List Of Alarming Google Penalties In SEO & Ways To Fix Them

Is your website’s rankings dropped drastically? Then you may have been struck by a Google Penalty!

See, Google has made it clear that its algorithms are designed to detect the quality of your website and reward it accordingly. 

By rewarding, it means that your website would be ranked higher in the search results. But that is just not the case…

Sometimes your website may be penalized by Google. The reason: not following the search engine guidelines.

However, I’ve listed some of the most concerning Google penalties that you should be aware of, as well as what you should do to avoid them.

So let’s take them down one by one:

What Are Google Penalties? 

You must have come through a few penalties in sports. If any sportsperson does something inappropriate or violates the rules, he may get penalized, be asked to leave the field, or get suspended.

Google Penalties are no exception… If any website is found practicing any policy violation or violating the guidelines of Google, it may face consequences that could negatively impact its rankings or sometimes result in the complete removal of the website.

In simple words, a penalty is a punishment that Google imposes on a website that drastically causes a drop in the rankings and loss of traffic.

These effects are what make a Google penalty the worst nightmare for any website owner.

Even if your website has not experienced any technical issues, if you notice a sudden drop in your rankings as well as a significant decrease in clicks and impressions, your website may have been penalized by Google.

This could be because of two main reasons:

• Google’s webspam team detected some kind of black-hat tactics on your website and imposed a manual penalty.
• Google launched a new update that caused an algorithmic penalty (both would be discussed further).

But before we move onto the types or the reasons, you may ask, “How, by chance, can you identify whether your website is struck by any of the penalties?

Well, I was only about to come to that. 

How Is A Google Penalty Identified?

For manual actions that are imposed only by the Google team, you can identify them through some penalty checker tools or by simply using GSC, which is Google Search Control, under the section “Security and Manual Actions.” Here’s how it looks.

Thankfully, there are no such issues or penalties imposed on my website. But if there were any, it would reflect this…

It may also reflect the area where the issues have been detected, making it easier for you to fix them.

So far, we’ve discussed identifying manual actions, but the case for algorithmic penalties is VERY DIFFERENT and CHALLENGING!

Actually, there’s no such notification that would alarm you when Google penalizes your website with an algorithm. 

Therefore, the only way you can identify that your website has been hit by a Google update is when you suspect that your website’s rankings are dropping as soon as Google launches a new algorithm.
Here’s a live example,

In 2019, various websites have noticed a backslide in their rankings. The reason turned out to be that Google rolled out one of its significant updates, known as BERT.

Similarly, Ahrefs’ organic traffic dropped with the upcoming of a new update in 2020 (just 2 years ago), which was related to delivering quality content to your users.

You might think so, being the best in the business, but still, how did the website get hit by the update?

For this, I have a quote stated by Google’s webmaster…

Gary Illyes says, “If a core algorithmic update hits your website, you should not consider it a penalty.” It’s possible that you’re simply doing something that someone else is doing better than you are.

This means that, whether there’s nothing wrong with your website, you can still face the issue of getting hit by the update just because your competitors are doing something better than you.

Therefore, you must get this, algorithm updates don`t just drop low-quality websites that provide a poor user experience: they also boost the rankings of the websites that are doing better and offer a great user experience.

Now that you know how to identify whether your website has been hit by a Google penalty or not, let’s look at some of the alarming Google penalties in SEO that may hurt your website.

List Of Some Alarming Google Penalties In SEO & Ways To Tackle Them

Algorithmic Penalties

Algorithmic penalties are caused whenever Google introduces a new update that results in the drop-down of a website’s search engine rankings and traffic.

See, Google doesn’t want its users to be tricked by low-quality websites. Therefore, whenever Google introduces a new update, it aims to improve the user experience. 

And for that, it identifies low-quality websites and penalizes the websites that violate the guidelines of Google.

For example, here’s a fact: Over 8.5 million searches are conducted on Google Every Single Day!

So, Google makes sure that each and every user finds what they are looking for and has a good user experience…

For this, it regularly updates its algorithms that help crawlers identify which websites are providing content that is useful for users and the ones who are delivering a negative user experience.

Year by year, month by month, Google comes up with new algorithm updates. Below is the infographic that shows every update that Google launched from 2011–2022.

Some updates, such as the Google Panda and Penguin updates, can cause nightmares for several websites, and some updates, such as Pigeon and Hummingbird, are designed to enhance your rankings.

