Google’s Manual Action Penalties Doubled in 2016

Google’s Manual Action Penalties Doubled in 2016

Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” As part of that mission, they have an extensive set of tools to fight web-spam. Google released a report earlier this month detailing their web-spam-fighting efforts and manual action penalties taken in 2016. This is important to know even if you’re not a spammer. If Google thinks that some of your marketing tactics or your ad network are against their policies, you could find your website penalized.

Google’s 3 Core Methods of Fighting Against Spam

Google fights spam in its search results through three core methods:

Search algorithm […] Read more

How to Recover from a Thin Content Penalty

How to Recover from a Thin Content Penalty

There’s 12 different manual penalties that can be enforced on a site by Google and many of these are pretty straightforward. For instance, unnatural links coming from the site means a user needs to remove all those spammy links and request to be reconsidered by Google. However, the Thin Content penalty can be a bit confusing and there are a few steps that need to be addressed before the penalty can be removed by you or by the team of qualified experts experienced in removing SEO penalties. 

Thin content is defined as content with ‘little or no added value’. Now what does this […] Read more

What is Unnatural Links Manual Penalty by Google?

What is Unnatural Links Manual Penalty by Google?

One of the most common manual  SEO penalties by Google is for having “unnatural links to your site” or “unnatural links from your site”. This often happens when a site has been participating in poor linking building practices or receiving payment for links. Having one of these penalties enforced on a site can can cause some major headaches, fortunately, there’s some simple steps that can be done to get the site back on Google.

The first step is identifying what type of manual penalty the site has been hit with. By logging into the Search Console, find the appropriate site, […] Read more

Differences Between Manual and Algorithmic Google Penalties

Differences Between Manual and Algorithmic Google Penalties

Over the past few years there’s been nothing more terrifying to digital marketers than the dreaded Google penalty. Website owners have seen rankings jump and drop within the day as Google updates are announced, and unfortunately many sites were penalized for different reasons.

With there being different types of Google penalties out there it can be difficult determining which information is accurate. The first step to recovering from a penalty and getting back on Google includes understanding which penalty the site was hit with and how to overcome that setback. The following article will help users determine which penalty they […] Read more

Google’s Penguin 4.0 – How it will change SEO penalties

Google’s Penguin 4.0 – How it will change SEO penalties

At the end of September of this year (2016), Google released an update to their Penguin algorithm called Penguin 4.0. Google has released a number of different updates to its search algorithm over the last 14 years. Some have really impacted sites, and others not so much. Penguin was a major one that impacted a lot of marketers. When Penguin or Panda get updated, site owners go rushing to their SEO dashboards to check their new positions.

However, this Penguin update may prove to be a bit of a boon for marketers. First, Google says that this will be the final […] Read more