To put it short, a SEO Penalty or Search Engine Penalty such as Google Penalty or Bing Penalty is basically a Search Engine identifying your website violating their Web guidelines. This could be due to two main reasons, the utilisation of manipulative methods to increase your website’s search engine rankings or your website has a poor user experience when people visit your website.

Our SEO Penalty Recovery service identifies and gets rid of any toxic or harmful links that’s pointing to your website. If you’re seeing a drop in traffic or your rankings for specific keywords related to your website have been completely removed, you may be ‘penalised’ by search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.

To expand on what we mentioned above, a website can be penalised due to two reasons – applying ‘blackhat’ marketing tactics or offering a poor web experience to your website visitors. Your website could be affected by two ways, Manual penalisation action or algorithm penalty.

A Manual penalty is when someone who works at either Google or Bing manually reviews your website and its link portfolio and deem your website as violating their Web guidelines. A algorithm penalty is when your website triggered a filter or action that a search engine’s algorithm was programmed to identify and follow common footprints to deem the website as violating a specific web guideline.

To determine if you’ve been penalised by Google or Bing, you can check if:

1. 1. You received an email or Webmaster tool notification that there’s been unusual activity / web spam from your website (usually manual penalty);
   2. There’s a sudden drop in traffic / enquiries from a specific time / date which closely aligns with Google’s algothirm update;
   3. Sudden drop in search engine rankings from 10 to 100 in search engine ranking position;
   4. You can’t see your website on any search engine results. Try search site:yourwebsite.com.au and see if there’s anything that shows or certain pages that don’t come up in the search results.

According to Google, the search engine updates its algorithms (positive / negative) over 500 times a year! Imagine not knowing if one day that you may violate rules and be penalised for it!

That is why we identify the major updates that could potentially affect our clients and update and manage the changes to avoid any penalisation.

Here are the tactics that may potentially cause you to be violating Google or Bing’s web guidelines:

1. Link-building schemes;
2. Keyword stuffing/hiding text links;
3. Copying existing content;
4. Abusing META tags such as Schema;
5. Minimal to no content on a webpage;
6. Spamming on the web;
7. Heavy affiliate-based content.