One day you check your metrics and find a severe drop in traffic for no clear reason. What happened? There are many factors to determine the reason for the drop and one of the most likely is the worst nightmare for many: SEO penalties.
In this article, we are going to review what SEO penalties are, what types, and their most common causes. If your Chicago cleaning services website has a sudden drop in traffic, check out this information. You may find the solution.
What are SEO penalties?
When you misbehaved, your parents scolded you, right? Well, something similar happens with Google. The almighty search engine acts as a parent that supervises the content of its children.
That is, an SEO penalty is Google’s way of punishing those who break the rules. You may receive a penalty for doing black hat SEO. Or you may be doing things you shouldn’t be doing without realizing it. Whatever the case, the important thing is to get to work when Google penalizes you.
Recovering traffic may not be an easy task, but, with practice and dedication, you will recover your ranking.
Now that you know what an SEO penalty is, let’s see how to detect this penalty. To begin with, there are basic indicators that inform us that something is wrong with our website. What are they? A sudden drop in organic traffic or loss of top keyword rankings.
If you observe any of these scenarios on your website, it’s time to investigate the type of penalty. And, of course, what is causing it?
Are you looking for the best SEO Firm in Chicago to drive more traffic to your website? We are a Digital Marketing Agency specializing in SEO Website Audit and Web Design solutions.
Types of SEO penalties
Google divides penalties into two types:
Manual: Google has a dedicated team working to review sites with the goal of checking that you don’t break their rules. If Google penalizes you with one of these penalties, you will be able to notice it in your Search Console.
Algorithmic: If Google finds something wrong when crawling your site, you will be penalized. The penalty will affect your ranking.
As you can see, the types of SEO penalties are very clear. After all this, you may be wondering what are the causes for which Google can penalize me.
Causes of SEO penalties
Google can penalize your website for different reasons. Let’s see what they are.
Cloacking: Technique that consists of showing a content to users and a different and optimized content to robots.
Keyword Stuffing: Do you repeat a keyword in an absurd way? Beware because Google will penalize you. Google classifies it as spam because it does not provide any value.
Duplicate content: Google prioritizes user experience. If you provide your audience with content of little use, the almighty search engine will penalize you.
Copied content: Stealing is a sin, right? Well, Google takes it that way too. Stealing content from another site is heavily penalized by Google.
Linkbuilding: Getting solid linkbuilding catapults you to success. But, losing patience and getting toxic links could be a headache. Spammy links or links from unsafe sites are penalized by Google.
We’re a top-rated SEO firm in Chicago. We get small businesses to the front page of Google with affordable SEO. Get more leads and sales today!
Follow these tips and give authority to your brand’s website. Boxmark Digital has years of experience providing SEO services to Chicago businesses. The result? They’ve become total successes.
Contact us to increase your traffic and get more leads.
