Hopefully this one’s obvious: any duplicate content on your site makes it less useful in Google’s view, and that could result in a penalty. If you’ve been exchanging lots of links with clients, it could be seen as a manipulation attempt. Swapping links was once an innocent marketing tactic until it started to be abused. If you’ve been buying bad links (and lots of them), your actions could have caught up with you. Buying links could certainly be seen as an attempt to manipulate PageRank, and therein lies the controversy. Some swear it doesn’t happen, but actual evidence is mixed. While we’re not saying we know the definite reasons for a penalty, we do know that these factors all contribute. To get you off on the right track, here’s the part you’ve been waiting for: 50 common reasons for Google taking issue with your site. While it does publish clues about its algorithm updates, it rarely comes clean about all of its reasons for changes. Google is continually tweaking and revising the way it indexes content. If you see one or more of these factors, you can be pretty sure that a penalty has affected your site. Your listing – when you eventually find it in Google – is for a page on your site other than the home page.Running a site search – site: keyword – yields no results.The entire website has been removed from Google’s cached search results overnight.PageRank for your site has inexplicably dropped from a respectable two or three to a big fat zero (or a measly PR of one).Any page one positions you had are slipping back to page two or three without any action on your part.Even if your site doesn’t rank for much else, it should at least do well on that one keyword. Your website is not ranking well for your brand name any more.Those penalties may take even the most experienced SEO professionals by surprise.įor algorithmic penalties, here are some sure-fire clues. With manual penalties, you’ll probably be told, but you may not always know you’ve been targeted if the cause is algorithmic. Since then, SEO professionals have been very tuned in to Google’s plans, fearing the next update in case it results in a penalty for a site they’re working on. It hit more than 1 in 10 search results overnight, wiped some sites out of search entirely, pushed poor quality content off the map and forced optimizers to think much more carefully about their content strategy. The Penguin update was rolled out in 2012. Over time, it begins to eliminate poor quality content and elevate the good stuff to the top of the SERPs. Over the next decade-and-a-bit, Google continued to refine the quality of its search results. In fact, it was the first time PageRank was published in a meaningful or usable form. At the time, the toolbar update represented a sea change that would create the SEO industry as we know it. That’s when it released its toolbar extension. Google has been changing its ranking algorithms since December 2000. Sometimes a penalty is well deserved, but even if you know you’re in the wrong, you probably want to do something about it. That’s the consequence of Google taking issue with something on your site. Unfortunately, there’s a flipside: a penalty. It continually tweaks and improves its algorithms so that the best of the web gets the exposure it deserves. It wants to give its users access to accurate information, unique content and the finest writers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |