Imagine how frustrating it would be to open your Google Analytics dashboard tomorrow and notice the website traffic is flatline. That’s not so surprising!

In this fast-paced digital era, while everyone is trying hard to keep themselves ahead from others, it is common to see the often decrease in your website traffic especially when you are not following Google Algorithms. Usually, it happens, when search engine giant slaps your site with a penalty and badly affects the ranking of your site.

Also read: Google’s AMP for Email: Everything You Need to Know About It

Everyone is afraid of Google’s penalties. If you are also thinking that Google Penalties only happen when Google comes up with the new algorithms, then you are wrong. There are a lot of sites facing Google penalties even though there is no major change in the algorithm. You know why? Most sites are following spammy practices like buying links, using duplicate content, scraping content, stuffing too many keywords and so on.

No matter, what’s your business nature and what type of website you have, there is always a scope of being penalized when Google updates its algorithm. Even, we all have heard about the stories that how a recognized website has dropped in traffic due to simple SEO updates. Well, it’s the worst nightmare of every website’s owner. Your all hard work put into a website can be easily accounted for nothing if you have not taken the Google rules seriously.

There are many reasons why your website is performing terribly low or not showing the results. Don’t worry, you can easily protect your site even from the Google SEO updates and penalties.

Here are the ways to safeguard your website from Google SEO Updates:

Never Use Poor Quality or Duplicate Content

Google hates such websites that have poor or thin content. Your website content will be marked as low-quality content if you are using automatically generated content, thin affiliate pages, doorway pages, copying content from other resources, using a content spinner or post-low-quality guest post. You may need to bear heavy penalties in terms of traffic that the website could have generated, organically.

Generally speaking, never attempt to copy content at all, otherwise, you will be easily subject to penalized. If you are using any content source, then make sure you reference the source in the article, so Google and other search engines know that you recognize that some of the content is not unique.

Don’t Buy or Sell Links

While it is always an easy and simple way to buy links from other websites targeting your website or vice versa, but it can drastically affect the ranking of your website the moment Google comes up with the updates. Google works on smart strategies pretty much aware of what is a genuine link and which one is purchased link.

Secondly buying or selling links does not add any value to your content, because they are typically unrelated and not even gain many clicks.

Fight Negative SEO

Your competitors can hurt your SEO efforts and can even get you penalized by Google by doing negative SEO on your site. The most common practice of negative SEO is to link a lot of spammy sites to you. And if Google finds a spammy site linking to you, it might think of your site is also a low-quality or poor performing site. This will not only affect your website ranking but also increase the risk of penalties.

So if you notice any spammy sites linking to you, it is an alarming time to disavow those links now. Create a simple text file will all the spammy incoming links and then upload it using the Google disavow links tool page.

Watch Guest Blogging on your Website and Others

Guest posting is a popular practice among SEO experts for the do-follow internal linking purpose but the problem is as same as with buying and selling the links. If you want to protect your site from Google penalties, then limit guest blogging. The unrelated guest posts can harm your website ranking and drag down instead providing any aid to your website.

Watch Your Site From Hacking

Your site can also face a Google penalty if it got hacked. While the only moto of hacking your site is to stuff your website with lots of spammy backlinks that ultimately triggered the Google penalty. This will drop your website traffic and a site got completely wiped out of Google’s index. Getting hacked is the worst reason for facing google penalties as it is truly not your fault. The best solution is to protect your site to avoid such Google Fines.

Final Words

Facing the Google penalities is always scary, but you can’t live with the fear of this costly penalties when Google comes up with the latest algorithms. Build your website with honest practices and you definitely receive a good result. You can easily decrease the chance of getting penalized by simply keeping these points in mind.

You can hire a reputed digital marketing company that can easily reevaluate your site and keep these common issues at the bay. With every Google update, they will assure that your site will remain safe and avoid drops in website traffic.