Common Mistakes That Result In Google Penalties
April 2, 2025 Kelsey Way Digital Marketing

Common Mistakes That Result In Google Penalties

  • Slow Page-Load Speed
  • Keyword Stuffing
  • Duplicate Content
  • Thin Content
  • Misleading Titles or Meta Descriptions
  • Cloaking
  • Poor Core Web Vitals
  • Intrusive Ads or Pop-Ups

Is your website struggling with any of these issues? If so, you could be at risk of a Google penalty—leading to lower rankings or even removal from search results. Don’t let these mistakes hold you back from your marketing goals.

The ability for your website to show up in a user’s Google search is key to connecting users with your website. For anyone looking to stand out online, showing up in search results is essential—but mistakes are part of the process.

These mistakes are not failures but opportunities to learn, adapt, and optimize your strategy. In this blog, we’ll explore Google penalties, highlight common errors that incur penalties, and show how learning from them is the key to improving visibility and connecting with your audience.

What Are Google Penalties and Why Do They Matter?

Google penalties are sanctions applied to websites that violate Google’s Spam, SEO and quality guidelines. Incurring penalties can cause a site to rank lower in search results or even be removed from search results entirely. Penalties may affect individual URLs, specific user searches or your entire website.

There are two different types of penalties: 

  • Manual penalties: violations of Google’s policies that are imposed by Google employees. To resolve a penalty, websites are required to fix the errors and submit a reconsideration request in your Google Search Console.
  • Algorithmic penalties: caused by changes in Google’s algorithm and require a fix which will lead to an automatic improvement when Googlebot revisits or reindexes your webpages.

Google penalties are split into two categories:

  • Downranking: causes ranking drops and website traffic loss for any search results on the affected website pages. 
  • Delisting: results in the URL or entire website being removed from Google's index. If you think your site has been delisted you can check by searching for your website or page in a Google search. If it does not appear, your site may have been delisted.

It is very important to diligently correct any errors Google indicates could be a penalty. If you claim the errors are fixed before they are, you risk an extended removal from search results or long-term decreases in crawling of your site. This loss of visibility from being either downranked or delisted makes it harder for your target audience to find your website, leading to decreased traffic and reduced conversions. 

How To Check If Google Penalized My Site

Have you noticed your organic results dropping dramatically, or has your site been removed from Google search altogether? You may have received a penalty. 

If Google has penalized your site you will receive a notification in your Google Search Console. To see a detailed report, check the “Manual Actions” page under the “Security & Manual Actions” tab.

screenshot of Google Search Console manual and security actions

Algorithmic penalties are a bit harder to spot. If you’ve already checked for a manual action and are still seeing reduced traffic, you may have been hit with an algorithmic penalty. To confirm this, check for recent website changes, updates in Google’s search algorithm, or technical SEO issues that may have affected your website’s rankings. Blue Compass’ SEO Guide is a helpful resource for diving deeper into SEO best practices to help you avoid algorithmic penalties. 

Common Mistakes That Can Cause Penalties And Decrease Your Google Search Rank

Mistakes in technical SEO, poor-quality content, and website development could lead to penalties or deranking, making your site less visible to users. While not all of these errors will lead to Google penalties, they all will negatively impact the Google search ranking of your site. 

SEO Errors

Several types of SEO errors can trigger manual or algorithmic Google penalties. These errors stem from manipulative practices that seek to manipulate the Google search algorithm to gain more views and higher search results. The following are a couple of mistakes that utilize SEO practices to mislead Google and your audience. 

  • Manipulative Rich Snippets: Providing misleading or inaccurate schema data to influence how results appear.
  • Misleading Titles or Meta Descriptions: Using clickbait or deceptive descriptions that don’t align with the content on your webpage.

Content Manipulation: AI, Duplicate Content and Keyword Stuffing

Google values original, people-first content and has strict spam detection systems that help identify and remove content that violates its spam policies. When sites use spam tactics like cloaking, duplicate, or keyword stuffy content they can expect a reduction in search visibility. Errors in this category are simple to fix; focusing on writing quality and keyword-rich copy for your website will future-proof your site and reduce your chance of being flagged by issues in this category. 

