How To Avoid Google Penalties ?

Bloggers and webmasters who create blogs and websites know about Google penalties. Google gives penalty to the blogs or websites which create any kind of spam. We all work hard to create a website that could rank high in Google search results and get us some good traffic. But if we willingly or unwillingly do some activities that Google doesn't like then we might face a Google penalty. Before going any further we want to clear the term "Google penalty" so that all of our users can understand actually what is Google penalty ?

What is Google Penalty ?

Google penalizes or gives penalty to all those sites that create spam, linked in spamming activities, try negative SEO techniques to rank high in Google, provides very low quality content or copied content, malwares etc. Google uses algorithms that checks quality of a site and the two most common algorithms are called Panda and Penguin algorithms. These algorithms automatically check the sites for quality and penalize sites for spamming and providing low quality content. The penalties could be minor or major. If a website faces a penalty then as a result of it, it will face some issues like - some drop in rankings, not ranking at all in Google search results or even the site could be totally De-indexed from Google. Almost every site faces Google penalty whether it could be a big site or small but as Google works for providing quality to its users, so, site owners also maintains their site for ranking high in Google. So, its better if we could first understand about the most common algorithms used by Google to check quality of a site and also the penalties associated with them. So, our first very common algorithm that almost affects all sites on internet is Google Panda Algorithm.

What is Panda Algorithm?

Google Panda is an algorithm that evaluates the quality of a website. Google call it a "Quality Algorithm", which determines whether a website is providing quality content or not. If a website provides low quality content that is duplicate or repetitive content, copied content, thin content (extremely less content), missing site-wide information like contact page etc then Panda algorithm considers the site as a low quality site and assigns it a low quality score, which makes it difficult for a site to rank high or even rank in Google search results. The penalty given by this algorithm is called Google Panda Penalty. The affects of this penalty could be, your site will face a big traffic decline, your post or pages will face difficulty in rankings, your specific posts could be De-indexed from search results etc.

Now, the other very common algorithm used by Google is Google Penguin Algorithm.

What is Penguin Algorithm ?

Google penguin algorithm is an algorithm which checks the quality of links that is whether a link created is solely a genuine or natural link or it is just created to manipulate the search results. Any link created with the purpose of increasing the rank in Google results is considered as the violation of Google webmaster guidelines. This includes negotiating link exchanges, paid links, automatic links created by SEO tools etc. The penalty given by this algorithm is called a Penguin Penalty. The affects of Google Penguin Penalty could be, sharp drop in rankings, De-Indexed pages or site etc. To find out whether your site has been De-Indexed or not, you can simply search it on Google as mentioned below:

• Go to Google.com
• Then enter site:www.yourwebsitename.com and click on search tab.
• If the resulting page is your website's homepage then you don't have to worry about anything otherwise your site has been penalized by Google.

If you want to check whether on some specific keyword your site is ranking or not then simply follow the below steps:

• Go to Google.com 
• Then enter "site:www.yourwebsitename.com keyword" in the search bar and click on search tab.
• If Google returns your pages then everything is fine otherwise you will be facing penalty on specific keyword.

So, these are the two major algorithms and penalties associated with them. But, Google also gives another penalty called manual penalty, which is given manually to sites.

What is Manual Penalty ?

Manual penalty is a manual action taken against your site, this could be a result of violation of Google webmaster Guidelines, which includes selling links, unnatural links, cloaking(serving different content to Google and user) . This penalty can also cause drop in rankings, De-Indexation of pages and website etc.

How To Avoid These Penalties ?

You can avoid these penalties easily by following the below steps:

• Write high quality content.
• Write at least 400-500 words articles.
• Do not purchase or sell links.
• Do not copy others content.
• Do not create duplicate articles or the articles that are almost duplicate to other articles present on your site.
• If your site's niche is something like that forces you to write duplicate content then simply try to increase your post length with some different keywords.
• Do not use excessive links or affiliate links, if your site provides excessive affiliate links then use nofollow attribute for your links.

An example of nofollow attribute: <a href="http://howdon.org" rel="nofollow">HowDon</a>

Note: Nofollow attribute tells the Google bots not to count these links for ranking.

• If you are providing high number of external links then try to back them by enough content.
• Do not provide anything like script or code that could be considered as spam.
• Do not infringe copyrights or patents.

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