The search engine giant has added 12 new types of Google Penalties, which involve violations of Google News and Google Discover policies. This means that a website will now receive a penalty if it violates any policies related to News and Discover. Before this, it only sent manual actions for violations of Google Search.
Of course, Google did enforce its policies on News and Discover, but this will be the first time a reviewer will issue manual action penalties if a website is not in compliance with Google’s policies and guidelines. As a website owner, it is best to avoid Google penalties and follow through with guidelines.
Table of Contents
Google Penalties: News
Websites need to provide detailed information about their authors, publishers, bylines, dates, publications, company, and contact information. If a site doesn’t provide any of the information mentioned above, it will violate Google’s News guidelines, which specify transparency.
Google Discover Penalties
Websites penalized by Google will receive a manual action report via the search console. Here is the list of Google Discover penalties to avoid getting your website banned.
1. Adult-themed content
A site will violate this policy if its content contains nudity, sex acts, sexually suggestive activities, or sexually explicit material.
2. Misleading content
There is a fine line between clickbait and misleading content. Deceiving people to click on your website page by delivering something different inside than in the headline is considered misleading content.
3. Dangerous content
Content causing severe harm to people or animals. Avoid posting content with physical injuries involved. Videos that instruct viewers to kill or harm something or someone also is part of dangerous content.
4. Harassing content
Harassing content applies to exposing private information, encouraging threats and defamation. Google prohibits all forms of harassment, threatening, and bullying content.
5. Hateful content
Publishing content that stimulates hateful content or incites hatred amongst viewers is strictly prohibited. Content that targets groups and individuals based on sensitive topics like nationality, ethnicity, origin, religion, race, age, disability, and gender identity.
6. Medical content
The content provides medical advice, treatment, or diagnosis for commercial purposes.
7. Sexually explicit content
Content containing sexually explicit images or videos intended to cause sexual arousal.
8. Terrorist content
Content promoting terrorism, extremist recruitment, inciting violence, or celebrating terrorist violence.
9. Violence and gore content
Content glorifying violent acts or displaying graphic or violent material.
10. Manipulated media
Content, image, or video, including manipulative, deceiving, or fraud-related language.
11. Vulgar language and profanity
Google forbids content containing obscene language or profanity.
12. Cloaking and sneaky redirects
Cloaking is the act of showing the pages to users which is not shown to Google. Meanwhile, sneaky redirects send users to pages that are not shown on Google. Suck act can also get your site penalized.
How do you deal with a manual action penalty?
Hence, if your site has received a manual action penalty via Search Console, read the detailed information to understand the reason behind the penalty and read how you can recover from it. The recovery process consists of submitting a Review Request so that Google can reconsider the penalty.
Depending on the penalty, Google usually takes several days to two weeks to complete the review process and sends an email on its completion.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. How will I know if my site receives a Google penalty?
Log in to your Google webmaster account. Under the manual action option, go to search traffic. You will see the penalties there. However, if you don’t, you will see a message saying no manual webspam actions found.
Q2. What types of actions will lead to a Google penalty or manual action?
The three main types of actions that lead to Google penalties or manual actions are spammy content, keyword stuffing, and unnatural backlinks.
Q3. How long does a Google Penalty last?
There are two types of penalties: manual and algorithmic. Manual Google penalties last mainly 10-30 days, and Algorithmic Google penalties can last up to 6 months, depending on the penalty.
Q4. How often does Google update its penalty algorithms?
Google updates are unpredictable. According to the reports, Google launches changes to thousands of changes in a year, which makes it 10-15 times a day.
Conclusion
Google Penalties can also result from black-hat SEO tactics like adding suspicious links or keyword stuffing. Therefore, you must avoid all the penalties if you want your website listed on Google.