After you’ve learned about algorithmic penalties and how they can negatively impact your rankings, let me tell you how to recover from such Google penalties.

How To Tackle Algorithmic Penalty 

If you discovered that your website was “hit” by an algorithmic penalty and that your rankings have declined over time, this signals that you now must stop every single thing that led to that penalty. 

Change your approach to providing information in response to the update you received.

For example, consider the latest “Helpful Content Update 2022,” which is focused on providing user-first content that satisfies a visitor’s needs and provides more value, which would perform well as compared to content that does not meet the user’s expectations.

Google would simply rank your website lower somewhere in the SERPs if your website has content that is of no added value and that does not satisfy their needs. The image below shows how it affected the rankings of websites ranging from the top 3 results to the top 5, and the top 10 results.

If your website has been penalized as a result of this violation, you must look to repurpose your content and make it more helpful for the users.

Here is the list that Google provided to make your content helpful for the users. It says that you have to ask yourself a few questions while writing SEO content for your users. These are:

• Is your content have expert knowledge of the information that is provided?
• Will the users gain any help from your content (for example- learn about a topic or achieve a goal)?
• Can your content develop a feeling in the users’ minds that this content is what they all required?

Therefore, if your rankings have also dropped due to this Google update, you must consider it as a warning and start developing a user-focused SEO content strategy.

Similarly, in another core update that came in 2011, the Google Panda update, Google stated that it would penalize websites providing poor content to its users. So this is what happened next…

Most of the websites saw a decline in their visibility on search engines…

This served as a wake-up call for all webmasters to start following the guidelines and providing search engine optimized content that is not duplicate, thin, or overstuffed, and to replace such content (if already present) with user-oriented content rather than ranking higher.

Manual Penalties

Compared to algorithmic penalties, manual actions are much easier to detect and work on. They are detected by Google’s team only for violating guidelines such as content quality, using black hat SEO tactics, etc. 

The main question is whether it applies to the WHOLE WEBSITE or just a specific URL. Manual actions are implemented for a reason and come with an effect.

So, without wasting any time, here is the list of some manual penalties that your website can face and get penalized for.

1. Providing Thin Content

Mean it! Google will only rank you higher in the SERPs if it discovers that your website’s content is search engine optimized and of high quality, with users in mind.

The equation is simple: high-quality and optimized content = higher ranking. Low-quality content = no chance of achieving high rankings.

Over the time, Google has identified websites that have low-quality and thin content that adds no value, and as a result, it has simply degraded those websites.

Some common examples of thin contents are:

• Scrapped Content
• Automatically Generated Content
• Thin Affiliated Content

According to Google guidelines, these methods of demonstrating poor content would no longer provide any value, whether in terms of rankings or traffic.

As a result, you must remember that providing high-quality and valuable content to users is the only way to improve your SEO rankings.

Next, follow these steps to fix this Google penalty.

• Conduct an SEO content audit right away to identify any duplicate or automatically generated content on your website.

• If you come across any of this content, try to make it more valuable to users. This is one of my blogs that would surely guide you in developing an SEO-friendly content strategy.

• Combine pages that have similar content into long-form SEO content.

• After doing this, if you are confident that all that was needed is done, select “Request Review” in the Manual Actions.  

• Give examples of the bad or poor content that you removed and the high-quality content that was added.

2. Keyword Stuffing

Keywords, as you must know, are the core element of any SEO strategy. Perhaps you also know that keywords in your content tell the search engines that your website has the content that a user is searching for when they type a search query (or keyword) in the search bar.

Having the right amount of relevant keywords is critical for improving your website’s on-page SEO…

But sometimes, website owners take this as an advantage and try to deliberately stuff a few terms, violating the webmaster guidelines.

Filling a web page with keywords or numbers in an effort to manipulate rankings in Google Search results is known as “keyword stuffing.”

However, stuffing keywords is considered a black hat SEO tactic in order to increase your website’s rankings. Doing this would definitely lead to a Google penalty.

Here’s how it looks:

“If you need SEO services, we would love to give you our SEO services.” Our team of SEO service experts would give you the best results. “If you render our SEO services, your website rankings would increase, organic traffic may enhance, and your website could make more sales and revenues.”

Moreover, sometimes there may be hidden text on your web pages. At times, they may not appear, but they surely violate the policies. Some of the examples are:

• Content or text with font size “0”.
• Using the same color of the text as the background color. (blue color on blue background, white color on white background)
• Deliberately hiding text behind the images.

