You may have recently noticed that your site has dropped a lot of Ranking, or suddenly disappeared from the front pages of search results. You may be wondering why this happened, and how can you fix it and return your site to its original ranking, or even improve it. The decline of your site may be the result of Google's sanctions. What are Google's sanctions? And what are the reasons why Google punishes sites? And what are its repercussions on your site? And how do you know if your site is punished?

What are Google sanctions?

Google is trying to improve the quality of research results by ranking good sites that offer useful content, and by penalizing poor, manipulative, or unsafe sites by downgrading them. That's why Google is constantly developing and updating its algorithms.

Every time Google releases a new update, the hierarchies of a range of sites change. Either up or down. The severity of the change varies depending on the size and depth of the update. For example, Google's 2012 Penguin update punished a large proportion of websites, estimated to have affected the hierarchies of 10 percent of websites. It even wiped out a lot of sites permanently, removed them from search results, and wiped out entire projects.

Risks of Google Sanctions

Should you worry about Google's sanctions? And to what extent can Google's sanctions affect your site or business? In fact, Google's sanctions should not be underestimated at all, as most of the traffic to websites comes from search engines. So any drop in your site's ranking will automatically cause your site traffic to drop sharply, meaning a lot of potential customers are lost.

Google's punishment for your site is a dangerous indicator because it shows that Google sees that your site's content is not worth a visit, so it doesn't see it as worthy of getting an advanced ranking in search results pages. In return, Google rewards sites that respect their rules by improving their ranking, which may be at the expense of your site's ranking.

You might say that I don't practice black SEO, I don't steal content from other sites, and I'm keen to abide by Google's rules, so I don't have to worry, Google won't punish my site. Unfortunately, even if you make sure to abide by Google's rules, that doesn't make your site completely secure from Google's sanctions. There are many factors that Google takes into account in the ranking of sites, and even more so that these factors are constantly updated by Google. Perhaps the most prominent example that shows that no one is immune from Google's sanctions is that Google has punished itself at least 5 times in the past.

Yes, that's right, this may seem strange to you, but Google punished the Google Chrome page because Google's marketing campaign involved buying links. It is one of the behaviors that Google bans. Although Google said it was a mistake and not deliberate, it decided to give the lesson itself, punishing its Google Chrome browser.

As another example, Google punished Google's ads page after finding that Google's ads page practiced cloaking, a banned technique that some site owners use to improve their ranking, so that they show search spiders different content from the content visitors see something that Google bans.

If Google were to exempt a site from its sanctions, it would exempt itself, so you should never underestimate Google's sanctions and their seriousness on your site and project. A single mistake, even an unintentional one, can throw your site into the Internet, make it unavailable and keep it out of search results. The question you might be asking now is: How do I know if my site is punished?

How do you know if your site is punished?

It's not easy to know if your site is under Google's penalties. Sometimes Google sends you an alert if the punishment is manual, and it will tell you about the violations you have committed or the rules you have violated. It will often give you time to correct those errors.

But most of the time sanctions are automated via Google's algorithms. Such sanctions pass silently, and the owner of the site may not pay attention to them until it is too late. The question you might be asking now is: How do I recognize Google's penalty for the site? There is no guaranteed way, but there are some indicators that may mean that your site is sanctioned by Google, the most important of which are:

• 1. Permanently delete your site from Google's index: You'll know this if you find that Google no longer displays your site in search results for all keywords as if it doesn't exist. This is a serious indicator and often means that the site is punished.

• 2. A custom site search doesn't return any results: If your site's name is example.com, if you type site:yourdomain.com, you won't see any results.

• 3. Your site doesn't show up when you search for your brand: If you have a brand, your site should appear in the first results when searching for the brand. Search for your brand name in Google, and if your site doesn't show up, it's most likely punished.

• 4. A sudden and significant drop in your site's ranking: Sometimes you may notice a sudden and obvious drop in your site's ranking for many keywords. For example, you may find that your site is further away from the first pages of search results, or that it has retracted a lot for no apparent reason.

