When a website misuses Google Webmaster Guidelines for ranking purposes, then Google will automatically or manually penalize a website. Therefore, monitoring and maintaining your small business website according to Google algorithms and Webmaster Guidelines is a must!

Watching over your site establishes a strong presence on Google search results, obtains quality traffic, increases better conversion rates, and expands your reach.

Let’s jump into more details.

How to Protect Your Small Business Website Against Google Penalties?

Here, we have broken down the mysteries about optimizing your small business website to prevent it against the Google penalty.

1. Build a Responsive Website

Google constantly focuses on providing the best experience to its users on all aspects. With mobile-optimized websites, it is easy to provide flexibility to visitors. According to a report from Mashable, more than half of the 100 billion searches that Google receives a month come from mobile devices.

Non-optimized websites ruin the experience of visitors. They cause a lack of interest among the website visitors, due to which Google reduces the ranking on the search results.

If you do not want Google to penalize your small business website, then it is crucial for you to build a friendly website. Responsive feature in a website has a major impact on your SEO rankings and user engagement. Also, we have written a detailed blog on how to build a small business website under $1000. Take a look to learn more.

2. Avoid Duplicate Content

According to Google, duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Owing to duplicate content, Google does not impose a direct penalty for your small business website but hides your visibility on the results page.

Users like to explore unique content from the search results therefore Google filters and displays only the original version of the content and not the copied one. Moreover, if any third-party citing is duplicating your content without permission, you can file a request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Here we have listed a few tips on creating quality content for your small business website without violating Google guidelines.

• Focus on your target audience
• Do a lot of research and analysis before developing content
• Maintain consistency in your content across all channels
• Align the content to your small business goals
• Understand the basics of SEO, HTML, CSS
• Design the content with appealing infographics, videos, images

Smart and ethical content marketing techniques stand as a firewall to protect your small business website from Google penalties. If you find it difficult to develop quality-rich and impressive content, feel free to take assistance from the skilled content writers.

3. Manage Keywords

Google keeps on upgrading its algorithms to deliver the best relevant results for the users. Back in the early days, it was easy for marketers to rank on SERPs through keyword stuffing.

Nowadays, keyword stuffing has become an inactive marketing approach. Rather than keywords-heaped webpages, Google prefers content with information that best matches the users’ search queries.

When you pile-up keywords for ranking purposes, Google considers it as one of the black-hat SEO practices. There are chances of being removed by Google from the search results page. Therefore, build Expertise, Authenticated, and Trustworthy (E-A-T) content without stuffing keywords unnecessarily.

4. Do not Overuse Anchor Text

Anchor texts are clickable words symbolized in blue color which will direct visitors from an existing page to another page. Few marketers misuse and overuse the anchor text by giving links to particular pages that are not relevant to the users’ search.

Google penalizes websites with manipulative anchor text. With the help of bots, Google evaluates a webpage content based on how many links there are for a particular anchor text, on what types of sites those links occur, how natural those links seem in the context, and level of commercial intent of those keywords.

Therefore, it is understood that the overuse of pointless anchors would annoy the users and it also reduces the value of your website. If you want to escape being trapped by the Google penalties, then make sure that your webpage has necessary and relevant anchor text in a meaningful context.

5. Use Relevant Links

Outbound/external links lead users from your site to other sites for reference. Inbound/internal links drive users from other websites to your site. When both inbound and outbound links are overused or misused, they might lead Google to penalize your small business website.

Here are a few smart ideas for placing relevant links to reduce the risks of Google penalties.

• Inbound links on highly reputable domains
• Inbound links on several pages of notable domains with higher PageRank
• Inbound links on webpages of lower
• PageRank from reputable websites
• Relevant outbound links to relevant webpages
• Number of do-follow and no-follow links

Google considers negative links as the intention of creating an artificial depiction of relevance and reputation. With the help of effective tools and technologies, you can easily evaluate the quality of domain links on your web pages and disavow all the negative links thereby reducing Google penalties.

6. Optimize Page Load Time

Proper maintenance of your webpage load time is crucial because it protects from threats like customer dissatisfaction, loss of potential clients, tarnished brand image, and reduction in search engine ranking. According to a research,t 40% of people bounce off a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

In fact, Amazon recently analyzed that a one-second delay in page load speed costs them $1.6 billion in sales each year. Usage of unclean code, various types of ads, multiple flash content, JavaScript issues, un-optimized images with high-resolution causes your website to slow-down.

With the help of tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Test My Site, you can optimize every content of your webpage so that it loads quickly and provides an engaging user experience to your visitors.

7. Control Advertising

Google has some restrictions on advertising too. It does not want its advertisement network to dissatisfy the audience with misleading advertisements. When you break those guidelines and publish an advertisement for prohibited content, Google will ban your website from the search results page.

Here are a few examples that Google considers as misleading ads and keep tracking these sorts of websites.

• Weapons
• Tobacco
• Advertising drugs
• Explosive materials
• Firework
• Adult content – adult magazines, matchmaking sites, etc
• The gambling industry ads – online casinos, bingo ads
  Alcohol

You have to be aware of what Google is expecting and create ads accordingly so that you can prevent your small business website from penalty. If you want to design a professional advertisement for your small business, feel free to take assistance from our creative graphic designers.

On a Final Note

For sure, Google penalties are a disadvantage for your small business enhancement. Therefore, watch over your website regularly to check whether the content abides by Google guidelines.

With the help of Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and many other tools or simply by searching your brand on Google, you can easily identify whether your small business website is penalized or not.

If you do not want your small business website to be penalized by Google, then you can reach professional end-to-end service providers like Small Business Web.

We take care of your online business activities from logo design, content creation, optimizing for search engine rankings, and beyond. Feel free to reach us via message or call +1 (919) 234-5140 at any time. We are happy to work with you!

Do you have any questions regarding Google penalization? Ask us in the comments section below. We are ready to answer your queries.