Let’s Talk About Google Penalties

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I’ve had the unfortunate “pleasure” of being hit with Google penalties a few times. I’ve reached some conclusions, that others may not agree with. Google penalties are something unfortunate, but you can recover from both Google penalties, and even complete domain bans (as long as Google adds you back in). The basic idea with Google penalties is: once penalized, you need to fix up whatever got you in the mess in the first place.

Most Google penalties are automated.

At least that’s my opinion. People often think Google gets involved and hand penalized websites (undoubtedly they do in extraordinary cases), but their company philosophy (which has made them more successful than anyone else), is to automate everything. Based on what I’ve seen, a penalty is initiated automatically, and can be removed automatically, provided you make changes.

Bans are probably automated also, with some “handjobs” done here and there.

The ban is a bit tougher to get back into. You’ll nee to file a Google index re-inclusion request and hope someone turns your domain back on. A human apparently does get involved in this process, and you need to make sure you cleaned up the “spam” that got you in this mess in the first place.

The worst class of Google penalties I’ve seen appear to be much more insidious. They just quietly and calmly affect your ability to rank. The only way to get out of them is to keep on tweaking the things that you feel might be causing the issues. Keep on tweaking until the situation improves.

Hopefully you’ll never need to know the information in this brief overview of Google penalties and bans, but you never know

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