Google penalties are something that you truly need to be afraid of as a website owner. One day, your site may be cruising along, with thousands of visitors visiting, and the next, you discover that virtually no one is coming to your website. What could be the cause of this sudden and drastic drop in the flow of traffic to your site?
Google Penalties are real
Though rather rare, Google Penalties for websites are, nevertheless, quite real. Each month, hundreds of websites across the globe get hit by these debilitating penalties from the world’s biggest Search engines.
How do you know if your site has been penalized by Google?
The first thing that you will notice if your website has been penalized by Google is if your traffic suddenly takes a drastic dip. Of course, traffic to any website will fluctuate from one day to the other. However, you should be on the lookout for drops that appear to be too sudden to be coincidental. If, as we have already mentioned, your traffic drops from thousands a day to 10 visitor, then something severe has definitely happened.
Why do websites get penalized by Google
There are a number of reasons why sites sometimes get penalized by Google?
- You have questionable backlinks on your site. In this regard, you should never rely on blackhat methods to gain SEO juice. The pain that you will go through at the end of the day by far exceeds any pleasure that you may derive from these nefarious activities.
- You have questionable links from your site. Again, this boils down to trying to take SEO shortcuts.
- Your website has been hacked.
- Your website has been hit by malware. In this case, Google wants to minimize the spread of the malware to other sites.
- Running a spammy site.
- Keyword stuffing.
- The content that’s on your website is of a very low quality.
Do I get notification when my site is penalized by Google
If you are lucky, you will get notification, through Search Console, about the penalties that your website has incurred from Google. However, most of the times, the only thing that will tell you that your site has been penalized is the dip in traffic that we have already mentioned at the top.
What to do when a website is penalized
Deciding on what to do when your website has been hit with penalties from Google tends to be difficult, particularly if the entire site is build around blackhat SEO methods. However, the best thing that you can do is to try and resolve the issue. If you have been penalized for having low quality, spammy content, you would need to remove this content and replace it with better quality articles (easier said than done).
Once you have done this, feel free to get in touch with Google to get them to reconsider their penalites on your website. What it means is that a penalty from Google does not spell doom for you and your site. Deal with the problem, and Google will restore your site, though it may take a while for it to regain its former glory as far as SERPs are concerned.
