How to Avoid Google Penalties on Your Site & Youtube Channel

Getting penalized by Google is a real pain for every blogger. No matter how much you invested in your content, imagine if you received a Google penalty. That would be frustrating, wouldn’t it?   However, despite the content you have created, on the whole, you should be blamed since it’s only because you have engaged in illegal tactics against Google, the most popular search engine. Therefore, it makes sense that you would have been penalized by Google.

It is the responsibility of every blogger to adhere to Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines. When we fail to comply with these terms, we will face Google penalties. The change wouldn’t be cheap, and it would mean losing a lot of traffic, revenue, and everything that kept us in business. Certainly, you would not want to see that happen. I have explained enough here to help you avoid Google penalties on your site and YouTube channel here.

What is a Google Penalty?

Google penalty is an action taken by Google as a punishment on a website for not sticking to its guidelines. Penalty results in your pages not being indexed in SERP, loss of traffic, and loss of revenue.

There are two types of Google penalties : 

• Manual Penalties
• Algorithmic Penalties

Manual Penalties: In simple words, it is a penalty given by the real human reviewer who evaluates our entire blog. If they find out one of our pages went against their guidelines and in case you used black hat SEO. They end up penalizing your website.

Algorithmic Penalties: These penalties are automatically enforced by the google algorithm. It’s a bot that reviews and scans every blog created on google. Whenever it finds out fraud sites, illegal links, or bad tactics that are going against their guidelines. They’ll give an algorithmic penalty.

Also, the algorithmic penalty can be divided into two parts :

• Panda
• Penguin

Panda: Google updated its system and introduced Panda in February 2011. Panda is responsible for websites that have poor quality or duplicate content and websites that fail to provide proper content.

Penguin: On the other hand, while panda focuses on poor quality content. Penguin update which was introduced in April 2012 monitors the internal part of your blog. It looks for deceptive links, spam, and paid external links.

Ways to Avoid Google Penalties:

1. Never Buy Links

The first step to avoiding the Google penalty is never buying links to your blog. That’s one of the black hat SEO techniques that would harm your entire website. Google bot ‘ Penguin’ tends to find you and take action against your site. You may buy links from several sites like Fiverr and Upwork. But believe me, those links will definitely besmirch your SEO value and you end up getting a penalty from google. There are proper natural ways for link building. With that, you could get high-quality links and grow your page authority accordingly.

2. Inorganic link Building

Inorganic link building is something new bloggers do for the sake of backlinks. Mostly on Facebook or Twitter, bloggers exchange links with other bloggers. When you’re doing it, some authors aren’t aware if it’s harming their page authority or SEO value. But sadly, it does in fact ruin to an extent.

Google is always aware of its system, they know what is natural or unnatural. Once google found out that it is a planned link building. There’s a probability that you will get google penalty. However, there’s a certain limit for a link exchange, if you exceed the limit, now that’s a risk. Regardless, There are a lot of natural ways to build quality links

So here are some best ways :

• Guest Posting
• Broken Link Building
• Commenting ( for a limit )
• Social bookmarking
• Forum Links

Also, if you’re getting inbound links from fraud, illegal and deceptive sites. Google penguin will automatically send a illegal claim against you. So it’s better to stay away from those tactics and focus on quality link building.

Read: Visual Link Building and How it Grows Your Website Traffic

3. Moderate Spam Comments

You must have seen spam comments rolling under your article so many times. Yeah, it does annoy us sometimes.

There are few users who stumble on similar niche blogs and spam on comment sections for their link building. They usually enter their URL at the end of their comment. Those are typically spam comments.

Because of this reason, it’s wise for you to moderate your blog comments if you’re really trying to avoid Google penalties. If necessary, you can install the Akismet WordPress plugin, which helps to eliminate spam comments from your blog. However, it cannot guarantee effective spam-free blogging. But it certainly helps.

 4. Never Create Shallow and Low-Quality Content

The sole aim of google is to provide insightful information to the users and fulfill their purpose. Whenever your site fails to accomplish the aim,  There’s a bot called Panda in a google search engine that will give you a penalty if you create shallow and low-quality content.

Just because you’re getting quality links from good websites doesn’t mean you don’t necessarily have to sketch good content. Mark it, your content always matters. If it doesn’t provide value to the readers. Your backlinks aren’t worth a damn.

Moreover, some bloggers create duplicate content just to fill the pages. Also, that’s one of the bad SEO mistakes. It not only hurts the website authority rankings. But, also contributes to a panda penalty from google as well.

Even if you plagiarise content from other sources as your own. Don’t ever dare to do this. There will be bad repercussions for sure. Create only unique content that google always seeks and wants to index for.

