When a website’s ranking has taken a beating or if it no longer exists on the top of Search Engine Results Page, it is usually because it faced a Google penalty. These days, people look for websites that appear at the very top or at least in the first page. Anything beyond that is as good as not being there at all. Therefore, a Google penalty only goes to make it tough to reach out to your target audience, ultimately affecting organic traffic to your website, and leading to a drop in your business revenue. In any event, Google penalty is not something to entertain.
How Google Penalizes a Website
The penalty from Google could come because of breaching the Webmaster Guidelines. It could be either manual, one that comes from Google’s team, or algorithmic. People call the manual penalty issuers as “human reviewers” of Google, and they regularly track down spam content. On the other hand, Google algorithms are released specially to deal with things such as site optimization, page response, keyword stuffing, etc. If your site is not optimized for the web or it does not correspond with the quality standards of Google, so as to clear its own algorithm filters, then it will likely get penalized.
No matter whether it is manual or algorithmic, your site does not want to attract a Google penalty. In fact, there are many guidelines to follow when you publish a website on the search engine, and if you breach any of them, your site would be penalized accordingly. For starters, you need to steer clear of black hat SEO practices like cloaking, deceptive website redirects, and duplicated content, which try to trick Google for high rankings. Moreover, you should be aware that Google revises its algorithms and Webmaster Guidelines from time to time, so the things that could lead to the penalty may change too. Therefore, the webmaster of your site should be up-to-date with all these things to avoid any penalties.
What to Do if Google Penalizes your Site
There is a long-drawn-out process of fixing issues mentioned in the manual review, and then submit a reconsideration request on Google Search Console. The search engine team will then make a decision on your request. If it approves it, then the manual penalty will be taken off from your website. However, lost rankings may be due to other things too, and it is not always an indication of a Google penalty. So it is better to approach an SEO service provider or your web design company to do a site audit and see what actually has affected the website’s performance.