Google has penalized you: ways to know and fix it

In this article we will try to dispel this doubt, but first we will review a brief history of the most important algorithm changes that Google has made, because it will help to better understand how the search engine works and why it makes certain decisions.

Brief history of Google algorithm changes:

1. Caffein: in this case it was not exactly a change in the algorithm, but an improvement in Google’s architecture to improve its indexing capacity. The main objective of Caffein was to crawl and index results in a faster way, due to the movement of information generated by social networks [it analyzes the web in small portions, with a faster dynamic].What do you value?
   • Content update frequency.
   • Web page loading speed
   • Domain age.
   • Lower SEO weight of PageRank.
2. Panda: Panda’s main objective was to remove pages with low-quality content from search results:
   • Duplicate content copied from other sites.
   • Obsolete or outdated content.
   • Contents of little value: short, with spelling mistakes.
   • Excessive repetition of keywords in body text and in an unnatural way.
3. Penguin: Affected websites with inbound links obtained/considered unnatural:
   • High % of poor quality links: link farms, automatic links…etc.
   • High % of links repeating the same anchor-text (the text / body of the link).
   • Contents of little value: short, with spelling mistakes.
4. Hummingbird: It is created to adapt the search results to the new way of searching through the new supports such as mobiles, or tablets: (searches through voice). These searches are of the following type: How tall is Everest?, How old is Miley Cyrus?, How tall is Pau Gasol?, In which movie theaters in Madrid is the movie…? This is another step forward in Google’s recognition of natural language. With this new algorithm, Google intends to:
   • Understand what Users really want, the meaning of what they need.
   • Provide concrete answers.
   • NOT to link search words and words contained in the pages presented in the results [SERPs] as in the past.
5. Pigeon: This change serves to improve Google’s local search results, thus giving greater importance to businesses that are closer to the user performing the search. Most important aspects of the algorithm change:
   • The search results of local listings disappear for many keywords: so to cover the remaining market, we can resort to Google Awords campaigns, or on page SEO strategy for keywords of the market we want to cover.
   • Local search results depend more on the authority of the website.
   • Local directories are becoming more relevant in local positions.

How to know if Google has penalized you?

To understand this you must first know what kind of penalties can be given:

Manuals

Two circumstances may occur:

1. Your website, for various reasons, raises the alarm of someone from Google’s team specialized in this type of cases.

2. A person sends a spam report.

Subsequently, someone from Matt Cutts’ Antispam team (Quality Raters and Engineers) manually analyzes your website and sees if Google’s guidelines are actually being violated. Then, if there is a violation, you will receive a notification in your Webmaster tools / Search console account in the messages section, or you can also check it in Search Traffic > Manual Actions.

2. By algorithms

In this case, the penalty comes from the fact that one or more of Google’s algorithms has analyzed your website and has detected that it is in breach of any of the guidelines, automatically applying a penalty. If it occurs in this way we will not receive any notification.

In both cases the important thing is to detect the type of penalty, be attentive and with some identification tool or Webmaster tools / Search console, realize what the problem is and know how to act to solve it.

Once this is known, some of the symptoms that may appear or that we can look out for may be the following factors:

1. A very noticeable symptom, if we have traffic monitoring tools such as Google Analytics or Omniture, is that organic traffic is gradually reduced since the penalty has been applied.
2. Some pages do not appear in the search results.
3. The domain no longer appears when searched in search engines.
4. With certain keywords, search engine traffic loses visibility, i.e., users who with these words found us and entered our website, now do not. We can check this through our Webmaster tools / Google Search console profile or account under Search traffic > Search analysis.

Tools to identify if you have been penalized by Google:

