Yes, unfortunately it can happen …

I am pretty sure that you have already heard about white hat and black hat SEO techniques. You can find these terms in almost every SEO-related article. Now, we are going to take a closer look at each one.

White hat vs. black hat

So, what falls under the umbrella of white hat SEO? Any ethical SEO optimization technique or tactic that focuses on a human audience instead of search engines and follows all the search engine rules and policies.

Obviously, these are less-aggressive, time-intensive strategies – such as constantly creating unique and insightful content, building genuinely engaged communities, interacting with a truly interested audience through multiple marketing channels, etc -, but they will help you to build long-term assets without running into problems with search engines.

White hat SEO focuses on human audience, so if you want to build a loyal customer base – one that not only buys from you, but sincerely recommends you to friends – you’ll have to focus on these methods that give the customer a unique and great experience.

Now, let’s see the dark side …

Any unethical technique or method that is used against Google’s webmaster guidelines – for example, hidden content, keyword stuffing, duplicate content, etc – in order to achieve better search engine rankings falls under the umbrella of black hat SEO.

Originally, the term “black hat” was coined to describe computer hackers, but has also been used to describe practices and techniques that directly violate search engine guidelines. Usually, these are quite aggressive techniques and methods that seek to exploit loopholes in the search engine algorithms in order to rank websites higher than they actually deserve to.

Sadly, the list of these practices is almost endless: cloaking, link farming, hidden content, link injection, keyword stuffing, bought links, etc. Honestly, I really can’t understand the “fans” of this approach … I mean, I know, it’s much more easier and faster, but risking severe and often irrevocable consequences in exchange for some temporary and potential advantages is something inconceivable for me. Search engines have an obvious financial incentive to fight spam and users also hate spam.

I admit, spam still works sometimes, but generally it takes more effort to succeed than producing helpful and quality content, and the long-term payoff is basically non-existent! So, instead of putting all that effort into something that the search engines will throw away – and severely penalize! -, why not invest in a value-based long-term approach instead? It goes without saying, but I’ll say it: don’t ever use any shady SEO techniques to gain insignificant, short-term advantages! The consequences will appear inevitably and believe me, they will “solve” your SEO problems for a very long time …

Depending on the gravity and the seriousness of the violation, the penalty can last from a few weeks to several months and as I already said, if the worst-case scenario occurs, your website can be banned even permanently from search engines. I really don’t know why, but many marketers or business owners believe that these search engine penalties are myths or unfounded gossips.

Believe me, they are very real! In May 2013 eBay has been penalized by Google for a plethora of traffic-generator doorway pages and according to John Donahoe – the CEO of eBay – the penalty had a 200,000,000 (two hundred million!) dollar impact on their sales! Two years earlier (February 2011) overstock.com was running a smart marketing tactic offering nice discounts in exchange for incoming links. Due to the received – somehow debatable? – Google penalty their website was practically degraded from the rankings (even when searching for their own name!). As a result they have encountered a $300 million dollars decrease in sales during the given year. So yes, the penalties are very real and they can kill your business in a heartbeat!

And of course, between white SEO and black SEO there is a very thin and easy-to-cross line, which is often called gray-hat SEO …

The point: if you are accountable for using black or dark-gray SEO techniques, you’ll have to endure the well deserved consequences. If you’ve been a bad boy, your site will receive ranking penalties or even worse, will be banned from the search engines entirely. Don’t ever forget this, if you want to make a successful SEO for a WordPress website!

There are two (main) types of penalties:

1. Manual penalties

In this case, a member of the web-spam team has manually applied a penalty to your site after finding something that was in violation of their guidelines. In order to see if you’ve been given a manual penalty, simply check the manual penalty section in your Google Webmaster Tools account:

In order to remove the penalty, you’ll have to file a Google reconsideration request to tell them what you have done to solve the given problem and how you plan to never engage in similar practices again.

Google will manually decide whether or not to lift the penalty and sometimes they’ll come back to tell you that you haven’t done enough (yet) to eliminate the problem that you have been penalized for.

2. Algorithmic penalties

These are automatically applied penalties and usually just fixing the problem can lead to the penalty being lifted next time when Google will re-index your site. Sometimes, though, you may also need to file a reconsideration request.

