Google’s Manual Penalties and Algorithmic Updates

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.

Below are some popular Google penalties and algorithmic updates:

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.