The following issues are common among penalties stemming from poor or manipulative content. 

  • Duplicate Content: Copying content from other sources without proper citations or duplicating it across multiple pages without utilizing proper canonical tagging on your site tells Google that you are not providing helpful people-first content.
  • Cloaking: Presenting different content or URLs to search engine bots than to users. This deceptive technique violates Google's guidelines, as it misleads search engines and can result in penalties.
  • Thin Content: Pages with little to no value, such as those lacking useful or unique information are against Google’s helpful content principles.
  • AI-Generated Content Without Quality Control: Automatically generated content often doesn’t meet Google’s quality or relevance standards.
  • Keyword Stuffing: Manipulating search rankings by unnaturally utilizing keywords violates Google's spam and helpful content standards. 

Development Mistakes And Core Web Vitals

Even minor development mistakes can significantly impact user experience and search engine rankings when building a website. Issues like poor Core Web Vitals, improper use of robots.txt files, slow page-load speeds, and intrusive ads or pop-ups can all result in Google penalties. Understanding these pitfalls and addressing them proactively is key to creating a seamless, user-friendly experience and maintaining visibility in search results.

  • Poor Core Web Vitals:  Core web vitals are a set of 3 metrics that measure how your website performs for users. These metrics measure layout shifts and how long it takes for your site to appear and respond to an action. 
  • Incorrect Use of Robots.txt: Blocking search engines from accessing important pages harms your ability for bots to crawl and index your site.
  • Slow Page-Load Speed: Slow load times can negatively affect user experience and rankings.
  • Intrusive Ads or Pop-Ups: The use of ads or pop-ups disrupts user interaction or makes content hard to access, reducing overall user experience.

Fixing Mistakes And Optimizing For Google Search

The good thing about penalties or downranking is you can use SEO best practices to fix many of these mistakes. Regularly conducting an SEO Audit is a great way to identify SEO errors like HTTP errors, content length, missing or duplicate meta information, and redirect errors. Ensuring that you are using SEO best practices will reduce your chances of incurring Google penalties. 

Optimizing your site for Google Search also means writing quality content that follows E-E-A-T practices. E-E-A-T is a standard of quality Google uses to evaluate content. The acronym, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, is part of Google’s helpful content values. 

Further copy optimization, including investing in keyword research and writing robust webpage content above 600 words, will future-proof your website and reduce your chances of incurring a penalty. 

How To Recover From A Google Penalty

Recovering from a Google Penalty does not have to be scary, all penalties can be resolved by diligently addressing the root of the problem. Checking for Manual Actions in Google Search Console will tell you if it is a sitewide issue or a specific issue. Once you have identified the issue, make the corrections and request a review of the action. Be sure to be diligent in fixing your errors and double-check that everything is corrected before submitting for review.  In your review request, make sure to explain the flagged issue on your site, describe the steps you took to fix the problem and document the outcome of your efforts. Google may take a couple of weeks to review and lift the penalty. This is where being diligent in correcting all errors is important; if Google finds that the fix was not correctly completed, it may cause more issues for your site than the initial Manual Action.

For algorithmic penalties, identify the issue by investigating what type of error is occurring, fix the error, and then, in Search Console, resubmit the URL or site for indexing. This will tell Googlebot to rescan and re-index your site. If the fixes you completed were successful, you should see organic traffic resume and normalize. 

Let Blue Compass Help You Navigate And Avoid Google Penalties

Navigating Google penalties can be challenging, but understanding common mistakes and proactively optimizing your website can help you avoid costly setbacks. Whether it's technical SEO errors, content quality issues, or developmental mistakes, our team of experts can assist with identifying and addressing these issues, ensuring your site remains visible and competitive in Google search rankings.

By making strategic adjustments and prioritizing quality, you can address, correct and avoid penalties, resulting in a stronger, more trustworthy online presence. If we can support you in this endeavor, please contact us. We would love to talk about how we can partner with you.