Detecting algorithmic penalties is a bit harder, but if you are experiencing significant traffic drops that happened after your site has been re-indexed or at the same time as automatic search engine penalty updates were introduced, there are great chances that you have received an algorithmic penalty. As I mentioned earlier, those awesome guys at MOZ have a great page where you can check anytime the Google algorithm change history.

Important: even if you have spotted a significant traffic drop that corresponds to a given search engine update, make sure the drop isn’t caused by other technical issues or external factors (robots.txt, server issues, bad redirects, crawling problems, etc)!

Also, don’t forget that these algorithms usually run over longer periods of time – even several weeks -, so your traffic drop probably won’t start on the exact day that the algorithm was reported! However, if you are looking for signs that could indicate a potential penalty, you should pay attention to traffic drops on individual pages or particular keywords, significant number of de-indexed pages or a huge traffic drop overall. If you are a visual type, I recommend you to use the Panguin Tool provided by Barracuda Digital. This awesome tool will line up a graph of your traffic with colored vertical lines that indicate when given algorithms were run. In order to use it, you’ll have to log in with your Google Analytics account.

The two most important algorithmic Google updates are known as Panda and Penguin. The former one is focused on content quality, the latter one on anchor text distribution and backlinks. And the most common algorithmic penalties are:

• Google Panda penalty; Panda is looking for low-quality – short, poorly written, valueless – content; as far as I know, the Google bear is unleashed only a few times per year, so there aren’t too many “opportunities” to get penalized, but that’s also a big disadvantage, because once you got hit you’ll have to wait a few months to get the penalty lifted; more than that, if your reconsideration request was unsuccessful, you’ll have to perform another cleaning and of course, to wait again for the next iteration of the algorithm; also, you should know, that if your website has a certain amount of low quality content (for example, particular affiliate pages), the entire site will be penalized; in other words, Panda is a site-wide penalty

• Google Penguin penalty; to put it simply, Penguin looks for unnatural link profiles and backlink patterns focusing especially on link quality, link diversity and link velocity; is an even bigger algorithm than Panda, so it can take more than a few weeks to fully run, therefore can be detected a bit harder; the good news: Penguin is not a site-wide penalty, so this not-so-lovely animal will affect only specific pages on your website

• Google Top Heavy penalty; the algorithm was first run back in January 2012 and it’s all about targeting websites that don’t have “enough” content above the fold; if you have a bunch of ads above the fold or a large section of the site’s initial screen is dedicated to anything else than the actual content, you can easily get a site-wide Top Heavy penalty; you should know that it is run very infrequently – in 2013 for example, wasn’t run at all -, so, if you got a hit you’ll have to be very, very patient to get it removed

• Google Payday penalty; the original algorithm has been launched in June 2013 in order to target queries containing spammy keywords, such as payday loans, money lenders, Viagra, gambling, casinos, Garcinia cambogia, etc; if you are operating in a spammy niche, you’ll have to be very careful if you want to avoid being penalized and if it happens, is almost impossible to obtain a successful reconsideration; usually the only solution is to move your stuff to a completely new site

OK. Now let’s see some …

Techniques and scenarios that must be avoided at any cost

As I already said, there are – too – many shady practices out there and I won’t even try to give you a complete list, but here are the most common issues that can put you in the situation of encountering manual or algorithmic penalties:

• Keyword stuffing. One of the most obvious – and less effective – spamming technique is to use keyword terms and phrases repetitively on a web page in order to make it appear more relevant to the search engines. The truth: the search engines can’t be fooled with such methods anymore.

• Cloaking. Showing the same content to the search engines that you’d show to a human visitor is one of the most important search engine guidelines. This is a quite sensitive and dangerous area, because cloaking can be accomplished in many ways and for a variety of reasons including an increased user experience and it’s extremely easy to cross the unclear, blanch line that exists between white hat cloaking and black hat cloaking.

• Low value pages. The Panda update took very aggressive steps to reduce low quality content across the web. The search engines are able to identify properties across entire root domains (and sub-domains as well) in order to efficiently filter duplicate content, thin affiliate content, valueless dynamically generated content, etc.

• Spammy comments and forum profiles. Forum posts or comments that are left only for the purpose of placing a link, usually will get your site penalized. If you are running a forum, you’ll have to pay a great attention to these issues!

