Google Penalty Checklist: Rank Drop Troubleshooting Guide
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Is your website not appearing in Google, and you're not sure why? It is possible that your site has been penalized for not following Google's webmaster guidelines. This article will walk you through troubleshooting your website to help you turn up some of the most common issues, and correct them so you can achieve the search engine ranking you deserve.
Background
Ranking is the most important objective in any search engine optimization activity. A high ranking equates to a high amount of traffic that usually increases revenue to any commercial website. A high ranking makes a site look glamorous and popular. Other sites will want to be associated with it (i.e. link building), because such an association can increase their traffic. This will speed up everyone's marketing efforts, simply because that one site achieved that status.
The problem with websites nowadays is that they often practice techniques that are not good for search engine optimization and sometimes even result in a search engine penalty. A search engine penalty is a situation wherein rankings will not improve or even be decreased despite search engine optimization efforts, such as gaining links and improving onsite factors.
A lot of SEO companies fail to conform their practices to the Google webmaster guidelines. As a result, they spend time troubleshooting and sorting out issues which could be very simple to resolve. In the worst cases, these companies are so greedy that they ask for their client's money in return for investigations which they never carry out. We have heard about a lot of issues between clients and their SEO firms.
The objective of this article is to come up with a standard troubleshooting guide that follows Google's webmaster quality and technical guidelines. Other industry- accepted Google SEO ranking and penalty factors will also be considered. This troubleshooting guide can be applied by any webmaster, even one without an SEO background.
By mastering this troubleshooting guide and completely understanding how to implement the solution, the webmaster or a site owner may not even need to hire an SEO firm to sort out Google ranking penalty issues.
A highly important requirement fortroubleshooting is to add and verify your website in your Google webmaster tools account.You can find more important information here:http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Important note: It may take at most a few days to a week for Google webmaster tools to return data after the site is verified with your webmaster tools account.
Next: Understanding algorithm-based and manually-driven Google penalties >>
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