There’s absolutely no one in this world who dreams of getting his or her site penalized or suspended. However, no matter how careful you are, it still happens. There are many reasons why a site would get penalized. It happens mainly when you break the standards and guidelines through either black-hat techniques, carelessness and worse – through honest SEO mistakes. Sometimes, sites who follow the best practices where SEO is concerned still manage to get themselves penalize. It can come as a surprise to everyone. Like, how in the world did that happen?

1. Business Relationship From LinksIt is common for businesses to create relationships with other business in order to flourish and expand their scope. One way businesses strengthen relationships is by creating links to one another in order to help improve each other’s click-through traffic. Trading links can be done with the purest intentions but at times, it can hurt both businesses. It does not happen all the time, but if you are involved in a link-leveraged business relationship, a penalty just might surprise you when you least expect it to. Like you can agree to add a footer link for your business partner in exchange for product discounts. This in itself is not a bad thing. However, if your site is pretty huge with many pages and you add the link (according to your agreement) to every page, that would generate too many links that would cause you to be penalized manually. An extremely high number of links from a single site can get you penalized, especially if all those links are footer links.Footer links should be avoided when it comes to SEO. Having those on your site appears negligent and could really cause you trouble. Swapping links is even worse unless you make it as carefully and as naturally as possible. Swapping footer links could be the worst mistake you could ever make for your site and your business.
2. Affiliate ProgramsWhen you sign up for affiliate programs, you can only expect either of the two results: one is for the improvement of your SEO campaign and the second is the death of your SEO campaign. This is why affiliate programs are considered a gray area for SEO. There are many Orange County SEO company experts who still don’t know how to deal with affiliate programs properly.We cannot deny the fact that affiliate relationships online mean big business. They’re mostly spam-free so it’s easy to join this type of programs without worrying about getting penalized. However, there are instances when affiliate deals can work against you. For instance, an affiliate program that is implemented too quickly, without providing ample information to the affiliates can cause problems. When the affiliates do not implement the links properly, your site can get flagged and even penalized. When the ‘affiliates’ posting your links have sites with no authority whatsoever, the links can be seen as junk and could lead to your site’s failure.
3. Influencer OutreachThere’s no denying the fact that influencers can do wonders for your business. SEO wise, influencers can help boost your SEO strategies. What you need to do if you were to pursue influencer outreach, is to find the top influencers in your niche, reach out to them, get links, get exposure and enjoy the benefits.However, if the outreach will aim for a low-authority niche, the backlinks from the influencer outreach can compromise the website. Usually, the link from the influencer’s site will not enhance your Search Engine Optimization but could do the opposite. If you choose a low-authority niche in your influencer outreach, you should ask the influencers to use ‘no follow’ links. You can provide them with the code for that that they can include in their articles. You can also direct the audience to a specific page for the outreach campaign to avoid getting penalized.
4. Guest BloggingGuest blogging is an awesome option for your SEO content creation campaign if you do it properly. This might be something that you are planning to apply to your campaign, or it could be something you are already doing, without knowing that it could get you penalized. Yes, it’s an awesome thing, but if you don’t do it right, it isn’t without its dangers. The danger involved in guest blogging is something that you don’t expect. It also has to do with the niche that you are targeting, not guest blogging itself.Google announced that guest blogging is now used mainly for link building and many of these guest posts include spam. Of course, this does not include high-quality multi-author blogs. The problem is the niche. Not everyone is fortunate enough to find a legitimate niche and a high-authority site to boot for their guest posting. If you’re unfortunate, you could get your site penalized, depending on the niche and the site you work with. If both are questionable, the link juice you get from guest blogging will likely impact your SEO campaign negatively. It could even get you penalized for real.Be careful where you guest blog, that’s all. There shouldn’t be a problem if you choose a safe niche.

Now that you know all about the honest mistakes that could get your site penalized, you’re probably not going to make these ‘honest mistakes’. If you insist to do so, it won’t be an honest anymore.

If after reading this article you realize that you have been making them all along, you are probably on the verge of getting penalized. You need to stop making these mistakes, correct them and move forward.

Of course, correcting such mistakes won’t be easy. No matter how much you beg Google, the damage won’t be reversed overnight. You can even tell them a sob story but it will never work. You can try all. If you want more information on our Orange County SEO pricing, give us a call.