05-01-2023
3 min read
Discovering Google penalties with precision
Fruition's Google Penalty Checker offers a swift and reliable method to identify algorithmic penalties affecting your website. By employing statistical analysis, the tool delivers a comprehensive understanding of which Google updates significantly impact your site. Google Penalty Checker's recommendation engine also provides insights on What To Work On Next™ ("WTWON") to enhance traffic, recover from a Google setback, and maintain long-term website health.
The Rationale Behind Creating the Google Penalty Checker
One of our clients believed they had been penalized (specifically, their in-house SEO analyst thought so). We disagreed, asserting that the observed decline in organic traffic was primarily due to seasonality and content adjustments resulting from a change in their business model. We promised the client we would substantiate our position using statistics. We initially built the model in R and later transitioned to Python. Our analysis demonstrated, with high confidence, that the site had not been penalized, and the SEO analyst concurred. This outcome allowed us to concentrate on the most effective SEO strategies with reduced guesswork. Thus, Fruition's Google Penalty Checker was born. And yes, the original client for whom we developed GPC remains a thriving client after 18 years!
The Genesis of the Google Penalty Checker: A Real-World Scenario
The development of the Google Penalty Checker was inspired by a client who believed they were penalized, primarily due to their in-house SEO analyst's opinion. We disagreed, attributing the decline in organic traffic to seasonality and content adjustments stemming from a modification in their business model. We assured the client that we would validate our perspective using statistical methods.
Initially, we built the model in R, later migrating it to Python. This approach allowed us to establish with high confidence that the site had not been penalized, and the SEO analyst concurred. This positive outcome enabled us to concentrate on the most effective SEO efforts with less guesswork, resulting in the creation of Fruition's Google Penalty Checker. Notably, the original client for whom we developed GPC remains a satisfied and successful client after 20 years!
Harness GPC to Evaluate the Impact of Google Algorithm Updates on Your Website
Several factors, such as site downtime and seasonal fluctuations, can influence site traffic. GPC helps you cut through the clutter to gain a clearer understanding of your site's health. By aggregating data from hundreds of thousands of other websites, GPC can accurately identify when an algorithm update has affected your site, empowering you to make informed decisions and optimize your SEO strategies.
How do you manually check for Google Penalties?
If you don't want to use Fruition's Google Penalty Checker tool then you can use the following steps to help narrow down if your site was penalized.
We have a more detailed guide available to check for Google Penalties./google-penalty-checker
How many clicks should I be getting from organic search?
Typically, the amount of clicks one should be receiving from organic search is measured not in terms of absolute number of clicks, but rather in click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of people who see your site in the search results that click on it. The average organic CTR for any business is 2%. What is considered a “good” CTR varies depending on the source; some say that anything above 3% is good, while others advise aiming for ranges like 4-6% or 6-7%. This can vary by industry; for instance, sites in the customer service industry generally have a higher average CTR than sites in the legal industry, so two sites with the same CTR might actually be performing above and below average with regards to their respective industries. And, of course, how many specific clicks a CTR translates into will depend on how many impressions a page is getting; a widely-seen page with a low CTR can be getting more clicks than a a rarely-seen page with a high CTR. As such, how many clicks you should be getting depends on a wide variety of different factors including your industry and the type of SEO strategy you are pursuing.
You can increase Google organic search traffic to your site by following good SEO practices. Here are five basic SEO tips. One, have a strategy to generate natural backlinks from high-quality, high-authority sites relevant to your industry. (Do not pay for links, as this is a spammy practice that is penalized by Google). Two, create unique and original website content. Sites hosting unique content are more likely considered high-quality by Google than ones which simply recycle material that is readily available elsewhere. (Of course, it should also be useful and relevant to your users). Three, make sure your site is mobile-friendly. As mobile devices are responsible for an increasing number of searches, Google is increasingly prioritizing it as a ranking factor. Mobile-friendliness includes such factors as having responsive design to display on different screen sizes and loading quickly even for less-powerful computers. Four, include relevant keywords in your content to optimize it for search. Including long-tail keywords in your content can target more specific queries, while placing keywords in important positions like titles elevates their importance. Five, make sure your site is secured by an SSL certificate. Security is a Google ranking factor, with https sites ranking higher than http ones. Beyond these five tips, further information on how to improve your website to meet Google’s standards can be found in Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Negative keywords are keywords that prevent an add from being triggered. Unlike positive keywords, which trigger your site to be delivered to a searcher when they match the users query, negative keywords cause your site to not be delivered to searches which include those keywords. For instance, if you are selling Apple computer products, adding “fruit” as a negative keyword to your ads will prevent them from being delivered to searchers looking for the food rather than the electronics brand. The reason you may wish to do this when paying for Google Ads is that you are charged for clicks, meaning that every result delivered by mistake to a searcher it’s not relevant to costs you money. The use of negative keywords in SEO for organic search results is a more difficult matter, as you can include positive keywords in your content, but there is no way to make a list of negative keywords. The most you can do is to deliberately avoid including any phrases you deem to be negative keywords in the content on your site. The impact of this is much less significant than it is for paid advertisements, as you do not pay a cost for mistaken organic clicks, but it may improve certain metrics like conversion rate by reducing the amount of mistaken traffic to your site.
