It’s often confusing as to which actions just damage performance and which ones will actually earn you an official Google penalty. Here are the actions that will leave you with a slap on the wrist, or worse – no traffic to your site at all.
- Cloaking
This is showing something different to search engines and users whereas redirecting the bots but not the users is also a violation of Google’s guidelines which will end up in receiving a penalty. Both processes involve showing certain links and texts only to search engines and showing HTML to the search engines but users seeing only images.
- Manipulating Backlinks
Google will recognise a pattern of unnatural links designed to cause deception and manipulation with artificial links directed towards a website. For advice on SEO Services Dublin, contact www.rycomarketing.ie/seo-services/
- Auto-generated content
One of Google’s recent algorithms has been targeted specifically at looking for high-quality and useful content. Any content on a site that’s been auto-generated, scraped from elsewhere, copied or placed together with little value or meaning will be flagged up by Google and penalised.
- Site Performance
If your site is suffering from serious technical issues, it could lead to it being removed completely by Google. This isn’t a penalty as such but removing your site entirely from search results can have a massive impact on your business. Keeping your site running well and speedy enough for users is paramount.
- Incompatibility
Your site must be mobile-friendly to satisfy Google’s requirements. Mobile web browsing has now overtaken desktop use, so if a site isn’t up to Google’s mobile-friendly policy, it won’t be getting any search results boosts anytime soon.