Online businesses are now not an alternative but have become a necessity in the times. As everything is getting online, marketers are shifting their business from offline platforms to online platforms to receive great ROI and a large customer base. Search engine traffic is thus what most of the businesses are aiming for on the internet. But to achieve the higher rankings is not an easy task. SEO techniques require time and patience to show up the results. To get better results, marketers are pushing the link building process to the limits and in this process, they violated the search engine guidelines. Thus, they get penalized for all such kinds of violations. This thus results in not showing up on their websites on the SERP.
As per the reports, there are more than 400,00 manual actions that are initiated by Google every month. And this is what is in the end, there are a lot number of websites that are being penalized because of the algorithmic updates by Google. Out of all these, only 20,000 webmasters send requests for the reconsiderations that this is why only 5% of the websites are able to recover their rankings.
So, if you are afraid of your website being penalized by Google, then do not panic. You can easily recover from these penalties. The penalty can be algorithmic or manual. So, do not give up the hope and here learn that how you can recover your lost rankings and traffic.
Before we get started let us learn about the penalties and why the search engines are penalized.
Why is your website penalized by Google
In case if you have got a penalty form Google, then this can be extremely detrimental to your website. And sometimes even you might be not able to understand that your website has been penalized. A penalty occurs for a search engine when a website gets some negative impacts either from the manual actions or the algorithmic updates.
So, if you experience a sudden drop in the traffic of the website, then it is a concerning point and you may need to hire an SEO Expert for that. We as a San Diego SEO Expert have faced certain things several times with our clients. Dripping results in the SERP or being completely de-indexed by Google shows that your website has been penalized by Google for any cause.
Kinds of penalties that Google may give on your website
Penalties are broadly classified into two categories- manual and algorithmic
And there is not a single specific reason for both of the categories. Let us get to know some of the reasons why you get penalized by Google.
- Manual penalty– This gets on your website when the Google spam team flag your website. This is usually done for breaching reasons. If you want to know that your website is penalized by Google for the manual actions, then you have to go on the Google webmasters tool or the Google search console. There, check for any kind of new notifications like the warning messages. Or if you find the traffic drop, then you can dig in deeper for your GWT and look for the reasons behind the traffic drop. The major reason that one can get on their website is because of the backlinks profiles on your website. The major reason for the manual penalties is the unnatural links to the website- impact links, unnatural links to your site, Unnatural links from your site.
- Algorithmic penalty– These are the penalties that occur on their own when the Google search algorithms flag a website. This generally happens because Google is continuously updating its algorithm and the data refreshes periodically. When you are hit by the algorithmic penalties, then it becomes hard to detect by the website owners. Because of such kind of penalties, you do not get the notification on the Google search console. Rather you can get an idea about the penalty just by noticing the downfall in the traffic to your website.
The major two penalty that has recently it the majority of the websites due to algorithmic update are Panda and penguin.
- Panda– Panda was the algorithmic update that was done by Google and after the release of the update, a large number of low quality got penalized by Google. This was launched with the aim of high quality of content on the website. In case if Google recognizes your website as low quality or the content is not authorative or plagiarized, then the panda will tank your rankings.
- Penguin– This was another update for the algorithm that reshaped the SEO scenario. This was the automatic bad link detector that looks for the link quality and how quickly the website acquires and retains links. If Google recognizes the bad quality of links, then your website definitely gets penalized by the penguin.
How to recover the rankings
In case your website has been penalized by the manual or the algorithmic penalties, then you would experience the downfall in the rankings. Or even sometimes your website might not be ranked in the SERP. This is why is it is important for your websites to get recovered from these penalties. For more information contact digital marketing agency victoria
Here is how you can recover the website from Google penalties.
Have a look on your backlinks
As soon as you recognize the substantial drop in the traffic and rankings, analyze the backlinks that have caused the drop in the rankings. Once you identify the links, then you can easily remove the links.
Get started with your Google webmasters tool and download all of the backlinks that are recognized by Google. On the left side, you will see the menu, click on the search traffic and then click on the links to your site. You can thus analyze all the links in detail from the Google webmasters tool and if you wish to export the backlinks, then you have to click on the download latest links.
Identify the bad links-
You can use a lot of tools that can help you to identify the bad links. Connect the tool with your Google analytics account and import the link from the Google webmasters tool. Thus, you can see all of the backlinks to your website. Find out the backlinks that are associated with the website that have:
- Unrelated content to your website
- Thin content
- The site has a large number of backlinks from auto approved comments.
Such kind of websites have no value for your website and it is a better idea to de follow the links from such sites.
Once you have found all the bad links to and from your website, all you have to do is to remove them.
Here is how you can do this with the Google webmasters tool:
- Create an email to the Google webmasters to request for the removal of the link. Make sure that you request the webmaster and not threaten it.
- Keep the track of the email request made by you.
- Find the contact details of the webmaster account from which the website has been verified.
- Send your personalized requests to remove the bad links on your website
If you do not get any response from the Google webmasters or if the process is taking too long, then you can go ahead and disavow those links with the help of Google’s Disavow tool in the Google search console. This will let the crawlers to know that they have to ignore these inbound links next time when they crawl and index your site.
Once you have done all this, you can submit the reconsideration request to the manual actions section on the Google webmasters tool account. May be your request gets denied but do not lose hope. You might need to send two or three requests for the reconsideration before Google finally considers your website back for good rankings.
How to recover the algorithmic penalty
Penalties, be it in real life are not wanted by anyone, and the same is the case with penalties on Google. These are definitely not good for a business and if your business is completely dependent on the online mode, then for sure you might face a great loss.
How to recover from the algorithmic penalties?
As the algorithmic penalties are much different from the manual ones, so fixing them is much different as well.
As you know that Google is continuously refreshing the data and updating the algorithms for the SEO and this is why websites get penalized. So, in case if your website is penalized for the algorithmic penalty, then your site won’t recover until the data refreshes and Google recognizes that there is no more penalty with the website.
As soon as you recognize that there is a penalty, you have to determine the cause of the penalty caused. In case if you are penalized under panda, then you what you have to do is to do the complete audit of the website. Also, you have to check that the content on the website is high quality and is not duplicate.
In case if you are hit by the penguin, then you have to try to remove the bad links as mentioned above like to the manual penalties. The only difference is that you cannot request a reconsideration. So, what you can do is to identify the harmful links and get them removed or disavow them.
Another penalty by Google can be mobile responsiveness. This is what you can easily adhere to by continually testing the website and services. Use the Google tool and refresh the mobile data whenever you find that your website is not working well for the mobiles.
Conclusion
Whenever you hit by the downfall of the traffic and rankings the major possibility is with the penalties of the website. Or another possible reason can be the negative SEO and Google penalizes your website.
All you have to do is to not panic and be patient. Understand what has caused the penalty and implement all the techniques mentioned above. Backlinks removal play a major role in the penalties removal, so be safe. Use regularly your SEO tool to get more insights about the links that you are using.
I hope the article has helped you to know how you can recover your website from a hit of the Google penalty.
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