Reasons That Google May Penalize Your SEO Strategy (Part 1)

Search engines, like Google, are constantly updating their algorithms in a bid to wheedle out the unethical and downright illegal SEO’s from those individuals who undertake strategies properly. With each new update, what is considered ethical and unethical SEO strategies changes – so you may soon find that your website has received a penalty and have no idea why. Look through the following reasons below, fix up the problem and ask Google to reconsider your website for inclusion in their rankings:

• Back-links to banned websites: check that all of the outbound links from your website are working, and then check that you are not linking to a website that has been banned by Google for unethical SEO practices.
• Cross linking and link schemes: if you own multiple websites, it’s likely that you have linked them all together in order to boost their rankings, but if they have all received a penalty it is likely that you have done this too much and Google thinks you are running a link scheme.
• Duplicate content: at first, if Google spotted duplicate content it would only index the original page and disregard the others. It was quickly realized, however, that this can affect the SEO success of your website, resulting in a penalty of sorts anyway.
• Hidden text links: many unethical SEO’s think that they can hide links by making the text the same colour as the background – whilst this is invisible to the human eye, it’s still visible to search engine spiders.
• Over-optimisation and filters: using black hat SEO techniques (such as aggressive link building in anchor text) will immediately attract Google’s attention – and not in a good way. To avoid a penalty, you should use different anchor text and keywords for your link building campaign.
• Shared links with ‘bad’ neighbours: when we talk of ‘bad’ neighbours, we are talking about spam websites, doorway pages and link farms. These sites are not to be trusted in the eyes of Google, so sharing links with them for SEO should be avoided at all costs.

In part 2 of our article looking at reasons that Google may penalize your SEO strategy, we look at even more techniques that could result in your website being removed from Google’s rankings. If you feel that your website is exhibiting any of the SEO techniques outlined in these articles, it is very important that you immediately take steps to rectify such issues and get your website back onto Google.