Search Engine Penalty

All website owners must follow a specific set of rules if they want to play in the internet league. As in any game, a rule breaker must be punished according to the decision of the referee, websites that violate the established rules are penalized by search engines.

What is Search Engine Penalty?

A search engine penalty is an action taken against a website which failed the algorithm inspection. Such algorithms or search engine filters are constantly evolving and exist in order to provide the most relevant search results.

As a result, sites that do not comply with the search engine’s rules are removed from the page listing, which means they become invisible to Internet users. It is very difficult for sites that have lost the favor of search engines to restore their previous rankings, so it is very important to understand why filters are applied, what filters exist and how to avoid them.

Types of Search Engine Filters

Search engines can apply various filters like:

• Ban – removal of the site from the search results and indexing.
• Pessimization of the site – reducing the relevance of the web resource to the request.
• Removing individual pages from search results.
• Disregard of certain factors affecting the ranking.

The measures are applied to unscrupulous SEO-optimizers who use dishonest ways to promote resources. Search engines try not to rank high or exclude such sites.

Reasons for Search Engine Penalties

The main reasons for getting under the SE filters are:

• a large number of internal duplicates;
• use of low-quality content;
• frequent unavailability of a web resource;
• keyword spam;
• significant increase in link weight;
• an excess of advertising on the site;
• an abundance of outbound links;
• cheating behavioral factors;
• unnatural link weight (it is extremely important to place exclusively natural links on the site).

Google Filters

Important search filters you need to know:

“Panda” sanctions are imposed for poor internal optimization. The reasons are: filling with low-quality content, high bounce rate, excess advertising.
“Penguin” is the exclusion of a resource from the search results that occurs for unfair building of the link weight. Sanctions are imposed in case of poor quality or excess of non-thematic external links.
“Hummingbird” is created for the convenience of users in order to better understand their needs.
“Sandboxing” is applied to new sites, and does not allow them to occupy high positions for key queries.
Google Supplemental Results is simply called Snot by experts. The search engine finds pages with the same text on the resource and transfers them to an additional search.
The filter is applied for a large number of broken links.
Baby Panda is used for many advertisements at the top of the page.

How to Determine that a Site is Penalized

The simplest and most obvious factor indicating that a site is being penalized by Google or another search engine is its lack of ranking for key queries. Online monitoring systems used in website promotion allow you to almost immediately learn about pessimization or banning of the site and its individual pages, since they reflect the site’s position in the ranking for all key queries in real time.

In the absence of a monitoring system, it is necessary to monitor the volume of traffic and the number of visits to the site. In case of a sharp decrease in traffic, you need to check the presence of the site in all promoted search engines.

November 10, 2021