SEO has the reputation of being the digital marketing lever that relies the most on long-term work. This statement should be qualified, but it is nevertheless based on a reality. Because it is clear that nothing great can be built in natural referencing without a certain consistency in the work of content creation and net linking.
The consequence is that, more than for any other lever, the accumulation of the benefits of the actions taken over time is crucial in an SEO strategy. In this area, being forced to start from scratch can have dramatic (even irreversible) consequences for a business.
However, this is what can happen to you if Google inflicts an SEO penalty on your site. Not all penalties are equal and not all result in the same inconvenience. But they can quickly happen if you do not respect a certain number of essential principles.
This article therefore aims to summarize what you need to know in the matter. It is not a question of adopting an expert point of view on the question, but of giving you the keys to register the natural referencing of your site in a sustainable digital marketing strategy.
What is a Google Penalty?
The evolution of Google's search engine has been structured from the
outset by a central project: offering users the sites that best meet the
demands expressed in their queries. Over the years, an increasingly
complex algorithm has therefore been developed to highlight a site when it
serves this project and penalize it when it serves this project.
Thus, a penalized site is a site that Google considers does not respect
the rules of its project. But the penalties in question can be of two
types.
Manual penalties
As their name suggests, these penalties are manually activated by a human. In this case, they are made by the Quality Raters of the Google Quality Teams. The latter regularly visit the sites referenced on the search engine, in parallel with the indexing robots, to assess their quality and the level of compliance with the rules set out by Google (see below).If your site clearly violates any of these rules, they will apply a heavy penalty to it in the search results; which could cause you to lose almost all of your natural traffic.
Algorithmic penalties
These penalties are not inflicted by humans but by Google Bots, which scan the web all day long to also assess the quality of the sites referenced.
Unlike
manual penalties, algorithmic penalties are not explicitly notified. But they can have an
equally damaging effect on your site traffic. The main difficulty about
them then remains to be able to identify them when your site is a
victim…
How do you know if your site has been sanctioned with a penalty?
In the case of a manual penalty, identification is not a problem: a message is displayed in your Search Console to notify you of the penalty:
You also have access to the reason for the penalty and to a form allowing
you to resubmit your site to have it removed.
Generally, site owners who suffer this kind of penalties are not very
surprised and know what action(s) they owe it to. If they don't know it,
their
off page SEO services
provider certainly knows it… Suffice to say, therefore, that there is no
need to look very long to find out where to clean up before asking for a
manual review of the site.
On the other hand, if you are the victim of an algorithmic penalty, the
problem is more difficult to pin down. And for good reason, these
penalties are applied automatically without the site owners being
notified. The difference is therefore not obvious between a site that
simply does not benefit from a powerful SEO strategy and a site that is
really penalized by the algorithm.
With experience and by following SEO news (in particular the impact of
successive updates to the Google algorithm), we can however identify them with more or less certainty. In the case
of a blatant drop in traffic and positions on certain keywords, without
major action on your part or on the part of your competitors, it is
reasonable to say that your site has been pinned by an update of the
algorithm.
Conclusion? You should know the guiding principles of these updates and
especially those of the two main filters of the last few years.
Panda and Penguin: two algorithmic filters to know to avoid being penalized
In the field of natural referencing, there has been a golden age of site over-optimization practices. For a long time, it was enough to know a few technical tricks to interfere with the flaws of the algorithm and propel a site to the top positions of search results.
But those days are over, and since 2011 Google has developed two filters,
Panda and Penguin, which receive regular updates in the algorithm to
penalize site owners who try to circumvent the rules. Since then, other
filters have emerged, but these two remain the most influential and those
that penalize the most sites. Better to know them...
Panda: content according to Google
To put it quickly, the purpose of Panda in the Google algorithm is to guarantee the quality of the content of the sites that are referenced in the search engine. The idea? Hunt down sites whose pages bring no value to Internet users and have been written solely to improve their positioning in the ranking of search results and increase their visibility on the web.
Are thus penalized the sites which practice for example the “duplicate
content”, the
over-optimization of keywords (in the texts and in the anchors of link), the spam and the writing of
poor quality in the broad sense. To find out if you are likely to be
affected, you can take a look at the questions to ask that Google made
public in 2011.
Today, Panda even enjoys a place at the heart of the algorithm, with each
site crawled by robots receiving a “Panda score”. It is no longer simply a
filter, but rather a calculation signal in its own right.
Penguin: net linking according to Google
For its part, Penguin is to external SEO practices what Panda is to internal content. It aims in particular to sanction the actions of net linking which are not natural. Basically, the purchase of links or their abusive exchange.
In the ideal “Penguin” world, every backlink would have to be earned by
the sweat of the brow or, at least, by merit. Of course, in fact, it is
possible to acquire PPC for Event Plannersquality sites and within the
framework of a natural approach to which Google finds nothing wrong. But
you have to be very careful with this approach to
SEO, which is a potential source of penalties.
Especially since, like Panda, Penguin has also ended up integrating the
heart of the algorithm, of which it is today a permanent signal. In the
same way as the quality of the content, the quality of the net linking has
thus become an essential axis for working on your SEO in the (official!)
rules of the art and avoiding penalties.
Best SEO practices to remember
The subject of Google penalties may seem complex at first glance, but if you had to remember only one thing, it is that by doing things honestly and intelligently, you normally do not incur a penalty. In this case, we therefore recommend that you adopt at least these few good practices.
Take care of your content
Today's digital marketing cannot do without quality content. Also, wanting to save time at the expense of this quality can quickly become a very bad idea. Conversely, investing time and money in a real strategy for creating original content, adapted to the needs of the target, is to lay the groundwork for long-term performance.So, take care of your content and your content will pay back (at least through Google at first)!
Optimize your UX
Google's goal is to offer these users the best navigation possible. It is also increasingly attentive to the quality of the user experience on the sites it references.
Forget about pop-ups that open in all directions, pages that take several
seconds to load, long submenus or, worst of all, interfaces that are not
adapted to mobile. Since a major update in May 2021, which endorsed the
notion of “Page Experience”, the Google algorithm takes all these details
into account.
Develop a network of natural backlinks
Rather than systematically turning to a service provider to acquire backlinks in obscure places on the internet, try asking yourself how you could obtain them naturally. By creating reference content with high added value, in which you share your experience and expertise, you will surely be able to attract the attention of other content creators and recover links to your site. The key is to find the subjects that lend themselves best to it.
Don't put all your eggs in the SEO basket
Even if you have good will in your SEO strategy, you are never totally safe from a penalty applied by the algorithms. However, when this happens, the consequences can be brutal, especially if your entire acquisition strategy is largely based on natural referencing.
At Ad Premier, in general, we recommend developing a versatile digital
strategy, capable of seizing opportunities where they are and skillfully
integrating the different channels in a scalable approach. This is the
best way to quickly compensate for a drop in performance on a particular
channel, for example a Google penalty on your SEO.
