By: Jenna Ryan
Search engine penalties are traffic tickets of sorts, used by the big search engines to keep web criminals at bay. It happens all the time, websites get penalized for what seems like no reason. One day your site is broaching page one, the next it’s banished to page 330. You may have been privy to a Google Penalty. When this happens, you can kiss your prestigious rankings and steady stream of leads goodbye.
Detecting Google Penalty Triggers
Violating Google’s Terms of Use policy or doing something against its Webmaster Guidelines can get your website penalized. The goal is to keep website owners from trying to trick the search crawlers by artificially achieving high rankings. The search engine giant is constantly changing its algorithm to stop websites from getting to the top of results unnaturally.
Avoiding Google Penalty Triggers
Over-optimization – If you use every on-page optimization trick in the book and load your entire site and its code with keyword phrases, it could trigger a Google penalty. There is a fine line between what’s good optimization and what’s over-optimization.
Mirror Sites or Duplicate Page Content – If your website content is duplicated on other websites online, Google will likely only index one of the pages in the search results. The duplicated page will be penalized and pushed down in search results. Doorway pages are equally bad.
Broken Links – A website with many broken links may incur penalties.
Bad Robots.txt Page – The robots.txt page must be written “just so” if you want search crawlers to index your website.
Cloaking - The process of submitting one thing to a search engine and then displaying something else to the end user. Sometimes a web page is optimized for a particular search engine or phrase, and then the page or code is swapped when an end user clicks on a search listing.
>>Find Out More About Google Penalties
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Thank you for this -- very clear information.
Li