A must read… Google Search Engine Penalties - Avoid common penalties
Posted by seo services team: You may not be ready to jump into having an SEO specialist fix your website. But, chances are - your website is breaking the most common Google rules. At a minimum, you may want to consider reviewing your website so that the quality is acceptable enough - to avoid being penalized!
There is something called the Google 50 penalty, and the Google 950 penalty. Keep this in mind if significant changes happen to your website. Google evaluates consistent quality changes. Therefore, if your website drops 50 places, or drops to the last pages of Google, your site will be penalized.
Over-Optimization Penalties
Many web developers can penalize your website if they do not know the basics of Search Engine Optimization. One of the most common mistakes is to ‘over do it’ by repeating certain key phrases too many times. If you have repeated your key phrases many times in the <TITLE>, <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, <B>, and <I> tags, ALT and TITLE , domain, sub-domain, directory name, and repeated several times in the content of your website, chances are you will not have any significant rankings. Search engines look at usage and saturation to evaluate the quality of your website. It checks to see if you know what you are doing. In fact, correct saturation is a very low ratio - meaning your key phrases should not be repeated that often, just more often than the rest of your common text.
Duplicate Content penalty-this is still VERY common. Consider this, if you have copied any of your text from another website source, then Google and other major search engines have already crawled it, and you will be penalized for copying even a few sentences, since they have already been recorded by Google.
Meta Keywords-again, do not over do it. In fact, meta keywords do not help any more. Back in the day, when search engines were unsophisticated - meta keywords did matter. Now, they do not help your rankings but will hurt your rankings if spammed. Do not repeat a word too many times or fill up your meta keyword tag with too many words. This is also a good way to figure out if you are working with a professional SEO consultant that really understands the business. If anyone suggests to you that your website will achieve rankings from meta-keywords, then it is scam and a sure way to penalize your website.
Changing hosting companies-unfortunately, if you change your hosting account, there is not way to preserve your rankings. How long your hosting has until it expires is also a minor factor. Make sure the length of your hosting account expiration date is always maxed out, and if possible, try not to change your hosting account.
Buying and selling links-dont, there are are few that you will not be penalized for but it may not be worth the time and effort to find out which ones.
Linking to banned/bad websites-maybe you like a particular website, but linking to a website that has irrelevant content, a low PR/SERP ranking, or penalized itself - will penalize your website. An SEO specialist can evaluate your inbound and outbound links to see what needs to be changed/removed.
Hidden links and text on your site- this was banned a long time ago! Hidden text(making it the same as your background), and making a link hidden is also one of the classic best ways to have your website penalized.
Incorrect Redirects-this one is a one of a few more technical issues, basically, when you create links out there that point to your website, try to avoid using both links with and without the www. prefix. This is because all of your backlinks will not be counted together. So stick to one - create your backlinks using the www. prefix or without it.
Hope this helps you remove some of the most common and obvious violations.
Â
