When I read Google penalties I knew that it was fatal for SEO but the truth is that I spent a long time without knowing what being penalized by Google really consists of.
It is convenient to know what these punishments are by the search engine and the reason why any type of penalty occurs because the sooner we detect it, the sooner we can correct that aspect.
A penalty is a punishment that Google imposes on websites that, in its opinion, try to cheat in web positioning. it is also the punishment that it imposes on low-quality websites or for technical reasons, this is the worst thing that can happen to us in SEO. since we can literally disappear from the face of the internet.
We can make SEO mistakes without knowing it
Types of penalties
There are two types of penalties: automatic (carried out by the algorithm) and manual, which is the application of the penalty for something serious.
The punishment is usually to disappear or the penalty applies a filter to you in the case that it is slight and you go backwards from 30 – 50 – 90 or kick, you can also get the AD.
Do not confuse the penalties with the loss of positioning compared to websites of higher quality or relevance.
Automatic penalties:
The one that is produced by the normal operation of the algorithm. these are applied when any directive is violated and detected by the algorithm, whether it is penguin, Panda or Hummingbird.
For example, when examining a blog, the Panda algorithm sees that the content is of low quality and penalizes that page or if it is duplicated.
Or Penguin discovers that you have links from pages that have nothing to do with your content in no time
Manual penalties:
The manuals are more dodgy, they are made by Google staff when your blog is suspected of spamming, stealing content, selling links, hiding text, identity theft… and from these it is very difficult to get out of them because they are rarely wrong and although do not be aware of the lack.. they do.
The difference between one or the other is like when you are caught by a traffic helicopter without a belt and another is that the Civil Guard stops you and apart from not wearing the belt they ask you for papers they do tests… because you were doing that. Hahaha
Are all penalties the same?
Well no, there are penalties that apply them more severely than others and within a penalty there are several ways where Google applies them depending on how the infraction has been.
Apply the penalty on a keyword or keyword.
Imagine that you use Iphone as a keyword and it is not appropriate at all, or that you have abused it, you have repeated it in 10% of the text and decide to ban that keyword by not ranking on your website.
You receive this type of penalty with payment tools or if in Search Console you see that a certain term stops appearing or goes to 0.
Put queries and you will see the keywords and log tail for which you positio
You can apply the penalty at the address level, using the full URL.
This is the case, for example, of a page with duplicate or low-quality content. in this case you would see that the page is not shown in a position as high as it had and the plummeting from one day to the next is characteristic.
You can penalize only one subdomain
If this is the case, for example, of forums that are very spammers or websites with very different sections in which there may be black chickpeas that carry out penalized practices.
You can penalize the entire domain including subdomains and folders
This is already a serious case, this occurs mainly with buying and selling of links and with black hat practices such as hiding text, these types of penalties are serious and it is difficult to get out of them.
And it can kick you out of Google or delisting and you stop showing up in the search engine
It is the easiest to detect, not even the cat sees you and if you put in the search engine site: your domain and it tells you that there is no web… bad, it has fired you !.
This penalty is produced manually. it is not algorithmic, at least I have never encountered it like that and Google alerts you through the search console that it penalizes you.
As you can see, there are some that are very resounding, such as de-indexing your website from Google, but in serious cases it happens.
How long is it from when Google catches you until it penalizes you
Since the violation of the penalty by Google is committed, it can take a long time. especially if the action has been manual, since there must be previous complaints and an investigation, I have worked with websites that were penalized for errors of 6 or a year before.
The algorithms take less time, it can be about 3 months at most until they catch you.
By the way, algorithms can carry out penalties retroactively. they can penalize things that you did years ago and that are now prohibited, so we cannot lower our guard.
Never try to fool Google
As I have a lot of faith in the people who pass through the blog, I am going to focus on the algorithmic penalties, which are what we can suffer without realizing it.
There are things Google does not like us to do, think how valuable you are creating content like the person who searches and to offer accurate results it strives to improve its algorithm so that when you search for something, it offers you the most successful the first time.
When do I know if I have been sanctioned for a penalty
I recommend that you monitor your blog well, that you have a continuous view of the positioning of your post and your keywords to see if you have plummeted in positions, there you have the sample of the penalty.
You can use analytics to see the evolution of the position, measure and analyze data is necessary for you to control your blog.
How to know if my blog is being penalized
If the penalty is manual, Google will send you a message through the Search console warning you that you are in danger, it is convenient to be attentive to the messages that Google sends because sometimes it warns you of serious problems or irregularities that you commit, it warned me that I accidentally duplicated my content because of a plugin.
How to avoid falling into a penalty
To avoid falling into penalties from Google, you must follow the directives set by Google and be up to date with what the algorithms are incorporating as basically bad paxis, I would like to develop this in depth in a later post.
Keeping up to date on SEO is the way not to fall for them, here I pay a lot of importance to SEO and the news that appear so I encourage you to take a look.
But I’m going to give you two wonderful tips for your SEO
Think that the synthesis to avoid falling into penalties is to create original content of good quality. relevant and interesting for people who come to your blog naturally, think that this content has to satisfy them and that it is in relation to what they were looking for.
Do not look for links, if your content is relevant they will link you. it is useless to have 100 links that are not relevant compared to 5 that are, do not buy links or links to pages that you should not link, keep your line.
This post explains the penalties, later I will deal with the subject in more depth about why they occur, if they can penalize us for things that are not our fault, remove penalties… and more things on this subject that can damage our SEO so much.
