In the last few years Google has made more significant changes in it’s algorithm than ever before. It’s enough to make your head spin. If you feel like you have been punished by any of these updates, the first step is to determine exactly which guideline(s) you’ve violated.
Hummingbirds and Penguins and Pandas oh my!
Google actually makes it easy for us. They’ve given us a list of 10 key elements that they may list as the reasons for your warning and ultimately why you’ve been punished. Each of these can be considered as a direct violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:
Unnatural links to your site – impacts links:
Google has found unnatural or deceptive links pointing to your site. This impacts specific links only. Just remember not every referral is a good referral.
Unnatural links to your site:
Google has found unnatural or deceptive links pointing to your site. Impacts your entire site. If shady sites are linking to you, you’ll be shady by association.
Hacked site:
Google has found malicious content and suspects your site has been hacked by a third party. Impacts your entire site. Don’t worry if you don’t keep up with the security of your site, Google will take care of it for you… by not sending anyone to your site!
User-generated spam:
Spammy links have been found within blog or forum comments or profiles. This may be created by users of your site, but you’ll be punished just the same.
Spammy freehosts:
When a majority of a site is considered spammy, the entire site or ‘service’ may be deemed spam and receive manual action. This can be equated to the old saying, “you’re only as good as the company you keep.”
Thin content with little or no added value:
Google has detected shallow pages such as automatically generated content, scraped content or doorway pages. Nobody likes the middle man, if you’re copying content from other sites or using small amounts of content to then send visitors somewhere else., you’ll be punished.
Cloaking and/or spammy redirects:
Google has found that you’re showing one page to users and another to the search engines, or redirecting visitors to a page other than the one shown to Google. If you’re doing this, Google will start cloaking you from their search results, and you won’t be found again.
Unnatural links from your site:
Google has found unnatural or manipulative outbound links on your site. Guess what this will get you… you’ll naturally be thrown out of Google’s search results.
Pure spam:
Google has found that your site uses “aggressive spam techniques” like cloaking or scraping, or is guilty of other “egregious” violations. No fancy mustard will save this spam sandwich, you’ll be thrown out with the garbage.
Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing:
Google has found text that’s hidden from users but not search engines, and/or multiple keywords on a page, for the purposes of manipulating your rankings. Yep you guessed it. Hiding keywords will get you hidden from search results and the game will be over.
So the lesson is, Google wants us to have great sites and lots of traffic, all we have to do is make sure we listen.
