Everyone who has ever even tangentially touched an SEO effort always has a nagging fear of a Googe penalty that could blow up their entire site. Having experienced a devastating traffic loss as a result of a Google update, I can relate to the fear but still think it is misplaced in 2023.
In the early days of search, the search quality team at Google functioned like the morality police of the Internet always on the lookout for websites breaking the rules of search, and when they caught them they nuked the sites through individualized penalties. Some of these penalties would push an entire site down by hundreds of positions and have years attached to the penalty.
To be fair to Google and the search quality team, the penalties were probably well deserved and it was penalties like these that taught the citizens of the Internet to behave a bit better when it came to SEO strategies. However, like everything in tech manual efforts don’t scale very well.
Google penalties of 2023
The Google of today does not need these manual penalties as the many algorithms that underpin Google search act in real-time to keep the balance of search. Many of the loopholes that used to work simply don’t work anymore and are ignored. The loopholes that websites do discover will work for a short time and then when the loophole is closed, the site just loses the advantages they had from the loophole.
There is little need for Google to levy an extra penalty beyond removing that advantage unless it’s a case where the website was so egregious in their SEO manipulation that Google needs to remove them from the index. For most of these instances, the websites are well aware that they are playing with fire and when that fire is extinguished they just move to the next site.
Google and IRS audits
I think a good parallel to this is to think of a Google penalty like an IRS audit. When most people think of an IRS audit, they envision being dragged in front of an IRS bureaucrat with boxes of documents to defend their tax practices. In reality the vast majority of IRS audits are what they call “correspondence audits.”
These are audits that are mostly sent out on automated basis by IRS when something in a tax return needs clarification by the taxpayer. The taxpayer is given a specific window of time to respond to the letter with a defense or a payment if they can’t defend what is in the return. These audits are designed to have the lowest overhead on the IRS (!) while maximizing their tax revenue.
While most people justifiably fear an audit, more than likely an audit of their return would be a correspondence audit which of course is not desired or fun, but light years better than an in-person audit.
Google penalties are the same. The Google algorithms are constantly on the lookout for sites that take advantage of search best practices and when they catch them, it just balances the ledger and brings the website back to where it should have been without that advantage. Major penalties absolutely do exist but those are reserved for the extreme outliers and the likelihood of experiencing one of those are very small.
TL;DR: The concept of a Google penalties is vastly overblown and most websites have nothing to fear if they are mostly following the rules.