We don’t know how exposed you are to the digital world and marketing, but we are sure you know much about Google. Right? Google is where your target prospects can search for you and find details about your construction business. It is everyone’s goal to rank first on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), and so do you.
Apparently, Google is regularly updating its algorithms to improve search quality further and give all
users the correct answers to their search queries. This also means punishing pages and sites that often violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Google penalties can impact your search rankings one way to another. In many cases, your whole website or pages can be removed from the search results. And no contractor whose goal is to rank first wants that to happen, right?
So, for this blog, we will cover what not to do and what you should do instead. Take this as your guide in preventing some Google penalties and effectively protecting your website from a traffic drop.
What are Google Penalties?
A Google Penalty often occurs when it detects a particular website that violates the Webmaster Guidelines. When a website is found to be abusing quality guidelines, whether intentionally or not, Google can use algorithms to downgrade the website or issue an immediate action.
Curious about the consequences of some Google penalties? Below are some of the consequences and in most cases, the severity of the drop depends on the type of penalty being issued.
- Directory-level penalties: The ranking will usually drop for a particular URL.
- Keyword-level penalties: Ranking drops because of a particular keyword.
- Domain-wide penalties: Ranking drops for a few URLs and keywords across your website.
- De-indexing or delisting: This is perhaps the highest level of penalties being imposed by Google. Google’s team removes your domain from the Google index. And as a result, none of the content of your website will be shown on Google results.
Reasons for Google Penalties and How to Effectively Prevent Them
As a construction business, you strive to get the first ranking in Google Search to increase your site’s traffic and ultimately earn more customers. The way to achieve that is a lengthy process that often requires patience and effort. This is why many folks, particularly those who have just started a website or blog, are drawn to use shortcuts to increase their rank. However, such tactics only backfire in the form of Google penalties.
Here you will discover six of the most common penalties of Google and what you can do to prevent and fix them:
1. Hidden Texts and Links
Hiding links and texts for Local SEO purposes rather than the users goes against the guidelines. Links and texts can be hidden in many ways, like:
- Setting the font size to zero
- Using white texts and linking in the background
- Using CSS to place texts out of the screen
- Hiding a text behind the image
- Making links with the same color as the background
In preventing hidden content penalties, you just have to:
- Not do it intentionally. If you need to hide something, it should not be on your page.
- Go to the URL inspection section and enter the affected web pages.
- Check for any hidden links and CSS for you to determine.
2. Thin blog content and doorway pages
This is when you prioritize more on quantity over quality SEO blog content. As a website owner, you oftentimes believe that more content means more web traffic. However, it is not usually the case because this is a purely lousy SEO practice. Not only are these poor SEO tactics that Google can detect. But, low-quality content also reflects poorly on your construction business.
To prevent thin content penalty, follow some tips below:
- Do not outsource or try to mass-produce any of your content. Mass-produced content is not considered a quality. Outsourcing leads to content that is incohesive and off-brand.
- Conduct proper keyword research and determine the right keywords to target. Your content should also match the intent of the query.
- If you want to scale your content, hire a digital marketing agency like ConstructionMarketing.io. You can work closely with all content creators and marketing experts that bring value to your readers.
- Create cornerstone content or pillar pages instead of doorway pages.
- Combine short pages fully optimized for keywords into one long page that generally contains more information on one certain keyword.
3. User-generated spam
If you are running a forum, allow some guest posts, and have comments enabled on your blogs. Spam links might link out to poor quality and improper pages. In any other way, actual humans can leave a comment in one of your blogs with one or more irrelevant links to get a backlink from your website to increase the domain authority further.
In preventing user-generated spam penalties:
- Use anti-spam tools. Nowadays, spammers use automatic scripts to flood the comment section. We recommend using Google reCAPTCHA with your website to prevent any comment spam.
- Use comment moderation tools. We recommend you delete, filter, and ban spammy comments. You should also review any approved comments before they go public.
4. Poor links to your website
A new Google’s algorithm update is designed to detect poor link building. Backlink building is a very effective SEO tactic that can increase anyone’s page authority. This only happens if they come organically from quality websites.
To prevent the unnatural link penalty, make use of an appropriate link-building tactic that does include:
- Link exchanges
- Buying and selling links
- Blog comment links
- Article directory links
- PBN links
- Building too many links in a shorter span
Pro Tip: You can also perform regular backlink audits. Use Search Console, Google Analytics, or SEO tools like SEMrush to analyze your backlinking profile and disregard toxic links.
5. Keyword Stuffing
On-page SEO, such as adding keywords to the headings, title, meta description, body and alternative texts, can help Googlebot understand your page. However, keyword stuffing is nothing but a black hat SEO strategy that triggers a Google penalty.
To prevent keyword stuffing penalty:
- Integrate keywords naturally in the content, as you can explain something personal.
- Instead of focusing only on one keyword, use long-tail keywords. Opt for the best keyword research tools for help.
6. Hacked Website
Suppose the hackers gain access to your construction website. In that case, they cannot only expose confidentiality but also inject malicious code, put irrelevant content, and redirect your construction website to harmful and spammy pages.
Your website can see severe ranking drops on all search queries, and Google will automatically delist your entire website from the search results as for this penalty.
To prevent this hacked website penalty, below are some ways that can help you tighten your construction website’s security:
- Use strong passwords and change these passwords regularly.
- Keep your content management system constantly updated.
- Invest in quality hosting
- Backup your construction website regularly
- Hide login URLs and limit log-in attempts to prevent any brute force attack from the hackers.
7. Structured data issue
The behind-the-scenes instructions telling browsers how content must be organized on the website are structured data. This data tells the search engine what is on your page. Rich snippets are one of the common examples of structured data. So, if you want your blogs to get more visual appeal in the search engines, you should use structured data to describe what is on the page.
However, if your website, for instance, uses structured data to control your visitors, except for a manual action. Google sees it as suspicious. So, this is how you can prevent the so-called structured data penalty. Here’s what you can do:
- Only use structured data that actually make some sense for your content.
- Do not add any fake reviews to increase CTR. Always follow the proper ways to obtain honest Google reviews.
- Ensure your mark-up content is always visible to the readers.
- Never add schema mark-up that associates any illegal activities, violence, and prohibited content.
ConstructionMarketing.io Saves You from Any Penalty!
As the blog ends, we assume you understand and learn about Google Penalties. You are now finally equipped to preserve your rankings and continuously grow your website traffic. But it does not end. It is critical to level up your efforts in preventing any Google penalty that may incur to your website. Doing this kind of effort can be time-consuming and confusing for you, especially for a starter.
We can help you with that! Here at ConstructionMarketing.io, we cease any black hat SEO practices and focus more on high-quality content, helping you avoid any form of Google penalties. One of our solutions is implementing security and moderation tools on your construction website, ensuring tight protection against hackers.
Talk to us today. Let’s start improving your ranking and traffic while getting away from Google Penalties!