Here’s how to delete trash pages from google index :

• Go to your Google Search Console account
• In the left toolbar under the “ Index ” section, you can find “Removals”
• Add the page’s URL on the removal request
• Google will remove within several hours

Read: How to Find Blog Post Ideas and Topics

5. Don’t Stuff Keyword Too Much and Annoy Readers

Overusing a specific keyword will surely hurt your SEO rankings. There are some authors who overstuff the same keyword for the sake of improving on-page SEO. Apparently, It doesn’t work that way. Yes, keywords play an important role in SEO but, to a certain limit. If it surpasses, the readers easily get annoyed by the way you used the keyword. It looks unnatural, overused, and gets repetitive for the users, consequently you will get a low bounce rate.

I’ve also seen several articles in which they repeated the same keyword that is out of context and intentionally trying to fill the keyword. It was my personal experience which was annoyed me. In fact, it also annoys the google algorithm, and eventually, those sites end up getting a penalty.

So, that’s why I recommend you, is just write for the readers, not the search engine. It hurts the SEO and while also you lose the readers. The sole purpose of a website is to give valuable information to the users. Not to overstuff the keyword.

6. Original Content

Original content is always king and will always win. Readers and viewers will embrace you if you provide them unique high-quality content. They’ll always cling to your articles and videos if you keep adding value to your content. As long as you’re providing a good user experience, users will remain on your blog. As a result, your site rankings will be increased, can get approved for google adsense, and also gain traffic along with a good reputation.

However, there might be some situations when your content gets old sooner or later and requires to be updated. In that case, do not ever hesitate to update the old articles and increase your rankings. Because I’m quite sure, you must have written average articles in the beginning and so do i. I highly suggest you do the same as it helps you to build more internal links, increases more value, proper usage of keyword, and let google know that you have good content to look at.

Just the same,  you provide original content to google, and google increases your website ranking as a reciprocation.

7. Never Take Copyrighted Content

Even if it’s a website or youtube, you’re highly restricted to take content from other channels. It’s one of the most important guidelines on youtube.

Whenever you upload copyright-protected material on your channel. It’s a youtube thing that you will get a strike for your video within few seconds. You may think you can trick the youtube and get the views to your replicated video. But, since you’re not the owner of the material and you’re unauthorized. It’s a sure thing you will be penalized on youtube and also blogging .

Being said that, sometimes you may want to use a clip of other videos for fair purpose. In those cases, here’s what youtube had to say

“In the United States, works of commentary, criticism, research, teaching, or news reporting might be considered fair use. Some other countries have a similar idea called fair dealing that may work differently.”

You can use a few clips of other videos incase of fair purpose. Go through this page and get a fair use disclaimer to insert on your video description to avoid the Google penalty. But If you still get strikes, there’s no option left except to put your video under Creative Common License.

8. Harmful, Sensitive and Inappropriate Content

Youtube doesn’t want your videos to encourage people to do illegal activities, risky activities, and doesn’t want to get disturbed by your sensitive material. Youtube always protect videos from harmful and inappropriate content. If you did that so, you will most likely be penalized by youtube.

Here’s what youtube doesn’t encourage:

• Dangerous or threatening pranks
• Instructions to kill or harm
• Illegal Hacking
• Violent Events
• Instructional theft or cheating
• Bypassing payment to use premium apps
• Promoting Dangerous remedies
• Hard drug use
• Age-restricted content

If you ever upload a video on the above topics, your video will be banned from youtube.

9. Don’t Be an Imposter, Get banned

Being an imposter in youtube means being represented as someone else even though you’re not. You can’t impersonate another channel and get subscribers as if people are subscribing original channel. Youtube doesn’t allow and will straightly ban your channel once you were found.

10. Are you Using Bots for Fake Engagement?

There are some creators out there who have used bots to increase their subscriber numbers, likes, and views, and fake engagement on their channel.

Google only allows organic but, not unethical. It is one of the policies enforced by youtube on every content creator. Even it’s the same case with blogging, you can’t always manipulate and win the views. At the last, you know you will be removed permanently from youtube for going against their policies.

If you’re doing this :

• Linking to artificial traffic booster
• Purchasing views from a third party
• Promoting third-party view count
• Linking to deceptive and illegal sites

You will be banned from google. The way termination works on youtube is, once you got 3 strikes on your channel. Youtube will permanently delete your account and you can no longer upload videos on the channel.

So, here’s how you can avoid Google penalties on blogs and YouTube. Perhaps you’re wondering how to check if your site or channel has been penalized by Google.

How to Check If Your Site or Channel has been penalized by Google :

• Go to your Google Search Console account
• In the left toolbar under “ Security & Manual Actions
• You can check if you’re site is penalized. If you see “ No Issues Detected” You’re safe.

On Youtube :

• Navigate to your studio page
• In the left toolbar, open “ Settings”
• Select Channel – Feature Eligibility
• Under “Default Features” it tells you if you are free from strikes.
• In case you got a strike, just remove the disputed video. The strike will expire after 90 days.
• If your situation was different and you didn’t get zero strikes.
• Put a smile on your face.

Read more on :

• 5 Quick Ways To Get Youtube Subscribers
• Using Google Search Console to Increase Traffic on Your Blog
• How to Make Your Blog Profitable with 6 Tactics
• 8 Stupid Mistakes Bloggers Should Avoid in 2021