18 April 2021

Google Penalty: How to Recover from a Google Penalty?

As we all know, search engine traffic is the holy testament of digital marketing and we work ardently to enhance the SEO traffic at any cost! The building up of SEO traffic is so difficult and at times, we find marketers going way out of the way to push the link-building process beyond the limits.

And what lays beyond is a nightmare to every digital marketer! And that’s getting penalized by Google! This is followed by a significant drop in the traffic! It’s deduced that almost 4 million manual actions are being undertaken by Google every month. And to our surprise, only 20,000 webmasters are delivering a reconsideration report. This gives us a strong insight that only 5% of the websites try to improve their site ranking after being penalised.

There exist two ways whereby your site can get penalised by Google and they are:

Manual Actions
Algorithmic Updates

Manual Actions undertaken by webmasters and algorithmic updates (Penguin, Panda) in the Google site ranking domain can also penalise your website. Google’s spam team can take direct initiatives to block your site or else Algorithmic Penalty can doom on you!

Now how do you find, if your site was penalised manually or it faces an algorithmic penalty?

Go to Google Webmaster tools in Google Search Console and find out any new notification awaiting your attention! Then be sure it’s a manual action!
To identify which algorithmic penalty has been imposed on you, check with the time duration you underwent a drop in traffic and the corresponding changes made to the algorithm. This can be traced from Google Algorithm Change History.

To stay up to date with Google’s Search Algorithm, continue to follow Google Webmasters, Mozcast, or Algoroo. One of the most significant algorithmic updates are Panda, which relies on content quality, and Penguin, which focuses on backlinks and anchor text distribution.

What brings in the dreaded Google Penalty?

Having backlinks from websites that are penalised by Google.
Plagiarised content on your site.
Creating backlinks to sites that are not related to your site.
Having spammy website content.
Hidden content.

How to recover from the Google penalty?

Firstly, trace all of your backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools and pick out the bad backlinks. Now, try to remove them by creating an email and sending it to the respective webmaster. Keep track of your mail request. It’s also necessary to remove any duplicate content from your site since it’s a huge red light to your site rankings. Also, make sure your site is clean of low-quality, impoverished content. Perform your anchor text distribution in a perfect way.

To remove a manual penalty, you have to send a reconsideration request after following corrective action. It might take only two months to recover from a manual penalty.

Employ the disavow tool in Google Webmaster Tools that help to get rid of link-based penalties.

To wrap up

Go through the Google webmaster guidelines, remove the bad backlinks, and if you can’t, then disavow them. Primarily understand the root cause behind the Google penalty!