Google Penalty Recovery

Every time Google releases another update to its algorithms, its rules for SEO change. There are all kinds of Google SEO penalties that can affect your site’s traffic and overall search ranking, such as:

• Poor website speed: Google wants to see a mobile speed score of 50/100 or more as it’s starting to penalise sites that are under 50. If your page is slow to load, you’re likely to lose customers and conversions as this makes for a poor user experience. To prevent this from happening, we provide speed optimisation services.
• Poor navigation: How easy is it to navigate your site? Are there outdated links that no longer work, redirecting your customers to a 404 Error? If you haven’t kept your links updated, this can affect your site’s ranking. Google assesses content to make sure it’s timely and up-to-date. Also, check your URLs. Longwinded, messy URLs tend to get penalised, too. It’s important to make sure they’re relatively short, to the point, and make use of relevant keywords.
• Not mobile-friendly: Most people search the web from their phone, so you’ll need to make sure your site is mobile-friendly for a range of devices, including smartphones and tablets. If it’s slow to load on these devices, you’ll lose potential customers quickly.
• Images: Have you optimised your images for the web? Large, high-res images are slow to load and not particularly search-friendly, therefore slowing down your website and affecting your Core Web Vitals. This also extends to features like sliders and banners. Images will need to be compressed to allow for a seamless user experience.
• Keyword stuffing: This one’s as old as time itself, and comes from the old-school SEO belief that more is, well, more. But it’s like with anything – if someone mentions something over and over again you’re bound to get sick of it, and Google knows this. It therefore penalises websites that cram multiple keywords into a short amount of space, making sure that users enjoy easier access to high-quality content that’s useful and relevant.
• Duplicate content: Google assesses your content for overall quality, originality, truthfulness and good grammar. It prioritises unique content that’s been tailored to the user, and will be quick to penalise text that has been copied and pasted across your site (this is called cannibalisation). In Google’s eyes, this is just lazy. It’s about providing users with unique, high-quality content that’s obviously had some thought and care put into it. Your customers will appreciate this, and so does Google.
• A.I. generated content: Content written by artificial intelligence is more prevalent across the internet than people think (we know, space-aged, right?) While it might save time, A.I. content comes at the cost of quality, usability and the human touch. It seems robotic and unnatural, and readers can typically spot it from a mile away. Google has recently updated its algorithms to outlaw A.I. written content that’s been automatically generated by GPT-3 writing tools, saying it considers this on par with spam.
• Shady link building: Some sites use underhanded tactics to increase their online ranking. This might involve paying for links on other websites to create backlinks, or hiding internal links through your website (specifically to target crawlers). Search engines frown upon these unethical techniques.

Here at Kia Ora, our team of Google penalty checkers will re-index your site and bring your content back up to scratch. We’ll also keep track of key SEO KPIs to help manage your progress while increasing your revenue.