SEO donts that causes Google to penalize a website

Having your website penalized by Google can be quite frightening. Penalties from Google could lead to a reduction if not total loss of traffic coming into your website.

Having to face these restrictions could breed a form of uncertainty in the website or business owner and that is generally bad for business.

There isn’t an officially published list for things that might cause Google to blacklist and impose sanctions on your site which is the reason why some innocent and unsuspecting webmasters fall prey to these penalties.

In this post I will be sharing four things that can cause Google to penalize any website.

Google violations to steer clear of

Link Farms

Link farms are websites that exchange links among themselves to manipulate search results.

Usually, link farms exchange link of unrelated content which is a no-no for Google search algorithms, since link farms are only known for spam links.

Pointing your links to a link farm might spark an undesirable consequence from Google and we don’t want that.

Hidden Texts

Hidden texts are words/text that exists on a webpage but with the same color as the background color of the webpage.

The essence of hidden texts is to trick the search engine into indexing and ranking a page for the words that are hidden by process of the definition above

Most times, these words are unrelated to the subject matter and the webmaster might be looking to manipulate search rankings and get cheap traffic from these words, any suspicion of foul play on your part as a site owner will put you in Googles' black book.

Keyword Stuffing

This is a fast way to get on bad side of Penguin, the results can be very drastic too. Getting a top ranking page to one of the lowest ranking page for the stuffed keyword is very likely.

It’s very easy for Keyword stuffing to look like spam, so whenever you are trying to rank a page for a certain keyword try to be as natural as possible and do not overdo it.

Basically, each paragraph or section of your page/post should contain not more than two or three mentions of your keywords and if you have to use your keywords after the first three mentions, you would do well to use related words and synonyms instead.

Automatic Submission of Links

Usage of automated tools or software to submit links is also an indicator of spam on your website and will cost you if Google gets to detect which they definitely will.

Using unauthorized software will cost you PageRank or completely prevent your site from being indexed.

Sometimes you might unknowingly violate some of these rules and more that weren’t mentioned here. Should in case that happens, it’s not the end of the world. It is very possible to recover from being penalized by Google, you just have to look inwards and identify the main cause of the penalties and do everything that can be done to remedy it.