Google Reserves The Right To Manually Penalise A Website

How Will This Guide Help You?

Guideline Violations That Can Cost You Your Website Ranks
There are many factors that can drop your website ranking instantly. So, you must find them and fix them before you get more damage to your business.A Major Spam Problem
It is a manual notification by Google which highlights on major spam problems. This indicates that Google thinks the content of your website page is spammy entirely which caters no value to your website.
User-Generated Spam Problems
This User-generated spam usually is an issue for large websites with a huge audience at their back. Google flag the website when spammer and black hat exploit it. In this notification, Google asks the webmaster of the website to keep the things in order or else “Somebody gonna get really hurt” (In Russell Peters style).
You need to follow the below decorum to avoid the user-generated spam problems,
- Make sure your forum or discussion software is up to date, especially with regard to any security patches that have been issued.
- Use moderation capabilities for the following:
- Blacklist obviously spammy words or inappropriate words (like pharma-related) and continue to add to your blacklists based on spam that you’re seeing.
- Identify and check content when a single account or IP address accounts for a large volume of posts in a short time.
- Subject posts from new members or new posters to editorial review before they are published, lifting the restriction once they have established themselves as trustworthy.
- Limit users’ ability to link.
- Consider disallowing links entirely or allowing only trusted contributors with spotless track records to link to other sites.
- If you allow links, you may nofollow them to remove some of the incentives to link externally.
- Close comments or discussion on threads after a reasonable period, as they’ll often collect spam after real users have ceased to engage on them.
Hacked Content Spam
A very interesting thing to note is Hacked content spam penalty is almost identical to user-generated spam. Again, Google’s message includes a sample URL, which provides a clue to where to start the investigation and what type of content to look for while cleansing the site of spam.
- The first thing to note is the hacked content spam penalty is applied to only those sites which have issues with their website’s security. They must not be user-driven as well.
- Another thing to note is content spam penalty label your website with a statutory warning for the user. This generally results in immediate loss of organic user traffic from the search engine.

Unnatural Outbound Links
This is like a yellow card from a referee. A warning not to repeat the same. Selling links for manipulating PageRank is an offensive deed. This triggers the manual penalty with a message highlighting the issue.
Filing A Reconsideration Request
When you receive any of the manual penalty given above, you can fix the issue and then request Google to check your website again. If Google finds your website free of error, then they will lift the penalty from your website. This filing is the Reconsideration Request.
Over To You
So, you understand the process how Google can penalise your website. To avoid them, you need to be extra conscious. Let’s have a look at what we discussed in the above post for a quick recap.Points At Glance
- Google reserves the right to apply manual spam actions, better known as penalties, to websites it finds in violation of its Webmaster Guidelines.
- Major spam problem penalty indicates that Google thinks the content of your website page is spammy entirely which caters no value to your website.
- The User-generated spam usually is an issue for large websites with a huge audience at their back. Google flag the website when spammer and black hat exploit a website.
- Hacked content spam penalty is almost same to user-generated spam. The reason behind this identical issue is when spammers abuse a website to inject malicious and/or irrelevant content without the site owner’s consent. Again, Google’s message includes a sample URL, which provides a clue to where to start the investigation. Also what type of content to look for while cleansing the site of spam.
- Obtaining rich snippet is an enticing process. If spotted, a notification highlighting incorrect structured data is the result. This will make your rich snippets disappear in the search results.
- Unnatural outbound links penalty is like a yellow card from a referee. A warning not to repeat the same. Selling links for manipulating PageRank is an offensive deed. This triggers the manual penalty with a message highlighting the issue.
- When you receive any of the manual penalty given above. You can fix the issue and then ask Google to check your website again. If Google finds your website free of error, then they will lift the penalty from your website.