Every website is in the race to reach the highest search engine ranking possible to generate more traffic. With the tough competition, the beginners are having a hard time competing in the big leagues and hence resorting to link-building tactics that are continually violating the strict guidelines set by Google. However, there’s forgetting one important thing: Link Penalty.
1. What is Link Penalty?
Websites are chock full of links. They’re essentially the building blocks of a site’s SEO ranking. The Anchor links, backlinks. Editorial links and all the others are either good, or they aren’t. The bad, low-quality links that manipulate the ranks, or violate Google’s search guidelines are the one that result in link penalty – a penalization from the company for engaging in unnatural practices.
The penalty can be a single page penalty, or it can even be a site-wide penalty.
2. Why is it Important?
A Google link penalty is important for any website because it adversely affects said sites SEO ranking. This has the possibility of causing a significant drop in traffic generated through to the website eventually resulting in a loss in business and profits.
3. Links That Land You in Trouble
Of the variety of link building techniques employed by web-developers all over the globe, there are some very obvious tricks that are bound to land you in trouble with Google, resulting in one or more link penalty. They include:
- Content spinning
- Forum spam conducted through multiple profiles or by placing links in innumerable forum posts.
- Use of low quality, bulk directory for forum blasts.
- Scaled posts through guest blogging
- Using private blog networks PBN’s to establish rank.
- Links from hacked websites or those containing spam, illegal or adult content.
- Non editorial paid links that are specifically designed to pass PageRank.
- Comment spamming on various websites.
- High percentage linkage to poor quality websites in foreign languages
4. Two Basic Types of Link Penalties
The link penalties are of two kinds: manual and algorithmic.
Manual Link Penalty is when an actual member of the Google web-spam team scrutinizes, monitors, and reviews your websites link profile and applies a penalty manually in response to a regular reviewing, a spam report against your website, an algorithmic trigger or target monitoring of a particular web niche.
Algorithmic Link Spam Penalty is one that is generated automatically when triggered through the Google Penguin filter and applied to our website without human intervention or review.
5. They Impact a Website’s Ratings
Any Google penalty, regardless of whether it is a manual one or an automated algorithm generated one is harmful for a website. It not only negatively impacts the SEO rankings and overall rating of the website, in extreme cases, it can also cause it to become de-indexed entirely.
6. The Recovery Process is Long
The recovery from a link penalty is no walk in the park, nor is it a process that ends fairly quickly with the website resuming maximum functionality within a matter of days, no. A Google’ penalty causes the SEO ranking to take a nosedive and re-establishing them takes time and considerable effort, not to mention the use of more than a few top tools and strategies to recover from the link penalties.
7. Dealing with a Link Penalty
Once you’ve been penalized with a link based penalty, your website needs to review all the link schemes used to separate the high quality ones from thes low quality links in order to seek recovery. The site needs to clear up the link profile by identifying and removing or disavowing the bad links. A good way to deal with low quality links is to do so through the Ahrefs Site Explorer.
8. Avoiding Link Penalties
To avoid receiving link penalties in the future and risk de-indexing your website, one should be considerably more careful with the links used in the content created or uploaded to their site by the users. Moreover, avoid linking your website to known spam engines and refrain from offering compensation for links on your site – or anything that can be construed as paid links by Google.
9. Chances of Rank Redemption
To seek rank redemption and expedite the recovery process from the link penalty, website owners should submit a reconsideration request to Google after eliminating the bad links. If you cannot remove the links on your own, you can also request assistance from Google to disavow them in order to recover your site in a timely manner.