The most helpful content addresses your audience's problems or needs and provides a solution for them. Our team of content strategy experts can help you identify your audience's unique problems and develop content that addresses them.
If you're researching your own ideas for content generation, here are a few ways you can get inspired:
-Research trending topics to find out what keywords are currently the most popular. This can indicate what content people are most interested in seeing.
-Research what type of content is being put out by your direct competitors. Since they are targeting the same customers as you, their content will likely interest your audience.
-Directly poll your customers about what type of content they would like to see from you. Polls like this can easily become part of your social media or email strategy.
-Look at websites geared towards providing content ideas, like Quora, Answerthepublic, Ubersuggest, Buzzsumo, and Exploding Topics.
There is no single most effective SEO strategy. While different sources might emphasize different specific tactics, it is widely agreed that SEO is a holistic process that requires work in multiple different areas. Having highly searchable keywords is meaningless if your content is useless or irrelevant to your target audience; even the highest-quality content will fail to be discovered if it has no backlinks pointing towards it; no amount of backlinks will help a site if it is delisted from Google for violating their webmaster guidelines, and so forth. No single magic bullet can guarantee SEO success; rather, one must pursue many different strategies and improve in many different areas in order to build the best overall site.
Yes, the user-averaged active continuous time spent by a user (in seconds) on host pages after clicking on a query from a search engine.
The best offsite SEO strategies are building organic backlinks and encouraging positive customer reviews. Backlinks from popular, relevant, and high-authority sites pass PageRank to your site, increasing its importance in the eyes of Google’s algorithm. The higher the status and authority of the linking page, the greater the benefit to your site. However, such backlinks must be built and acquired naturally; paying for backlinks is against Google’s webmaster guidelines and may result in your site being penalized. Likewise, numerous and largely positive reviews from customers will be seen a sign of business quality and raise your site’s significance for the algorithm, but bribing customers to leave positive reviews or generating fake reviews are against Google’s rules.
Offsite SEO factors are anything that contributes to how your website is ranked by Google that is not hosted on your website itself. This includes the number of backlinks pointed to your site by other websites, the authority and relevance of the sites hosting those backlinks, and reviews of your company or product written by customers.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It works by designing your site’s structure and content to meet the criteria Google’s search algorithm uses when determining how high-quality a site is, and therefore how highly to place it in the search results delivered to users. Important ranking factors include keyword placement, natural backlinks, mobile-friendliness, loading speed, usefulness of content, and avoiding forbidden practices that can result in Google imposing penalties.
A blacklist SEO attack is when a malicious actor hacks a website to subvert it for their own ends. This might involve phishing to collect personal information such as passwords or bank account details from visitors, or installing malware on the computers of visitors, or redirecting visitors to their own websites. In order to protect users, Google places warnings on such compromised pages, advising visitors not to proceed. You can check whether your website’s URL has been blacklisted using such Google Safe Browsing. If it has, you can request Google restore it by re-securing it and removing any malware (either yourself or with the help of a professional service) and then submitting your website for reassessment on Google Search Console. This is often talked about but there haven't been too many instances where an attack has been successful.
The average number of active actions (clicks, keystrokes) for users when the user is continuously on the host pages after clicking on a request from a search engine (the factor depends on the pair (request,domAttr)).
To get your website to rank higher in Google, a number of different SEO strategies can be employed, and these different approaches should all be pursued in combination for best results. First, you should ensure that there are no immediate severe issues like manual penalties or delisting; these can be checked through tools like Google Safe Browsing and Google Search Console. If nothing requires fixing, then SEO involves improving your site in a number of areas: content quality, technical SEO, and offsite SEO. Content quality involves the material posted on your site: ensuring that it is original rather than copied from elsewhere, valuable and relevant to your visitors, and contains your targeted keywords. Technical SEO involves ensuring that your site is functioning properly: that your pages load quickly and are accessible from different platforms including mobile devices, that your navigation links are functional and not broken, and that Google’s crawlers aren’t blocked by your robots.txt file. Offsite SEO involves acquiring natural backlinks from other high-authority sites relevant to your industry and obtaining positive reviews from customers.
Yes, percentage of visits to the site not by links (typed by hand or from bookmarks
Four of the most effective SEO strategies are keyword research and placement, producing high-quality content, structuring your site architecture well, and building natural backlinks. Keyword research and placement refers to determining what search terms are most used by your target audience and including them on your landing pages, particularly in important positions like page titles and headers. Producing high-quality content refers to creating page content that meets the standards set out in Google’s webmaster guidelines. This includes hosting content that is accurate and useful to searchers while avoiding spammy practices intended to deceive them. Structuring your site architecture refers to having clear, easy-to-use navigation and internal links. This assists Google’s crawler in indexing your pages and makes for a better user experience for customers. Finally, building natural backlinks refers to developing legitimate links to your site from other high-quality sites. Backlinks are an important ranking factor for Google’s algorithm.