Ever since Google grew to take up the majority of the world’s internet traffic, trying to adhere to their rules and regulations and not facing the wrath of their bots has been the primary business of SEO experts. It’s often confusing as to which actions just damage performance and which ones will actually earn you an official Google penalty. Here are the actions that will leave you with a slap on the wrist, or worse – no traffic to your site at all.

Manipulating backlinks

Google will recognise a pattern of unnatural links designed to cause deception and manipulation with artificial links pointing to a website.

Auto-generated content

One of Google’s recent algorithms has been targeted specifically at looking for high-quality and useful content. Any content on a site that’s been auto-generated, scraped from elsewhere, copied or placed together with little value or meaning will be flagged up by Google and penalised. For help from SEO Services Ireland, contact a site like www.rycomarketing.ie/seo-services

Weak content

As mentioned above, Google looks to prevent poor-quality content sites from appearing in their search results. Things that will alert them include too many images, not enough copy, keyword stuffing, blank pages and any other technical issues that will negatively affect a user’s experience.

Performance

If your site is suffering from serious technical issues, it could lead to it being removed completely by Google. This isn’t a penalty as such but removing your site entirely from search results can have a massive impact on your business. Keeping your site running well and speedy enough for users is paramount.