Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is surely a useful way to enhance the presence of your website on the Worldwide Web, and the results can be quite rewarding, provided you use it in the right manner.
Overusing these SEO methods can prompt Google to stop your website from their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). So, it is necessary to stay aware of ways to avoid Google SEO penalties completely. Staying away from the penalty triggers of Google will offer peace of mind and also good results in SERPs.
Severe penalties can lead to complete ban on your site in Google search results. To avoid such devastating ending, it is recommended to make use of the best SEO practices. So, the million dollar question is how do you avoid the Google SEO penalties? Read on to find out how to safeguard your site from such penalties.
Review Your Links on a Monthly Basis
Begin by auditing your backlinks and forming a baseline. Find out who is linking to you. Among your links, you need to identify how many are coming from low quality sites and how many authoritative ones are coming from high quality sites. If at all you happen to find any link from low-quality or spammy websites, email the website for removal of the link.
Keep a track of such mails as you may need the copy just in case you get penalized and need to register a request for reconsideration. Make use of SEO tools for monitoring your links.
Monitor Link Ratios
When Google discusses about earned and unearned links, the best way to monitor these figures algorithmically is by looking at the ratios. Here are few ratios that you can check when monitoring the health of a site –
- Type of link: Text, image or mentions
- Location of link: Link list, paragraph, side, header or in-content
- Theme of the domain: Computers, business, portals, news or reference
- Type of site: Blog, general, CMS, social network or link directory
- Deep Links Ratio
- Sitewide Ratio
For instance, if you find that there are several links coming from link directories, it implies an imbalance and you can build alternate links in order to create a good backlink profile.
Create Alerts for Google Analytics
Just create Intelligence Events Alerts to have Google Analytics alert you in case your traffic has come down or if anything has changed. Listed below are just a few alerts that you can set up for your clients:
- Traffic drop of 10% or more
- Increase of Bounce Rate by more than 5%
- Decrease of Google Organic Traffic by 5% or more
Keep an Eye on Drop in Traffic Levels
Occasionally, a minor drop doesn’t really indicate big issues, but if you keep ignoring the drops in the traffic levels, then the end-result can be disastrous. So, whenever you see any drop in traffic levels, review the website and backlinks and then address those issues before they lead to loss of major traffic or Panda/Penguin penalties.
If you want to avoid Google penalties, the most important of all is not to involve in any kind of grey/black-hat activities, and building links from private networks or shady sources.
By building a high quality site that follows the best practices and guidelines of Google, you will not need to worry about Google penalties at the first place. And, of course, you should also conduct a site audit every 2-3 months to improve its overall quality, and help in boosting its growth over the coming years.
