Penalties, whether manual or algorithm based, are the result of negligent or manipulative practices. Receiving a penalty can have massive implications for your business, especially if you are reliant on your rankings to drive business.
List of Practices that will result in a penalty
- The use of commercial anchor text. Abusive commercial anchor text is when many different websites hyperlink to your website using the exact same phrase; a phrase that you are attempting to rank highly in its corresponding SERP.
- Displaying content that is present on another website is not something that search engines want to reward. The same goes for repeating content from you own website. If it is not original, or using substantially unique content, plan on the panda update to biting you.
- Having thin content, very little or unsubstantial information surrounding your topic, will evoke the same negative effect on ranking of the panda algorithm updates as those updates are centered around the quality of content on a site.
- High quantity of poor quality links is a sure fire way of gaining a link based penguin penalty.
Major Google Algorithm Updates
Google is continuously updating their algorithm to better display more relevant and better search results for people who depend on their search engine to connect them with the information that they are seeking. In fact, is is reported that there are roughly 500-600 updates to their search algorithms per year. To get a basic understanding of their updates, here are the monikers constructed to help marketers better organize the updates.
Panda Updates
These updates to the organic search algorithm are content based. The updates are centered around determining the quality of information on the site. If the site is of thin or duplicate content, panda updates are the algorithm improvements responsible for the site’s poorer performance in the search engines. Dates.
Penguin
The penguin series of algorithm updates deal specifically with penalizing sites using spammy backlink techniques. This includes the heavy use of commercialized anchor text, high quantities of hyperlinks from lower quality sites, or comment spam to name a few abused techniques of gaining backlinks.
Hummingbird
Hummingbird is all about semantic search.
Pigeon
The Pigeon update refer to the recent Local algorithm changes that have been rolling out since July 2014.
Dates of the “major” Google Algorithm events since 2011.
- 02.23.11 – Panda Farmer
- 04.11.11 – Panda 2.0
- 05.09.11 – Panda 2.1
- 06.21.11 – Panda 2.2
- 07.23.11 – Panda 2.3
- 08.12.11 – Panda 2.4
- 09.28.11 – Panda 2.5
- 10.05.11 – Panda Flux
- 11.03.11 – Freshness Update
- 11.18.11 – Panda 3.1
- 01.18.12 – Panda 3.2
- 02.27.12 – Panda 3.3
- 03.23.12 – Panda 3.4
- 04.19.12 – Panda 3.5
- 04.27.12 – Penguin
- 04.27.12 – Panda 3.6
- 05.25.12 – Penguin 1.1 (#2)
- 10.05.12 – Penguin #3
- 01.22.13 – Panda #24
- 03.14.13 – Panda #25
- 05.22.13 – Penguin 2.0
- 07.19.13 – Panda Recovery
- 10.04.13 – Penguin 2.1
- 05.19.14 – Panda 4.0
- 07.24.14 – Pigeon
- 09.23.14 – Panda 4.1
- 10.17.14 – Penguin 3.0
If you would like to research more about any particular event listed above, visit MOZ’s algorithm change history:
How to recover from a penalty
The short answer is that it depends on your specific situation. The longer answer may not be what you want to hear. If you would like us to take a look at your specific situation, we would be happy to provide you with detailed advice on the steps that you will need to take to escape any penalty that may be placed on your site.