Finding, Fixing, and Avoiding Google Penalties

Getting a website penalized by Google is something that almost every webmaster seeks to avoid. However, even if a website gets slapped with Google penalization, not all is lost.

The reasons why Google might penalize a site remain many. Still, the underlying cause is often the same – some combination of on-page SEO or a technical aspect doesn’t work to provide Google’s goal of providing users with high-quality, fast, and accurate results.

Why should a business care if Google penalizes its website in 2021? The most common reason is that Google penalization means less traffic to a site through organic searches. A more significant issue is when Google doesn’t think a site’s content is very good.

After all, why would users come to a site with poor content? Furthermore, why would a company work to maintain a site that doesn’t support its performance?

Why Doesn’t Your Website Show Up on Google?

A Google penalty creates a situation where a website no longer appears in search results, or its ranking positions drop dramatically. When a website is penalized by Google, it will likely become practically invisible in search results.

Nevertheless, Google doesn’t specify the factors imposing the most significant impact on penalization. Unfortunately, this also means that webmasters cannot determine the activities that definitively result in a penalty.

What Can Hurt a Website’s Ranking?

Duplicate Content

One of the most prominent examples that could result in a site getting penalized by Google is duplicate content. For many years, Google has outlined that content on a site should be internally and externally unique. Elements on a site cannot be copied from other web locations, including product and category descriptors.

Slow Website Speed

This aspect of technical SEO is one of the primary drivers of overall user experience with a website, and a top Google ranking factor. If a website takes forever to load, webmasters can count on Google penalizing it.

After verifying the loading time of the site, webmasters can effectively implement the following to improve:

Reduced Image Size
Compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Code
Upgraded Hosting
Maintained Redirect Chains

Broken Links and Other Errors

A 404-error means that a link is broken, leading users to a page that no longer exists. Google really doesn’t like these problems on a site, severely penalizing ones with too many broken destinations.

For Google, it remains essential that users receive the information they look for. 404 errors and other site problems prevent the search engine from fulfilling this purpose.

The most important thing a webmaster can do is find all the broken links on a site. They can do this manually or utilize useful web tools to crawl a site and search for the broken links.

Keyword Stuffing

Even as recently as 10 years ago, webmasters and content creators engineered their content strategies for search engines. Today in 2021, we can find many texts filled with keywords. Unfortunately, they don’t often provide useful information for web users. This will result in the sites becoming swiftly penalized by Google for a high “bounce rate”.

Keywords remain a crucial component of website content. However, they should naturally reside and flow in the copy. Google can evaluate content stuffed with keywords, rating it as low-quality with limited value for users.

Times change and content (as well as on-page SEO) should focus on web users. A great start is creating unique content that meets user needs and expectations on main pages, service pages, and even in a company blog.

Why is Your Site Being Penalized by Google? | Avoid Google Penalties with GOA-TECH

By avoiding some of the common pitfalls listed above, we’re certain that a Google penalty remains unlikely to affect a company website. Google doesn’t like sites that are not user-oriented, optimized only for search engines, and ignoring the overall user experience. For any webmaster involved in spamming on-page SEO or poor technical aspects on a site, they should stop them immediately.

If you’ve noticed that your business website has suddenly dropped or disappeared from Google search results, don’t hesitate to contact our team from GOA-TECH today. Our team wants to help you recover and avoid your site getting penalized by Google while helping you reach a higher ranking position!