Getting a vulnerable penalty from search engine giant like Google is one of the worst things that can ever happen to your website. The main consequences of getting Google penalty may mean either your specific webpage or site will completely disappear from the search results and your organic traffic will dry up. The only way back solution to overcome this problem is to ensure that your site meets all Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines which may change time to time and then ask for a resubmission. Even if this is granted, it may take a long time for your blog/website to recover its previous ranking.

Google Penalties and How To Avoid Them

Whether you are building inbound links to your business website by yourself or outsourced SEO tasks to some agency, you must always be updated and know how to keep your rankings and organic traffic intact.

In this post, we’ll look at the things which could get you a Google penalty and likely to affect your rankings in the future.

We will discuss some practical ways by which you can protect your site from any Google penalty.

1. Don’t Use Duplicate Content

2. Avoid Keyword Stuffing

3. Work on Your Website/Mobile and App Design

4. Don’t Try Cloaking

5. Don’t Use Hidden Text on Your Website

#Don’t Use Duplicate Content

If you’re curious to start your own business by having an online presence through organic or paid marketing, then the first thing that comes to your mind is having a business website. And website needs to fill with content, but you don’t have time to write it all by yourself. You might think that one cool trick would be to steal someone else’s stuff and just publish it on your website/blog. Aside from being utterly unethical and possibly putting you in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you could also hurt your rank in the search engine SERPs.

# Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing, the practice of adding excess keywords everywhere on your webpage, is a certain way to open yourself up to a Google Penalty. According to Google Panda algorithm updates when someone found using plagiarized, user-generated spam or web pages having keywords stuffed in articles can be penalized by downgrading their rankings.

Keyword stuffing is one of the most common SEO best practices used by SEO nerds out there. And now it is something to avoid at all costs by following genuine strategies.

They are still in wide use to optimize your content for what people are searching online. But keyframes should be added naturally to your blog content, rather than overdoing it and reciting the same keyword as many times as possible.

And, some agencies suggest using optimal level of keywords in the article by calculating its density by having some sort of formulas. But forget about calculating their optimal density and so. It doesn’t matter anymore, keep your content natural in tone for your readers and you’ll be delivered.

# Work on Your Website/Mobile and App Design

The way your website or application looks also matters to online users and Google alike. And we aren’t talking about attractiveness here. Google’s ranking algorithms can recognize efforts you have put into making your website user-friendly, to improve user experience (UX) and easy to navigate on mobile devices by the audience.

It is all about the visitors and how they feel when they are on your website. If they are happy with your page load speed, visual resources add worth to your content, and if they can find easily what they want without many efforts, you are on the right track folks. If you don’t, Google will presume that you don’t care much, and it would negatively impact your site ranking.

So, make sure that you invest some time and money trying to improve the design of your website. It will also increase your conversions which may convert to business leads at the time.

# Don’t Try Cloaking

There are several definitions of “cloaking” go around in the SEO biosphere. Here, cloaking refers to the technique of spamming the desired content in one way to the search engines while showing completely different content to site visitors.

For instance, if you are having a website related to pirated online music store which is completely illegal but to hide it from search crawlers to gather such information while gone through your blog you offer them content related to an online bookstore selling books and journals just to change their intentions.

That’s accomplished by using a JavaScript code that reads the IP address and/or User-Agent HTTP header of the user and rendering content accordingly.

That’s another sure shot trick that can get your site penalized for sure. So, our advice is not to use it for short-term rankings.

# Don’t Use Hidden Text on Your Website

Using hidden text is a form of deceptive search engine spamming technique. Typically, hidden text is either characters, words, numbers or combination on a web page that are of the same colour as a background, making it invisible to users but still visible to search engine spiders. Whereas hidden links are links when hidden text also has in it.

Examples of hidden text

• Using white coloured text on a white background
• Placing text behind an image
• Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to move text off-screen
• Setting font size to 0
• Hiding a link by using one small alphabet or special symbol as the anchor text, e.g. a hyphen

You might think that you can trick search engines like Bing and Google into thinking that certain text on your site, even though it’s completely invisible to humans. You should be well known that Google considers that practice as a violation of its policies and will penalize you in its own sense.

# Summary

Our final piece of advice to you may sound apparent, but it is still very relevant. If you want to rank well on the net and see more traffic from search engines, don’t try to con the system.

And if you think that you have been able to do this, so you can continue this path, you will soon find out that your fate won’t last long. With millions of web pages to be index, Google search algorithms might take a while to identify what you are doing, but soon it will.

So, make the most out of best SEO practices that you can find. They might bring results at a slow pace, but once you get there, they will be steady, fruitful and long-lasting.

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