HOW TO PROTECT YOUR WEBSITE FROM GOOGLE SEO PENALTIES

     If there is a sudden fall in ranking of your website then Google algorithm changes like Penguin and Panda is updated. When Google changes the search algorithm with rolls out of Google Panda and Penguin updates, penalties are common. To check for Google penalty requires recent analysis to be made. If you guess a Google penalty, first refer the Google algorithm change history in SEOMoz and check when the changes are made and what has caused the problem.

     When you suspect Google penalty, you can check how many number of URLs are indexed for your site. You can use site:yourdomainname.com and search in Google. If no URLs are indexed then there may be a chance of penalty to occur for your website. If Google penalties are severe then your site gets banned and de-indexed.

The following are some of the ways to protect your website from Google SEO Penalties:

1. Audit your Links Monthly:

First check with your back links which are high quality and low quality sites and which sites are actually linking to you. If you find any of your links are from low quality sites you can email them and request for the link to be removed. You can keep the document of the sites which you have emailed and when. This document would be useful when your site gets penalized and have to submit a reconsideration request. You can choose any SEO tool to monitor your back links and perform on a monthly basis.

2. Check your Anchor Density:

High anchor density is one of the factor which leads to penguin penalties. It is important to know the anchor density of your keywords. When new links are generated, anchor density changes. You can generate anchor density report every month. Anchor density for the brand terms increases by 50% but with no penalties. If you find that your density is increasing then builds the brand terms. 

3. Link Ratios: What to Monitor, and What they Matter:

By using ratios you can monitor earned vs. unearned links. Some of the ratios are given below:

Type of Link: Image vs. Text vs. Mentions

Location of Link: Paragraph vs. Link List vs. In Content vs. Sidebar vs. Header

Theme of Domain: Business vs. Computers vs. Reference vs. Portals vs. News

Type of Site: General vs. Blog vs. CMS vs. Link Directory vs. Social Network Sitewide Ratio

Deep Links Ratio

If there are number of links coming to your site from directories then it shows as an imbalance and try to build other links and create natural back link profile.

4. Watch your Webmaster Tools Account:

Some of the site owners do not have Webmaster Tools account and don't monitor it. You can see the links which Google shows in your account and helps you to find the problematic links. You can also identify the low quality links very quickly if you keep tabs on these links. If Googlebot can't access your website then you can see many crawl errors. Before there is loss in rankings and drop in traffic for your site make sure to monitor your webmaster account.

5. Create Google Analytics Alerts:

Google Analytics helps you to know whether your traffic has been decreased or if anything is changed by creating Intelligence Events Alerts.

The following screenshot is the Google Analytics Alert Conditions:

The following are some of the alerts that you can set up:

a. 10% Traffic drop

b. Bounce rate increases by more than 5%

c. Google organic traffic decreased by more than 5%

You must review the site and also back links if there are any problems before resulting in penalties and drop in traffic.

6. Don't Engage in Spammy Link Building:

You can find numerous spammy and low quality links from directories and article sites. 

Some of them used Fiverr gigs for link building and build 10,000 wiki links.

It is not worthy in doing those links which will get you penalized if any algorithm is updated. Fiverr doesn't work for link building. 

You can check for the distribution of TLDs your linking domains have in Open site Explorer tool as shown in the below screenshot: 

7. Build High Quality Links:

Focus on building high quality links to your site and rank well in search engine results.

Focus on building high quality links to your site and rank well in search engine results.