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.
Google Penguin Devalues Links Instead of Penalising Them
The new algorithm in Penguin devalues spammy links instead of applying a penalty. Despite this, John says getting rid of disavow completely would be a bad strategy, as you can use the disavow file for any links you do not want to be associated with.
Manual Penalties are specific to www/non-www and HTTP/HTTPS
Manual action penalties are specific to www/non-www and HTTP/HTTPS domains so you need to have them all set up in Search Console to see them.
Add Nofollow to Shared Links
If you are giving out links to be shared on other websites, you should ask for nofollow to be added. If a few links are added without the nofollow, it probably won’t cause a penalty, but you can disavow the URLs with the links to be safe.
Google May Use Contact Information
Google doesn’t look for contact information on a page for rankings, but John says it could be useful if Google wants to contact you directly to notify you of a serious issue which they occasionally do.
No Penalty for Links to Duplicate Content
Linking to sites with duplicate content won’t ‘usually’ result in a penalty.
Don’t Deliberately Block Pop-ups for Googlebot
If you have a pop-up which doesn’t show in Fetch and Render, then it probably isn’t seen by Googlebot. But if you are using a technique to block this deliberately then it could be interpreted as cloaking and result in a manual penalty in extreme situations. If Googlebot is able to see the pop-up, it might result in the content on the pop-up being given more weight than the content on the page.
DMCAs May Impact Search Results
An excessive number of DMCA requests could have an impact on your search results although the impact and method of penalty is vague.
Google Recognises Separate Sites on Subdomains
Google has a process to recognise when separate sites are hosted on subdomains, and when they are used for a single website. They will then apply per site e,g, penalties and malware detection, but this can affect the entire domain if they haven’t recognised them as different sites.
Content Starting Below the Fold is OK
Google will not penalise for content that starts below the fold.
Manual Penalties Expire Automatically
Manual penalties will show up in Webmaster Tools, and will expire naturally after an amount of time. Algorithmic penalties are only updated when the algorithm and data is refreshed, or the algorithm is retired.