Violations against the Webmaster Guidelines of Google will be discovered sooner or later and in many cases lead to a penalty. These can be so-called “manual measures” or algorithmic punishments. In both cases, the rankings of individual keywords deteriorate significantly. And visitor numbers also come under pressure. For some companies, such a Google penalty can mean an existential risk. Therefore, act quickly and implement recommended measures as completely as possible. Then the rankings will recover and visitors will return to your site.

If only a few of the recommended measures are implemented, the penalty is also only partially resolved.

Do not waste time!

Causes of a Google Penalty

The reasons for a Google Penalty can be unnatural backlinks or poor quality content.

Google Panda = bad content

If bad content on a website is the problem, then resolving a penalty is usually time-consuming. From Google’s perspective, the content of individual pages does not meet the search interest of users. This can have two causes:

• Too much advertising in relation to the actual content
• Pages with very little independent (unique) content

Therefore, in any case, the templates and also the page structure must be checked and questioned in their current form. The goal is to align the content with the needs of the users.

Google Penguin = bad backlinks

The quickest cause for a devaluation by Google are bad backlinks. For this Google has provided the Disavow tool, which devalues bad links. Even though this tool exists, you should not buy backlinks. On the one hand, the naturally created backlinks are usually enough to achieve top rankings. For another, you put your business at risk if you slip into a penalty by buying backlinks.

Even domains without backlinks can be in position 1 for contested search queries – if the content meets the users’ expectations.

Core Update = a combination of different factors

Updates are often confirmed by Google as so-called “core updates”. Although there is no statement about which factors exactly flow into this, pages with Penguin or Panda problems are conspicuously often found among the losers. Therefore, in the case of a ranking loss at the time of a core update, both possibilities should be checked as the cause.