Why was the website penalized? What should I do if my website is punished?

A few days ago, I saw someone asking in the group that a certain website had been punished. Can everyone help me find out what caused it? I myself have also encountered this situation when I was doing website SEO optimization in my company. It is still fresh in my memory. In view of this, I (Dongguan SEO Feng Chao) plan to write an article about why the website was punished? What should I do if my website is punished? I hope this article can help everyone.

Why was the website penalized? What should I do if my website is punished?
First of all, if the punished website is indeed a spam website, it is normal to be punished by Baidu. Only by building a good website that is beneficial to users can the fundamental problem be solved. A website whose content is completely reprinted and plagiarized, and whose external links are all spam links from blogs and forums, will hardly have a good ranking and is not worth the time and effort.

If your website is not a spam website but is punished by Baidu, you can try the following methods.

1. Check the robots.txt file

This is a seemingly impossible but often occurring reason for a website to be penalized, especially when the website is completely deleted, so you should check the robots file carefully. Not only do you need to check the code manually, but you also need to use GOOGLE website tools to verify whether there are any errors, which would prohibit the search engine from including certain directories and pages.

2. Check other websites on the server

Although search engines generally do not punish other websites on the server just because there are other cheating websites on the server used by the webmaster, there are now a huge number of spam and cheating websites. If there happens to be a webmaster with a large number of spam websites using the same server as you, and most of the websites on the server are cheating and punished, then your website may also be affected. Use this tool to see what other sites are on the server:
http://whois.webhosting.info/
Randomly select a part and check the inclusion and main keyword ranking. If many websites have problems, then change the hosting provider as soon as possible.

3. Check if the website uses redirection

In addition to 301 redirects, other Meta updates and JS redirects may be suspected of cheating, even if the webmaster's original intention and the purpose he wants to achieve have nothing to do with SEO cheating. If there are a large number of redirects on the website, delete them as soon as possible. In fact, a properly designed website rarely needs to use redirects at all.

4. Check the Mete code of the page

Check whether there is noindex in the Meta part of the page; like the robots file, this is a mistake that seems unlikely to happen, but some people actually make it. It could be added by someone from other departments of the company, or by a competitor who hacked into the website, or it could be added during website testing and forgotten to be deleted when the website is officially launched.
5. Thoroughly check whether the website is over-optimized

Check the page to see if there is any suspicion of keyword stuffing? Do you add internal links just for the sake of adding internal links? Is the anchor text too focused? Does the footer contain links and text that are meaningless to users and are only intended for search engines? Where there is over-optimization, be determined to "de-optimize" (reduce optimization). The overall decline of many keywords is caused by over-optimization. Mastering the degree of optimization is a must for qualified SEO personnel to experience personally.

6. Be patient and don’t act rashly

If you are sure that your website has not cheated and you encounter a drop in ranking, remember not to act rashly and do not rush to modify the website. Observe for a few days or even weeks first. A drop in ranking is not necessarily a problem with your website. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms. Sometimes they launch a new algorithm, and monitoring data shows that the new algorithm is not effective, so they are changed back after a few days.
7. Check the server header information

Although users can see no problems when visiting the website and the pages are displayed normally, there may be problems with the header information returned by the server when the search engine accesses it. The editor has encountered a friend's website before. There was no problem at all when visiting it, but when checking it with the server header information checking tool, all the returned codes were 404, or there was no response at all.

8. Check and delete suspicious links

Suspicious links include: a large number of friendly link exchanges, internal links that appear in the footer only for search engines, buying and selling links, links to bad neighbors, a large number of cross-links to one's own website, and export links that are irrelevant to the website's subject content.

These links may not seem to be serious cheating, but when combined with other suspected cheating techniques, the website's cheating score may reach the penalty threshold.

9. Check for duplicate content

This includes the same content on different URLs on the website itself, as well as the same content on other websites. That is, it may be duplicate content caused by reprinting or plagiarism, or it may be duplicate content caused by technical reasons. If a website mainly reprints and plagiarizes from the very beginning, this punishment is justified. Strengthening original content is an essential process for the start of a website.

10. Know when to give up

If a website is severely punished by search engines, the possibility of recovery is not high. Not to mention that webmasters often cannot figure out why they were punished, so they cannot completely correct it. Even if they know why they were punished and all the cheating content is clear, they may not be forgiven by the search engine. Sometimes it takes two or three years for a website's ranking to recover, and sometimes there is no chance of recovery at all. Therefore, many times it is better to give up and start a new website than to try to recover.