Google Reserves The Right To Manually Penalise A Website
Google reserves the right to apply manual spam actions, better known as penalties, to websites it finds in violation of its Webmaster Guidelines. The specific reasons and scope of manual penalties can be manifold, and the real impact may range from barely noticeable to utterly disastrous for a website’s presence in organic Google Search results.
How Will This Guide Help You?
From 2012, Google tidies up a bit their communication efforts with webmasters through Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools for all the website’s issues. These issues have potential to cause a negative impact on the visibility of a site on the organic search.
We designed this guide to focus on how you should respond to these error notifications. These notifications are “warnings”. They are related to Google Search Engine Console guidelines violations such as black-hat techniques spotted by the Google Search Quality team that was deemed egregious enough to trigger sanctions.
This guide will offer you all the help you can get to avoid these penalties. If Google penalise your website for any of these things, with the help of this guide, you will be able to overcome the loss with the feasible tips of this guide. Here you go,
Guideline Violations That Can Cost You Your Website Ranks
There are many factors that can drop your website ranking instantly. So, you must find them and fix them before you get more damage to your business.A Major Spam Problem
It is a manual notification by Google which highlights on major spam problems. This indicates that Google thinks the content of your website page is spammy entirely which caters no value to your website.
This message shows that when a user reads the content of your website, one of the most severe consequence come into effect. This makes Google remove your site from the organic Google search results. There are cases where Google only removes some of the subsets of your website pages.
When a website is pure spam, a rare variation of the major spam problems action highlights the gravity of the violation in more stark wording. That message seems to be on the verge of being deprecated as in recent months it has been sporadically registered (in comparison to the major spam penalty, which is very common).
Pure spam notification is very common for those who often use cloaking. Displaying vastly different content to search engine bots and users based on the user-agent has become rare; at the same time, Google has stepped up their detection methods. This is a likely explanation for why this specific penalty has become less frequent.
User-Generated Spam Problems
This User-generated spam usually is an issue for large websites with a huge audience at their back. Google flag the website when spammer and black hat exploit it. In this notification, Google asks the webmaster of the website to keep the things in order or else “Somebody gonna get really hurt” (In Russell Peters style).
The highest impact of this penalty is the removal of that particular URL mentioned in the report from the Google search results.
This seems to be a little price to pay, but it is important in the big picture. Sites affected by user-generated spam often receive a lot of user-generated spam messages, even on pages not identified by Google. If the vulnerability isn’t swiftly taken care of, chances are there will be thousands of potentially malicious, user-generated pages which Google will remove from their index to protect their users.
You need to follow the below decorum to avoid the user-generated spam problems,
- Make sure your forum or discussion software is up to date, especially with regard to any security patches that have been issued.
- Use moderation capabilities for the following:
- Blacklist obviously spammy words or inappropriate words (like pharma-related) and continue to add to your blacklists based on spam that you’re seeing.
- Identify and check content when a single account or IP address accounts for a large volume of posts in a short time.
- Subject posts from new members or new posters to editorial review before they are published, lifting the restriction once they have established themselves as trustworthy.
- Limit users’ ability to link.
- Consider disallowing links entirely or allowing only trusted contributors with spotless track records to link to other sites.
- If you allow links, you may nofollow them to remove some of the incentives to link externally.
- Close comments or discussion on threads after a reasonable period, as they’ll often collect spam after real users have ceased to engage on them.
Hacked Content Spam
A very interesting thing to note is Hacked content spam penalty is almost identical to user-generated spam. Again, Google’s message includes a sample URL, which provides a clue to where to start the investigation and what type of content to look for while cleansing the site of spam.
Let’s see how it is different from user-generated spam,
- The first thing to note is the hacked content spam penalty is applied to only those sites which have issues with their website’s security. They must not be user-driven as well.
- Another thing to note is content spam penalty label your website with a statutory warning for the user. This generally results in immediate loss of organic user traffic from the search engine.
Obtaining rich snippet is an enticing process. If spotted, a notification highlighting incorrect structured data is the result, and your rich snippets will no longer appear in search results.
The recovery and reconsideration process is similar to what you would do for other types of manual penalties. House cleaning, spotless implementation and documentation are key.In practical terms, regaining the accuracy of the rich snippet is impossible.
Gaming structured data is, therefore, a risky business. It is not only not recommended, it is also likely to indefinitely impact upon the look and feel of a site in Google SERPs.
Unnatural Outbound Links
This is like a yellow card from a referee. A warning not to repeat the same. Selling links for manipulating PageRank is an offensive deed. This triggers the manual penalty with a message highlighting the issue.
Given the site owner’s total control over their own website. Narrowing down the problem and applying a suitable solution, such as no-following questionable links, is easy.
Filing A Reconsideration Request
When you receive any of the manual penalty given above, you can fix the issue and then request Google to check your website again. If Google finds your website free of error, then they will lift the penalty from your website. This filing is the Reconsideration Request.
Every manual action notification arrives, they usually come up with a detailed instruction. This will help you in fixing the issue. All these steps vary as the type penalty issued. You need to satisfy all the requirements given by Google to lift the penalty from your website. After fixing the issues, you need to click on the Reconsideration Request button. This will start the Google inspection on your website for error.
Over To You
So, you understand the process how Google can penalise your website. To avoid them, you need to be extra conscious. Let’s have a look at what we discussed in the above post for a quick recap.Points At Glance
- Google reserves the right to apply manual spam actions, better known as penalties, to websites it finds in violation of its Webmaster Guidelines.
- Major spam problem penalty indicates that Google thinks the content of your website page is spammy entirely which caters no value to your website.
- The User-generated spam usually is an issue for large websites with a huge audience at their back. Google flag the website when spammer and black hat exploit a website.
- Hacked content spam penalty is almost same to user-generated spam. The reason behind this identical issue is when spammers abuse a website to inject malicious and/or irrelevant content without the site owner’s consent. Again, Google’s message includes a sample URL, which provides a clue to where to start the investigation. Also what type of content to look for while cleansing the site of spam.
- Obtaining rich snippet is an enticing process. If spotted, a notification highlighting incorrect structured data is the result. This will make your rich snippets disappear in the search results.
- Unnatural outbound links penalty is like a yellow card from a referee. A warning not to repeat the same. Selling links for manipulating PageRank is an offensive deed. This triggers the manual penalty with a message highlighting the issue.
- When you receive any of the manual penalty given above. You can fix the issue and then ask Google to check your website again. If Google finds your website free of error, then they will lift the penalty from your website.
