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SEO PenaltiesSchmitz Marketing

Schmitz Marketingschmitzmarket ing.com

Thomas SchmitzFounder & CEO@TomSchmitz

Organic Inbound MarketingSEO, Social Media, Content Strategies & More

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What are SEO Penalties?

Webspam

Penalizes infractions against webmaster guidelines or search engines’ terms of service.

Webspam is determined by intent and extent.

Search engines deal with most things they do not like automatically and without assessing penalties.

Penalties are for egregious offenders.

Penalties

Usually it is not a penalty!

Types of Penalties

Manual Actions

Algorithmic Google Panda Google Penguin Others

Burned Domains

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Manual Actions

Manual Actions

A Google or Bing quality assurance team member manually reviews the site.

Finds egregious infractions of the webmaster guidelines or terms of service.

Applies a manual penalty.

Sends a message via webmaster tools.

Manual Actions

Causes Unnatural links to your

site

Unnatural links from your site

Hacked site

Thin content with little or no added value

Pure spam

User-generated spam

Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects

Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing

Spammy freehosts

Spammy structured markup

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824

Manual Actions

There are various types of punishments

Some or all pages removed from the index

Some or all rankings reduces # spots (i.e. down 5, 10, 50, etc. places)

Manual Actions

Remove all offending content and/or links.

Request a review via webmaster tools.

List any inbound links you are unable to get removed in Google’s and Bing’s disavow tools located in webmaster tools.

Manual Actions

Manual penalties have expiration dates.

The worse the infraction, the longer the penalty.

Infractions that go unfixed will be penalized again.

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Algorithmic Penalties

Algorithmic Penalties

Search engine program identifies infractions.

Automatically applies punishment.

May or may not send a message via webmaster tools.

Panda

Google Panda Penalty

Penalizes low quality content

It is built into the ranking algorithm and updates are continuous

Drops site-wide traffic 80%

Panda

Recovering From a Google Panda Penalty

Remove or rewrite all low quality content

Rewritten content must bring additional value to the web

When fixed and the site is re-crawled, the penalty will go away

Panda

Recovering From a Google Panda Penalty

Do not expect all rankings and traffic to return after recovering from Panda

If you remove or block content it cannot rank

Rewritten content will not necessarily rank as well as the pre-penalty content

Penguin

Google Penguin Penalty

Penalizes aggressive unnatural link patterns

It is separate from the ranking algorithm. Updates are manual

Drops site-wide traffic 80%

You may or may not receive a webmaster tools message

Penguin

Recovering From Google Penguin Penalty

Identify low quality and unnatural inbound links

Request websites to remove the bad links

Disavow remaining bad links in webmaster tools

File a re-inclusion request

Penguin

Recovering From Google Penguin Penalty

Recovery will not happen till the next update

Updates are months apart. The last one was October 5, 2013

Do not expect rankings to fully recover because the authority from removed and disavowed links will be gone

Other Algorithmic Penalties

Other Algorithmic Penalties

May be difficult to diagnose

No webmaster tools notification

There is no automatic expiration

You cannot file a re-inclusion request

Other Algorithmic Penalties

Made for AdSense

Aggressive Ads

Aggressive Footer Links

Doorway Pages

Duplicate Content

Keyword Stuffing

Overused Anchor Text

Scraped Content

Slow Page Loads

Spammy Keywords

Causes

And More…

Other Algorithmic Penalties

Google and Bing do not share many causes of penalties. They consider this part of their secret sauce…

…and they do not want to help real web-spammers.

Burned Domains

When a website goes too far, search engines may ban it from their search results for all time.

When a site search on a domain (site:domain.com) show zero results and there is no message in webmaster tools, the site may be burned.

The only thing to do with a burned domain is discard it and start with a fresh domain.

Schmitz Marketingschmitzmarket ing.com

Thomas SchmitzFounder & CEO@TomSchmitz

Organic Inbound MarketingSEO, Social Media, Content Strategies & More