Samantha Odo
Table of Contents
Number of clicks and PPC Cost
One way a Google penalty can affect your PPC efforts is that it starts driving up the number of clicks and cost of your PPC ads. When your site is no longer ranking as high on Google, you may find your ads targeted at keywords that you used to rank organically for, are getting more clicks, as users find your ad online but no longer see your organic search results.
Google Penalties Are Bad for Business
They mean either your keyword rankings have dropped or your site is no longer visible in searches. You may have just been trying to improve your site’s rankings and get a penalty, and that is not easy to recover from. If you don’t want to get penalized, you need to avoid too much duplicate content and low-quality content, make sure there are no viruses, adware, or spyware, and also avoid deceptive redirects. Be careful not to have pages with too many irrelevant keywords, avoid hidden links or text, and avoid cloaking.
PPC is not affected by Google penalties because visitors are tied to how much you spend and the search engine algorithm is not such a big factor. With PPC you do not only use Google. You also have Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads, and even Bing/Yahoo are great, and cheaper, for everything from banner ads to text ads. PPC can help to recover from Google penalties. as they can lead to more clicks, mentions, increased links, and sharing on social media and elsewhere.
Jenny Abouobaia
Lee Goldberg
Your Ranking May Fall or Disappear
When a site is penalized, rankings generally fall or disappear altogether, putting more pressure on your paid media campaigns to drive the traffic that organic once did. This means that budgets will generally need to go up, and you’ll need to bid more aggressively on non-branded terms that you once ranked for organically to get the same level of traffic as you did before being penalized.
Absence of Organic Traffic
While the goal is to not get penalized in the first place, sometimes it does happen. In those few cases where we’ve seen or suspected a penalty, we usually notice a loss of organic traffic proportionate to the increase we saw when we added PPC. Running PPC typically leads to at least a nominal increase in organic traffic, so we expect to see some uptick. However, in instances of a penalized site, we’ll notice that PPC has almost no effect on organic traffic. It’s not necessarily a loss of existing traffic, but an absence of that expected organic bump.
Justin Ober
Taras Nazarov
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Website Will Not Appear on SERP
Google penalties will affect your organic performance and won’t have any direct impact on your PPC campaigns but there are a couple of things to keep in mind — your organic traffic will go down so you will have fewer keyword insights for your ads.
Also, when it comes to multi-channel conversions, you might lose clients which do some research after they land on the page from the ads. Meaning that your website wouldn’t be there on SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
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