A Comprehensive guide on various Google Penalty types. How to identify which penalty had hit your website & what is the procedure to follow to get out of it.

1. What is a Google Penalty? Comprehensive Guide to get out of it
Have you ever been rejected when applying for credit of some type? Maybe after haggling over
the price of a new car and the value of your trade in, the dealer’s finance department said it
couldn’t get loan approval based on your credit history. So under the Fair Credit Reporting Act
(FRCA) you likely got a copy of your credit report to find out any negative information on it.
And the FRCA gave you the right to request that reporting agencies remove incorrect
information (e.g., it wasn’t you that defaulted on a mortgage for a Costa Rican vacation home
but somebody with a social security number one digit different than yours).
At the end of the day, you were able to “fix” your credit by following a process under the FCRA.
A hassle yes, but at least a straightforward, step-by-step process to remedy the situation.
You would think that if your website
suddenly disappeared from Google
Search results that there would be a
similar process to find out why and fix
it, correct? Let’s say your Los Angeles
pool supply business doesn’t appear at
all in Search Engine Results Pages
(SERP) for the search, “Where can I
buy a pool filter in Los Angeles?” How
difficult could it be to figure out what’s
going on and get your business back on
to SERPs? Guess again as you’ve entered the not-so-straight-forward land of the Google Penalty.
Before getting into an overview of what a Google Penalty is and what to do to get out from under
one, it helps to understand the core of Google’s Search business. Think about why Google has
become a verb as well as a noun. Its because their business is providing users with the most
accurate, up to date and relevant search results when they “Google” something. And as a
consequence of having THE search engine, it can charge businesses accordingly for advertising
for access to all of those searching eyeballs.
So for our Los Angeles pool filter search example, Google wants the most relevant search results
to show up at the top of the SERP (i.e., in the top 3 results). What Google doesn’t want as top
results are a business selling pool tables, or a brick and mortar only operation in Denver or a
manufacturer koi pond filters. The types of search results that would have their user thinking,
“That’s not what I’m looking for.”
As a result, Google’s algorithms strive to return the most relevant search results. Those
algorithms are also calibrated to filter out any websites that attempt to “game the system” and
show up higher on SERPs than they actually merit. Google’s algorithms give weight to web
pages that are linked to from others since that conveys the former has some level of authority on

2. a subject. An example is the Wikipedia page about Jimi Hendrix linking to his bio page on the
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s website.
That algorithmic factor also gave rise to businesses that attempted to take advantage of Google’s
algorithms by selling links from their site to other websites. These “link farms” had no other
purpose than to show that the purchasing website had links directed towards it. Google of course
frowned upon this “black hat tactic” since it risked inaccurate search results. So Google tweaked
its algorithms to recognize and flag websites that received such link farm links and “de-index”
offending websites from its search engine results.
It should be noted here that Google is very protective of information about its algorithms and
penalties. Remember that it is a competitive business (e.g., Bing and Yahoo) with trade secrets to
protect. Additionally, it doesn’t want to provide information that assists those seeking to game
the system. That said, it does selectively reveal such information and provide guidelines so as to
shape the conduct of websites and webmasters in a positive manner (i.e., “white hat tactics”). So
unlike the FRCA where the rules of the road are clear, there is a certain amount of reading of the
tea leaves by the search engine optimization (SEO) community when it comes to Google
penalties.
A “Google Penalty ” doesn’t necessarily take the form of “you’re a bad website, go stand in the
corner.” It can also result from a tweaking of Google’s algorithms to filter out potential search
results from practices that aren’t trustworthy. For example, when a website engages in “keyword
stuffing”: overloading a webpage with a keyword just so that the page will show up high on
SERPs for search queries that include the keyword. Picture our hypothetical Denver pool supply
business including a page titled “Los Angeles Pool Filters” that contains basically gibberish text
that repeats the phrase over and over again.
Then there is what’s generally referred to as a “manual” Google Penalty. That’s where a website
is de-indexed from Google’s search engine as a result of going astray of Google’s guidelines
(e.g., trying to game the system). The previously mentioned link farms caused many a small
business to disappear from Google SERPs after it implemented what the SEO community
deemed the “Penguin” update in 2012. And many of those businesses didn’t even know they did
anything wrong, but had merely engaged SEO vendors for improved SERP rankings. Problem
was that some vendors tried to do that via black hat tactics such as buying links.
At least with a manual penalty you can find out from Google whether your website is under a
penalty. And there is a process, albeit a complicated and labor-intensive one, where a business
can request removal of the penalty. But when it comes to Google’s algorithms filtering out your
website pages due to their being deemed as untrustworthy, there isn’t a per se removal process.
Remedying the situation may require an overhaul of your website to implement SEO best
practices that comport with Google search guidelines.
LAD Solutions has a team of web design experts that can assist you with SEO best practices as
well as Google Penalty Removal. To learn more about to learn more about our search engine
optimization services or Google Penalty removal services please call (888) 523-2926, or
click the button below to submit your request at www.LADSolutions.com , and one of our
representatives will be in touch with you shortly!