Are You Suffering From a Google Penalty?

This month has been a tumultuous one for many website owners. I’ve been reading many reports pertaining to the most recent Google algorithm changes and how some pages have been affected for the worse. Some sites have likely been penalized in one way or another for not adhering to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. These are very simple, easy to follow directives, but some people either decide that these rules don’t matter, or don’t do enough research to understand them. 

I always say that In most cases, as long as you are doing everything you’re supposed to be doing, you shouldn’t need to worry too much about these regular fluctuations. When Google makes a change to their PageRank algorithm, site owners need to learn how to respond potentially adjust your SEO efforts to mitigate the loss of valuable ranking positions.

Whether people understand them or not, it’s important to follow the rules and dial in your own SEO with as much “white hat” SEO as you possibly can and avoid anything even remotely “spammy” or manipulative to game or influence search results with nefarious intentions. Even if you get away with it for a period of time, eventually you get discovered, and losing access to Google’s search results does not sound fun. They serve over 86% of all search traffic, so missing out on such a large “piece of the pie” can and will be devastating to any small business.

When you consider that it’s really not that hard to create your own content, or pay a few bucks for an SEO to take a look at your site – it’s hard to see why anyone would try to game the system.

Even if you are truly on hard times and cannot afford to hire someone long-term, it seems like a real waste of time to try to trick the search engines when help is just an email away!