How to Recover Your Website from Google Penalty?

To know how to recover your website from Google penalty, you first of all need to understand what it means.

Today there is a set of filters, which are applied by the searching system to the websites that break rules of SEO optimization and placing of information. Roughly speaking, penalties are special penal sanctions that are applied to a particular site for violations of these general rules.

How can you find out that the website was hit by the Google Penalty?

The only way you can detect it – if you will constantly keep an eye on your website’s statistics. Look whether there is some traffic decreases or any unusual tendencies.

• Check the indexing by sending the following query [site: yoursite.com] on Google to see whether there the number of pages had changed.
• Go to Google Webmaster Tools and look if there are any problems with the site.
• Look at PR on Google Toolbar (the grey strip is a very bad sign).
• Search the name of your domain in Google. If you can’t find your website on first few pages, then more likely it’s a penalty by Google.
• Follow this link and check whether Google considers your website “dangerous”: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=actualkeywords.com.
• Check the HTML code of your website’s pages for the presence of some random links or other alien inserts.
• Copy along phrase from one of the pages of your site and paste it into the Google, the page from where this phrase was copied HAS to be in the first place.

Reasons that can cause a Google penalty

1) Over -spammed websites’ headlines

When you are just crafting your website, you need to make sure that your heading (which is actually the first thing that catches visitor’s attention) would sound more natural. Otherwise, if your potential clients will see that the goal of your heading is just to get higher ranking in Google, they will approach your website, and respectively – your product with suspicion and apprehension. If you already happen to get a penalty for over-spammed heading, it’s not the end! To learn how to fix this mistake, let’s first make sure that you understand what was wrong. The title that says “professional IT service, IT products for you, the name of your company, IT service” is a bad example. Why? -Because it has too many keywords in it, and not much information specifically about your brand, which makes it look like spam. To fix it and recover from a Google penalty, try to change your headline to something less spammed, for example – “name of your brand, IT services in (your city)”.

2)  Manipulative internal links

One of the most popular methods that are used by many SEO specialists is a reference to the same page several times with the help of the same anchor text. This strategy is meaningless because:

• Such texts look too spammed;
• Only the first anchor will be taken into account and evaluated by searching systems.

However, if you feel like this strategy can give you certain benefits and think that a certain page is useful, you can refer to it but try to use different anchor texts.

3) Footers that have too many links

One of the most common problems that cause penalty is the presence of the set of links with the same anchors in the bottom of your website. Often such links are written in the grey color on the grey background, so they are difficult to read. If you want to make a certain anchor text to refer to a particular page, consider placing it in the main menu or content of the site, instead of leaving it in the footer.

4) Texts that were written for searching systems

Many websites have high-quality and useful main content, but still there can be found certain blocks of text that were written to meet requirements of search engines (which means that they include a lot of keywords or phrases). If you don’t want to get a Google penalty or want to recover your website from it – you must get rid of such texts! Believe, they will bring you more headache than profit because they not only can cause penalty but also can push your clients away.

5) Back links from suspicious sources

Links can be very helpful in terms of SEO optimization, but at the same time they can be quite insidious, so you have to be careful with them. This is one of the most often and obvious mistakes. If you want to avoid unnecessary problems, don’t settle for link exchanges, as this can lead to penalties.

6) Pages with similar keywords in links

If you create several pages that have similar content and purpose but are simply rewritten, this can appear like manipulation for search systems. You can come up with another strategy that will allow you to advance your website successfully, using all the same keywords (within reason) on one page. This will be much better than if you would have three pages with the same content, which eventually will still lead to the same page.

Google filters, their kinds and ways to recover from them

The first step in your successful fight with Google filters is correct diagnostics. Only after you identify which one of them was applied to your website, you can make attempts to recover the site.

The methods of application of Google penalties can be divided into two kinds: manuals actions and algorithmic filters. The strategy of website’s recovery depends straightly on what penalty was used for it.

Manual penalties

Hand measures of Google assume lowering of site’s availability by a moderator for the use of searching spam or violation of rules of participating in a search. The most common reasons are the usage of paid links, not informative content, aggressive spam, and deception of mobile users.

If your website suffered from a manual penalty, you would see a notification in Google Search Console with all information regarding the reasons for such sanctions.

In some cases, these penalties don’t influence ranking and traffic. However, it doesn’t mean that it can be ignored.

Google algorithmic filters

These are special filters, which check the website for presence on its pages of searching spam and automatically lower the delivery of those resources in which violations were found.

The most popular algorithmic filters today are Google Penguin and Google Panda. Also, there is a list of less popular ones like PayDay, Mobile-Friendly, Top Heavy, Phantom, Pirate, and special penalties for Spam, Thin Content, and Unnatural Links. You can find more information about each of these penalties in the complete guide to Google penalties.

Usually, if one of such filters had found certain violations of rules on your website, you will be able to observe the global decrease of traffic.

Thus, unlike hand sanctions, in this case, you won’t see any notification about the Google penalty of your site in GWT.

How to understand what filter found mistake in your site

As a rule, Google publicly reports about the update of lowering algorithm, and information about this news appears on many forums and blogs.

If the date of traffic decrease of your website coincided with the period when one of the filters was updated, then your site had suffered exactly from it.

How to recover your website from Google penalty

To make correct adjustments and recover your website you have to:

— Define the type of filter;

— Eliminate the cause of its imposition.

Please share your experience if you also face this types of any situation with your website & how you recover from it.

About the Author:

Author’s bio: Mary Brains is experienced SEO specialist at Essay Samurai who has successfully created and optimized many high-quality websites. Now he’s willing to share his experience with other specialist and beginners in the field of SEO.