Google is notorious for its penalty regime, and when it comes to penalties due to outbound links, they are cruel. If your website carries some irrelevant or spammy links pointing towards other websites, you could be under a Google penalty. There is nothing more fulfilling for marketers than having a website and running it on top of search engine ranking pages. But stooping to the black hat methods to achieve that accomplishment is a real turn-off. There are cons out there don’t think a minute before jumping to spam to boost their site rankings.
Using unethical means to taste success offends Google and thus invites stricter Google penalties. Once your site gets penalized, it loses its ranking and the overall organic traffic it gained in the past. Traffic and ranking keep falling unless you fix the problem that invites these penalties.
What is an outbound link penalty?
An outbound link penalty occurs if Google detects bunch of illegitimate links to spam pages on your website. This kind of possible link spamming signals Google that your website is a source of spam and should be penalized with an Outbound Link Penalty. The penalty to be levied can be both sitewide or page-wise. In a sitewide penalty, all pages of a website will be penalized, while in page-wise penalty all the pages containing spam links are punished.
Spammy Back Links that Cause Link Penalties
Most of the unethical methods involved in the SEO are associated with Link building. Google favors the links acquired through link-building best practices. Inbound and outbound links obtained through ethical link building help websites receive an ample amount of traffic.
The article brings forth some of the Google Link Penalties, many reasons why they occurred, and the way they could get fixed.
1. Excessive Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal link building has been quite a norm for webmasters over the years. Reciprocal linking is a sort of link-building strategy where two website owners exchange links for their mutual ranking benefits. Once a powerful strategy, reciprocal linking is now an unethical activity that could lead to severe Google penalties.
2. Low Quality Links
Link penalties are all about promoting ethical link-building practices. It’s to encourage webmasters to earn the links the right way. Quality links will always bring better results in terms of ranking and traffic. While running behind the links, don’t compromise the quality and avoid securing links from anonymous or dubious sources.
Rely only on the backlinks coming from reputable sites. It helps you build brand value both for their audience as well as yours. Here are some common link types that can create problems:
3. Paid Links:
As the name implies, paid links are those links that you buy/sell in exchange for a few dollars. Buying links, in the first place, is a stark violation of the Google link policy. Yet you can douse the fire by tagging that link ‘no-follow’ to skip Google’s fury.
4. Directory Links
You must have seen web directories that organize websites in hierarchical order. They are almost dead and obsolete. Getting links from these spam directories may cause trouble.
5. Links from Low-Quality Article Directories:
The era of writing tons of useless articles and submitting them in article directories is almost gone. These sites allowed users to include a link back to their site. Since such articles mostly go unread, they don’t act as a true endorsement for your site, and therefore, it’s futile to use this practice anymore.
6. International Links
It’s of no use to get backlinks from international websites where you don’t operate. Few links could be fine, but, if you get lots of these, that could create problems. Links obtained from coupon codes, poor-quality widgets, affiliates, comment Spam and link exchanges could spell trouble.
7. Links from Private Blog Network
For apt bloggers, the private blog network is a known term. It’s a network of blogs/websites that are owned by a single owner or a team of spammers to link to each other on this network. Post-penguin update back in 2011, the PBNs turned out to be a serious risk for webmasters. Now, it’s a futile and unethical practice to join a private blog network. Not only it can lead to Google penalties, but also causes a lot of damage to your site’s online reputation.
Types of Google Link Penalties
Manual Link Spam
Usually, automated Google bots are the real watchdogs for faulty and spam link-building practices. However, Google also has a full-fledged team of webspam watchdogs who review sites for its link profiles and impose manual penalties. Like algorithmic penalties, manual penalties are equally disastrous to the site rankings. Google might put you under manual penalty if it received a complaint about your spammy link profile from either your close competitors or from a Googlebot itself.
Algorithm link spam penalty
An algorithm link spam penalty happens when an action is taken by Google’s automated algorithm. Under Google’s Penguin Algorithm, these penalties are imposed on offenders who flout Google’s link algorithm and keep buying links or obtaining them through personal blog networks or link networks. The moment a site gets an algorithmic link penalty, its organic traffic tumbles like a house of cards.
Unnatural outbound link penalty
If you accept guest posts on your website, double-check the available content before it goes live. This content might have malicious links pointing back to the guests’ sites and can negatively affect the overall link profile of your site. It’s recommended to check the submitted piece to see if the links are coming from low-quality websites or spammy ones. It’s a suggestion not to allow ‘Nofollow’ links in user-generated content and to perform a manual review of the content before final approval.
Malpractices that Cause Google Penalties(Strictly Avoid)
If you check your website ranking every day and find that it lies nowhere on top, then maybe you are the victim of the Google penalty. Perhaps you have already received various notices of SEO malpractices from Google, but all unnoticed. The penalty can be imposed on any website at any time, irrespective of domains or verticals. Although it's very much possible to repair the damage that occurred due to the penalty, you should have a proactive approach to prevent the Google penalty.
Link Manipulation
Cheap spam links won't be a great deal indeed. Low-value backlinks pointing at your website may trigger the chances of a Google penalty. There is no problem in buying links from outside sources but make sure that these links are mentioned as sponsor links. Buying bulk links for the sole purpose of improving the Page Rank is a straight violation of the Google SEO Standards. This giant search engine also hates hidden links in the CSS and JavaScript files.
Over On-site Optimization
Once you finish the optimization of every page of your site using all possible techniques, it's time to come to a halt. SEO services experts always recommend to keep your On-page SEO. Over-optimization not only hurts the overall user experience but also leads to severe Google penalties.
Content Spam
Duplicate or scraped contents pose a risk of getting filtered from SERPs. Thus, it is a good practice to replace or remove any instance of duplicate or scraped content on your website with relevant and fresh articles. It ensures the highest level of natural SERP visibility for your website. Not only Google but other search engines have also made it clear that they want to give top priority to high-quality content in the search results and Top 10 rankings. In the future, Google may cover spun articles under the penalty areas.
Keyword Stuffing
It certainly doesn't hurt to include a few keywords in your website’s meta tags. Stuffing however turns things sour. Thus avoid stuffing keywords unnecessarily in the website. Although H1 tags offer some modest ranking benefits for the SEO process but excessive use of this also attracts stringent penalties from Google.
Among other kinds of stuff that may be the reason for Google's penalty, manipulative content, and Doorway pages are the important ones. Hidden content is also called manipulative content. It is posted on the website using the same text color that the website background has. Search engine crawlers take no time to detect the practice of wrong Guaranteed SEO Services.
How You Can Fix Google Penalties?
Google sends webmasters a warning via the Google search console if it finds their website containing unnatural outbound links. The warning indicates that you are using linking techniques that are against Google guidelines. Once you receive the violation, you need to identify which links are unnatural. Then you should start removing those links or applying a rel= “nofollow” tag. Once you finish fixing issues related to unnatural links, you should create and submit a reconsideration request for your site.
Another type of Outbound Link Penalty warning comes when a webmaster receives a message in Google webmaster Tools announcing unnatural links pointing to their site. With this kind of warning, Google also provides a few bad links as examples that point to your website. This is also a serious violation of Google guidelines that invite penalties. In technical terms, this is also called 'partial matches'.
To fix the unnatural links pointing to your website, download a list of your links using Webmasters Tools. Check the links to find those suspicious or in violation of guidelines. After identifying links that are harming rankings, you could contact the webmaster of that domain. Request them to remove the link or add a rel= “nofollow” tag. If you have made serious efforts to remove the unnatural links, you might have the manual action removed.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.