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How to Avoid Google’s 5 Most Serious Penalties

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Have you ever wondered if there is a one-size-fits-all technique for ranking high on Google’s search engine results page?

There is, in a nutshell, a straightforward answer to this question. However, the reality is that it is not so simple. Before we move on to the strategy, let me try to explain why.

Google’s search engine ethos is primarily characterised by their desire for consumers to receive the most relevant results for their searches in the shortest amount of time feasible. Websites that provide the greatest feasible solution to this problem rank better and are prioritised in search engine results.

This attitude is exemplified by an algorithm that determines which websites are worthy of being ranked first, based on the priority of relevancy to a user’s search engine query.

As a result of ranking higher on Google’s search engine pages for specific search engine queries, a website is more likely to prosper as a result of increased visitors and conversions.

Regardless matter whether the website is instructional, e-commerce, or business-related, every webmaster’s ultimate goal is to rank first on a search engine page for a popular search engine query linked to the material on their website.

The secret to ranking highly on Google is to establish a plan that adheres to Google’s ethos (read: algorithm), because knowing the components that influence the algorithm decides how well your website will be ranked.

What’s The Catch?

Everything I’ve said thus far appears to be very simple and nearly automated, but the truth is that if it were that simple, everyone would be number one on Google’s SERP (search engine results page), right? … because we all know it’s impossible since no one can be number one!

The truth is that most webmasters, and even most Google employees, have no idea what elements are employed to decide a website’s ranking. What is obvious is that the algorithm employs over 200 ranking parameters, and Google provides some guidance for where these ranking factors should be prioritised.

While Google’s algorithm is always being refined, there have been five key algorithm updates that have influenced how webmasters and users interact with the search engine. The following are the names of the algorithm updates::

  1. Panda
  2. Penguin
  3. Hummingbird
  4. Pigeon
  5. Mobilegeddon

The following are the key directions and benefits of Google’s algorithm refinements thus far:

  • A growing commitment and focus on better user experience for search engine users,
  • A higher priority and preference for more productive and more in-depth content,
  • A focus and preference for websites that regularly update and refresh content,
  • A stronger emphasis on brand awareness,
  • An emphasis on search optimized for local ranking and
  • More and more prominence given to websites that adhere to a mobile SEO strategy

This article will cover what you need to know about Google’s various algorithms and algorithm updates, how the algorithms affect websites, both positively and negatively, and how you should shape your SEO strategy to conform to best SEO practises, good web design, and appropriate web development practises, in order to achieve the best online visibility and give your a competitive advantage.

Google Panda

The Panda update was Google’s first major algorithm change since its establishment. Its main goal was to fine-tune the quality of relevant search results by favouring high-quality results and moving lower-quality results further down the page.

In essence, Google’s upgrade was a move to generate better, high-quality results with the relevant content that search engine users want.

This was accomplished by filtering out or giving considerably less importance to low-quality or spam content that users didn’t want to spend time looking at, and giving more priority to websites that people wanted to look at.

With this change, SEO’s role was lifted from simply providing good content, inserting keywords, and adding backlinks to considering the overall experience that the website provided.

Google compelled webmasters to refocus their efforts on building a website and brand that people will love, trust, reward, and share. When it came to building websites, strategic thought about the user’s experience became more vital.

Since the Panda Update was released in March 2011, the algorithm has been refreshed or fine-tuned every one to two months, for a total of around 26 revisions.

Furthermore, the Panda Update sparked the idea that it’s critical to pay attention to what Google has to say about fine-tuning your website for a higher search engine ranking. This is due to the fact that what constitutes an excellent SEO technique is constantly evolving. In other words, today’s strong SEO technique could swiftly devolve into tomorrow’s terrible SEO practice or old approach.

Panda Update Quality Criteria and How to Avoid Panda Punishment/Penalties.

Below is a look at the three key quality variables introduced by the Panda Update, as well as techniques to avoid being penalised by the Panda Update.

1. Duplicate Content

There is a lot of information on the internet concerning duplicate content and how to avoid it, but it’s also crucial to note that it’s not necessarily duplicate content that gets you penalised by Google, but rather spam-like content.

I believe it is preferable to concentrate on creating original, valuable, and rich material that is beneficial to the user.

When it comes to duplicate content on your website, there are two major challenges to consider.

The first problem is duplicate material that you have created specifically for your website.

To solve this problem, utilise a duplicate page finder to check your web pages for duplicate content. You have two alternatives if you discover duplicate content on your website:

  1. Add a no-index tag to the page so that the Google spider doesn’t use that particular page to penalize the rest of your website ranking or
  2. Revise the content and ensure that it is unique and original.

