Penalties in Google Search
Google and other search engines may penalize sites that are deemed low quality, spam, or are seen to be using manipulative SEO methods to rank higher. This will cause some websites to suffer in organic search results and can take time to rectify. As it is important to understand the cause of penalties and how to handle them, our SEO Office Hours notes below compile advice from Google’s “SEO Office Hours” sessions with recommendations for avoiding organic search penalties.
Page Load Penalty Only Affects Extremely Slow Pages
Google only penalises pages which are extremely slow, taking minutes to load. Pages up to 30 seconds won’t be affected.
Structured Data Manual Actions Don’t Change Rankings
If you get a structured data manual action penalty, the structured data will be removed from search results, but it doesn’t affect the ranking of pages
Manual Action Penalties can be Applied to Thin, Spun or Aggregated Content
Thin content penalties can be applied to sites manually by the web spam team where the entire site seems to be thin, ‘spun’, or aggregated from other sources without any unique additional value.
Manual Penalties from Migrated Domains will be Visible in Search Console
Any manual penalties from migrated domains which are affecting your new domain will be visible in the Manual Actions report in search console.
Mobile Interstitial Penalty is Calculated on Recrawl
The mobile interstitial penalty is calculated in real time as pages are crawled.
Mobile Interstitial Penalty Will Roll Out In Days
The Google mobile interstial penalty will roll out to all data centers in the next few days.
Downloads Can be Flagged as Deceptive Content
If your download links lead to a different type of download, which might install toolbars or other types of content for example, it might be flagged as deceptive.
Manual Link Penalties are Relative to Industry
If every site for an industry is engaged in link spamming, Google might not decide to penalise them manually as there are no alternative sites to show. Or they might try to algorithmically ignore the spammy ranking factors.
Penguin Ignores Most Links so Only Very Bad Profiles Incur a Penalty
Only sites with very bad backlink profiles are likely to see any penalty. Penguin is now mostly ignoring links rather than applying any penalty.
Show Googlebot the Same Teaser Content as Users
If you only present teaser content, make sure Googlebot also sees the same content, otherwise this would be cloaking.