Complete Google Penalties Guide [Fixes Included]

Google penalties can be very scary.

Losing your listing overnight on the search engine results page, along with your traffic and revenue can be devastating.

It’s not just the dreaded Google manual penalties you need to look out for though: algorithm updates can slash your website’s metrics overnight as well.

That’s why today we’re going to explain in detail how these penalties work and how you can recover from them as soon as possible.
Let’s start!

Types of Google Penalties

As we mentioned before, Manual Google Penalties and Algorithm Penalties (also known as Algorithm Filters) are two completely different things, and each case requires different remediation approaches.

Allow us to elaborate.

Google Manual Penalties

These penalties can affect your entire website, or certain sections/pages.

Most of these penalties are derived from abusive optimization (over the top keyword stuffing, really thin and spammy content, hidden text, etc.) or from buying crappy, low budget links.

Sadly a common occurrence when you shop at places such as Fiverr, sketchy forums, and other freelancing platforms).

In fact, certain niches such as pharma & gambling are so competitive, that these toxic links are purchased as part of “negative SEO attacks”.

These are usually launched to spring Google into manually penalizing their competitor’s website.

Negative SEO attacks are not as common in most niches since there’s not as much money involved and the algorithms that rule said niches are not as punishing or easy to trigger.

Either way, this is why you should only buy high quality PBN links from proven professionals. Subpar, toxic links from inexperienced SEOs are not worth the trouble or money.

Thankfully, these manual penalties can be lifted (and we’ll show you how), but there’s a particularly revealing quote from John Mueller, a Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst we’ve featured in other articles: