What is Google Penalty in SEO [Updated Guide]

What is Google Penalty in SEO [Updated Guide] Google penalties, funny enough, are related to penalties in sports. At their core, they are made to punish websites that try to work against the Google algorithm, and as a result, Google spams or bans them.

This raises the dependence of business on Google. An improvement in Google search engine ranking for some keywords can improve the number of leads and therefore can help improve the profits.

Imagine that an SEO professional tries to manipulate the search engine index to get faster and better results from the ranking. They do it by either over-optimizing their site or by doing black hat search engine optimization practice. And when Google finds out, guess what happens? Google inflicts a penalty that brings down your website´s ranking.

What is Google Penalty?

Your website ranking can be affected by two things, the Google algorithm updates and Google Penalties.

Google Penalty is a standard action that Google takes if your site breaks the google webmaster guidelines.

And an algorithm update affects the Google search engine ranking page.

List of Google Penalties

User-generated spam

This penalty is not caused by a website owner attempting to disrupt webmaster guidelines. But due to some spiteful users who are trying to spam the site either through inappropriate links or content. Websites that accept users’ content are more vulnerable to being hit by this penalty.

I´m going to let you a few examples below of poor content that website visitors make:

Spam the blog´s comment section
A spammy account on available hosts.
Spamming forum strings with content that appears to be an ad.
Profiles that seem to be bots

It´s key to monitor your site for the above spam that some users may expect to create. If you don´t want this penalty to hit you, here are a few tips:

Turning off the comments for personal posts.
Moderate profile and comments before your posts go live.
Add some anti-spam tools like captcha.
The practice of a no-follow attribute for user-generated content links
Blacklisting profiles with repetitive spamming attempts

If this Google penalty hits you, you should find all the spammy content on your site and delete it. Once you´re sure that the website is spam-free, you can submit a reconsideration request with GSC (Google Search Console).

Spammy hosting service

Your website hit by a Google penalty is due to your hosting provider getting spammed through the making of new sites. Since most of them don´t follow the webmaster tool guidelines. That is a common problem for free hosting provider services.

Think about this scenario. You signed with a free hosting service and Google sees that most websites using this service provider are spammy. Then the provider will get a standard penalty.

This will result in a standard penalty for all the hosted sites. It´s important to make sure you use a committed hosting service for hosting your business or blogging website. Also, if you take a hit by this penalty, we suggest you change your hosting service provider.

Organized data issue

This Google penalty will happen if, for example, a website has messed up its published content and the organized markup is used. On top of that, assuming your website breaks the organized data guidelines of Google, your website will get this penalty. Make sure that you follow the organized data markup guidelines if you want to avoid this sort of thing. And also test the markup utilizing the organized data testing tools before going live with the code changes.

Unnatural links to your website

Some big-shot SEO specialists like building links at scale, building manipulative links, or taking an interest in link exchanges. For Google, this is a quest to control their indexed lists. In this way, it flags such action as unnatural. Keep in mind the next points we´re going to make, to avoid this penalty at all costs:

Do not get into link-exchange plans.

Avoid linking at scale using the specific watchword-rich anchor text.
Screen the outside links through the control center and try to delete any malicious links you find or repudiate them.
Avoid different visitor posts using the specific catchphrase-rich anchor text.
A good proportion of the no-follow and do-follow links.
Unnatural links from your website

This penalty happens when we have a very spammy outbound link profile. It´s like the last penalty we talked about, and the main contrast is that this penalty is for outgoing links. The other one is for links put on our website on different domains. You need to avoid linking to superfluous domains, taking an interest in an over-the-top link exchange, trading of links.

Thin Content

It´s important to guarantee that your website’s content brings value to the users and of course, isn’t malicious. Assuming Google flags several events of bad quality updates on your site, you´ll get a content penalty. These are a few thin context examples: