As a business, search engine traffic is essential to your success. However, it is a very competitive field. This makes many smaller businesses feel desperate to find ways to make the system work for them and outrank their competitors.
Sometimes, this works out. Other times, it results in Google SEO penalties.
Why Sites Get Google Penalties
There are a lot of reasons your site might get a strike from Google. However, only a few are particularly common. These include:
- Unnatural Links: If Google thinks your backlinks aren’t right for your site or might be part of a scheme, you’ll get a penalty.
- Low-Quality Content: Google likes to reward high-quality, authoritative content. If they find your content to offer low quality, they’ll give you a strike.
- Duplicate Content: If your website has content that is identical to, or nearly identical to, content from another site, it will be a penalty.
- Spam: Chances are you aren’t using your website to spam people, but if you use a free host, you might get the spam penalty anyhow. Sometimes, Google will penalize all sites related to a host known for hosting spammy content.
If you get a strike, it is essential that you start focusing on Google penalty recovery so you can start showing up in searches once more.
How to Recover from Any Google Penalty
The process for recovering from Google penalties, no matter the reason you received one, is pretty simple.
- Identify the reason you got the penalty.
- Fix the issue that triggered the strike.
- Wait for the algorithm to refresh.
In terms of simplicity, this is great news. However, that waiting period can be lengthy. Google tends to run its data refreshes once every few months, and your site will remain penalized until the refresh happens and it is determined that your site no longer has any issues.
This can be devastating, especially for small businesses that are relying on online traffic for customers to even realize they exist. As soon as you realize you have been penalized, start figuring out why it happened and fixing the issue. This may require a full site audit.
Of course, you don’t need to do all of this alone. SEO experts in Cumming can help. Whether you need to get your site back into search engine results or help with email marketing in Atlanta, SEO Guru can help.
