Google penalties can be manual (applied by human reviewers) or algorithmic (resulting from algorithm updates). Both cause drops in rankings and traffic. To avoid them, follow best practices and stay away from risky shortcuts.
Practices that trigger penalties include:
- Manipulative link building: buying links, private blog networks (PBNs), link exchanges at scale.
- Low-quality content: thin content, duplicate content, automatically generated text with no human review.
- Keyword stuffing: repeating the keyword artificially and excessively throughout the text.
- Cloaking: showing different content to Googlebot than to the user.
- Deceptive redirects: redirecting users to pages different from what they expected.
If you have been penalized, Google Search Console shows pending manual actions. For algorithmic penalties, diagnosis is more complex and usually requires a professional audit.