Google penalty is a sudden drop in traffic and positioning in the Google search engine, which results from an update of Google algorithms and/ or a manual action by a Google employee.

A manual action comes from Google’s spam team, so it all starts with a Google employee who punishes a site for various reasons. To see if you’ve received a manual penalty, go to Google Webmaster Tools for your site and see if there are any “unnatural links” notifications or similar messages.

An algorithmic action is more difficult to determine because it is an automatic punishment. You must consult with SEO Denver specialists who can make an analysis and reveal the reasons of the penalty.

10 reasons to get a Google penalty

There are a lot of reasons why Google can give you a red card, and these are the most frequent:

1. Too much link exchange
2. Duplicate content
3. Wrong sitemaps
4. Too many keywords on the page
5. Links hidden in the page
6. Lost external links
7. Slow site speed
8. Errors in Robots.txt
9. 301 Redirects
10. Spam

Keep in mind that a Google penalty is not a death sentence. Stay calm, analyze and see where this penalty came from. You can reach the same traffic as before the penalty, all you have to do is take correct action and wait for Google to lift your penalty.