There are many reasons why and how your website can get penalized by Google. We’ve gathered some information and compiled a quick list on our website. If you are new to SEO, a business owner who implement SEO, or need some refreshing, you will find the information given in this article very useful. If you’re doing any of the things clearly stated here, then you risk being at the wrong end of a Google penalty.  Here are the usual four reasons why websites get penalized by Google

Link Farms and Link Wheels

Link farms refer to a series of websites created explicitly to generate backlinks to specific sites. These websites are generally developed on free platforms such as Blogger and WordPress, and cost next to nothing to the developer. Their only purpose is to artificially inflate the search results for the main website using these backlinks.

A link wheel is somewhat similar. Here you would be linking a money article or an article to your main website to articles on other websites that belong to you. These articles are then linked from other articles, which are also linked to the main money site. Most people would say both link farms and link wheels are outdated but many still use them and in various ways.

Homepage Linking

You should be very careful when having links to your homepage as a part of your backlinking strategy. This has to be done naturally, otherwise a lot could go wrong. But please don’t be under the illusion that linking to your homepage would push up the ranking of your site. It doesn’t work that way. Google ranks web pages, not websites. So you should try to get quality content within your website linked, not the homepage itself.

Now, if you have nothing but a homepage or a landing page on your website, you are doing something wrong. You should have a blog on your website and create great content as well. As you attract more people to your website through the blog, that will do wonders for your website. Sometime people may even link back to your content pages from their blogs therefore receiving a natural backlink.

Acquiring Backlinks from Penalized Websites

The worst thing you can do is to get backlinks to your website from other websites that have been penalized by Google or send to the Google sandbox. There is a reason these websites get penalized and getting links from them could hurt you as well. You wouldn’t want to be associated with sites that are not trusted by Google. So get a full list of all the incoming links to your site and run a check on them, to find out if they can be trusted or not.

Purchasing Links from Vendors

NEVER buy links from vendors. That is the worst violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and that is the principal reason for websites to get penalized.  All links that come to your site should come naturally. Your backlinking strategy should be above board and well within Google’s very specific guidelines.

There is nothing worse than purchasing links. That would put you in a league of black hat SEOs, who are blacklisted by Google. You will never be able to make any money on the internet after you are caught doing that.

With the Penguin and Panda updates, Google has become very good at identifying people who buy backlinks or resort to other black hat SEO strategies. A lot has changed in search engine optimization over the last few years. Make sure that you stay abreast of the latest trends and developments and keep away from anything that can be considered not passing Google guidelines.

Thanks for reading our article about the four things that trigger a Google penalty. Many marketers make a living with these strategies and we just want them to be aware for their businesses in the long run. Again, thanks again for checking our article out, follow the guidelines and your will be fine.