• Dangerous backlinks. Any suspicious or low-quality backlink is an additional risk factor for your rankings and your overall SEO efforts. Pay special attention to:

• Dangerous backlinks. These are backlinks coming from sites that are violating search engine webmaster guidelines.

• Links coming from sites unrelated to your niche. The lack of relevancy will definitely raise a red flag.

• Low value links. These are links from directories and social bookmarking sites with thin content.

• Spam links or illegal links. Usually these are links coming from gambling or adult websites.

I've already covered the backlink profile topic in a previous lesson. And now I'll give you another useful tip ...

Want to identify your harmful backlinks? No problem! Go to your Google Webmaster Tools account, select “Search Traffic -> Links to Your Site” and click the “More” link in the “Who links the most” section:

On the next screen click the “Download latest links” button to export your latest backlinks.

Once you have them, you can import them into a given analytical tool to efficiently analyze, evaluate and fix each link.

When you are certain that a given link is bad for you, try to remove it. Contact the involved webmaster via email and politely ask him to remove the given link from his site. Use your company email, personalize your message and be as specific as possible.

In best case scenario your request will be fulfilled and the problem has been solved. If the webmaster is not interested in removing the link – or your email has been simply ignored -, you’ll have to disavow the entire domain.

• Manipulative linking. A practice which can be implemented in many different ways including:

• Link schemes. Basically, these are link networks or link farms where valueless websites are built purely as link sources used to artificially increase popularity. Due to the inevitable link overlap they can be easily detected by search engines.

• Low quality directory links. Sadly, there are many pay-for-placement web directories out there, ready to provide you with “quality” inbound links. You should know, that these links are almost useless and often they do more harm than good.

• Reciprocal link exchange. It’s a quite common method where – even unrelated – websites create pages that point back-and-forth to one another in order to spuriously inflate link popularity. The search engines are very good at detecting these methods as they fit a very particular, easy-to-spot pattern. Of course, search engines have no problem at all with sites linking to each other for genuine and legitimate reasons in a natural way that is good and useful for users.

• Paid links. Another sad fact: there are hundreds of sites willing to place links in exchange for money. Additionally, they often “evolve” in large networks of link-trading communities and although the search engines work really hard to annihilate them, they still exist. Evidently, search engines want business to perform well in search results because they have unique quality content, not because they have deep pockets. Buying links is a risky business and unfortunately, many people doesn’t really understand the differences that (should) exist between bought links and paid advertisement. Well, Google explicitly stated, it’s all about passing (or not) PageRank values. Buying advertising is a great practice while the advertisement doesn’t pass PageRank to your website! In order to avoid passing PageRank via your paid advertisements, you should use the “nofollow” attribute, a Javascript-based link which cannot be followed by search engines or a redirected page which is blocked in your robots.txt file. As a result your paid ads won’t effect your organic search results and more importantly, won’t unleash the wrath of the search engines.

As you can see, sometimes (white hat cloaking vs. black hat cloaking, bought links vs. paid advertisement, etc) the ice can be very, very thin.

This is why it’s so frightfully easy to trigger a manual or algorithmic search engine penalty. And usually, you won’t receive any alert, so you should always keep an eye on your Google Webmaster Tools account – Search Console -> Search Traffic -> Manual Actions – to realize if something went wrong.

Additionally, you should check regularly the number of pages indexed by search engines to detect any changes or indexing issues. You can do it in many ways, but I recommend you to use the Google Search Console. Just select Google Index -> Index Status:

There are four possible scenarios:

• the number of pages indexed by search engines is close to the actual number of pages; in this case your whole website has been indexed successfully and entirely

• if the number of indexed pages is bigger, than you probably have duplicate content and you’ll have to solve the problem as fast as you can

• if the number of indexed pages is smaller than the actual number of pages, you have content that is inaccessible for search engines and you’ll have to find the reasons to fix the existing problems

• the number of indexed pages is zero! well, this is the scenario where you should probably take a few very deep breaths and maybe even a well-tried tranquilizer, because your website … has been excluded from the search engine’s index; after the tranquilizer has taken effect, first of all you should perform a cross-check to corroborate your miserable situation; all you have to do is to enter the “site:yourdomain.com” command in the Google search bar (or any other particular search engine); in a normal situation you should receive a search result page with all the pages that have been indexed on your site, but if your site has been excluded, you’ll find nothing but a blank page

OK. Now let's see the worst case scenario ...

