How to Avoid Google Penalties for Link-Building Mistakes

Everyday, Google processes around 10 billion searches. This means, businesses around the world depend on Google traffic.

However, websites that do not follow the guidelines could face the penalties. These penalties can have long-term effects on a website and link building best practices as well. So, it becomes crucial to know about penalties and how to avoid them.

What Are Google Penalties?

You can easily understand it with a simple example – a Google penalty is like a traffic ticket for not following a specific traffic rule.

Similar to those traffic tickets, a penalty punishes the website for not following Google’s guidelines.

With that said, have a look at the types of penalties that Google can impose on a website:

  • Excessive Reciprocal Linking
  • Low-Quality Link
  • Manual Spam Links
  • Unnatural Outbound Link Penalty
  • Unnatural Links

What are the major consequences of a Google Penalty?

Some of the most common impacts of a Google penalty involves a drop down in SEO ranking along with inability to utilize organic search that helps reaching out to potential clients and customers.

In addition to this, if Google has removed your website, you might lose the target audience as they aren’t able to find you in the results.

For most of the companies around the globe that hugely rely on Google, a penalty can impact their financial stream and a sudden drop in profits.

How to Avoid a Google Penalty?

When it comes to avoiding a Google penalty, the first thing you should prioritize is optimizing your high-quality content along with the natural link building.

Although, if your website’s pages are lacking useful content, users will have a bad experience. And this will lead Google to know that your website isn’t worth ranking.

What about Google penalty recovery? Recovering from a Google penalty is not that much difficult, in spite of that, it may take from hours to months.

With the help of the best SEO agency, you don’t have to stay much concerned about the prolonged recovery.

Here are the points that you should keep in mind to avoid Google penalties:

1.     Use Well-Researched and Well-Written Content

You should publish new content regularly in order to drive traffic. The content you are uploading must be well-written, indexed, and informative.

A productive approach to have high-quality content is relying on a SEO agency, as they will use SEO optimization techniques to make things far better.

Types of content are as follows:

  • It must be relevant to the topic
  • Start the intro with a statistics
  • Use small paragraphs
  • Know the target audience
  • Use simple and easy sentences

2.     Avoid keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is one of the most common mistakes that people make. To avoid Google penalties for stuffing the keywords, you can instead use natural language and keywords.

You must keep the keyword density up to 3% according to the word count. Not doing that will significantly increase the chances of getting a penalty. Let’s have a look at some of the ways to confront keyword stuffing:

  • Extend the word count
  • Research quality keywords
  • Give each web page a different primary keyword
  • Use secondary keywords
  • Use tools like SEO Minion to manage on-page SEO

3.     Do not Reuse Content

Using duplicate or repetitive content is one of the major mistakes that Google doesn’t allow. Google also hates it when you use content in more than one place, like when you just copy and paste content from other websites for a guest blog post.

The easiest method to avoid this penalty is to use 100 percent unique content and incorporate the best content marketing strategies for high-quality backlinks as well, keeping in mind that it should only be used for one location page.

4.     Do not make your website Too Heavy

If your website has too-many ads on the page, to the point where you are not completely providing any valuable information to the users, it may become an issue.

To avoid being penalized, there should be ads spread out between well-written and unique content. By doing this, users will get what they are looking for.

According to sources, the conversion rate of a website drops by an average of 5% with every additional second of loading time.

Thus, it is important to keep website pages running smoothly.

5.     Never Hide Your Content 

Hiding content is an old spam technique so that only Google can analyze and see it. This hidden content generally uses repeated keywords and phrases to manipulate Google and improve ranking.

Instead of hiding your content, you can use the ‘read more’ link, so that it should be visible to the reader or user. One can also use ‘no-follow’ links to stop Google from indexing your information.

Conclusion

Avoiding Google penalties is not that much difficult if you hire the best SEO agency. There are various ways to avoid as well as recover it. Whether it is SEO backlink strategy, or valuable content, you must follow the guidelines to improve the visibility of your website.

Always remember, the primary goal is to provide users what they want. When you prioritize the overall user experience, search engine rankings improve naturally.