Few SEO nightmares can compare to the horror of waking up to a sudden drop in rankings — and worse, traffic — and discovering that your site has been penalized by Google.
A variety of factors impact rankings both positively and negatively — schema/rich snippets, links, and mobile user experience — to name just a few. Determining the precise cause of a sudden change can take some investigation, but when a site receives an actual penalty by Google, the webmaster is notified via Google Search Console.
Despite these notifications, Google penalty notices are the subjects of some of the most frequently asked questions at both our “Meet the SEOs” and “Ask the Search Engines” Q&A sessions at our search marketing conferences. What does this penalty mean? How do we respond? What actions do we need to take to get the penalty reversed? To answer those questions and provide a resource for readers to reference on an ongoing basis, we’ve partnered with Search Engine Land contributor and former Google Search Quality engineer, Kaspar Szymanski of SearchBrothers.com.
Kaspar has put together the ultimate guide to Google penalties. This comprehensive Google penalty guide addresses:
- On-page guideline violations & related notifications
- Off-page guideline violations & related notifications
- Reconsideration requests & related notifications
We’ll be featuring specific sections of the guide over the next few weeks, and will have a wrap-up FAQ where Kaspar will address some of the outstanding questions readers have after digesting the guide. We encourage you to submit your penalty questions for Kaspar here.
We’ll be keeping this guide current and updated, and encourage you to submit feedback and suggestions you may have.
Kaspar will also be presenting a deep dive into penalties next week in New York at our SMX East conference. Be sure to catch his “All Google Manual Penalties Explained” presentation!
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