So, you have been a naughty and your site has been penalized or excluded from the search engines. What’s next? Obviously, you’ll have to submit a reconsideration or re-inclusion request. So ...

How to submit a reconsideration or re-inclusion request?

Requesting a reconsideration or a re-inclusion in the search engines is a painful – and often unsuccessful – process. First of all, you need to understand that search engines receive thousands of reconsideration requests every week and your super-urgent problem is just another file among thousands of other super-urgent cases. So, once you have submitted your request, get ready to wait!

Penalty-lifting actions can take weeks or even months and the re-inclusion – if it happens – it’s an even longer process. And don’t – ever! – try to speed up things! You need to understand that you are not the only one who has urgent issues!

Also, you need to be aware that with the search engines, lifting a penalty is not their obligation! Legally speaking they have all the right to penalize or to reject any website. It may sound annoying, but inclusion is a privilege, not a right. This is why making pressures or being impatient will always do more damage than good. Some people will say that you should send them a follow up email to ask how the request is going, but I don’t recommend it …

And of course, your request needs to really stand out, so let’s see some important considerations and best practices that will help you to create and to submit outstanding requests:

Good documentation

These requests are handled by real people, so good documentation helps the reviewer better understand the situation. You’ll have to focus on three things:

• explaining the exact quality issues on your website; tell them the rules you think you may have broken and show them that you are serious about solving the problem

• describing the exact steps you have taken to fix the given issues; be sure to provide supporting evidence for how you have updated or modified your site; provide a list of links you’ve taken action on; keep in mind that simply disavowing your backlinks without trying to remove them, can cause the rejection of your request; provide a list with any piece of bad content you have removed (and good content you have added); provide a list with every page where you have added the “nofollow” attribute to the violating links; if you had invalid clicks – which is a quite common reason to get banned – explain them why those clicks were valid

• clearly documenting the outcome of your efforts

And again: get into as much detail as possible and be polite! You are dealing with real people and you desperately need their help! Be considerate and thank them for the time and effort that they are taking to look into your request. Being an impatient jerk won’t help you …

Full disclosure

Needless to say, full disclosure is literally critical to getting consideration. You’ll have to tell them everything you have done. Honestly. Why, how, where, when, etc. These details will help search engines to improve their algorithms and your transparency will be appreciated. Hold back any details and they are likely to view you as dishonest and incorrigible.

You’ll have to convince them that you learned your lesson!

Cloaked and spammy content

Always use the the “Fetch as Google” feature in your Search Console when you are trying to solve your problems or to clean hacked, user-generated, etc content!

It’s a tool which enables you to test and see how Google crawls or renders a given URL on your site, so will help you to identify any sneaky redirects, wrongly cloaked content, etc:

Quality guidelines and unanswered questions

Before submitting your request always read (again) the quality guidelines provided by the given search engine. They will help you to re-evaluate your situation and your request. Also, if you have any questions and you need some guidance, it’s always a good idea to post your question(s) on the given webmaster help forum.

Here are the links for Google and Bing:

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Google Webmaster Help Forum

Bing Webmaster Guidelines

Bing Webmaster Help Center

Be sure to do your research in order to fully understand what is really going on, and ensure, that the changes you have made meet the requirements!

Submission

Send your reconsideration or re-inclusion request using the Google Webmaster Tools service rather than the public form. This will create an additional layer of trust and that means a better chance.

Conclusion

In these days the search engines are extremely smart, making it considerably more difficult to adversely affect or influence their intended algorithms. If you are doing nasty things, sooner or later you’ll be severely punished, and as you have seen above, recovering from a search engine penalty isn’t easy at all. In fact, the best way to recover from a search engine penalty is to avoid it in the first place! So, here is a piece of advice (again): if you want to make a successful SEO for a WordPress website, BEHAVE!

I know, accidents happen … If you have tried a new awesome link-building method or you simply hired a black hat SEO agency and you got hit by a penalty or an exclusion, don’t panic! You’ll be fine! Do your research, identify the reasons, fix the problems, submit a well-crafted reconsideration or re-inclusion request and … say a few prayers. But don’t stop there! If you are accountable for those crimes, choose an entirely different approach and re-define your SEO strategy while it’s not too late!

And that's it my friends!

If you have any comments, further questions or update requests please don't hesitate to react! Like, comment and share!