Reasons why Google punishes sites

There are a lot of reasons Google penalizes sites, and it can be difficult to determine why your site was punished. But overall, most of Google's sanctions come from the following reasons:

1. Buy Links

Links are one of the most important ranking factors that Google adopts to rank sites, and they are also one of the most frequent reasons why Google punishes sites. The more good links to your site, the more indicative of the quality of its content, so Google raises the ranking of sites that have a lot of backlinks.

Building links is a slow and time-consuming process, so some site owners buy links to improve the ranking of their sites. On the Internet you will find many selling thousands of backlinks, you have to think a thousand times before buying them because Google prevents the purchase of links and punishes for it. Most of those links are poor and from sites with a low Big Rank. So you're going to probably do more harm to your site than it does.

Solution: There are plenty of legitimate ways to build backlinks to your sites, such as creating a blog and posting useful, high-quality content and guest articles. These techniques usually take longer but are legitimate, and their results last longer.

2. Exchange of links

Another technique similar to buying links is the exchange of links between sites. For example, a group of website owners exchanges backlinks, with each one posting backlinks to other sites. This technique is prohibited, because it has obvious manipulation, especially if it occurs intensely.

Know that Google can easily monitor the exchange of links. If you notice that all sites that link to your site have backlinks on your site as well, Google's algorithms will detect this and may punish you for this. So avoid this and stay away from problems.

3. Footer links

One of the things that are most frequently used is footer links, and more often used by companies or website developers.

This may sound like a good idea, you might say I'll put the link to my site or my company's site in the footer of the sites I design so that people know me and get free links. However, the truth is that this may harm your site, and may be one of the reasons why Google punishes sites. Because the footer links are supposed to be intended to make it easier to browse the sites only.

Solution: If you are a freelancer designing website, or you own a web design company, avoid this habit, you can ask the site owner to add a link to your site to his blog or one of his pages within the framework of appropriate and good content that does not raise suspicion and improves the ranking of your site.

4. Theft of Content

Unfortunately, this scourge is widespread on the Arab Internet, where website owners copy content from other sites and publish them on their sites, thinking that this will enrich their sites and improve their ranking. But this is counterproductive. Because Google won't display duplicate content on the results pages, so it chooses the original content, i.e. the content published first, and the stolen duplicate content will keep it away from the search results.

Solution: Write original and unique content, one original and good article is better than 10 duplicate articles. Because the chance of your site appearing in search engines will be greater. If you don't have the time or the queen of writing to write original content, you can hire creative and professional writers to write high-quality content by purchasing writing services.

5. Keyword stuffing

Keyword targeting is an essential part of SEO guidelines. But some site owners exaggerate, stuffing their site's pages with certain keywords. They overdo and unjustifiably overload to better arrange their positions.

This is an example of keyword stuffing:

"The importance of sunscreen"

Sunscreen is very important for your skin because sunscreen helps repel harmful radiation, so you should use sunscreen permanently. There are several types of sunscreen. In our store, we offer the finest sunscreen.."

Notice how the keyword "sunscreen" is repeated strangely and annoyingly. On the one hand, keyword stuffing technology has double harm, it may make your site vulnerable to Google penalties, because Google may consider too much of a particular keyword as an indication of deception. Too many of them can also make the content poor. Even if a visitor enters your site, they'll be upset by bad content, and they'll immediately realize that your last concern is to deliver good content.

Solution: SEO experts recommend calculating so-called keyword density, a metric that measures how often a particular keyword is repeated in content. Experts generally recommend that the key density should not exceed 1% of the content. For example, if the content consists of 2,000 words, the number of times the keyword is repeated shouldn't exceed 20 times.

6. Camouflage cloaking

Google indexes the contents of websites by launching small software called spiders in network sites to index their contents and store them in Google's servers. Some website owners are trying to circumvent Google by creating two versions of their sites, one for Google Spiders, and one for site visitors.

