How to Recover from Google Penalties
After spending the time and money building the perfect website to represent your business online, and then spending more time and money on the SEO side of things, to suddenly watch your website slip quickly off the web and into obscurity, is nothing short of heartbreaking.
Not only is it quite an emotional thing, to see your hard-earned rankings slip away, but it is also money lost.
SEO is well known for its complexity and with so many ranking factors to take into consideration, it is all too easy to miss something or do something in a way that Google doesn’t look too kindly on. And when that happens, penalties can occur and the result is your website being dropped into the online abyss.
Possibly the first way that you will notice that your website is on a slippery slope, is that the site starts to lose its position on the search engine.
Now naturally, your rankings will jump up and down constantly, depending on how much work is being put in. One day you could be at the top of a page, and by the end of the day, you could have dropped to the bottom. This is because Google is forever shuffling the results around, as it deems one or another website more relevant than another.
The worrying sign to keep an eye out for is a sudden big drop. Here is an article on how to recover from Google penalties.
We’re talking you were on page 1, and within the space of a day, you have plummeted to page 20.
A sudden drop in Google rankings, especially if you have been getting a lot of business from your site, can mean that every day you lose more and more money, as your potential clients will no longer be able to find you.
So naturally, when your site has dropped, you will need to find out everything you can about recovering the site and getting it back to being competitive.
What are Google Penalties?
To start with, unless you do something really, really bad, it is actually rather difficult to earn a penalty.
Generally, a penalty comes when you have gone against Google’s webmaster guidelines. The penalty can be automatically given by the algorithm, or it can be manually applied by a Google auditor.
Penalties can also come in when Google has done a big update to one of its algorithms, and there is something on your website that is no longer compliant with the latest checklist.
Essentially, a Google penalty is a time out, of sorts, for your website, and much like any other kind of time out, it is not necessarily permanent and can be fixed.
You shouldn’t think of penalties as some sort of bad things. These penalties are put in place to stop bad websites from climbing the web, you know, those awful spammy websites. So in a way, Google is protecting businesses like yours, and when you get a penalty it is quite possibly something of a blessing, as it will force you to improve your website.
The Most Common Penalty Offences
Unless you have done something truly drastic, the reason you have been given the penalty will quite possibly be because you have committed one of these offenses:
- You’ve keyword-stuffed the life out of your website.
- You’ve hidden a few sneaky links on your site.
- Your site is full of duplicate content.
- You’re including keywords that are in no way relevant to what your business offers.
- You have too many bad redirects.
- You have some sort of virus on your site.
- You have too many bad links.
- You are guilty of cloaking.
Recovering from the Penalties
The good news is that you can quickly recover from a penalty once you have addressed all of the errors that you have been flagged for. Depending on how long it takes to fix the problem, and if Google will accept the changes, it can take up to 30 days after you have submitted your request to see your site recovered.
Some sites, those guilty of more infringements or who have committed more serious web crimes, can expect to wait up to 6 months for their site to regain its position.
To start the recovery process, this is what you can do:
Make sure you actually have a penalty problem
Websites jump up and down the rankings for all sorts of reasons, so your dramatic drop might not be because of a penalty but because of an algorithm update that has caused a ranking reshuffle. To check that it is not a penalty, you can look for a penalty detection tool, of which there are quite a few online.
Check Google Analytics
Go to your dashboard and have a look at how your site has been experiencing traffic. Check particularly for drops that happen around the time of a known algorithm update. If the time corresponds with your site dropping, you could have a penalty. Then check what the latest update entailed and from there you could perhaps be able to pinpoint the issue and fix it.
Updates to the Penguin algorithm can see you get a penalty for something to do with your backlinks or anchor text, while Panda updates can create penalties relating to the quality of your content.
Do an audit for common errors
Sometimes the simplest error can lead to a penalty. So if your site has been penalised, run an audit and see where the error is. You can then get to work fixing it.
Along with doing a site audit, you can also do a content audit, for the same reason. And again if there are any issues, all you need to do is fix them.
Clean your backlinks
This one is a time-consuming process that you should be occasionally doing anyway. Over the many years that you have the site, you are easily going to be building hundreds if not thousands of backlinks. And as the algorithm has changed and puts more emphasis on quality backlinks, your more outdated backlinks that might be a little spammy now, could end up giving you a penalty.
To fix this, you will have to manually remove or improve these backlinks. To simplify the process, there are various tools that you can use to find these backlinks instead of doing the work manually.
