What Are Google Penalties And How Can You Avoid Them?

All the talk surrounding SEO is always about how you can improve your search ranking. Everyone provides advice on doing this and provides tips you can follow. What’s rarely spoken about are the penalties Google dishes out to websites.
Today, we look at Google Penalties and figure out how your website can avoid them for good.

What Are Google Penalties?

Essentially, a Google Penalty is where your website gets bumped down the rankings as you’ve done something that’s frowned upon. Often, people that get penalties have been conducting ‘Black Hat’ SEO techniques. This term refers to techniques that aren’t on the Google SEO guidelines, and you’re explicitly told to avoid.
Sometimes, after an algorithm update, websites may receive penalties as something that used to be fine is now not fine. So, you have to address the penalty and fix things on your site to ensure you avoid it.

How Can You Avoid Penalties From Google?

The best way to avoid penalties is to understand what Google penalizes. In doing so, you will know what you should steer clear of if you want a healthy and SEO-friendly website.

• Keyword Spamming: This is one of the most common Google Penalties as many sites will spam keywords. Talk to any search engine optimization agency, and they’ll tell you that keywords are important, but you have to use them sparingly. Don’t have an entire paragraph full of keywords, Google will notice this and hit you with a penalty.
• Link Spamming: Along with keyword spamming, link spamming is a big no-no. This is where you spam links to your site all over the internet in the hope of creating backlinks. Google will notice if you do this, and you’ll be hit hard. If you’re link-building, ensure you do it properly and build backlinks naturally through authoritative sites.
• Paying For Links: Likewise, if you pay to generate a load of backlinks to your site you will be penalized. Remember, they need to be natural and organic!
• Weak Content: Google puts a lot of emphasis on great content that’s valuable to the user. This has been further emphasized in their latest update. Sites that have very little content, or whose content is poor and invaluable, are being penalized hard. Similarly, websites that are very ad-heavy are getting hit too. Your business website must have lots of quality content and can’t just be full of ads or junk content.
• Hiding Things: In the past, many sites tried hiding things in the hope that they could boost their rankings. They’d spam keywords, then hide the text so users couldn’t see, thinking that the keyword density would boost them up the rankings. Or, more complexly, they’d try and disguise their site, so Google thought it was something that it’s not. Neither of these things will fly with Google, you can’t hide anything on your site, or you will get penalized.

These are the main penalties Google will hand out to websites. By understanding what they are, you can avoid doing wrong things and damaging your site. Stay clear of black hat techniques and keep your website SEO-friendly if you want to see success.