Google is the most popular search
engine in the world that helps you to find other websites on the internet. Google
wants to provide the most accurate search results to its users. The websites or
webpages that show at the top of a search result are most important and
relevant to a searched query. A website’s importance is measured by PageRank which
is Google’s system for ranking website and it is measured on a scale of 1-10 (1
is the lowest and 10 is the highest). In search results a website that has the highest PageRank will show up above the
website that has a lower PageRank. There are many benefits of high PageRank, it brings more traffic to your website, it helps you to increase
revenue, and it also helps you in marketing your products.
Higher Google PageRank has always
been an attraction to webmasters, internet marketers, and bloggers and they try
to achieve it by different techniques. The use of different techniques to get a
higher PageRank is called Search Engine Optimization. There are Google’s
Webmaster Guidelines to optimize a website safely, But to get a higher PageRank
overnight webmasters and internet marketers go against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
that, sometimes, cause a Google Penalty. Google is always determined to improve
its search features for the users and for this purpose Google has introduced
different types of penalties for the websites which violate Google’s quality
guidelines.
Manual Penalties:
Google gives out manual penalties
to those sites that have spammy content or unnatural links. There are millions
of websites on the internet and it sounds strange that Google would manually review
all of them. Actually, Google only reviews manually those sites which are listed
in the top spots on the search engine results. Manual penalties are very dangerous
because they can totally de-index your site from search engine or your site may
go 5 pages down in search result. If your site has been manually penalized then
you will receive a message from Google in Webmaster Tool to let you know that
you have been violated Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
There is a good thing about a
manual penalty that it can be revoked. If you think that you are hit by a
manual penalty when you shouldn’t be then you can apply to Google to reconsider
their actions, and they will review your site and maybe they will lift the
manual penalty.
Google Panda update:
Google Panda is misunderstood as
a penalty, but this is an algorithm update. Google Panda is basically an algorithmic tweak, whose objective is to reward the quality sites by ranking them up and
punishing the low quality sites by ranking them very low in search engine. If
your site has low quality content, too many ads, and/or design issues then you
might get hit by Google Panda update which will result in a drop of your site
traffic and ranking both. On the other hand if you are a good follower of
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines then you will be rewarded with a higher rank and
tons of traffic to your site. You can check the Google Panda update in your
Google Analytics. The last Google Panda update came out in 2013 on 14 March.
Google Penguin update:
Just like Panda, Google Penguin
is also an algorithmic update and not a penalty. This update first came out in
2012 and its aim was to specifically hit sites which had too many unnatural links
and spammy content. Links from low quality sites play a major role in getting
hit by Penguin update. The latest Penguin update was rolled out on May 22,
2013.
Google EMD:
The EMD means “Exact Match Domain”. Some websites have keywords or key phrases in their domain names, for example if "howtomakepizza.com" is your domain name. "How to make pizza" is an exact key phrase that somebody can search for when looking for a cooking advice. A site can rank well in search engine by just having a keyword or phrase in its URL even if it has low quality content. So your site could be penalized for having an exact phrase or a keyword as domain name.
