Google Penalty Checklist: Rank Drop Troubleshooting Guide - Understanding algorithm-based and manually-driven Google penalties
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In no way should the statements in this article be considered to be affiliated with Google or official statements from them. But as far as I know, there are two types of obvious penalties: algorithm-based and manually-driven. Before we can start troubleshooting, you must understand these types of penalties. Algorithm-based penalties result from your website being “filtered” by Google's algorithm due to some linking and onsite issues. Different types of filtering exist; the most common involve the duplicate content filters.
Algorithm-based penalties could result from your site sending a poor relevance signal to search engines. It means that your site is not telling them that a certain page on your site is relevant to a certain query.
Other algorithm-based penalties involve minor infractions in the areas of hidden text, cloaked text, nearly hidden text and hidden links, especially on your important pages. Details of these will be included later.
Since Google prefers algorithm-based solutions to combat spam, it is obvious that most website problems are caused by algorithm issues.
The other type of penalty is manually driven. For some types of penalties that are too serious, Google will take action manually. Google gives this type of penalty when it spots a serious violation of its quality guidelines. An actual human working at Google will take a personal look at your site and will send you a mail that the site's behavior is against the search engine's quality guidelines. Failure to correct manually-driven penalties can result in a site being banned from Google.
Next: The Basic Checklist >>
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