Have you heard about “manual action”? Manipulating search index without considering Google’s webmaster quality guidelines is illegal. Google issues a manual action against any website when a Google visitor claims that website pages are not compliant with proper guidelines.
If you ever receive a manual action report in the Google Search Console, here the best SEO Company in India shares a list of Google penalties and how to fix them.
There is a lot of misinformation about Google penalties. Many believe that algorithm updates like Penguin and Panda are Google penalties; whereas, the truth is, they are algorithms. Google also appoints human reviewers to review and flag any suspicious websites. When your website gets caught by Google reviewers, they claim a penalty and it results in a huge loss of organic traffic.
In this post, we will focus on manual penalties and how you can fix them.
| Google Penalty List | Google Penalties | How to Fix? |
| Hidden Text or Keyword Stuffing | Hidden texts or keyword stuffing is something your website should be guilty about. For this, Google penalty arrives in two forms: (1). Partial matches, which affect a certain portion of your site, and (2). Site-wide matches, which affect your whole website. | 1. Visit the path of Fetch as Google through the Google search console. Fetch pages from affected website portions.2. Find out texts or contents that are the same as the website body.3. Search out hidden text using CSS styling.4. It’s better if you remove or re-style hidden text.5. Remove texts or paragraphs without any context.6. Search & remove any instances of keyword stuffing throughout the website.7. Apply for a reconsideration request after you fix these issues. |
| Thin Content | Website pages with low quality could come in this category. There can be low quality blog posts, spun content, thin affiliate pages with no value, no unique contents, and scraped content from other websites. Penalties for such issues also arrive in two forms as defined earlier, whole website or partial website gets affected. | 1. Find out auto-generated and spun content as soon as possible and remove them.2. Eliminate affiliate pages that don’t add value to the website.3. Make use of a plagiarism checker before uploading content or check content on duplicate content detection software to find out and replace those contents.4. Remove doorway pages.5. Search out content with low word counts and thicken those pages for use. |
| Unnatural links to Your site | With time, Google relies more on algorithms than manual actions for handling spammy links. Purchasing links or participating in link schemes to boost organic SERPs is a clear violation of Google webmaster guidelines. | 1. First, download the links to your site from the Google search console.2. Audit these links for identification that any of them may violate linking guidelines.3. Add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to all the non-conforming links.4. Disavow any links that you could not remove or no-followed.5. Send a reconsideration request after completing these steps.6. It would be better if you invest time into creating links in the right way to avoid link schemes. |
| Unnatural links from your site | Google busts on the webmaster for selling links. Such links are considered manipulative, unnatural, and deceptive outbound links. Google may penalties your whole website or partial website. | 1. Add rel=”nofollow” attribute to remove or modify these links so they no longer pass PageRank.2. After removing non-compliant links, submit a reconsideration request. |
| News and Discover Policy Violation | Contents that are dangerous, misleading, terrorism-related, manipulated, medical, hateful, harassing, vulgar language or sexually explicit on your website is not acceptable on a strict note. | 1. Review the website and remove if there is any problematic information in the form of text, video, audio, or images.2. After completing necessary changes, navigate to Google Search Console > Security & manual actions > Manual actions and request a review.3. Keep your eyes on Google Search Console account where Google will inform you about site review. |
| Sneaky mobile redirects | Most of the website pages redirect mobile users to content that are not visible to Google crawlers. This clearly indicates a violation of Google Webmaster guidelines. The manual action involves the removal of URLs from the search index. | 1. If you are not engaging in such activity intentionally, check Security Issue Report to ensure that your website is hacked or not.2. Review all third party scripts on the website.3. If you have done this intentionally, then make necessary changes that meet Google guidelines. Then, request for a review and keep on checking the Google search console. |
Besides given the above Google penalty list & its fixes, there can be many other possibilities that you need to ensure by contacting SEO Company in Ahmedabad to smoothen your way of online success.
