Your website may lose its rankings overnight. No warning and no alarm bells (automatic penalties). Your site simply disappears from its search results. It is gone as if it has never existed. You might have spent months and hundred hours in making it to the top in search engine result pages. But overlooking trivial issues can actually put you into great trouble and make your website being penalised by search engines.
Unnatural Link Building
You know that link building is a great way to tremendously increase the rankings of your website. Many businesses create links to each other to increase search engine rankings and click through traffic. But, you must know that unnatural link building by your SEO service providers can lead to Penalise your website. Google has become more determined in evaluating the feasibility and the quality of links for ranking the websites. The giant search engine has been cracking down low quality links for over many years; however, it has become severe with Penguin and Panda updates, causing several sites to lose their rankings.
- One should avoid links sold in bulk at low prices, which are usually of low quality and are penalised by search engines.
- Don’t use automatic and bulk link building tools.
- Avoid adding links while doing blog comments on any blogs.
- Avoid creating links, which looks created intentionally for Search Engines only.
- Be cautious while getting links from sites that have no relevance to your own niche.
If you are submitting articles and blogs to boost rankings, it should be submitted to reliable and highly targeted site that’s reviewed by an actual human being.
- Check for broken links, unnatural anchor text and correct HTML
Google elaborates the pattern of unnatural, artificial and deceptive outbound links that violates its guidelines. Click here for detailed information.
Affiliate Links
Affiliate programs provide ads, links, photos and content to be published on your webpage. Websites having affiliate ads are known as affiliate websites. If someone clicks these ads and buy something from the advertiser’s website, you will get a portion of the sale. It allows advertisers to increase the sales of their products and they pay only if they make a sale and not otherwise. Webmasters also prefer affiliate programs because it allows them to earn extra bucks from their web pages. Affiliate programs may seem to be great revenue generating means to webmasters, but they can actually harm your rankings and reputation if not chosen carefully.
Google doesn’t hate affiliate programs. It just stresses upon to avoid participating in affiliate programs, which do not add sufficient value to your site for the users. Google ranks a website as per the value it provides to the searcher and not as per the kind of advertising it promotes. Thus, if your affiliate programs are having low authority or publishing low quality content, the Google can penalise you. Find out here what Webmaster guidelines advise on affiliate programs here.
Placing ads above the fold
Google has pushed out page algorithm in 2012 that attacked sites with too many ads and slapped them with penalty. Majority of bloggers and webmasters depend upon AdSense ads for revenues. However, placing ads above the fold can put your web presence at stake.
Google has not described the limit for ads so you will have to determine the legitimate limit by yourself. A few banner ads won’t create any problem, however stuffing ads in between content as strategy to increase click through rates and traffic will actually ruin your website.
301 Redirection
When any page of a website is deleted, it will not be visible to us. However, search spiders and Google will keep looking for it until and unless you put a 301 redirection in place to let bots know that the page has been permanently moved to another location.
301 Redirect not only directs Google and spiders to move to right direction but also helps to retain the SEO value attained so far. For instance old URL might have passing links, link juice, and historical value. If you have not implemented 301 redirects, it will mean that your new web pages are starting from scratch. It may undo all the SEO value attained so far. You must follow Google Webmaster guidelines, when you need to change the URL of a page as mentioned here:
If your website receives a manual penalty, you’ll be notified by Google Webmaster Tools account. But, if your website receives algorithmic penalty, you won’t get any notification from Google. However, instant and tremendous long-lasting drop-in rankings makes it evident that your site has been penalised.
When you start optimizing site make sure that your link building and content strategies are focused on enhancing the user’s experience. If your website is valuable for users/searchers, then only it will be rightly evaluated by search engines for rankings. It is equally important to be careful and don’t consider SEO for being an easy-to-handle phenomena by any Tom, Dick and Harry with little knowledge.
