What Is a Google Penalty and How Do I Avoid It?
There are two forms of “penalties” that SEOs think about when they refer to a Google penalty. One is a manual action penalty, which is site-specific and intentionally applied. The other type of “penalty” is really more of a consequence. It happens when a site loses rankings as a result of the Google algorithm. Google reports that manual actions occur less and less frequently as the algorithm gets smarter. For example, Google applied 2.9 million manual actions in 2020, which is far fewer than the 4 million sent in 2018 and the 6 million in 2017. Since algorithmic hits account for ranking drops more and more, calling them search engine penalties sounds fair to me. Below I’ll give more details about both types and why penalties exist. Feel free to jump ahead: How webmaster guidelines and penalties work What is a Google manual action penalty What is an algorithmic penalty How Webmaster Guidelines and Penalties Work Google’s “ Webmaster Guidelines ” help website publishers understand wh
