Recover From Google Penalty
Are you running an online business and are tensed because of the declining traffic on your website? Or has the Google search engine ranking of your website seen a drastic fall in the recent time? Then it is quite possible that your website has been penalized by Google.
What is Google Penalty?
Google has a set of guidelines which are acknowledged as the Webmaster guidelines. If either a keyword or a webpage fails to adhere to these guidelines then Google can penalize you by dropping your ranking on the search engine which can ultimately reduce the traffic on your website.
Types of Google penalties
The way Google usually penalizes websites can be broadly classified into two categories
Manual penalties
Manual penalties are usually imposed when Google personally reviews your site and comes across a case where your website does not keep up with the Webmaster guidelines.
Algorithmic penalties
Algorithmic penalties are imposed when a website does not meet the requirements of Google’s algorithms. Two of the most important Google’s Algorithmic penalties include:
Panda
This Penalty usually comes unannounced every month and revolves around the quality of the web content and usability of the website.
Penguin
This penalty is rolled once in a year with an announcement. It mainly focuses on the issue of over optimization of websites.
Some of the possible reasons for penalization of your site
Over optimization of keywords
If your web content is full of keywords then you are susceptible to Google penalty. You must maintain a balance while using keywords so as to rank in Google search results.
Use of paid links
If you happen to pay some websites so that they may link to your website or vice versa, then Google penalty can be imposed on you.
Presence of the website links on irrelevant and contemptible sources
If several low grade sites or irrelevant sites point towards your website then Google can definitely penalize you.
Over optimization of anchor texts
Anchor text is the hypertext that points towards a website. If Google finds loads of anchor texts that are pointing towards your website through nearly same keywords then it is quite possible that it may penalize the site.
Low quality content
If the content of your website is full of plagiarism, is really poor in quality, or has very less or irrelevant information then your website might get penalized by Google.
How to identify whether the website is penalized
Whenever Google penalizes a website, it does not give any official information to the website owner regarding this. A website owner can only realize this fact when he encounters some of the signs of Google penalty which include, dropping of the Google search engine rank by 10 to 100 positions or the sudden decrease in the traffic on the website. If you come upon such instances, then you must definitely follow these instructions to confirm the same.
For checking manual penalty
You can simply log on to your account on the Google Webmaster Tools and can check for a notification under the manual actions in search traffic which says that the Google Webmaster Tools has detected unnatural links on your website. It will confirm the manual penalty.
For checking algorithmic penalty
The algorithmic penalties have no clear notification and are evident through a drastic decrease in ranking and site traffic.
How to recover
Recovery from the Google penalty is very essential for the future of your online business and it will include the following:
From manual penalty
Identify the manual penalty through Google Webmaster Tools and work aggressively to remove the penalty that is present on your site. Finally send back a reconsideration request to Google, and if the response is in negative, repeat the process.
From panda penalty
The panda penalty is due to low quality content, therefore review and redesign the content of your website and make sure that you have a unique and relevant content that has a proper balance of keywords. As soon as you resolve these issues, your ranking would rise again.
From penguin penalty
For resolving the penguin penalty, you need to download the entire list of links that point to your website. From these links you need to identify the ones, which are responsible for the penalty and you must remove and disavow them. As soon as penguin algorithm updates, you may find your website topping the Google rankings yet again.
Some of the reasons why your site isn’t recovering
- You are not following the correct format while submitting the Google report.
The content of the website is still not qualifying the standards required by Google.
There are some bad links that are lurking somewhere and are still not removed.
You have missed on submitting the reconsideration report for the manual penalty.
You need to wait for the penguin update to refresh, which might take a year.
Every year loads of websites fall prey to Google penalty and therefore, you must not feel disheartened. You must work hard to resolve these penalties and within no time you would find your website back in action!
