Google Penalised My Site, Why?
There are several reasons why you have been penalised by Google. There are two types of penalties; algorithmic penalties and manually applied penalties.
Algorithmic penalties aren’t actually penalties applied to your website, they are just a part of the algorithm assessment process whereby one or more elements of either your on-page or off-page SEO fails to pass one or more of Google’s quality filters.
Failing an algorithm check may well feel like you are being penalised, but you are not.
How To Check For Google Penalties
The first step, if you don’t rank very well is to check in Google webmaster tools that your website hasn’t been actively penalised for an ranking infringements. There is an Issues and penalties section in your webmaster tools account.
If a manually applied penalty has been applied, you will see details and will need to address whatever issues have been highlighted. Additionally, it is worth reviewing any messages in your WMT account to make sure that there are no warnings that you need to look into.
If there are no manual penalties listed in your Google account then congratulations….. it means that your site is just a bit rubbish & Google doesn’t value your content very highly.
The good news from here is that you can now begin to address those issues one by one until your site ranks well.
Probably the most common manual penalty that Google apply is related to automated link networks.
It is quite usual that when Google identify a link network and penalise it, they will manually penalise all the sites that are linked to from the network. On the upside at least they inform you as such so you can take steps to fix matters.
How To Make Google Love Your Website
There are two main areas to improve. Your actual content quality and the quality of backlinks pointing to your pages.
On-Page Quality
Because Google measure many different elements related to your website, you need to look at more than just a quick rewrite.
Bounce rate and time on page are important metrics used to decide if real people like your content or not. If you have a high bounce rate then it is reasonable for Google to conclude that your content isn’t very relevant for the search terms that sent you traffic.
There are a few simple steps that you can take to improve your bounce rate. Removing your contact details from all pages and replacing them with a ‘Contact Us’ link to click through to your contact page will force users to visit two pages of your site, turning their visit from being a failure into a success in Google eyes.
Additionally, on your home page use teaser snippets linking through to a full page of content for each topic. This will again increase your click through rate, increasing your websites performance stats dramatically.
Off-Page SEO Quality
Backlinks are very important for good search engine rankings. They are also a very easy tool with which to upset Google’s ranking filters. Over optimization (trying too hard) is the most common offence with off-page strategy.
The secret is to do less exact match linking than you want to, keeping targeted links to a minority, and focusing instead on links that use your website address, company name or variations of them.