Did you know that in 2018, webmasters received 4 million messages from Google about manual actions taken on their website? A Google penalty comes like a sudden shock that leaves you puzzled.
A lot of website owners receive the Google penalty. This means the website has violated Google’s guidelines. When this happens, the organic visibility of a website goes down quickly. Most of the time, Google penalizes a website if it uses black-hat SEO techniques.
A lot of websites have backlinks that redirect to another website. Make sure that the website you are backlinking, follows Google’s guidelines. If it doesn’t then your website will be penalized too.
Including the backlink of a website that doesn’t follow Google’s guidelines, is considered as a black-hat SEO technique.
What are the factors to remember in a Google penalty?
The most common reason for a Google penalty is a spammy outbound or inbound link. As we said, you will be penalized for using the website links that don’t follow Google’s guidelines. In a recent study, SEMrush collected data on more than 830+ websites where 53% of them received Google penalties due to sponsored and paid links. More than 50% of the websites had exact match anchor texts. If you are not aware of how Google penalties work, read more here.
All those websites got penalized in the last two years. Now, there are certain factors that you need to remember while using backlinks.
- A single bad link will not cause a penalty. A combination of 2-3 or more bad backlinks will trigger penalties. Audit your backlink profiles one a month to detect the unnatural backlinks.
- The lifespan of a website or a backlink has got nothing to do with the toxicity of a backlink. A backlink of 2016 can affect a website of 2019 and vice versa.
- The reputation of a website doesn’t matter. Regardless of the popularity of the backlinks website, Google will still penalize it if it shows manipulative tactics.
- When penalizing, a complete website is penalized instead of specific webpages.
- Google algorithms find out the exact match anchor texts and consider it a spam. In the survey conducted by SEMrush, more than 50% of the websites had exact match anchor texts.
- Google will not offer any example of an unnatural link. You have to file a reconsideration request. Maybe after a few reconsideration requests, you will see one or two examples of bad links.
- Removing the penalty and recovery takes time. It will take at least 2-3 reconsideration requests to remove a penalty. It might take up to six months to remove an inbound link penalty.
- Do not send too many reconsideration requests. It will only extend the penalty. Just stay calm and follow Google guidelines.
Make it a habit of running monthly website audits. This helps to get rid of the bad links.
What kind of inbound links cause a Google penalty?
For the sponsored and paid links
- Sponsored and paid links within the articles and blog posts cause 53% of the penalties from Google. Some of the common phrases include, “the article was sponsored by”, “information was provided by”, “advertorial content”. Don’t add these texts next to the link.
- Buying & selling links to get the link juice flow causes a Google penalty. If you are exchanging money for links, exchanging goods or services for links, or offering a free item for an article and posting a link to it, will cause a penalty.
How to avoid penalty and get it removed
- Don’t promote products or services without using nofollow or sponsored attributes like rel=”sponsored”.
- Request for a “re=sponsored” attribute while placing a link to another site.
- Do not use too many keyword-rich anchor text.
- If you don’t find the website’s administrator, disavow it.
For guest posting & press releases
Guest posts that use exact same keywords in the anchor text to build links are violating Google’s guidelines. It will lead to a penalty for unnatural inbound links. The search engines will not consider it as a helpful resource, causing a red flag.
How to avoid penalty
- Do not post numerous press-releases with links to your website. It is not a good SEO strategy.
- Avoid using too many keyword-rich anchor texts.
- Use rel=”nofollow” in the author’s signature or text.
- Avoid all sorts of direct promotion.
- Disavow if the nofollow or sponsored attributes don’t work.
For private blog networks (PBNs) and link networks
Private blog networks and link networks are toxic practices. It doesn’t increase the SERP results. In fact, it does the opposite. Private Blog Networks are created with free blog services and standard templates.
The anchor texts mostly contain the same keywords with limited variations.
The only way to avoid a Google penalty is to remove or disavow such links.
