How to diagnose if you have a Google or Bing SEO penalty and how to fix it.

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SEO Penalties
Schmitz Marketing

2. Schmitz Marketing
schmitzmarketing.com
Thomas Schmitz
Founder & CEO
@TomSchmitz
Organic Inbound Marketing
SEO, Social Media, Content Strategies &
More

3. S
What are SEO
Penalties?

4. Webspam
Penalizes infractions against webmaster
guidelines or search engines’ terms of service.
Webspam is determined by intent and extent.
Search engines deal with most things they do not
like automatically and without assessing penalties.
Penalties are for egregious offenders.

5. Penalties
Usually it is not a penalty!

6. Types of Penalties
S Manual Actions
S Algorithmic
S Google Panda
S Google Penguin
S Others
S Burned Domains

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Manual Actions

8. Manual Actions
A Google or Bing quality assurance team
member manually reviews the site.
Finds egregious infractions of the webmaster
guidelines or terms of service.
Applies a manual penalty.
Sends a message via webmaster tools.

9. Manual Actions
Causes
S Unnatural links to your site
S Unnatural links from your
site
S Hacked site
S Thin content with little or no
added value
S Pure spam
S User-generated spam
S Cloaking and/or sneaky
redirects
S Hidden text and/or keyword
stuffing
S Spammy freehosts
S Spammy structured markup
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824

10. Manual Actions
There are various types of punishments
S Some or all pages removed from the
index
S Some or all rankings reduces # spots
(i.e. down 5, 10, 50, etc. places)

11. Manual Actions
Remove all offending content and/or
links.
Request a review via webmaster tools.
List any inbound links you are unable to get removed in
Google’s and Bing’s disavow tools located in
webmaster tools.

12. Manual Actions
Manual penalties have expiration dates.
The worse the infraction, the longer the
penalty.
Infractions that go unfixed will be
penalized again.

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Algorithmic Penalties

14. Algorithmic Penalties
Search engine program identifies infractions.
Automatically applies punishment.
May or may not send a message via
webmaster tools.

15. Panda
Google Panda Penalty
S Penalizes low quality content
S It is built into the ranking algorithm and updates are
continuous
S Drops site-wide traffic 80%

16. Panda
Recovering From a Google Panda Penalty
S Remove or rewrite all low quality content
S Rewritten content must bring additional value to the
web
S When fixed and the site is re-crawled, the penalty
will go away

17. Panda
Recovering From a Google Panda Penalty
S Do not expect all rankings and traffic to return after
recovering from Panda
S If you remove or block content it cannot rank
S Rewritten content will not necessarily rank as well as
the pre-penalty content

18. Penguin
Google Penguin Penalty
S Penalizes aggressive unnatural link patterns
S It is separate from the ranking algorithm. Updates
are manual
S Drops site-wide traffic 80%
S You may or may not receive a webmaster tools
message

19. Penguin
Recovering From Google Penguin Penalty
S Identify low quality and unnatural inbound links
S Request websites to remove the bad links
S Disavow remaining bad links in webmaster tools
S File a re-inclusion request

20. Penguin
Recovering From Google Penguin Penalty
S Recovery will not happen till the next update
S Updates are months apart. The last one was
October 5, 2013
S Do not expect rankings to fully recover because the
authority from removed and disavowed links will be
gone

21. Other Algorithmic Penalties
Other Algorithmic Penalties
S May be difficult to diagnose
S No webmaster tools notification
S There is no automatic expiration
S You cannot file a re-inclusion request

22. Other Algorithmic Penalties
S Made for AdSense
S Aggressive Ads
S Aggressive Footer Links
S Doorway Pages
S Duplicate Content
S Keyword Stuffing
S Overused Anchor Text
S Scraped Content
S Slow Page Loads
S Spammy Keywords
Causes
And More…

23. Other Algorithmic Penalties
Google and Bing do not share many causes of
penalties. They consider this part of their secret
sauce…
…and they do not want to help real web-
spammers.

24. Burned Domains
When a website goes too far, search engines may
ban it from their search results for all time.
When a site search on a domain (site:domain.com)
show zero results and there is no message in
webmaster tools, the site may be burned.
The only thing to do with a burned domain is
discard it and start with a fresh domain.

25. Schmitz Marketing
schmitzmarketing.com
Thomas Schmitz
Founder & CEO
@TomSchmitz
Organic Inbound Marketing
SEO, Social Media, Content Strategies &
More