Watch out for Google penalties: how to recognize them and recover

Paraphrasing a very well-known italian advertising campaign from the late 1980s, we can say “if you know them, you avoid them”: today our blog deals specifically with Google penalties, that is, the various sanctions that the search engine imposes to punish sites that have been guilty of behavior contrary to its quality guidelines, with first reference to the acquisition of backlinks or online spam activity. This penalty results in a dramatic drop in rankings and a loss of organic traffic, not to be confused with the other situations in which a site may run into a decrease in visibility.

What Google penalties are

The starting point is the guidelines for SEOs and webmasters, which have been called Search Essentials for a few years now, in which we read that there are “behaviors and tactics that can lead to lower rankings or complete removal from Google Search results,” which fall under the broader “Spam Rules.”

Wanting to summarize, this means that if (and when) Google discovers that a site has taken actions contrary to its guidelines it intervenes with a specific penalty, which can result in either lower rankings in the results or, in the worst cases, complete removal from the Search Engine Index as an effect – and in turn the penalty can be imposed on the individual page or, in the most severe and compromised situations, the entire site.

The work of detecting violating content and behavior is done both through automated systems and, if necessary, through review by individuals, ending in the execution of a manual action.

Techniques discouraged on the search engine

Google’s penalties spare no one: from small local businesses to large international brands, any website that breaks Google’s quality guidelines can be subject to penalties. It is important to note that Google does not act to punish, but to ensure that search results are as useful and relevant to users as possible.
In fact, the directions for creating a site in line with Google’s advice are really clear and simple, providing a few points to follow and adhere to:

• Design pages for users and not for search engines.
• Avoid misleading users
• Do not use tricks to improve ranking
• Find a way to make the site unique and valuable.

Then there is a detailed set of techniques that are openly discouraged as “illicit,” such as automatically generated content or content copied from other online resources, link schemes, cloaking or doorway pages, which we have already encountered in the in-depth study on black hat SEO and which represent, precisely, manipulative tactics that can result in a penalty from Google.

The types of Google penalties

In its official documentation, Google does not use the term “penalties” to refer to these anti-spam actions, which are instead referred to as manual actions, which (especially in the past) were accompanied by so-called “automatic actions” or “algorithmic acti