In online marketing, a Google penalty is a sanction imposed on a website by Google. A penalty is imposed when a website violates the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
On the one hand, algorithmic penalties are imposed. These are sanctions that are assigned automatically by the Google algorithm using underlying metrics to check websites for properties. If websites violate these properties or if the properties are not fulfilled, the visibility and findability of the website collapse.
On the other hand, sanctions can be imposed through manual penalties, i.e. manual intervention by a Google employee. Reasons for a manual penalty can be user-generated spam, hidden keyword spamming and/or hidden text, pure spam, superficial content of little importance or without added value for users, unnatural backlinks in general, unnatural and cross-page backlinks or unnatural links from your own website to others.
Depending on the severity of the violation, a penalty can have varying degrees of impact on the website. Penalties can be at keyword level, URL or directory level, hostname level or across pages. Even exclusion from the Google index is possible.
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