsolete now. And doing this could get your website penalized.
You can use our best meta tags analyzer tool to check your website’s Meta information for the signs of keywords stuffing and other anomalies that might affect your west negatively.
4. Website Cloaking
Website Cloaking is a cheap and dangerous search engine manipulation technique that shows a different version of your website to the user and Google. But thanks to the latest algorithms being used by Google, cloaking is easily detectable and could get your website penalized. Google promotes honesty and it is advised that you stay honest in your approach as well.
5. Comments Spamming
Comment spamming through profile and forms commenting is extremely prohibited. Comment back linking is probably one of the fastest ways to earn backlinks but doing it in an unnatural fashion negatively affect your website.
6. Piracy Takedowns
Pirated material on your website could get you panelized. When Google receives multiple privacy violation requests for a particular page then removing the content is one thing, Google could also penalize your website. Always try and respect the copyright of the material that you are planning on sharing.
7. Overdoing it with Anchor Text
Overusing anchor text to maintain page authority was normal a few years ago but since the penguin update, this is also extremely prohibited. And it makes you eligible for Google Penalty.
8. Slow Responsiveness
Your website’s loading speed as well as the responsiveness also determines whether it gets taken down by Google or not. If your website is taking too much time to load then it’s only a matter of time it gets taken down by Google.
9. Poor Mobile Design
Since Google already has introduced Mobile First Indexing which states that the website performing well on mobile devices would be given the priority over the websites which don’t have a mobile browser version, not having a well optimized mobile version of your website would negatively affect your website’s ranking.
10. Availability of sitemap data
If you haven’t submitted and don’t regularly update your sitemap data to Google then it could get you a Google penalty anytime. Google analyzes the sitemap data that you submit to Google via webmaster tools to schedule the crawling process of your website and in turn the indexing of your website. Make sure that your sitemap data is regularly updated and sent to Google.
11. Paid Linking
Buying fake links for your website might benefit you in the short term but could severely affect your website in the long run. Google always prefers organic traffic that comes to your page for determining your rank. Paid links are just there for the money and have no intentions of staying there. Once the initial effect lifts off, your website would start to de-rank and might get taken down.
12. Plagiarized Content
Content Plagiarism is one of the most hated things by Google. Stealing someone else’s work and then showing it as your own is morally wrong and punishable. This is what the search engines believe as well. Whatever you do, don’t ever resort to plagiarizing content unless you want to get penalized, you can use the best online plagiarism checker tool analyze the plagiarized content to avoid the duplicate content penalty.
13. Penguin
Penguin is a link analysis algorithm that is developed by Google to analyze the quality, quantity and frequency of the links that are coming in and going out of your website. This algorithm is quite powerful and tricking it is almost next to impossible. Make sure you don’t do any suspicious activity while building links or prepared to get caught by the penguin.
14. Website Continuously Timing out
If your website keeps timing out then it is only a matter of time it gets penalized. There could be many reasons for slowing down like poor website design with many, many ads that make it hard for your website to load up. Whatever the reason may be, you need to do a serious reevaluation of your website’s performance if you want to maintain your rank.
Final Words: Search Engines expect that you respect their policies. If you try to go for the work-arounds then you can get in a boatload of trouble. That is because tricking Search Engines is not as easy as it once was. With updates in the Google algorithms for analyzing links and local search queries etc. it is quite hard to play games with search engines.
The best way to maintain trust with Google and other search engines is to stay honest in your approach. And if you don’t stay honest then website penalization is the only option left for Google and other search engines.