As time goes by, we can notice how much search engines have been changing. Google improves its algorithms to help people find what they are looking for and improve their overall experience on the Internet.
Search engines filter out the inappropriate content by assessing penalties to malicious and manipulative webmasters. Here, we will cover the consequences of Google algorithmic penalties and the 5 essential tactics to protect your website against them.
Why You Should Be Afraid of Google Penalties
For website owners of all niches, Google penalties may be the worst nightmare. People across the Internet put all their time, effort, and money into fighting for higher Google rankings. Many of them resort to unfair competition, and then penalties get in the game.
A website can be punished if it contradicts Google’s guidelines and violates its rules. These unethical tactics are known as “blackhat SEO”. In this case, search engines can assess a penalty and lower the website ranking drastically, and sometimes even remove from Google Search results altogether.
Google algorithms are extremely complex and include over 200 components. Here are some of the most important algorithms updates of the last ten years:
- Panda: hits low-quality and duplicate content, grammatical errors, too many ads, the mismatch between search a query and the content on the page;
- Penguin: proves for keyword stuffing, unnatural and blackhat link building tactics;
- Pigeon: focuses on local content and SEO signals;
- Hummingbird: looks for the relevant results to the queries.
Needless to say, these actions have devastating effects on a website’s performance. Not only do they affect the authority of the pages, but penalties also provoke a massive loss in traffic and therefore a decline in attendance, sales, or reaching any other website goal.
We are here to remind you of the essential rules for running a website safely and enjoying your high rankings without getting penalties.
5 Safe Practices to Avoid Google SEO Penalties
1. Follow the Rules
To comply with the rules, you first need to know them. Google publishes and updates its guidelines regularly, so all you need to do is to learn and follow them. Any penalty that you can face comes primarily from violating these rules.
These guidelines equalize the opportunities and rights of everyone who wants to deliver his or her message. So, they have become, in a sense, a Constitution or a Bible for anyone who wants to join this tremendously large community of business owners and content creators.
2. Quality Content Wins the Game
The first thing you must do after learning Google’s rules is to think of the quality of your content. Nothing is more important than that. In recent decades, Google algorithms have shifted their focus to the information that creators and business owners want to deliver.
Quality is not an abstract concept, in this case. Here is what it implies:
- Comprehensive, in-depth research. This is what adds value to the lives of your readers. It is not as hard as you think! Just ask yourself: do my visitors get all the information they are looking for? What else would be useful for them? Which questions may they have after reading this post? Even these basic questions will give you more space for research.
- Consistent updates. Post new content regularly to engage your audience. This will also help you find common ground with search engine algorithms.
- Various formats. Try to experiment and implement different kinds of content. Videos, infographics, e-books, checklists will generate more interest and increase traffic inflow.
By following this principle, you will not only satisfy algorithms but also build a solid foundation for your further optimization. So do not ignore the basic rules of content quality!
3. Insert Keywords Wisely
In view of the quality of the content, keyword spamming can spoil the whole point. Betting on the number of keywords, combining them in senseless sentences used to work well some decades ago, but not anymore.
Relevant keywords and their synonyms are still valuable, though. Include them in the title tag, headline tags, and in the body evenly and naturally. In this way, you will not harm the readability of your content and avoid SEO penalties, too.
4. Create a Balanced Backlink Profile
Backlinks are vitally important for search engine ranking. If Google finds a great number of relevant links to your page from relevant and authoritative websites, it will put you higher in search results.
Google punishes websites that use blackhat SEO tactics to build their backlink profiles. So, you should rather think of quality backlinks: do your guest posting campaign, contact services for outreach like https://adsy.com/blogger-outreach-service, and work on your content quality to attract more backlinks naturally.
5. Provide Technical SEO
Everything we have covered is a part of great search engine optimization. Besides that, working on the technical side of website optimization is also important for avoiding Google SEO penalties and improving your rankings.
It is essential to keep your website safe and prevent any hacker or cybercriminal attacks. On fromdev.com, security gurus share their thoughts on this aspect of search engine optimization. Additionally, keep an eye on your URLs, page speed, mobile optimization, page structure, and more.
Wrapping Up
As you see, SEO for business websites is more complex than you think. Some mistakes here can be critical for your performance. To run your website safely, learn Google guidelines and follow our tips on creating and optimizing great content. Once you get it and track algorithm updates, you will never be afraid of any penalties.
