Feared and hotly besieged: the SEO penalty. But when do you have to expect a penalty and what actually leads to it?
The goal of every company or website owner is, of course, to rank as high as possible in the Google rankings. However, certain characteristics of websites can be detrimental to one’s own success here, because Google penalises them if, for example, SEO measures are too obvious and the actual content of a page is increasingly pushed into the background. Comprehensible: Google wants to offer its users real added value, and users should find what they are looking for instead of being spammed. Spam in particular is severely punished by Google. Google acts here with a bad ranking. If you want to remain successful with your website, you have to rely on a natural web presence.
The reasons for a penalty are not clearly stated by Google, but spam links, broken links, over-optimisation, low content quality and keyword stuffing are said to be among the reasons.
However, Google also acts here with various penalties. For example, a penalty can occur at different levels. However, the user must recognise this himself. Users are often penalised at the keyword level. The search engine giant then worsens the ranking of certain Google keywords.
Penalties can also be imposed at the URL or directory level.
This then affects not only keywords but the entire domain. This is a higher penalty. If Google goes further on the penalty scale, a delisting can occur, in which case the page of a domain is completely removed from Google’s index.
What has changed within the punishments compared to the past is the introduction of Google Penguin. The quality update contributed to a more effective fight against link spam by means of automated processes and the algorithm. Employees no longer have to carry out such punishments manually; these are largely taken over by the algorithms. These algorithms can recognise whether the structure of a website complies with Google’s guidelines or not. The link structure is also recognised by the algorithm and divided into unsuspicious or suspicious.
To avoid being penalised, certain procedures should be followed when designing the website and using SEOs. A natural link structure is important and also a healthy degree of optimisation. The website should be easily accessible for crawlers and the indexing should be as clean as possible.
In addition, a look should be taken at welcome behaviours of website operators. The Google Webmaster Tools and the Webmaster Guidelines can be used as a benchmark to support the correct page structure.
