How To Ensure Your Website Is Not Penalized By Google

Recovering from a penalty and getting back to your original rankings can be very difficult, as it is not only building back almost from scratch, but you also have to struggle with many others who are in the same position as you are.

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So the latest Penguin update came out on the 27th of September, and if you are one of the lucky ones, you have probably survived what millions of other site owners faced- their sites virtually disappearing in the mire.

Remember that recovering from a penalty and getting back to your original rankings can be very difficult, as it is not only building back almost from scratch, but you also have to struggle with many others who are in the same position as you are. So it is better to avoid getting penalized altogether, and it is much easier than it sounds.

Before going into what you can do to avoid penalties from Google, let us take a quick recap of what are the basic kinds of penalties are:

Manual penalties

These are the penalties you get when a member of the Google team decides to review your site individually and penalizes you in the process. While these do not often happen, in case they do, you get notifications in your Google Webmaster Tools account. Recovery from these is comparatively easy.

Algorithmic penalties

These are what you really need to be worried about, and you get them when you violate any or some of the Google’s quality guidelines, which is determined by a complicated algorithm that Google uses to understand how your site fares in the face of queries from users. You must keep in mind that a single algorithm change can change the fate of around a million websites.

What are the Google Quality Guidelines?

These are the ones you HAVE to follow, no matter what. As Neil Patel writes, ‘If you make your living online, this is your bible.’ And they are very easy to follow if you have got your priorities right. They are divided into the helpful ‘General Guidelines,' ‘Quality Guidelines’ (with ‘Basic principles’ and ‘Specific guidelines’) sections. How easier do you expect it to get?

As per its page, it expects three basic things from you- help it to find your page, help it to understand what your page is all about and how it functions, and most importantly, help the visitors to your pages navigate them. Because Google considers the trust placed on it by the visitors to find the best content to be of utmost importance, and designs its policies to that end. As one of its basic principles clearly states, ‘Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines,' followed by ‘Don't deceive your users.' Technically thus, it is not the monster that many website owners are making it out to be.

So what are the things you need to take care of in order to make the best use of the framework Google provides you? Most experts seem to agree on the following unanimously:

Make content of really good quality

serpIQ

This is the most important thing. Because Google does not take kindly to plagiarism. Or even recycled content for that matter. Which is why you need to get as original as possible, maintaining a good quality in addition. Make your pages attractive, user friendly and relevant.

The days of 300-500 words content are passed. Make your posts at least 1500-2000 words long, and be as detailed as possible. Try to make it such that a visitor does not need to go anywhere else for information. Popularity is extremely important to Google. So you need to make your pages such that they sell.

Take care of the security. And be careful of the backlinks. Google does not like poor security, and backlinks leading to visitors ending up landing on penalized and controversial sites while exploring your pages.

Also, you need to look into how long it is taking for your pages to load, and whether your site is up and working continuously, at least 95% of the time. Usually, a visitor would leave your site on an average of three seconds in case it does not load. And Google can completely de-index your site even if has all the other things in place in case it remains unavailable for some time.

Take care of guest blogging

You may think that the more the guest blogging and keywords with links, the better are your chances of ranking high. And Google would vehemently disagree with you. Because while it greatly values authoritative, the experienced backing of your content, over the past few years, guest blogging has increasingly lost its reverence, what with mostly spammy backlinks that are there for the sole purpose of link building. So getting rid of irrelevant links should be your priority, and should be ideally taken care of every two months.

This is what the former head of Google’s head spam team had to say on occasion:

Also, concentrating more on natural anchor phrases than unnatural, keyword-rich anchor phrases is a better idea, as the Penguin update decided to penalize overcrowding of keywords.

At the same time, remember that guest blogging is a very useful tool when used carefully, as it adds to your brand image and increases audience strength. ‘Relevancy is the new PR.' The linking domain should ideally have a good social media following, and you should take care that the backlinks do not make up more than a maximum of 25% of your overall link profile. Try to reserve the guest blogging only for branding purposes in order to increase credibility.

Make your site mobile friendly

With 50% of searches now originating from portable devices like mobiles and tablets, Google has started paying better attention to sites supporting mobile visitors with its mobile-friendly algorithm update Mobilegeddon. Remember, though, mobile friendly does not mean a mere accessibility from a mobile, but a page design suited for the device. Run Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to get a better idea of how things should be.

Work on your brand image

Brands are better placed to escape Google’s weeding, even if their SEO strategies are problematic because it counts on a brand’s experience and the trust it has garnered from the users. In the event of a penalty, brands have a better chance of recovery.

So, you need to make Google understand that your site is of a brand, and that it has all the accompanying features and qualities. Because of which you need to maintain a good delivery of services, a good social media following, and a good user interface with credible and branded backlinks with anchored texts. A clever, negative manipulation of any of these and remember, Google will come down twice as hard on you.

Wrapping Up!

Therefore, to sum it all up, you need to play by the rules and make the best use of the means available to you. Good content needs good investment, especially for time, along with good management. So you need to remember that merely leaving a site up and running will not get you anywhere. Also, be on the lookout for Google’s algorithm updates, do a regular cleaning up, and when it comes to your SEO, don’t settle for the second best, because while some can be very good, many can be very bad and destroy your site.