Google is always attentive towards its servings to its users with quality search results. And when we talk about SEO, Google has implemented a certain set of rules and regulations. Any violation of rules or Search Engine Spams (spamdexing) and can make you pay back for your wrong deeds. Google penalizes the websites which are engaged in practices against the guidelines laid by Google.

An online business needs Search Engines to survive. And to attract that traffic, you need to be in the top rankings of Google. High Ranking in Google is not at all easy to achieve and due to this, many Marketers and SEOs opt for unnatural links. And due to these practices, by the violation of Google’s guidelines, many websites are getting penalized

Google penalties lead to a drop in rankings of websites and that cause a major decrease in traffic for the site or even permanently banning or blacklisting of the website. This effect of Google penalties can be measured by Google Webmaster Tools as well as website owner can analyze the timings of their traffic drop with the timings known of Google updates. If you have tried to manipulate Google, sooner or later, google will punish you for your black hat techniques. These penalties can either be algorithmic (automated action without any manual interference) or manual (users are notified from about wrong practices).

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Google takes more than 400,000 manual actions every month against the websites which are involved in violation of rules and only 5% of this figure (20,000 webmasters) submit a reconsideration request and try to recover their websites. Google penalizes websites by removing them partially or completely from Google index.

If you notice a sudden traffic drop, there is a probability of Google penalty. There are two types of penalty applied by Google.

  1. Manual actions- These actions are initiated by Google’s spam team. To check whether your website is penalized by these spam team, you need to go to Google’s Webmaster Tools and check you have any notification relevant to spamdexing or any other manipulation of rules. If you don’t have any notification of such type, then you need to dig more to find out the reason for the sudden drop in your website’s traffic.
  2. Algorithmic penalty- Panda and Penguin are the 2 algorithmic updates set by Google. To find out what type of algorithmic penalty web site is facing, webmaster has to correlate the time of website traffic with the date of new algorithmic updates.

To stay updated with Google’s algorithm, one can follow Matt Cutts (head of web spam team at Google) on twitter, Google Webmaster on YouTube and keep a regular check on MozCast and Algoroo.

The list well-known websites that were penalized by Google includes JC Penny, EBay, BMW, Expedia, Interflora, Google Chrome, Overstock, Rap Genius, and Beatthatquote.com and so on.

Daily Google and other search engines have been updating their complicated algorithms to make sure to catch all the black hat techniques used by the promoters.

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