Defeating the online competition is a complete exhausting task that requires your lot of effort and effective strategies to win online battles between different niches websites. It’s an undeniable fact. In the boast of attracting search engine traffic and achieving high rankings in Google, several website owners push the link-building process to the extent that leads their website in big trouble of getting penalized. Yes, your website could get penalized for violating Google’s guidelines.
Getting a Google Penalty is the worst nightmare of every website owner as it sends all their efforts ranging from creating a website to taking above in a Google, down the drain. Such a strict action taken by Google not only impacts the performance of your website in the SERPs but also affects the traffic to a great level. So, it is essential to conduct the SEO activities like backlinking following Google’s mentioned guidelines to not face such a situation. But, if you are already facing this situation, it doesn’t mean that there is no chance to recover from the penalty. There are some ideal ways you can follow to get rid of such penalties. Wanna know what they are?
This blog post has covered everything you need to know about Google penalty recovery, mentioning different methods, etc. Before we deep dive into the topic, let’s start with basics-
What is Google Penalty?
Is your website traffic suddenly dropped? Are you seeing a consistent decline in the website ranking? If you are facing such troubles, then there is a high chance that you are receiving on the end of Google Penalty.
In 2014, Google reported that over 400,000 manual actions are taken against web portals every month by their professional webspam team. This stat probably, make your jaw drop, but this is just a fraction of the total number. Whenever Google brings new updates to Penguin or Panda, a high number of websites get penalized for violating the Google guidelines.
When a website faces a sudden drop in rankings, then it can have a diverse impact on its overall performance in terms of sales, leads, traffic, and more. So, it becomes necessary to find out the real cause of the Google penalty.
Reasons Why You’ve Been Penalized
There can be several reasons why your website gets penalized by Google. Sometimes it can be given after an algorithmic update as there can be a mistake in a set of calculations or following rules. Sometimes, websites get penalized after a manual review where Google suspects your site may be using Black Hat strategies. Reasons can be any. Let’s find out more-
1. Manual Action
- Unnatural Links: Google considers backlinks as a way to determine the website’s overall quality, including its content. If Google finds out that paid links are used or are a part of link schema, then there is a high possibility that your website will face the Google penalty. Examples of unnatural links are hidden, low-quality, and keyword-rich links in a site’s widget links in the footer of the website, optimized in the link in the forum’s content.
- Low-Quality or Duplicate Content: This is one of the most common reasons why websites get penalized. Google always prioritizes the user experience, and if they find that your content doesn’t deliver the value, then you can expect a penalty. Low-quality or duplicate content includes automatically generated content, scraped content, low-quality guest posts, etc.
- Spam: It includes everything, ranging from cloaking to scraping content, etc. It is rare to get a spam penalty until and unless you create a spam website.
2. Algorithmic Penalty
- Panda Penalty: This penalty focuses on checking the overall content quality that a website is publishing. The thing which makes it different from others is that it can affect your whole site if they find even a small issue in only one part of the website.
- Penguin Penalty: Penguin penalty, on the other hand, affect that part of the website where the issue arises. So, if in case your website gets this penalty, then you need to recover the page that has been penalized. Other pages of the website still have the chance to get ranked. This penalty is all about backlinks. Some of the backlinks factors that could give your site a penalty are-
- Link Diversity: If your backlinks are coming from comments or may link have an anchor text, then Google will consider these actions that you’re manipulating the search results.
- Link Quality: If your website has a high number of low-quality links, then it’s a bad sign for you. Even if you have a high number of good-quality links, then Google starts suspecting your site.
- Link Velocity: If a website is gaining more and more links over a short period of time, then Google considers them unnatural.
How to Recover Your Website from Google Penalty
Besides all these reasons, you can still recover your website from Google penalty in the following ways.
1. Identify & Remove Bad Links
First, identify the bad backlinks that basically come from a website having duplicate content & not related to the site’s niche, sneaky redirects, cloaked links, site-wide backlinks, hidden text backlinks, and a lot more bad backlinks coming from directories, sponsored content, adult websites, etc. Because such backlinks can affect your ranking, so it is necessary to remove them. All you have to do is to
- Send a follow-up mail to the webmaster from your company email address listing the bad backlinks you want to remove.
- The webmaster will remove the bad links as per your request. In some cases, they can demand some money.
2. Fixing the Penguin Penalty
When your website encounters Penguin Penalty, you can’t do much of that, but there are some ways that you can follow.
First, try to get rid of unwanted (bad or unnatural links) links following the procedure mentioned above.
Secondly, check your anchor text distribution with the help of Ahref’s Backlink checkers, which is free, easy to use, and can provide you with a detailed report in a matter of seconds. The report showing naked URLs, brand name keywords, variations of targeted keywords, etc., is a good sign for you. In contrast, the one showing match keywords in the report is a matter of worry as it attracts Google to penalize your website. So, it is advisable to remove all the given keywords.
3. Fixing the Panda Penalty
The website having a slow speed, poor quality of content, poor navigation, and showing a lot of ads, including irrelevant ones, is vulnerable to Panda Penalty. In simple words, if your website doesn’t offer a good user experience, then you can attract Google to penalize your site with a Panda penalty.
For panda penalty recovery, it is good to check your website speed regularly, using tools like Pingdom. Not only this, but you should also determine the web pages that are of low-quality or duplicate. You can use Google Webmaster Tools for this purpose. Once you get a list of low-quality or duplicate web pages, you can no-follow them, or you can go for a permanent delete option. This way, you can conduct Panda penalty recovery.
Conclusion
Although Google penalty recovery is tough, still with the right moves and following a well-thought strategy, you can get your rankings back. This blog post has listed everything you want to know about Google penalty recovery. We hope you find it helpful.
About the author: Rio is a Website Designer who helps businesses to increase their online presence with the help of engaging websites. He is the Founder & CEO of Web Design Melbourne, a One-Stop Digital Agency based in Melbourne that specialises in Web Design.