Coming to the steps to fix this penalty, they are:

• Head to the URL inspection tool in the search console to check which content is visible for web crawlers and which is visible to the audience.

• Check whether the background color and text color are the same or not.
• Check for the text that is hidden behind any image.
• Check for words or keywords that are repeated.
• Make sure that the title tag is not having repetitive words.
• Find out the issues and make all the rectifications.
• Use the keywords naturally throughout your content. 
• At last, after making the required changes, ask for “Request Review”.

3. Cloaked Images

Cloaking is the practice of displaying different content to users and search engines in an attempt to fool them in order to rank higher.

As a result, this manual penalty occurs when websites display images differently on search engines than they appear to users.

And this is what Google strictly denies, as it goes against the guidelines. Why? Because Google doesn’t want its users to have any negative experiences or get tricked by the websites.

Therefore, it penalizes websites that practice such “black hat” tactics. Some of the most common examples are: 

• Showing a page image about optimizing images for search engines but displaying a different image to the visitors.

• Displaying an image that is hiding a different image.

Steps to fix this issue are:

• Make sure that users visiting your website and the search results on Google see the exact same images.

• After you have rectified this error, you can select “Request Review” under Manual Actions in the search console.

4. Spammy Or Unnatural Links

Backlinks are still the main ranking factor for Google. But when they become “unnatural” or “spammy,” they can also be the reason for penalties.

But if there are links that try to manipulate search engine result rankings, that is considered “link spam” by Google. Following are some examples of link spam:

• Buying and selling of links for the purpose of ranking higher.
• Exchange of links on a high scale.
• Non-suitable anchor texts.
• Having links to low-quality or irrelevant sites.

So, if you think that your website has been hit with a Google penalty due to unnatural links, then you can recover your website. Follow these steps to fix this penalty.

1. The first thing you have to do is perform a site audit of your website to identify unnatural links to your website.

*There are many tools available on the market which can be used for this purpose such as Ahrefs.*

2. Next, identify the anchor reports. Anchor reports show you the exact anchor texts that Google is seeing in the link profile.

3. Else, to make it simple, head to the search console and list out the external link report. 

4. You can download the report from the search console and analyze the anchor text profile of your website based on the top linking pages, top linking sites, and top linking text.

5. After this, identify the links that are of no use, add no value to your website, and violate the guidelines of the search engines.

6. Ask the website owners to either change those links or remove them completely.

7. To disavow any links that you were unable to get removed, use the disavow links feature in Search Console.

8. Go to “Request Review” in the Manual Action tab after you have made the required changes. Also, provide proof of what changes and fixes have been made and explain the links that were unable to be removed.

5. Issue Of Structure Data

Structured data is a method of assisting search engines in understanding your content. 

Structured data is followed by a markup code that helps search engines understand how to deliver your website’s content to enhance the user experience and drive more organic traffic.

For example, here is an example of the FAQ schema,

Review schema

However, if you want your content to appear in the rich result with the appropriate schema, you must not violate the guidelines.

If you come across an issue that may result in a manual action, your chances of appearing as a rich snippet will decrease, regardless of your search engine rankings.

The only way to fix this issue is…

• Making sure that the structure data markup follows the guidelines of google. If there is any need to update the data markup or even remove any of them, you must do that.
• Do not try to add irrelevant or fake reviews thinking it way increases the click-through rates of your website.
• After making the required changes, move to Review Request in the Manual Action tab to reconsider this issue.

6. User-Generated Spam

You might not know about this, but spammy content added to a website by users through a gateway intended for user content is known as “user-generated spam.”

Or sometimes users purposely comment on your blogs and give irrelevant links just to get backlinks and increase the domain authority.

This could harm your website’s trust and authority (of E.A.T.) which are crucial parts of any SEO strategy.

Steps to fix this issue are:

• Search for comments with advertising, irrelevant links, or meaningless content as well as profiles with business nicknames like “Special offer Insurance.” 
• Check your website for inaccurate or spammy content.
• Eliminate such content from your website.
• Make it clear to the users, that you dont allow any abuse policy in your content.
• At last, you can select “Request Review” under Manual Actions in the search console.

7. Hidden Redirects

Redirecting generally means driving the users to some other URLs that they don’t even want to visit. A hidden or sneaky redirect is a practice that shows search engines some different content and users something else.

