Why is your website penalised

Over the years, the search engine giant Google has changed its website ranking algorithm significantly and this change has made searches better terms of quality and relevance. The conventional SEO has become obsolete and the new ranking factors still remain a mystery to most of us. Most SEO professionals don’t know the exact recipe for successful SEO but they have managed to find out what is required to stay ahead in the SEO game. Here is a list of SEO processes that Google and all other search engines have boycotted and you must not use them or else you will be penalised.

Duplicate content /poor content

Duplicate content or copied content is the number one reason why websites are penalised. Content is like food for search engines. If your content is not of good quality, doesn’t explain what you do, doesn’t help users with their queries, and has been copied from another website or from multiple websites, Search engine spiders will not rank your website. Most website owners hire external agencies to write content. Agencies can make your work a lot easier but some of them might not be genuine agencies and they may cheat you as well. Use a plagiarism checker to find out if the content they have provided is unique enough to be used. Unique, customised and readable content with appropriate use of keywords is what search engines look for and certainly, this isn’t too much to expect.

Website speed

Users these days do not have the patience to wait for a website to load, which means that if your website is a slow loading website, it will fail to get sufficient traffic. Slow loading websites record a poor user-experience. Search engines give a lot of importance to user-experience and if yours doesn’t impress clients, it will not be ranked well and it could be penalised as well. Therefore, make sure your website loads quickly. Also, hire a reputed website hosting company to make sure there is minimum possible downtime. Turnkey Media offers hosting with a 99.99% uptime guarantee.

Over-optimisation

Many times, we fail to differentiate between genuine optimisation and over-optimisation. You need to optimise (i.e. tag) your website (content, images, URLs, etc.) so that search engines can rank you for the right searches. However, the optimisation has to be relevant. Many SEO companies are still following outdated SEO practices where they stuff keywords into websites irrelevantly which neither pleases the search engines nor the visitors. Be genuine while optimising your website.

Non-responsive to mobile devices

If your website is not responsive towards various screens, i.e. if it doesn’t load seamlessly on all mobiles and tablets then it could get de-indexed by Google. User-friendliness is a major factor that search engines consider for rankings websites. If your website is not mobile responsive, it is not user-friendly, especially for mobile users. Contact Turnkey Media today to get a completely responsive website at an unbelievable price.

High bounce rates

Bounce rate indicates the percentage of people that leave your website within a few seconds of visiting it. High bounce rate means a low engagement rate. If your website’s home page is too heavy, too busy, too complicated, too self-promotional, or looks irrelevant, your visitors will bounce away from it as soon as they land. Search engines treat such websites as spam and often penalise them.

Hacked or malware infected websites

If your website is hacked or malware infected, your website will be penalised. Websites that are unsafe for visitors will be penalised as it is the responsibility of search engines to protect their users from those dangers. If your website has been infected, contact your website hosting company to get it fixed before it gets de-indexed. Contact Turnkey Media today to find out if your website is safe to operate.

The recipe of owning a successful website has been the same for decades: quality content, adhering to webmaster guidelines, following the SEO changes, avoiding blacklisted SEO strategies, and being friendly with your visitors. Fortunately, this isn’t too difficult to get right. If you think you have been penalised, contact us for a thorough evaluation of your website.