The main reason is they want to provide better search results for their users and provide a better user experience. Part of that means, providing a fair marketplace to get better results on to the organic section, which then enhance the user journey of people using their search platform. In the past few years, Google has been carrying after people that have been abusing their search results.

Google Penalty is a phrase for both algorithmic and manual actions. A manual action is where a member of the Google web spam team review a website and take action depending on what they found. If a site breaches their terms and conditions, an action will be taken by Google on that site. The second part is algorithmic devaluation. It is where Google runs an algorithm script across the whole internet, and that refresh takes place periodically (e.g. Penguin, Panda algorithm refresh).

As stated earlier, they are not actually all penalties. The first one is the penguin algorithmic devaluation. This targets links which Google thinks should not pass the same amount of pagerank and authority that other links do. Also, if a site has gotten a lot of links with a particular anchor text coming from a different country that may be looking unnatural to Google, it might be discredited, and its search results may automatically go down.

The second type of penalty is a manual action. The first type is a partial match action. This is where the web spam team looks at some data – whether it is from Google penguin algorithm refresh or from a manual spam report. An action is taken only against a particular word or a phrase, a targeted section of the site traffic. The site owner would notice a drop, but not all traffic going down.

The next one is the most severe type of penalty, which is when Google decides that the site has gone so bad, that it has to be given a site-wide penalty. This is when the site does not rank for any phrases and for the brand name anymore. This is going to have a big impact on the traffic. Google also penalizes sites for outbound links – links that have been paid.