The second issue is duplicate material from other sources on your website, such as guest pieces and sponsored articles.

To avoid this problem, make sure that before accepting guest content, you run it through plagiarism or duplicate checker like smallseotools.com to guarantee that the content you want to utilise on your website is primarily original.

You should aim for content that is at least 80% unique. Content with a unique content rating of less than 70% should be removed or improved immediately.

Other concerns that can result in duplicate content fines include:

  • Default information added by content management systems
  • Information automatically added to printer-friendly pages and
  • Web page addresses getting appended with session IDs.
  • The quality of inbound links

If your website has original, valuable, and rich material but still has a low search engine score, you should pay attention to the quality of your inbound links.

For additional details, see the Google Penguin Update section below.

2. Bounce Rate

The usability, design, and utility of your website to the user are the major elements that impact your bounce rate.

To be more exact, if users arrive at your website and leave without interacting with it because they can’t find what they’re searching for or because it’s too difficult to navigate, your bounce rate is high.

A bounce rate of more than 60% is considered excessive and indicates that your website has to be improved to make it more user-friendly. Sign up for a Google Analytics account and follow the instructive tutorials on Google Analytics to figure out your website bounce rate.

With that said, your website’s bounce rate may fluctuate abnormally at times. For example, if you rebuilt your website to make it more user-friendly, your bounce rate is likely to fluctuate as your audience adjusts to the new layout of the website’s user interface.

You can use a variety of methods to lower your website’s bounce rate.

3. Repeat Site Visits

If your website’s retention is low, meaning visitors don’t return often enough, Google assumes that your website isn’t very relevant or that the material on your website isn’t updated regularly enough.

The following are some of the numerous strategies to persuade visitors to return to your website:

  1. Using more guides and visual content to be more helpful to your audience,
  2. Using ‘Calls to Action,’
  3. Improving website load time,

How to Better Plan Your Website by Adhering to Panda Update Guidelines

To better plan your website, three important factors need to be addressed. These include:

  1. Improving the quality of, or optimizing ‘Static Elements’ including static pages like Privacy Policy, Contact, About Us, and TOS
  2. Consistent Quality Checks and improvements, e.g., improving your websites meta tags and upgrading to HTML5
  3. Improving the website’s User Experience.

Google Penguin Update

The fundamental goal of the Penguin Update was to limit and discourage the unethical use of links (both inbound and outward links).

The improper use of links entails deceiving Google into believing that a website is an authority website or that the website contains valuable information.

How to Steer Away from Penguin Punishment/Penalties

Through this algorithm update, issues not favourably looked upon, including the use of:

  1. Unnatural links including;
    1. Large numbers of links pointing to a website from low quality or irrelevant sources,
    2. Purchasing of links and
    3. The random use of links on a website while totally ignoring proper context.
  2. Link Schemes
  3. Keyword stuffing and
  4. Too much use of SEO; for example, if you have too many links to pages within your website or if you have too many H1 tags on a page,

How Your Panda and Penguin Strategy Will Lead to a More Impressive Site

When developing your website’s SEO strategy, keep in mind the following considerations:

  1. You must pay great attention to the quality of links to and from your website in addition to focusing on providing unique, valuable, and productive content. As a result, your SEO approach should focus on providing a positive user experience and developing high-quality links.
  2. The Panda update is more concerned with content quality, whereas the Penguin update is concerned with spammy and unethical link utilisation. As a result, the two changes are extremely intertwined and must be prepared concurrently to prevent Google penalties.
  3. Your website will be more trustworthy to users if you have a good strategy that takes into account the Panda and Penguin upgrades. Use the WOT tool to determine the trustworthiness of your website.

Google Hummingbird Update

One of Google’s most significant search engine algorithm modifications to date has been the Hummingbird update. In September 2013, Google made significant modifications to both the algorithm and the indexing processes.

The major goal of the Hummingbird update is for Google to be able to better comprehend user searches and hence offer better and more meaningful results.

In other words, the user’s search query intent became more essential than the keyword’s use alone. As a result, information that best answers a user’s query intent is more likely to rank higher and favourably than content that has the same keywords used by the user.

Techniques for searching for hummingbirds before and after they arrive

How Hummingbird is a big game changer and how it should affect your strategy

  1. Because the focus has switched from just ranking for a query to better understanding the meaning behind the query, long-tail keywords have become more significant than head keywords.
  2. It’s critical to employ a conversational tone in website content since it corresponds to how a person asks a question while looking for information.
  3. With a few adjustments to your general procedure, sticking to excellent keyword SEO practise should continue to be your strategy unless you’ve been bending and breaking the SEO guidelines. As a result, you should continue to:
    • Optimize your websites for mobile devices because conversational style searches are still growing. For example, there is a consistent growth of voice searches through smartphones.
    • Build strong links both inbound and outward for better credibility and authority,
    • Use proper structured data markup

Your Hummingbird Strategy

In summary, your hummingbird strategy should centre on using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to uncover relevant keywords used by users and then incorporating those keywords into your website’s relevant content in a conversational style.

