No matter what type of website you have, there is always going to be that little bit of doubt when Google updates their algorithm. We’ve all 
heard the stories of how a recognizable website has drops in traffic of more than 80%, sometimes, due to a simple SEO update. It’s every website owner’s worst nightmare. All the hard work put into the website, accounted for nothing, if the traffic reaching it is not consistent or decreasing.
However, there are generally reasons why websites suffer during these updates, so they are not always surprising. With this in mind, here are a few ways to protect yourself from ever getting penalized by Google and their SEO updates.
Don’t Copy Content
99% of people online should at least know that copying content will incur huge penalty losses, in terms of traffic that the website could have generated, organically.
The problem stems in the ‘grey’ area when some articles copy a little bit of content from another. When this happens, what will happen?
Generally speaking, do not copy content at all, unless you have the strictest permission to do so and in the smallest of moderation. When that is the case, make sure you reference the source in your article, so Google and other search engines know that you recognize some of the content is not unique.
Don’t Buy or Sell Links
Although it is good to have links from other websites targeting your website and vice versa, it is, on the contrary, very bad to buy or sell links. This is because Google can pretty much decipher what is a genuine link and what isn’t. Buying and selling links do not add any value to your content, because they are typically unrelated and do not gain many clicks – people rely on the ‘connection’ to good SEO they provide more than the actual number of people that will click onto it.
Limit Guest Blogging On Your Website and Others
In line with the above point, guest blogging is popular for the do-follow internal linking that comes as a payment for someone guest blogging. However, the problem is the same with guest blogging as it is with buying or selling links – it’s not natural. This is especially the case with unrelated guest posts, as opposed to the types of articles that are on your website before that.
Create High Quality and Unique Content
To maintain and continually improve the SEO of your website, the best thing to do is write content that you believe is not currently on the internet. When you do that, you will be creating the most unique and high quality content, that will often have very little competition against it organically.