The custom version of Google Spiders respects Google's rules perfectly, so its chance of getting a good ranking is greater. But the version for site visitors is different, and often includes some things that Google warns against, such as too many ads, or too many pop-ups.

Avoid this. This is one of the banned technologies that Google penalizes. We have already seen how Google punished its Google Ads page for using this technique.

7. Slow location

The speed of loading of site pages is one of the ranking factors that Google adopts to rank sites in search results. If your site is slow, it will be a nuisance for visitors. One of the basic rules of SEO is: what bothers visitors, it bothers Google. So Google may delay your site's ranking if you notice a clear slowdown in loading the contents of your site's pages.

Solution: Constantly monitor your site's indicators, and verify that site speed is acceptable. The best way to do this is to test a site on the PageSpeed Insights tool. It is a tool from Google to measure the speed of sites. This tool will give you a set of important recommendations to speed up your site and improve its indicators.

If you notice that your site is slow, you should speed it up as much as possible. There are many reasons for the slowness of sites, as the slowness may be caused by the script of the site if it is not enhanced, or if your site uses a lot of materials, such as scripts, photos, and videos. Or if it's on slow hosting.

Check all these things, and don't forget to install the Cash extension and use CDN links to reduce the loading time of the site's pages. If you don't know how to solve the problem of a slow site, you can buy a technical support service and hire a website development expert to examine your site and look for glitches, and solve the problem at its roots.

8. Not responding to mobile screens

Responding to different screens has become essential, especially on small mobile screens. If your site is not responsive, it won't look good on mobile screens, and this will negatively affect the experience of mobile users. So Google delays the ranking of unresponsive sites in the results of mobile searches.

Solution: Make your site mobile-responsive, if your current site isn't responsive, edit it or change it immediately. You can check how responsive your site is to mobile screens via Google's mobile-friendly testing tool. It is a tool that tests your site and checks its responsiveness to mobile screens.

9. Links to suspicious websites

Never place links on your site to suspicious sites or offer bad content, such as malware, pornographic content, and others. Stay away from such sites and do not link to them, because in doing so you endanger the safety of your visitors, lead them to bad sites, and put your site in the crosshairs of Google's sanctions.

10. Site Errors

No one likes mistakes, whether users or search engines. Errors make your site's content unavailable to visitors and search engines, and also disrupt the services offered by your site. You have to address your site's errors as quickly as possible to avoid Google penalties.

11. Lack of a site map

A sitemap is a file for organizing your site, providing information about the data, pages, and videos your site contains. The sitemap makes it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl your site and archive its content more effectively. The sitemap file directs Google's spiders to the pages it deems most important to prioritize archiving.

If your site lacks a sitemap, it will be difficult for Google Spiders to crawl and archive your site, and it is also one of the reasons why Google punishes sites, and may lead to not archiving part of your site, and then will not appear in search results. Solution: Check that the sitemap is set up and constantly updated to reflect the structure and contents of the site.

12. Annoying comments

If you own a site, there's no doubt that you've encountered the problem of annoying comments. These comments do not necessarily contain offensive expressions but are often positive. But they are full of links to external sites. Some website owners use this technology to get thousands of free links from other sites. They program robots that crawl on sites and add a lot of comments to site articles and pages. Google hates such behaviors and punishes the perpetrators because they are very annoying and harmful to the user experience. So they should be avoided.

There are a lot of reasons why Google punishes sites, and there is no room to mention them all, but there is one thing that connects them all, and that is that it bothers visitors, or tries to deceive them or deceive search engines. Avoid such behaviors to be away from the hammer of Google's sanctions.

Monitor the ranking of your site and your Big Rank constantly, and in case you notice a sudden drop in its ranking or suspect that your site is sanctioned by Google, try to fix the bug quickly, or use the technical support services provided by experts, to verify this and solve the problem of Google punishment as soon as possible.