How to determine if the site is spam?
- It is recently launched or the owner recently changed.
- Poor traffic
- Not much traffic from PBNs
- Low domain authority score
- No privacy policy and Contact us
For the user-generated spam
- Google penalizes if there are spammy links from forums
- Links within profiles and signatures
- Spam links in the comment sections
How to avoid the penalty
- The best idea is to disavow the UGC spam link and keep your backlink profile clean.
- Also, use the rel=”ugc” attribute
Web directories and link listings
If you get a penalty in this case, your website must have multiple toxic backlinks distribute throughout the web directories. 3-5 backlinks are not enough for such a penalty. There must be dozens of such backlinks.
While monitoring the backlinks, you have to pay attention to the directories and listings traffic and performance in the SERPs.
To avoid the penalty
- Audit the backlinks from the directories and listings
- Monitor the traffic you get from these directories and listings. Also, check their overall performance in SERPs.
- If a link generates valuable referral traffic, ask the webmaster whether the link has rel=”nofollow” attributes or rel=”sponsored” attributes.
For Pure Spam
Google is extremely sensitive about pure spam. They have zero tolerance for such activities. Pure spamming activities include keyword stuffing in website content, sneaky redirects, links that are irrelevant to the topic.
The only way to avoid such a penalty is to stop such black-hat SEO practices at once.
For the direct ads and affiliate links
Google loves to spot the “buy now” or “sign up now” links and the discount offers. Doesn’t matter what in what form it is.
If you have to promote products of other brands or services, Google asks you to use rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attributes. This is how you avoid a penalty.
For business directories and bookmarking sites
Not that all businesses are bad, but the problem is most of the directories are of low quality. Thus, if you have listed your websites on such low-quality directories, it is better to remove them. If you can’t remove them, then just disavow them.
For links in widgets
This is pretty simple. If you are allowing third-party sites to post widgets along with an embedded code pointing to the website, add the rel=nofollow” attribute. If you don’t get a nofollow attribute, then disavow.
The only exceptions can be the links that direct to a relevant page of your website. Also, there are some free widgets that you can use on the website to link back to the service without a nofollow attribute.
For hidden links
People use hidden links deliberately. If you disguise a link in plain text, Google will penalize you for it. There is no other way.
To avoid this penalty, make sure that the links are visible with a nofollow attribute.
For Sitewide Links
These links are present on the footer, sidebar or blogroll. If an inbound link includes words like “powered by” or “designed by”, especially if there are keywords, you need to deal with them right now.
To avoid the penalty
- Set up rel=”nofollow” attribute
- Replace the anchor texts
- Remove the links
Some other minor reasons for penalizing
- Not removing old job posts for a job posting site
- Too many product review links, podcast links, scholarship links
- A direct link to another website causing theft of link juice or bandwidth. It is called hotlinking.
- Links to adult content
- Links with autogenerated content
- Infographic links or reciprocal links
Key takeaways about Google penalties
In conclusion, we shall say that there are certain factors you have to remember. If you can avoid them, Google will never penalize you.
- Pay attention to any irregular data spike in your website. Use website tracking to monitor the backlinks from different data sources.
- Perform monthly audits to keep your backlink profile clean.
- Analyze the inbound links and classify them as good, paid, and spammy.
- For spam links, contact those responsible, add a nofollow (rel=”nofollow”) attribute, or get rid of them.
- Don’t promote paid/sponsored links directly without a sponsored (rel=”sponsored”) attribute.
- Disavow links carefully. Create a .txt disavow file and submit it to Google.
- Send a reconsideration request.
Handling Google penalties is tricky. This is why you have to run audits periodically. This will help you keep your backlink profile clean and monitor the weird breaks in data.
A lot of webmasters might think that Google penalties won’t hit them, but it can happen to anyone anytime. It happens more if there are a lot of unnatural links on your website.
Thus, stay on the safe side and opt for the white hat SEO tactics.