And if your site has been hit by this manual penalty, you have violated Google guidelines. The most common examples are:

• Displaying one kind of content to search engines while sending visitors to a significantly different page.

• Displaying a normal website to desktop users while sending mobile users to a spam domain.

Ways to fix this issue are:

• First, in the Google Search Console, inspect the URLs that are having redirect issues. You would find the URL inspection tool in GSC.

• Identify the content that is appearing differently to the search engines and different to the users.

• Now, you have to eliminate the section of your website that is delivering Google and users a different piece of content. 

• Check for the URLs that direct the users to somewhere else and not the required place they want to visit.

• If your website redirects users in such a way, then resolve this problem as quickly as possible. You can do this by looking through the site’s code.

• After you have made the changes and the eliminations, go to Request Review and wait until the Google webmasters review this solution and take back the manual action.

8. Sneaky Mobile Redirects

As hinted at in the above-listed Google penalty, sometimes some pages of your website seem to send mobile device users to content that search engine crawlers can’t view. This could result in sneaky mobile redirects that offer a bad user experience.

Therefore, Google penalized websites that offered such a negative user experience.

Let’s consider a URL, www.abc.com, that shows up in the SERPs on a desktop and is accessible to the users, but, when clicking the same URL on a smartphone, they are redirected to some other URL (www.xyz.com).

And this is what frustrates the users. A user’s inability to find what they’re looking for is a major setback for any website and user.

Now comes the part where I am going to tell you how to resolve this issue.

There can be two scenarios, 1. This is done unintentionally, and 2. Having this done intentionally

For un-intentional, 

• Make sure that your website isn’t hacked. For this, look for the security issues report on Google. Make sure that your website is safe and is not controlled by hackers.

• Identify whether any third-party scripts or elements are the reasons for these malicious redirects. To prevent this: I. Remove all the third-party scripts that you don’t control. II. Analyze your website behaviors whether now also redirects or not.

• When the issue has been fixed, go to Request Review and wait until the Google webmasters review this solution and take back the manual action.

Do Not Consider It A Penalty If Your Website Is Not Ranking In Google

In a sense, if your website’s rankings are declining, the cause is not always Google’s penalties. Or thinking that if the rankings are going down, it’s obvious that your website has been hit by a Google penalty. No!

Keep in mind that the competition is rising at a very high pace, and Google’s ever changing techniques to rank websites fall under that.

So if you want to rank higher, make sure that you deliver content that is helpful to the user and not for the purpose of ranking higher or driving more traffic.

It’s just that you have to stay updated and work on implementing the best SEO strategy on your websites.

Conclusion

So there you have it, a list of some frightening Google penalties that may befall your website if it fails to deliver the content that users expect. Not just content, but content that is useful to the audience and meets their needs.

You must be aware of these penalties, as they may strike and affect your website’s search engine optimization health. With every problem comes a solution, and that is also what I have provided to fix these issues.

See, it is not like you have to build a perfect website without any glitches; some or the other may come, but it is all upon you to make the required improvements to enhance your website’s performance.

And if by any chance your website is facing such issues and needs any guidance or assistance, you may directly approach me with this free 30-minute strategy session.

FAQ

1. Can my website get penalized for having duplicate content?

The most common misconception among webmasters about being penalized is that having duplicate content will lower their rankings or affect indexing due to Google updates and penalties.

But the answer to this myth is “NO.” Having duplicate content on your website may not directly penalize it.

Google would never notify you if you were penalized for duplicate content. Many websites have duplicate content, but this doesn’t mean that Google would increase your rankings.

It’s just that Google would rank that particular content higher, which provides better information to the users and meets their needs.

2. When would the Google review team respond after I fixed the issues?

There is no accurate answer to this query, but when researched a bit, Google on its own says, 

• The majority of reconsideration reviews take a few days or weeks.
• But in some cases, the review of your request could take longer than usual.

So after you submit a review request, be patient until the review team sends you an email.

3. Can my website again get ranked after the manual penalty is lifted?

Don’t think like this, even if the webmaster of Google lifts the penalty that was imposed, there are chances that your website may not immediately rank higher. 

It has been discovered that it may take a longer time for your website to rank, or you may see an increase in 3 months, or unfortunately never.

As a result, there is no guarantee that your website will rank higher after the manual action is lifted.