It’s also critical to concentrate on creating content that meets your readers’ demands, so that your audience is drawn in and engaged by intriguing information that addresses their needs, problems, curiosities, and general questions.

Google Pigeon Update

The Pigeon algorithm update was released in July 2014, and its major purpose is to serve online users looking for local search results with informative, relevant, and speedy query results.

The update is currently only available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, but it may be available elsewhere soon.

Your Pigeon Strategy

Based on this algorithm update, your strategy should incorporate the following ideas:

Source: Search radius has been refined

  • To deliver more realistic search results, cities have been divided into neighbourhoods, which should be reflected in your local optimization plan.
  • Maintain a consistent Name, Phone Number, and Address as much as possible.
  • The same location may be referred to by different neighbourhood names or synonyms, such as downtown, industrial area, and so on. In your local SEO approach, make use of these synonyms.
  • Make an effort to be featured and recognised in major directory listings relevant to your website, such as Yelp and Trip Advisor for hotels and restaurants.
  • Concentrate on obtaining positive feedback for your website.
  • Promote your website’s content aggressively and use effective backlinking tactics.
  • Because the majority of local web searches are conducted on mobile devices, you should implement a mobile SEO strategy.

Google Mobilegeddon Update

The goal of this update in February 2015 was to give preference to websites that were optimised for mobile devices, in line with Google’s intention to make the user experience through the search engine more pleasant.

This emphasis on mobile devices stems from the fact that mobile devices are increasingly used to do searches rather than desktop computers.

In the United States, for example, cellphones account for 94 percent of searches, with 77 percent of mobile searches taking place at home or at work, areas where a desktop computer is readily available.

The launch update was called Mobilegeddon by website creators in anticipation of the enormous changes that this algorithm update would bring. On April 21, 2015, Mobilegeddon arrived, bringing with it the anticipated changes.

Source: When compared to a regular webpage on a mobile device, mobile SEO is done correctly.

The ‘Mobilgeddon Update’ Has Caused Issues, Challenges, and Concerns.

The following are some of the things to keep in mind as a result of this algorithm update:

  1. It’s vital to remember that search results from smartphones and search results from desktops are likely to diverge and become more diverse over time, rather than being the same.
  2. If you have a well-established and dominant online business that isn’t relying on direct traffic from a mobile-friendly website, this algorithm update shouldn’t have a negative impact on your SEO strategy.
  3. The most significant impact of this algorithm upgrade will be felt by websites that rely heavily on people discovering them through Google search and rely on Google Search searches done on mobile devices.
  4. Depending on the scale of the website, converting a non-mobile friendly website to a mobile friendly website can be rather costly in terms of both time and money.

Your Mobile-friendly SEO Strategy

If you are not sure about the impact of ‘Mobilegeddon’ on your website, there are several things that you can do.

  • You should monitor your website traffic to assess the impact of the changes through this algorithm update.
  • Use Google’s recommended tool to check if your website is mobile-friendly.
  • Use Google’s well outlined and documented guide to update your website or build your website so that it is mobile friendly.

Bringing It All Together

The impact of Google algorithm modifications on webmasters and businesses who rely primarily on their websites for online revenue can be significant.

Proper SEO training and adherence to Google’s standards can mean the difference between a thriving online business and fade into obscurity, never to be seen or heard from again.

It’s vital to establish a web strategy that connects your website goals and your online business’s vision with Google’s ethos if you want to have the least detrimental influence on your website and business, especially if you rely on Google searches.

Furthermore, you may find that being nimble enough to make quick changes in response to Google algorithm updates is critical. Google often notifies all stakeholders about impending algorithm modifications, so having an ear to the ground in terms of what Google has to say is critical for all webmasters.

Alternatively, and perhaps more crucially, if you believe you are overly dependant on Google Searches, it is essential to diversify your marketing plan; else, you may find yourself doomed in the online world.

Using various techniques, such as good PR and marketing for your online business, could be a crucial move for your online business or website.

Ironically, the more you use robust strategies to promote your business, such as public relations and marketing, the higher your Google rank will likely become because you will be focusing on brand recognition and being a credible authority, which is what Google is aiming for with its search engine results.

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