SEO Tips: How to Avoid Google Penalty?

SEO Tips

If there is one that sits in the ruling center of SEO, that would be Google, because it owns the world’s leading search engine. That is why Google Penalties are the most feared online search engine penalties in existence.

What is a Google Penalty? For starters, Google Penalties are the penalties that Google applies to a specific website if this website violates Google Webmaster’s Guideline. It is just that simple. Google has certain rules, and the websites apply them. If something goes wrong, that’s when Google applies a penalty.

From the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, penalty greatly connects to a negative impact on their managed website. This negative impact will directly affect the website’s organic search rankings, especially its Google rankings. With this, website owners and marketers will do everything just to avoid Google penalties.

Can Google penalties, be avoided? The obvious answer would be yes. So, how do you avoid Google penalties? Well, here are ten tips for you (a diligent SEO marketer and website owner) to avoid Google Penalties:

1. If You are a Wise SEO Marketer, You would Know that Buying Links is a Big No-No!

The building of links is the bread and butter of SEO. Perhaps that is why new SEO marketers buy and build links wherever they can stick their paws into. Unfortunately, that is a huge mistake, newbies! Links that pass SEO value to your website should look natural.

There are many ways how to do link building naturally. On a more technical side, you should add a “nofollow” attribute to the link so that the hyperlinks you constructed will not influence the search engine ranking of the link’s target. This is important because it would look like you actually do not want to cheat. If you do this, you will save your website from link schemes and search engine spam.

From a common user’s perspective, your web content would look like trash if it are full of links. This discourages whoever visits the page. Exit probability rates for visitors would be one hundred percent. How much more from Google bots?

2. Do not Overuse Keywords

A common netizen will probably brand your content as irrelevant and spammy if your keywords are repeated more than five times on your page. If this is how a common netizen will feel, how much more for Google search engine bots? That content will not look natural and absolutely irrelevant. It can be directly seen that the sole purpose of the existence of that page would be for SEO marketing.

It is obvious if we say that stuffing your content with repetitive words will hurt not just your online reputation, but also your search engine rankings. The use of keywords is as important in SEO as link building. They are the bread and butter of an SEO campaign. That is why it is very important to use keywords, not repetitively, but appropriately and efficiently.

3. Original and High-quality Contents are Your Saving Grace!

If there is one thing that is a must-be in SEO, that would be to produce relevant and genuine content. These contents should also not only benefit the search engine rankings of websites. These contents should also benefit the common Internet users because that’s what these contents are created for; to be read by normal people on the Internet.

4. Do not do Cloaking

What is the purpose of creating website content again? Website content creation is both for SEO and for the use of normal people on the Internet. Now, if you cloak or hide texts on your page just for Google to index it, do you think it would serve a purpose for the common Internet users? It will not, right? Basically, Cloaking or hiding texts for the sake of increasing your search engine ranking is cheating. That’s a red flag already.

5. Avoid Generating Your Pages with the Use of Unauthorized Auto-generated Programs

It will not only slow down Google, but it will also lower your search engine rankings. That’s a negative impact on both Google and you. So why do it? Moreover, auto-generated pages are also a big no-no for Google because the creation of these pages will allow a lot of unuseful and untraceable materials.

6. Do not Duplicate Your Contents

If you think your duplicated contents cannot be tracked, well you are wrong. Also, the duplication of content goes against the very purpose of why people create content, which is to provide relevant information to people. This is, of course, another red flag, not just for Google, but also for the common netizens.

7. Limit Your Guest Postings

If there are too many Guest Posting on your website, it will just look like a public market because it is obvious that Guest Posts will only bring more and more links. Since it is already stated in item number one that the more links, the more negative your website can appear, it is common sense why this item is here in this article.

To add to that, Google may, in the near future, devalue links coming from Guest Posts because Guest Posting is now becoming a trend. Well, we all know that the more an item trends, the more it is becoming trash, right? Perhaps Google knows that, too. Thus, you should do your best to not give more than 20% of your link profile to Guest Posts.

8.  Diversify Your Anchor Texts!

Do not use one keyword for all your website content. It will be too obvious, not just for common Internet surfers, but especially for Google. The more creative and diverse your anchor texts or keywords are, the more helpful these will be to your search engine rankings.

Many SEO experts think that Google will use anchor texts are a factor for search engine rankings in the future. This means the game will be tougher, but this makes sense, right? There will be irrelevant content that will be eliminated when this happens because today, in the SEO market, a majority of the anchor texts are all over the place.

9. Avoid Building Fake Accounts. Real Social Signals are Way Better than Fake Accounts!

What do you prefer? Getting promoted by real people or by social media users who have zero engagement with other users? That’s common sense, right? Real people do real marketing for you. That is why, even if you have millions of fake followers, it will still not do better than having less than ten followers that are real people.

10. Build Trust

Since rank is equal to relevancy, authority, and trust, having trust will help you go up that search engine ranking. Moreover, if a common netizen trusts your page, he or she will not hesitate to visit it over and over again. Thus, it generates more traffic to your site and probably future referrals.

How to build trust? Well, one trick is to be referred by trusted sites such as sites with .edu and .gov links. Another is getting links from sites that have already established their brand names. For example, Facebook, Shopify, and other brand names that common people trust.

Now those are the ten tips on how to avoid Google penalties. If you are diligent enough in following, not just those ten tips, but also all the rules in Google Webmaster’s guidelines, you will be good to go.

If you no longer need the preventive tips because you are already penalized by Google, here are five tips on what you should do if you are in that situation:

1. Avoid Panicking

You have to know that even if you are penalized, there are still bigger websites that get penalized as well. So just relax and don’t overthink because you can still get through it.

2. Start Looking for that Disavow Tool

You got penalized because of harmful links. That’s a given. Thus, you need to disavow those harmful links now. This is your way of telling Google not to count those links that are harming your site.

3. Remove those Links that are Getting You into this Mess

It is good to disavow, but it is only a band-aid solution. To resolve the root cause of your penalty, you should cut and throw those links away. Make sure that you will never see those types of links again on your website.

4. Request Google to Reconsider Your Penalty

Even if it is a little bit awkward to do that, yes, you have to try and ask for reconsideration.

5. Keep Calm and Wait It Out

Sometimes, you need to wait out the rain because Google may be a super company, but there are still times that they will not be able to act out things quickly.

Final Words

Google penalties are absolutely hard to recover from. As a diligent and hardworking SEO marketer, you should study by heart the Google Webmaster’s Guidelines for you to avoid the discomforts of a Google penalty. At least we all know that avoiding Google penalties is absolutely possible, so, just be diligent about it and follow all those tips mentioned above. If you do that, you are good to go!


Mark Joshua Santos
Mark Joshua Santos is a Filipino Blogger and a digital marketing enthusiast that writes for a web agency in the Philippines. It develops mobile apps, SEO, and web design.


Gangadhar Kulkarni

Gangadhar Kulkarni is an internet marketing expert and consultant having extensive experience in digital marketing. He is also the founder of Seogdk and Director at DigiTechMantra Solutions, a one-stop shop for all that your website needs. It provides you cost-effective and efficient content writing and digital marketing services.

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