How Can An SEO Expert Help You Identify And Fix Any Penalties Your Website May Have Incurred?

How can an SEO expert help you identify and fix any penalties your website may have incurred? 

Several reasons can cause your website to get hit with a penalty by search engines, but some of the most common are: 

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Backlink Penalty:

If you’re using black hat SEO tactics such as link schemes and spamming to manipulate Google rankings, you may be facing a backlink penalty. Fortunately, this is not a hard fix if you can clean up your backlink profile by disavowing low-quality links and building new ones from reputable websites. 

Thin Content Penalty:

Having thin content on your site is not good for your SEO, but it’s easy to avoid if you know what to look for. There are a number of tools to help you identify and eliminate thin content, including the free Google Search Console URL inspection tool. You can use this to see what content is visible to Web crawlers, and then compare it with the same content on another page on your site (for example, a product description on one page vs. a similar product description on another page). You can also find out if you have duplicate content by entering a keyword into Google in quotation marks and seeing what results come up. Having duplicate content is not necessarily penalized by Google, but it can cause issues because Google may choose to rank one version of your content higher than the other because it provides better information and answers user needs better. 

Duplicate Content Penalty:

This is not a penalty that affects every website, but it’s an issue that needs to be fixed when possible. It can be done by creating unique, quality content for each page on your site, and then using a canonical tag to tell the search engine which is the preferred version of the content. There are a number of tools to check for duplicate content, and one of the most useful is the free tool called Siteliner, which can quickly determine how much duplicate content is on your site (usually less than 15%). 

Hiding Information:

A hidden text penalty occurs when your website is hiding information from both search engines and users. You can usually check for this using the Google Search Console URL inspection tool by inspecting a page and looking at which text is visible to search engines and which is visible to visitors. Examples of this include displaying one type of content to search engines and sending visitors to a different page, or displaying the content to desktop users while directing mobile users to a different version of the same content. 

Algorithm Penalty:

The last type of penalty is when your website loses its ranking due to a change in the Google algorithm. This is typically the result of a change in the way that Google evaluates your site and its competitors to ensure that its search results provide value to its users. This type of penalty can be a difficult to recover from because it may take time for Google to re-evaluate your site and change its ranking.