Avoiding Google Penalties

August 23, 2013HOW TO: DIGITAL MARKETING

Not many people have the rules and regulations handbook to avoiding a Google penalty.  These penalties can really hurt your domain and page authority and lower your rank considerably. Here are some ways to avoid getting penalized by Google.

 

    1. Don’t over do it with optimizing your anchor text. Choosing anchor text that is relevant to the link that it’s pointing to is important. However, if too many people point to your site with the same anchor text it could actually cause harm and decrease your rankings. If you have built links from sites with good authority, over time you will need to continually build additional non-rich anchor text from these authoritative sites. You can use several options such as your domain name, the text of your title tag, click here, learn more etc.

 

    1. Avoid spam links. If you are in the link building process, you will find that it’s quite the challenge to get authoritative sites to link to you sometimes. There are several black hat tactics that can generate links in virtually no time and those should be avoided at all costs. Stay away from link farms, sites that are low in quality and content, gambling or adult sites, or other penalized sites.

 

    1. Building links too fast. Occasionally, even if you have taken the time to reach out and acquire good links but are gathering a too many too fast your ranking can actually decrease. This tends to happen with hot businesses that are new and generating lots of buzz from other sites. In this case, just wait it out and eventually your ranking will become even greater. If you are generating too many spam links too quickly, remove those links as soon as possible to avoid google penalties.

 

    1. Get rid of duplicate content. If you have pages that have similar or duplicate content as a way to rank better, think again! Your site should always focus on creating quality content instead of having a lot of bad content that may not even be relevant to your site. This can hurt your ranking tremendously. Take the time and do it right.

 

  1. Be mindful of user-generated content. The Internet can be a very scary place where people are free to share their ideas if you let them. Unfortunately, that freedom can come with a great cost to you. If you allow people to post on your site freely without mediation, you open up the possibility of them linking to adult and gambling sites which will harm your rank and make you look bad.

 

If Google has penalized you already then you know how badly it can hurt your rank, but if you have not yet been penalized then you want to keep these tips in mind to avoid hurting your ranking.

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