Google Penalties: Detecting and Treating Unnatural Inbound Links
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 5:52 am
In 2018, webmasters received nearly 4 million notifications from Google about manual actions on their websites (data for 2019 has not yet been published).
Google penalties can strike you like a bolt from the blue, leaving you baffled as to what to do next.
A Google Spam penalty is a manual restriction for violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines, resulting in an immediate loss of organic visibility for a website.
Google Penalties - Estimated Traffic for Spam
Google Penalties - Organic Research Spam
Screenshots of a website sanctioned with a link penalty in February 2020. From 1,500 visits per month and around 500 keywords ranked, it has gone to almost 0 in a matter of days.
Control organic traffic easily
with the Organic Research tool
Try it for free →
ADS illustration
Demystifying Google's penalties for toxic inbound links
Typically, a manual Google penalty comes as a result of using black hat SEO techniques and not ensuring that a website's backlink profile is natural and adheres to Google's guidelines.
Among the most common triggers for a Google penalty are inbound an philippines number list d outbound links.
Unnatural links are also known as “bad” or “spammy” links, or as we call them at SEMrush, “toxic”.
Both inbound and outbound links can result in a penalty for your website.
Outbound links are located on your website.
You can get an outbound link penalty for linking to another website in a way that is contrary to Google's guidelines, such as by creating “a pattern of artificial, deceptive, or manipulated links,” as Google calls them.
This type of penalty has its own pitfalls and is worth discussing in a separate article.
Similarly, inbound links are links from external domains that point to your website or specific pages.
These links make up your backlink profile and you should keep an eye on them constantly.
We have a dedicated metric, called Toxic Score , that shows the quality of each inbound link within your profile.
In a recent study, we used our Backlink Audit tool to collect data from 830 SEMrush backlink profiles and user forums from industries whose websites were penalized in the last 2 years.
Our objectives were:
Google penalties can strike you like a bolt from the blue, leaving you baffled as to what to do next.
A Google Spam penalty is a manual restriction for violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines, resulting in an immediate loss of organic visibility for a website.
Google Penalties - Estimated Traffic for Spam
Google Penalties - Organic Research Spam
Screenshots of a website sanctioned with a link penalty in February 2020. From 1,500 visits per month and around 500 keywords ranked, it has gone to almost 0 in a matter of days.
Control organic traffic easily
with the Organic Research tool
Try it for free →
ADS illustration
Demystifying Google's penalties for toxic inbound links
Typically, a manual Google penalty comes as a result of using black hat SEO techniques and not ensuring that a website's backlink profile is natural and adheres to Google's guidelines.
Among the most common triggers for a Google penalty are inbound an philippines number list d outbound links.
Unnatural links are also known as “bad” or “spammy” links, or as we call them at SEMrush, “toxic”.
Both inbound and outbound links can result in a penalty for your website.
Outbound links are located on your website.
You can get an outbound link penalty for linking to another website in a way that is contrary to Google's guidelines, such as by creating “a pattern of artificial, deceptive, or manipulated links,” as Google calls them.
This type of penalty has its own pitfalls and is worth discussing in a separate article.
Similarly, inbound links are links from external domains that point to your website or specific pages.
These links make up your backlink profile and you should keep an eye on them constantly.
We have a dedicated metric, called Toxic Score , that shows the quality of each inbound link within your profile.
In a recent study, we used our Backlink Audit tool to collect data from 830 SEMrush backlink profiles and user forums from industries whose websites were penalized in the last 2 years.
Our objectives were: