5 Practices That Can Get You a Google Penalty (Part 1)

Regardless of your website’s role in your business model—be it the center of your transactions or the platform of your digital marketing campaigns—it is imperative that you conduct monthly website maintenance.

Avail a website maintenance package that is tailored to your company needs. Look for a website security and maintenanceservices agency that can keep your site up-to-date to the latest web developments. Most importantly, make sure that your site upkeep partner knows how to guarantee that your site remains penalty-free.

Google has two main reasons for penalizing your website: you promoted poor user experience or you utilized manipulative procedures to elevate your search ranking. Either way, Google will take action, entirely removing your site from the search engine’s index or implementing spam action.

Do not compromise your brand’s online visibility. Make sure your monthly website maintenance package can help your site avoid the following penalty-earning practices.

     1.    Using automatically generated content – This practice is one of the easiest penalty-inducing practices to identify. “Auto-generated” contents are out-of-place sentences or paragraphs that contain the page’s target keyword. They are often completely irrelevant and contribute nothing to the overall write-up.  

     2.    Developing pages that contain minimal original content – Google’s foremost priority is to provide the best experience to its users—which is the reason why it penalizes websites that put up pages with little or no authentic content. Hence, make sure your web content always offers something new and substantive to users.

     3.    Utilizing “scraped content” – Taking content from credible sites and integrating it into your own is a solid ground for penalization. Variations of this malpractice include:

o   Republishing “scraped content” without adding anything new or valuable

o   Slightly modifying “scraped content” without adding anything new or valuable

o   Replicating scraped content feeds without adding anything new or valuable.

     4.    Cloaking – Refers to the act of deceiving search engines and users by presenting varying URL or content. A prime example of this malpractice is the integration of a text to a page that is accessible only to a human user. Hackers often use this strategy to cover their tracks.

     5.    Engaging in link schemes – Link schemes refer to any plan to use links to influence a website’s ranking in Google. It typically involves the manipulation of incoming and outgoing links to your site, the utilization of automated link-generating programs, and the excessive acquisition and exchange of links.

Do not jeopardize your brand’s digital presence by availing an incompetent website maintenance package. Find a website security and maintenance services provider that considers the various grounds for Google penalties in their packages.