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Is Your Site under Google Penalty?

In order to ensure a site’s search ‘appropriateness, it is important to know what can get you penalized by leading search engines or Goggle in specific. Knowing how to measure the state accurately so that you can gauge if you have been recently penalized can assist you considerably to get your website back at the top for your search terms.

Obviously, Google does not disclose the criteria that it decides for penalizing a particular website and hence, it is obvious that we all have to come up with sensible and educated guesses. Spend a lot of time in various SEO communities, get to speak with experts of the industry and check what sort of SEO Services brings good results. For those who strictly follow SEO best practices and regularly keep themselves updated with the specified guidelines, falling for some trick that can get them penalized doesn’t seem possible. However, a few competitive and tricky situations may involve intelligent SEO warriors and unfortunately, this does not become visible at initial stages.

Differentiating between Google Sandbox or Penalty

Yes! Google sandbox exists and there is a difference between getting penalized and getting dropped in sandbox. When a fresh website is launched, it does not get indexed for about a few weeks or sometimes a few months s. It is only that until a new site or new pages earns its trust as far as Google is concerned, it may not appear in the search results. Once the search engine verifies the new pages or a website, it starts appearing in the search results. Till the time a website is stored in the sandbox, the website owners should continue with content improvisation and other SEO Services.

Lack of awareness leads to penalty

So whether you are in charge of taking care of only your website SEO services or a bundle of clients’ websites, you need to know to exactly how to identify the situation when your website get penalized. Only once you identify the situation, you can actually start with the process of determining the problem and getting it back into the search stream. Obviously, the first step that will propel you to think about getting penalized is absence in search results for your primary keywords.

However, perhaps, initially you would observe a sudden, drastic falling-off of traffic. Here, you need to be very cautious because not every sudden fall is an outcome of penalty. The reason could be as simple as the new algorithm of the search engine, where the search trends have changed and the terms you optimized for are no more as popular as they were. Such a situation is mostly a case with many websites witnessing sudden drop and therefore, it is highly recommended that one should keep consistently reviewing the in-use search terms.

Specific points of Getting Penalized

  • If you have an idea that you may have been penalized by Google then the best possible thing to start with is Google webmaster tools. This will provide you with the entire checklist so that you can gauge your problem, instantly. Follow the list and ensure to comply with Google’s list of best practices, so that you can make your way out of penalty.
  • Draw a comparison between different search engines. If you are ranking is still the same on the search engines but nowhere in the Google then you must have been penalized.
  • Take a look at your PR and see if Google toolbar PR has changed.
  • You can check your website ranking for a “domain-name” search , without TLD
  • If your URL is appearing in the search results by adding &filter=0 to the search URL or if you go for advanced search and check results for “show omitted results” link, you website is penalized by Google.
  • Pick a heading or a particular phrase from your website’s page and check for the exact match. Ensure that the phrase is taken from a page having top ranking earlier.
  • Find whether or not Google has blacklisted your site on the grounds of being unsafe for browsing. To perform this test, you can simply go on the following link: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com with your domain at the end.

Learning from getting penalized

A few basic insights into Google penalties may help you learn the following guidelines:

  • Maintain absence of hidden text or hidden links.
  • Stay away from the method of cloaking or sneaky redirects.
  • Do not send automated queries to Google.
  • Ensure not to load your pages with irrelevant words.
  • Creating multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content is completely useless.
  • Stay away from “doorway” pages that are typically created simply for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches like affiliate programs having very limited little or basically no original content.

Victim of the search monopoly

If you have been penalized on the grounds of practicing unsanctioned SEO services or intentionally deceptive techniques then it may be very hard for you to regain your original status in the search engine results without heavy deal of efforts and unwinding. In fact, even after cleaning up your site, you can actually gain inclusion in the index, and certainly start with the program to build real significance and structure that can hold up your ranks rightfully.

Interestingly, what is more frustrating is when you cannot figure out the actual cause for your penalty. Many cases involve penalty embarked by Google for no obvious reason. An innocent website that is kicked out of index because of some mistake or beyond understanding reason, is a real victim of the search monopoly. For such cases, a class action lawsuit is the remedy. Obviously, this is very difficult although.

Summary: Having relevant information about Google penalty is extremely important for every webmaster. Tactics that are not in compliance with Google’s guidelines, may help you optimize the website, temporarily or achieve top positions in the search engine. But they ultimately result in getting your website penalized by Google.

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