Google penalties: SEO practices to avoid

Google does not penalise sites at random. It applies public guidelines – its spam guidelines – and does so in two ways. Most of the sites that have been penalised did not intend to cheat: they followed bad advice or allowed a practice to continue that had become risky.

Two types of penalties

• Manual actions are decided by a Google employee. They are reported in Search Console, under the ‘Manual actions’ section. Once the problem has been rectified, you can request a review.
• Algorithmic demotion is not reported anywhere. It is evident from a drop in traffic, often coinciding with a Google update. It is lifted when the site improves, usually during a subsequent update.

In March 2024, Google merged its so-called ‘useful content’ system into its major updates and added three rules: against mass-produced content, against abusing a site’s reputation, and against buying up expired domains to capitalise on their history.

Content that adds no value

• Keyword stuffing: repeating the target phrase to the point where the text becomes difficult to read.
• Mass-produced pages: one page per town with identical text; articles generated automatically and published without proofreading. Google makes it clear: it is not the tool that is the problem, but content that has no value for the reader.
• Satellite pages: pages written for the search engine, which redirect the visitor elsewhere. In February 2006, BMW’s German website was removed from Google’s index for this reason: one page repeated ‘gebrauchtwagen’ (‘used car’) dozens of times, and visitors were immediately redirected to another page. The site was reinstated once the issue had been rectified.

A point that is often misunderstood: duplicate content is not penalised as such. When several URLs contain the same text, Google chooses one and ignores the others; it is best to tell it which one to use by means of a canonical tag. A tool such as Siteliner identifies duplicates on a website. Copying text from another website, on the other hand, constitutes spam.

Purchased or exchanged links

A link to your site counts as a recommendation. Buying it, or obtaining it in exchange for something in return, distorts this recommendation.

• In 2011, a New York Times investigation revealed that the J. C. Penney retail chain owed its top rankings to thousands of paid links: Google manually demoted it.
• In the same year, Overstock offered a discount to students and universities who placed links to its pages on their websites in .edu: Google penalised the company, as the discount was deemed to constitute payment.

An advertising or sponsored link is not prohibited: it must simply carry the rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", so that Google does not count it.