As every business is expanding their reach online, it is also very crucial for them to boost up their search traffic. This will also lead to the up-gradation of their Rankings. But in today’s scenario, it is not easy to gain traffic as it used to be earlier. So the business owners are pushing their limits to increase engagement.
But in the process of doing so, many of the websites are getting banned or penalized because the Google Guidelines are being violated.
You can face the Google Penalty on your website if you practice Black Hat SEO. You can also face it by improper maintenance of your website and also due to an algorithm update. As a result, it will adversely affect your Rankings on Google, and in some cases, your website can also be removed from search results.
WHAT IS A GOOGLE PENALTY?
A Google Penalty is a type of punishment given by Google when it detects that your website is violating the Webmaster Guidelines.
There are two types of penalties that are imposed but both of them result in the dropping of the website’s rankings.
If the traffic on your website is suddenly dropped, know that it is undergoing a Google Penalty.
This could be a Manual Penalty imposed by Google’s Spam Team or it can be an Algorithmic Penalty.
MANUAL ACTION:
If you want to know that your website is being banned by Google, go to the Google Webmaster Tool. After that check that in case you have a new notification.
If you do not have any new notifications on Google Webmaster Tools, then there must be some other reason for your website rankings to go down.
ALGORITHMIC PENALTY:
You will have to check which type of Algorithmic Penalty your website has then you will have to relate the time when your website lost the engagement along with the date and time when there was a new Algorithmic Update.
After that check Google Algorithm Change History.
Stay updated with the latest changes. You can do that by the following steps:
1. Try to keep track with Google Webmaster on Youtube to get some tips about SEO.
2. Follow MATT CUTTS on TWITTER, he tells about all the latest changes.
3. Lastly you can also check MOZCAST to know about the changes. They also update about the changes that are recognized by Google.
You must keep a regular check on your backlinks as well. As there are categories of backlinks that can harm your website rank. No matter how bad the penalty is, there is a proper way to remove them and recover your website rank back.