Search spam and penalties

Recommended

• Read and answer a manual action

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  Read the Manual actions report in Search Console every month and after any fall in traffic. Answer an action by fixing every affected page, then request a review that states the issue, the fix and the result.

Avoid

• Repeating keywords to rank

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  Filling a page, title, alt text, link text or description with repeated keywords, place names or numbers to rank. Examples are a block of city names, a list of phone numbers or one phrase repeated in every sentence.

• Hiding text or links from visitors

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  Text or links placed for search engines that visitors cannot see. Examples are text in the background colour, text behind an image or off screen, text of zero size, and a link on one character.

• Showing crawlers a different page

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  Serving search engine crawlers different content from what visitors get, or redirecting visitors to a page the crawler never saw. Both are cloaking and sneaky redirects.

• Near-identical pages made to catch searches

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  Many pages or sites made to rank for similar searches that all send visitors to the same place. The common form is one page per city with only the place name changed.

• Publishing pages at scale without value

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  Making many pages mainly to rank, by AI, templates, scraping or rewording, without adding value for readers. This includes mass AI-written articles that nobody checked.

• Affiliate pages with nothing of your own

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  Affiliate pages that copy the merchant's product text and add nothing of your own. Examples are product lists from a feed and reviews of things you never used.

• Renting your site's reputation to others

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  Hosting another company's content on your site mainly so it ranks on your site's standing. Examples are a coupon, casino or loan section run by a third party on a site about something else.

• Buying an expired domain for its old standing

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  Buying an expired domain and filling it with unrelated content to use its old reputation. Examples are affiliate pages on a former charity's domain or casino pages on a former school's domain.

• Structured data that misleads

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  Structured data that says something visitors cannot see on the page. Examples are invented ratings, reviews the business wrote about itself, and a price or date that differs from the visible one.