SEO Tip: Google Penalty – How to Remove or Avoid One

Detecting and diagnosing the presence and cause(s) of a Google penalty or ban can be very difficult, but don’t worry it is always possible. Google provides a very thorough list of Webmaster Guidelines in Google’s Webmaster Central; we will touch on many of the points described there, but to get all of the info I suggest you read that article in full at some point.

Let’s get straight to it – if your website has stopped showing up in search results, has dropped for certain keywords or has experienced a large drop in traffic lately you may be worried that you have been penalized by Google. you may be right, or you may have experienced the drop in rankings for a variety of other reasons (which we will go over at the end of this article).

Has your site been banned by Google?

Double check by performing a site:yourdomain.com search like this one: for LUCID Public Relations. The site search will show you all of your website’s pages that are listed in Google’s search index. If your website doesn’t show up for this search, you have been banned and need to find out why, then submit a reconsideration request with Google (2-3 weeks processing time).

How can you find out if your site has been penalized by Google?

Search for your domain name (not a ‘site: search’ just the domain – example: http://lucidpublicrelations.com) in Google – if it doesn’t show up #1, you have a penalty. Jump to the Webmaster Guidelines List list below to see where you might be violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Next, search for unique page or article names – if your article titles are common, this may not work, but if you have an article or page with a name like “SEO Tip: How to Remove (or better yet, Avoid) a Google Penalty” this should work. For unique names your site should show in the first page of results. If not, Jump to the Webmaster Guidelines List.

Have your dropped off completely for your major keywords or have you dropped from first place/first page to 3rd page or worse? This is probably due to a devaluing of your inbound links by Google. Basically, Google has determined some of your links to be spam, advertisements or the result of SEO work. See the section below on building quality inbound links to avoid penalties like this.

Webmaster Guidelines List: Most Common Penalty Causes:

This list is not an official Google list of the most common Google penalty causes – these are the causes we have noticed from years of SEO work & through our discussions with other SEO experts.

1) Bad Link Building Penalty:

It can sometimes take Google a while to discover bad inbound links. The problem is simple – when Google devalues your inbound links your site loses authority for the keywords that those links helped you with (the keywords used in the Anchor Text or on the page the links pointed to).

Building Good Links:

Content of linking site should be relevant to yours

As a general rule, there should be very few other outbound links on any given page (as a general rule we use 25-30, but even that is a lot, shoot for 5-10 if possible)

Build links consistently, not for volume of links – If you are manually influencing the number of links that are coming  in to your site, you want to give Google the impression that these links are being created naturally (through user interest in your content). Natural links will either build or remain consistent over time – avoid situations where you are building a large amount of links then dropping that number off in any given period of time.

2) Recently Changes Effecting Accessibility:

If you made and changes to your site and/or content recently, make sure that search engine bots can still see all of your content – you may have also dropped in ranking just because your content changes have reduced the relevancy of some keywords for your site. Check your website using a LYNX text-only viewer to see what your website looks like to search engines and other bots. If all of your content isn’t visible, you have some accessibility problems that need to be addressed. Make sure that your content is written in text, not in iframes, javascript or image based Flash on your website.

3) Duplicate Content:

Some webmasters have duplicate content problems without even knowing it – any time you have multiple URLS with the same information you are facing a duplicate content problem. Google created a short snippet of code that can solve this problem. In addition to using this code on sub pages, you should use it on your home page so that all versions of your URL point to a single, preferred version.

Example: http//:yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, http//:yoursite.com/index.php, http://www.yoursite.com/index.php should all point to one version (usually http//:yoursite.com or http://www.yoursite.com) as the preferred version. This will clear up any possible confusion Google is having about preferred versions of your content.

See the full list of potential Google Penalty Causes in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines Article