1. Advanced searches through Google: we can use the search “site:www.nuestrositioweb.com” in the Google search box to see if Google shows any search results for pages that are part of our website. If there are not, it means that we have been penalized.
2. Webmaster tools / Google Search console: if we have any manual penalization, we will receive a message that will appear in the messages tab. We can also see if we have been penalized by going to the Google Index tab > Indexing status, here we can see that the number of pages that Google had indexed our website has gone from X pages to zero.
3. Google Analytics: we can, through this tool and enteringAcquisition > Channels > Organic Search comparing a range of several months, see the evolution of traffic through search engines. If there is a sharp and continuous drop at any time, we can think that we have been penalized.
4. Panguin Tool: to use this tool the first thing is to have a Google Analytics account that measures the traffic of our website. It is very useful because it updates the traffic data of our Analytics account with the dates on which Google algorithm changes and updates were launched. In this way we can check the evolution of our traffic and see with the graph we have, if there is a correlation between the loss of traffic and the launch or update of the algorithms. You can learn more about this tool at https://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/.
5. WebSite Auditor: is a paid tool, although we have a free version. With this tool we can analyze aspects of the structure of our website and get reports on aspects such as: domain authority, indexed pages, traffic sources, traffic from different search engines, PageRank, position in Alexa, etc. It is intuitive, very complete and powerful; also with the paid versions (professional and enterprise) we will be able to receive updates about algorithm and search engine updates. And of course, we will be able to optimize our pages based on the chosen keywords, according to the most relevant indicators of SEO On page Visit WebSite Auditor
6. Rank Tracker: tool that will help us with the monitoring of the keywords for which we want to position. We will be able to know and control aspects such as the positions in the most important search engines of our keywords, the urls for which we appear by keywords and search engine, the difference in visibility of those keywords in relation to previous periods, progress of positions, traffic for those keywords, etc. In addition, with this tool we will be able to perform keyword research, i.e. to know the number of searches, competition, competition ratio and number of searches for different search engines, regions and languages. Visit Rank Tracker.
7. SEO SpyGlass: with SpyGlass we can monitor the quality of inbound links pointing to our website and see if any of them may be causing the penalty. It takes into account aspects such as: age of the domain of the website where the link is located, PageRank of the page and domain, page authority, inbound links to the domain and the page of the link.

How to get out of a Google penalty?

This is a good question. For this we pass you a small guide of the actions you can take depending on the algorithm changes:

Penalized by Panda:

This is a symptom of problems with aspects related to the quality of your content. In order to solve this you will have to address points such as:

• Elimination of duplicate content from your website. To do this you must take into account aspects such as: review not only the content itself, making sure you do not have copied content, but aspects such as Titles and Meta Descriptions duplicated between pages or the same URLs of different pages, which are sometimes repeated.
• Improve the quality of your content: original and with relevant information.
• Reduce ads / banners on your website (especially at the top of the page).
• The page content and page title does not match the search query for which it ranks.

Penalized by Penguin:

This means that the links pointing to our website are not of quality, or many have been achieved in a very short fraction of time. Google has noticed this and has penalized you. Actions you can take to try to solve this problem:

• Stop creating links with the same anchor text. The links must be natural, so sometimes they must go with the url type: www.misitioweb.com, taking several keywords, or with prepositions and articles interspersed in the keywords with which you build the link (example: the most used online marketing content for the ….).
• Do not place links on low quality pages or link farms.
• Placing too many links from the same page.
• “Clean” through the Google tool, Disavow , links that are not of quality. To do this we would recommend you first export all the links pointing to your website from Webmaster tools / Google Search Console from the Search Traffic section > Links to your site. Once this is done, check the quality of the links, and remove those that could be hurting you[SEO SpyGlass is a good tool to do this check quickly and easily].

Request for reconsideration:

If the penalty does not come from algorithm changes or updates, you have the option to send a reconsideration request to Google. By doing so, a member of the spam team will evaluate the actions taken on your website to improve it in terms of relevance and content for users, and depending on this, the penalty may be lifted. However, you can only submit a reconsideration request if Google has manually penalized you.

Why is Google making these changes?

We have to realize that, for each search we perform, there may be thousands or millions of web pages with useful information for users, so algorithms are only created to show the most relevant and useful search results for users.

At the moment, Google’s algorithms work based on more than 200 factors that make the search engine show, or try to show, what the user is really looking for. Some of these factors can be: domain, keywords of our website, the frequency of publication, the quality of the content published, the region in which we orient our site, PageRank, quantity and quality of incoming links to our website…etc.

Video on search evolution

Many of the improvements in Google’s search results come from innovations and additions such as the Knowledge Graph and Google Instant:

Knowledge Graph

Knowledge Graph will allow you to search and find objects, people or places about which Google has been collecting information [celebrities, cities, towns, soccer teams, emblematic buildings, works of art…etc], showing you relevant information about your query. To do so, it uses the collective intelligence of the entire Internet, not only from public sources such as Wikipedia or Freebase.

What is Knowledge Graph and what does it provide?

Google Instant

It is a function that Google incorporated years ago in its search engine to show related or relevant search results while a user is typing in the search box. With this feature, Google tries to improve the user experience, gaining speed in their search queries, as many of the alternatives that are offered as they are typing the words, may be the one the user is looking for or a better one.

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