How Google Penalty Can Adversely Affects your Online Presence

Google penalty can cause a sever loss to your website and can badly effect your online business. There are various reasons when a penalty is uplifted to a website i.e. may be a site owner has used some manipulative methods to gain the good ranking in Google search results or may be put a false impression on Google by employing black hat techniques.

Today, the biggest challenge before Webmaster or site owners is, how to rank their website on top 10. Some techniques which are absolutely approved by Google and come under white hat but some are strictly prohibited and can cause severe damage if not followed correctly. Although Google has explained all the required terms and conditions in its Webmaster Guidelines but still some webmasters forbids the warning and hence face the penalization.

Now we will discuss the top penalty which can completely evaporate you from Google search even from the indexing.

Top 5 Google Penalties

Manual Penalty

Manual penalty is levied on a website when someone from the Google team manually reviews your website and found something fishy in it. If any of the Google guidelines are breached or manipulated then Google takes a serious action on those websites and can demote the ranking of it in search results or even remove it from their index. Whenever a penalty is imposed on a website, webmaster gets a message from Google in their WMT (Webmaster Tool) account.

Google Panda

It first came in February 2011 and brought a prominent change in the history of SEO. This penalty was related with “Content” and it influenced the ranking of large no. of websites. After this penalty hit the web, all the websites, blogs, directories etc who had low quality content or duplicate content got skeptically affected. All the ranking that these sites were holding since long became invisible and some of them faced permanently de-indexing from Google.

Google Penguin

Google Penguin at first hit the market in April 2012 and shifted the whole working strategy of backlinks creation into a different direction. This update majorly focuses on “Links” as we all know that approx 30-40% SEO is based on backlinks, so this updation affects the ranking of the websites that had backlinks coming from low quality websites or link farming or content farming site generally. Site having paid links were also became victim in this penguin update.

EMD (Exact Match Domain)

This penalty was introduced back in 2012 (September) and its motive is to stop the advantages that websites were having because of the presence of keywords in their domain name. Prior, having targeted keywords in your domain name was an added advantage for website owners as they get the privilege to rank on that keyword in top search results. Later Google observed that huge number of websites are ranking on top results not because of their quality content and strong backlinks but because they have keywords in its domain. So they brought in EMD update which has a motive to lower the rank of all those websites which has exact match keywords in their domain but failed to maintain the quality in it.

Humming Bird

Hummingbird is not a penalty but it’s more of an update introduced in September 2013. It is basically presented in order to make Google search more interactive and direct. Via this update Google is pushing search results in strategic way and preventing black hat techniques from being employed. It is beneficial for long tail keyword like queries related with how to, why so, what are etc.

Above the Fold Penalty

This penalty was enforced on websites having ads on the top section and the useful content in visible after that. There are websites that are showing ads before the content which affects the users experience and they don’t get what they were looking for. Google examines this trouble from the root and came up with a solution in the form of Above the Folder penalty which penalizes the websites having too much ad in their upper section.