Should You Worry About Google Penalties?

If you’re already blogging you might have heard some noise about more recent changes to Google algorithms that ended up in a reduction of traffic to many blogs. Because of that there’s been a major railing against Google and its algorithms because what they told the public about these changes doesn’t seem to make much sense.

TODA MULHER MERECE UMA FLOR - AO DIA INTERNACIONAL DA MULHER...Every Woman Deserves a Flower - To International Women's Day
Jônatas Cunha via Compfight

I’m not going to get into all of that here. Instead, I’m going to answer the question as to whether or not you should let something like that get you worried, or make you hesitant to keep doing what you’ve been doing with your blog.

In one word, no. You should keep on writing and doing just what it is you’ve always done with your blog, unless you’ve been doing sneaky things. However, I’m going to own up to the fact that with this last update many of my blogs have taken a hit. I’m not really sure why because I haven’t engaged in any of the things Google said we shouldn’t be doing. Knowing something about SEO and the rest, you’d think that if I knew I hadn’t done any of that stuff and yet was still having issues (this is actually only the 2nd time that any of my sites have suffered traffic issues, though one of them did hurt my income a lot), that I’d be saying yes.

But I’m not, and I’m going to give you 3 reasons why.

One, because it’s hard to determine just what Google did, or what you might have done if you haven’t done any of the bad stuff. Even though they said what they did was an adjustment rather than a penalty, it affects us just the same. In their terms, a penalty means they manually did something to your blog or website because you were violating some terms, whereas an adjustment goes system wide. No matter; they can give you reasons for things they do but in the long run the explanations are meaningless.

Two, because when all is said and done what Google and other search engines value more than anything else is new content, and original content at that. Even if you took a hit with one of their changes you’re probably still ahead of a lot of other people, many of whom have hired companies to send letters to folks like me asking us to remove links that they paid someone to leave on our blogs in the first place. By adding new content on a regular basis they’ll continue stopping by and taking a look. Most of us probably aren’t doing a thing wrong or sneaky and thus we can believe that Google isn’t targeting us specifically, even if we take a hit.

Three, there’s no guarantee that your blog or website will be hit. I have 4 blogs, and three of them have been affected. Only two of my websites have been hit; no idea why since I follow the same formula across the board. Sure, it affects traffic to a degree, but what’s strange is that when I look at Google Analytics and compare what’s going on now to last year the traffic numbers are the same; go figure. That’s what I mean about analytics and such; it’s just too convoluted to deal with.

I’m still adding new content, and by building up the blogs for my consistent visitors, I don’t depend as much on search traffic for the blogs that suffered some. By doing more with social media and promotion I should be able to overcome the loss of potential traffic from search engines; this is what we all should be shooting for.

So just keep writing and pushing forward; those who like what you write will find you.
 

15 thoughts on “Should You Worry About Google Penalties?”

  1. Great post Mitch. I too have several blogs, but I have not seen any major changes in traffic…not getting that much in the first place.

    I just write what I feel and never worry about SEO. I think SEO is overrated in the first place.

    1. Paul, SEO isn’t really overrated in general but there are some folks who give tips that are way overrated. For instance, people like pulling out one article on their blog that they optimized to make it on the first page of Google. Wait about 3 months and the majority of those articles are long gone, not because their content was bad but because other people have written on the same type of thing and it’s newer content, which Google likes even more. At the same time, I have an article that’s still in the top 10 about 10 years later on a specific business topic because I optimized it to be there, though it’s not on a blog. So it can work, but for the most part it’s more important to be conversational.

  2. I stopped worrying about Google a long time ago Mitch. I don’t even bother with placing their adsense ads on most of my blogs.

    My traffic seems to be OK but then maybe the Big G hasn’t made it as far as web masters from Down Under

    1. Pete, you never know about Google that’s for sure. I’ve got way more things to worry about that these penalties, but I also don’t go out of my way to antagonize them like John Chow did years ago. Course they eventually made nice with each other because it turned out he really didn’t need them; strange, but around the time they made up is when I stopped visiting his site. I wonder what that says about me. lol

  3. Hi Mitch,

    Google always comes up with changes, you rightly said as long as we are not indulging in any sneaky things and we are coming with new and original articles, we can continue doing the same thing.

    As long as it is not manually hit, we are on much safer side.

    Hope you are doing great. Take care and stay awesome.

    1. Thanks Rohan. Yeah, being sneaky can earn some quick dollars but gets people shut down eventually and that costs more than any potential benefit. Doing what one feels is right and knows is right… always a better way to live. Good luck in 2015.

  4. Nice post Mitch! This is the most dangerous thing which seems in blogging and especially in Link building strategies. Well, nice post..

  5. Wow, its a relief to know that there are sites that are not affected in the new Google algorithm. As I searched for the the effects of these new algorithm, all I’ve hear are big changes on their websites. Right now my website is not yet hit by Google’s new algorithm, but Mitch is there a possibility that Google is not yet done crawling all the websites that’s why nothing change in the traffic of your 2 websites?

    1. Google is never done Edward, as I mentioned on this post. I wasn’t affected much by the others but this last one has had some effect. Still, I plow away.

  6. Yes i am worry about google penalties therefore i make my original content and even create backlinks manually. I don’t want any kind of trouble from google because It is the main source to get high traffic. I also did tier link building which is also safe from google penalty. Your tips are awesome and now removed my many problems and fear towards google algos.

  7. Hi Mitchell,
    You have written this article beautifully, We should aware about Google penalties because this is the main source of traffic.
    Yes, I worry for this!

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