Do you really want to add another Google penalty to your rooster list? You may have already had a few of them in the past and are looking to change things up.

You need to know what penalties you may be up against so you can stop them before they start.

1) Hackers will infiltrate your site if anything appears to be outdated. They can come in and drive your traffic towards their malicious information. Google can penalize you for this in a big way, whether you had anything to do with it directly or indirectly.

2) Do you know what "snippet spam" is? That is when sites will target irrelevant or misleading and use it against you. Hackers can find this information on your site in bold print. That is why you need to make sure that you only put relevant information out.

3) Google will penalize you if your site contains low-quality pages including cookie cutter pages and doorway pages. One door can open up a world of information for your hacker.

4) Do you have any links that are paid or spammy? You probably have bought some of your links along the way. They are low in quality and are linked to spam. Your hackers can attach themselves to the tail end and work their way in. That is what they do.

Google has a few ways you can redeem yourself and put yourself back on top of the search pages.

1) You can give your site and computer a good scrub. You can use tools including link detox, SEMrish, and Kerboo. Nothing beats a good, clean scrub. Your hackers should not be able to penetrate your zone once you do that.

2) You can get stop the negative SEO attacks by getting to them before they get to you. Start by getting the backlinks. Just one link will be enough for them to get inside. You need to submit a disavowal file to Google personally. Ask Google to reindex your most important pages and go from there.

3) You can avoid link penalties altogether by using one of the following:

a) Majestic Rrust Flow and Citation Flow

b) Moz Domain Authority

These tools will look at the metrics and give you specifics. The first two are the better ones to use. You can use them simultaneously. The scores will either come out similar to one another or worlds apart.

The scores that come out the same means your site is doing pretty good. That means you do not have much work to do to clean things up. The scores that come out differently means that your site is filled with a lot of spam. That means there is some major cleanup ahead of you.

You should have links to your images, subdomains, and non-followed links. Your anchor text should have links surrounding it, but not overloaded.