Since the founding of Google in 1998, the main mission of the company has been to provide the best results for user search, this was done by reviewing and analyzing user search based on several different criteria; One of the most important of these metrics is the number of times this request was made, as well as the search keywords that were included in the content of a website.
Of course, if this question and these keywords were repeated frequently, the websites that needed to be addressed would receive higher rankings.
In this way, everything went smoothly until businesses realized that higher rankings in Google results could significantly improve financial goals, brand awareness, popularity, and so on. And that was the beginning of a great war.
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The war over Google rankings
Owners of various businesses and businesses were looking for higher rankings in their field of work, so they started filling their website pages with keywords, related keywords, search terms, etc., so that they could get more traffic to their site.
This had a negative impact on Google’s core mission of improving search results based on audience needs, as people tried to trick Google’s algorithms.
And this was the beginning of a war between Google and SEO experts.
Google Updates
Google’s solution to this fundamental problem was to update its algorithms periodically and, of course, abruptly.
These updates have often been in order to check the content and its suitability for users.
Note: The latest updates include Google’s core update in May 2022.
for example; Google now fully understands and examines the quality of content from the range of related keywords, keyword repetition, copy percentage, writing, sentence length, and more. It also looks for abnormal links that have been sent to our site from other websites.
In the meantime, website architecture is very, very important in heavier competitions to achieve top rankings, because a user should not click 10 times to achieve what he wants!
This is why Google updates have been so effective in improving the quality of search results.
The problem for many webmasters, marketers, bloggers, and online businesses, however, is that they can still be punished by Google. Even if they follow Google’s red lines
These penalties can easily cripple a business and remove them from the Google search results list.
What is Google Penalty?
Google Penalty means that a site will be downgraded as a result of a Google update or will be penalized for violating Webmaster Guidelines.
This change in rankings by Google is often not explicitly explained to you and can depend on a number of factors.
As a webmaster, you need to work with other webmasters or read SEO articles or other methods to understand the nature of an update and improve the status of your website accordingly.
Then take some time to analyze what happened. Check to see if your rating change has been exactly affected by this update!
Another reason for your site being penalized could be because your site is manually penalized; This means that your site may have been reviewed by a Google employee after marking due to non-compliance with the guidelines and red lines. While these penalties can be serious and very dangerous, you can easily remove them as these alerts appear as a report in your console search account.
What are the reasons for website penalties?
Here are some of the most important things your site might be penalized for:
Buy backlinks or the same external link
Buying backlinks can both increase Google rankings quickly and act in reverse, which in these cases usually leads to a decrease in rank, removal from search results and finally a penalty.
The most common links to buy are known as wide site backlinks that are placed in the header, footer, sidebar or part of the linking site. Repeat these external links on all pages of the site with an anchor text. This factor causes your site to receive as many links as the number of pages indexed by the linking website with one anchor text.
A lot of external links
If the page has more outbound links to another site, it will be downgraded, and if the anchor text contains a keyword, the downgrade will be greater. It is best to insert non-page related links, such as output links in the comments section, resources, etc., as nofollow.
Copy content
Panda algorithm is responsible for penalizing sites whose site content production process is duplicate, or the relative relevance of content copied within the site is more than unique content.
This algorithm is one of the most powerful and intelligent algorithms in Google.
Error pages 404
It is better to put 404 pages of the site as noindex; Because if you have a link to a deleted page, if page 404 is noindex, there is a possibility that the page will be indexed, which in itself will create worthless and duplicate content.
Excessive use of keywords
Gone are the days of frequent use of keywords in the text for better rankings!
According to updates that have been made in recent years, the more you repeat the keyword in the text, the more the page rank in that word will decrease.
Instead, use keywords related to the main word. These words can be extracted through related Google searches and tools such as ahrefs, Moz, etc.
Use broken links
It can be normal to have one or two broken inefficient links on the site, but if the number of these links increases, it will become a problem for site users, and this is far from Google’s policies.
Unprincipled redirects
Using a 301 redirect will improve the ranking of the redirect host page in some cases, but if these 3 points are not followed, the site will definitely be seriously damaged. The following points are as follows:
- After redirecting page A to page B, all the links given to page A from the inside must be edited and given to page B; Because the presence of any redirected links within the site reduces the loading speed of the site and also Google’s crawling budget, these two factors also have a direct negative impact on the ranking.
- More than 70 to 80% of the authority of the redirected page is transferred to the host page, but no more power is given from page A to the other page of the site.
- For redirection, it is better to use only type 301, and be sure to consider that less redirection equals a more efficient site.
Be as obsessive about using redirects as possible.
Hosting problems
The loading speed of the site is a very important factor that depends to some extent on the quality of the site hosting. The search panel becomes the site console.
Existence of a secret link
If you have links on your site that are hidden from the user due to CSS, it is better to delete or make it visible now. Because it means bypassing Google and against the rules of its algorithms.
Page loading speed
Loading speed is one of those factors that has been officially announced by Google as an important factor in the ranking. In fact, it can be said that the two factors of speed and mobile friendliness are the most important factors in improving the SEO site in 2022.
Site hacking
The reason for hacking a website is abuse. Now, either this abuse is through phishing and stealing users’ information, or using the power of the site to do black hat SEO, such as: redirecting pages or secret links to sites requested by hackers.
Link exchange
Link exchange in the form of authorship or page-to-page link mode can not cause a penalty, but if it is placed in bulk, it will cause Google to suspect the site
Of course, according to the experiences of this category, the links are ignored by Google.
Clocking
Bypassing the user and Google or clocking is one of the black hat methods in which the user is redirected to a page other than the actual page and the search engine crawler to another page.
How to recover
For most online businesses, search engine traffic is very important, but getting high rankings on Google is not as easy as it used to be. Therefore, many SEOs and marketers take the link building process to the middle. As a result, many websites are penalized for violating Google’s guidelines.
According to Matt Katz, more than 400,000 manual actions are initiated by Google each month, and many other websites are penalized by algorithmic updates such as Penguin and Panda.
Interestingly, only about 20,000 webmasters file an appeal each month.
Therefore, this means that only 5% of the websites that have been penalized are trying to regain their rankings.
Google Penalty Check Tools
Google Webmaster or Search Console
This tool, made by Google, shows you all the important information about the website; Information such as punishment messages, reduced website traffic, errors and incoming links, etc.
Xenu Link Sleuth
This tool allows you to identify and investigate website problems.
Problems such as broken links, broken pages and other problems that reduce website traffic.
The tool can also detect duplicate content and poor quality content on sites, which is a very important issue to avoid the punishment of the Panda algorithm.
Ahrefs
A link search tool that can provide you with a complete list of links to a website along with its ancillary information.
Information such as link density, link transfer speed, link tag text and so on.
This tool is also very useful in removing the penalty of the penguin algorithm.