In order to improve the Google rankings of your website, you should consider a few points that can help your website to be viewed by Google as thematically relevant and valuable for the user.
But conversely, there are also some points that you should absolutely avoid in order not to be viewed by Google as “black hat SEO” – as someone who “over-optimizes” their site and wants to provoke placement improvements with illegitimate methods.
Google now recognizes forcibly optimized websites very well. Below are some points that should definitely be omitted for a legitimate SEO optimization:
There are also cases that you may have seen so often on your own website that they do not appear reprehensible to you, but which are still very critical for Google, for example:
Of course, there are other points that can bring you closer to the risk of punishment. We would therefore recommend that you do not simply work through these points or see them too rigidly, but simply ask yourself honestly:
“Am I being completely honest and adding value for my visitors, or am I trying to cheat in some way?”
If you can honestly answer the first part of this question with “Yes” and the second part honestly with “No”, you have nothing to fear. In all other cases you know what to do: Correct your page and undo any illegitimate steps you may have taken.
After a few months you can expect your website to pick up speed again. But there are two different cases of penalty that we have yet to talk about.
In order to clarify the question of whether and when you will be released from a penalty, it is important to distinguish between two types of penalty:
In the event of an algorithmic penalty, only Google’s algorithms ensure that your page is penalized and removed from Google results for certain keywords. These algorithms are constantly being developed. So if you have corrected all potentially illegitimate points on your site and you comply with the guidelines with your domain again, your penalty will be automatically corrected as it originally took effect. This can of course take a moment, and even afterwards your website will have to recover for many months and “clean up” the field.
In the case of a manual measure, your website was not penalized by the algorithm, but by the Google Search Quality Team – be it through the notification of one or more visitors, or through anomalies that the team itself brought to your site (for example in the case of using a trademark that doesn’t belong to you).
In this case you will receive a message in the “Manual measures” tab in the “Improvements” tab in Google Webmaster Tools. You then not only have to correct your website, but also submit a review request via the Google Webmaster Tools. This request must explain what has changed on your site and why you think it is in line with the guidelines again.
The following video can help you understand when and how Google penalties are lifted.
To avoid penalties from Google, be honest with yourself and your visitors and follow a very simple guideline: never cheat. If you have, intentionally or unintentionally, taken steps that Google does not consider fair, you must clarify whether you have received a message in the Webmaster Tools under “Manual measures”. If so, read through the relevant message, correct your page and request a new review.
If your rankings have plummeted without you having received any manual action: go through the list above and consider what you could have done with it. Then correct your website and just be patient. Further ranking checks will help you to see whether your rankings are slowly increasing again.