SEO Glossary: Google Penalty

What is a Google Penalty?

A lot has to happen before a Google penalty is imposed. The penalty is a punishment/sanction and always takes effect when conspicuous websites violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

 

There are different types of Google penalties, which have different effects. For example, it can happen that a website loses its ranking completely or, in the worst case, is completely removed from the index from the index.

 

Depending on how serious a penalty is, owners and SEOs can take certain measures to have their penalty lifted.

 

 

What types of Google Penalty are there?

 

A look at the Google Penalty shows that it can be divided into two categories:

 

• Algorithmic penalty

 

• Manual penalty

 

An algorithmic penalty is an automatic filter that regularly visits and checks websites. If irregularities and violations of the webmaster guidelines are detected here, an automatic penalty is imposed.

 

A manual penalty, on the other hand, is initiated by a Google employee. If there is a major suspicion, the website is subjected to a manual visual inspection. If the suspicion is unfounded for any reason, the penalty is dropped. However, if a violation of the guidelines is confirmed, the website will receive sanctions.

 

The various penalty levels and their effects are listed below:

 

• Keyword level: If Google detects irregularities for individual keywords, a penalty may be imposed here. This means that individual search terms lose visibility. Other keywords, however, are not penalized.

 

• URL level: With this type of penalty, individual URLs or entire subdirectories are penalized. This results in ranking losses for the affected pages.

 

• Domain level: If an entire website is under-optimized or violates guidelines, the entire domain receives sanctions. As a result, no subpage of a domain is displayed in the index.

 

• Complete de-indexation: In the worst case, de-indexation can also occur.indexing. In this case, a domain including all subpages is banned from the index. Visibility is therefore completely lost.

 

How do you recognize a Google Penalty and what should you do?

If there is an automatic or algorithmic Google penalty, no notification is sent. If the ranking drops and a look at the visibility index also shows a significant loss, there is a high probability of a penalty. A significant drop can be recognized here.

 

The following tips and measures can now help:

 

• First of all, keep calm and don't rush things

 

• A look at the SEO scene may provide information about recently published Google updates. The cause can then be narrowed down.

 

• Do you also find other websites where the index has collapsed? Do you possibly have anything in common?

 

• Once the penalty problem has been identified, it is now time to be diligent and take certain measures to resolve it. If the Googlebot comes back later and recognizes that the problems have been fixed, the penalty will most likely be lifted.

 

If it is a manual penalty, it is displayed in the GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE can be seen. To do this, simply open the "Security & manual measures" item in the left-hand navigation.