Google penalties occur when you break their SEO rules. These are the rules that Google have set up, and they are not the law of the Internet. Nevertheless, if you want to be listed on Google’s search engine then you need to play by their rules.
They have a set of rules involving Black-Hat SEO, and these are the ones that they will penalize you for. They also have some rules about pressing their guidelines, but these will often result in you slipping down the search engine results or getting a warning.
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Recovering From Google Penalties
1) What sort of things constitute pressing the Google guidelines?
- For example, they have both strict and vague rules about over optimization. They want you to optimize your site the best that you can, but they also want you to concentrate on quality and usability before you concentrate on doing too much SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
If you appear to be optimizing your site to much then they may punish you a little bit, or may send you a warning email.
- For example, if you run SEO checks on your pages too often then it counts towards being over-optimized. This will make it harder for you to climb up the search engine results. There are also things such as using your keywords too many times in one page.
Google understands that one keyword or key phrase may take up as much as 20% of the total content, but they know that this is rare. They also know that anything beyond that number is either over optimization or black-hat SEO keyword stuffing.
2) What sort of things are Black-Hat SEO
Hiding links and hiding pages is Black-hat SEO. So is keyword stuffing and hiding text. Hiding text can be done by making the text too small or making it the same color as the background.
If you break one of the many black-hat SEO rules then you website will be on the door to Google Penalties. Here are some tips to know whether your site hit by Google Penalties.
3) What to do first for Google Penalties
You need to find out why your website has been punished and penalized by Google. If you have an email telling you why, then you need to follow the instructions on the email to the letter. If you did not get an email then you need to contact Google right away and find out why you have been penalized.
You must do what Google say if you wish to lift the Google Penalties. If you persist in what you are doing then Google may ban you from their search engine results. If they tell you what you need do to then you need to go above and beyond the call of duty to prove your commitment to changing your ways.
4) It’s time to have a Black-Hat SEO audit
You are going to have to audit your website and run through all the Black-Hat SEO that you are doing (whether it is on purpose or not). You will need to root out the rules you have broken. You cannot assume that Google have found all of the ways you are breaking the rules, so it is best to remove them before Google find out.
5) Educate yourself on Black-Hat SEO
You should do this to stop yourself being penalized in the present and in the future. You may simply have been given some really bad advice that has led you to repeat mistakes (because you did not know they were mistakes). You may also have fallen foul of an immoral SEO company that has used a lot of Black-Hat SEO to ramp you up the search engine results.
The immoral SEO companies will use the fact that the effects of the Black-Hat SEO can sometimes be seen as soon as two days after it being done, and yet it can take Google as long as two months to realize that you are breaking the rules. They use this time gap to gain payment from you, before you realize you have been ripped off.
6) Learn about accidental Black-Hat SEO
For example, some printer friendly pages are incorrectly optimized and show up as duplication (which is against Google rules). You need to make sure that you are not making any innocent mistakes such as that.
It may even be that another person is stealing your content and Google are assuming that you duplicated the content (blaming the wrong person essentially).