Have you recently seen a dramatic drop in your website’s performance?
Although there’s a myriad of probable reasons why that could have happened, it’s also possible that you’ve got a Google penalty. You may have violated one or several of Google’s guidelines while trying to build a better ranking, and Google’s team will notify you about it soon enough.
Is it an inconvenience? Yes. Is it impossible to fix? Of course not!
In this article, we’re sharing several proven ways that can help you recover from Google penalties.
How Do You Know You’ve Been Penalized?
Despite working on your SEO strategy, as usual, your website has stopped appearing in search results. If you are experiencing something like this, you might want to check whether you are being penalized by Google. And there’s a simple way to check if there’s a manual action issued against your website.
On a side note, your website traffic won’t always drop due to a Google penalty. Are you compliant with the latest Google Core updates introduced to improve the search experience? Because your website performance may have been affected by an algorithm rather than a penalty.
Suppose Google’s human reviewer determines you’ve violated Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. In that case, they’ll report your website or some of its content, and as a result, you’ll rank lower or not appear in SERP at all.
Google will notify you about such manual actions via Google Search Console – you’ll find the notification in the message center and the Manual Actions report.
A green checkmark means your website doesn’t have any manual actions. In the same place, you’ll see the number of manual actions, if there are any.
The report will also tell you what guidelines you’ve violated and what pages (or the entire website) have been penalized, so you can fix them and get back in Google’s good books.
How to Recover from the Penalty
The very first step in recovering from Google penalties is identifying the problematic pages on your website and finding out what the issue is.
You can do that by expanding the description you find in the report and reading more about the manual action taken against your website. You’ll see a “Learn more” link to get more details, as well as the instructions on how to solve the problem. Do this for each page that has been affected – only when you’ve fixed all the issues on every page will your visibility on Google be restored.
To recover your pages, you also need to allow Google to access them. Make sure they’re accessible without login information and paid subscriptions.
When you’ve successfully resolved the issues, you can request a review from Google. However, this reconsideration request isn’t something you can do in a few clicks. Ensure you clearly and concisely explain what the issue was, how you fixed it, and what the result was.
Don’t panic if your penalty isn’t removed right away – these things can take some time, even up to a few weeks. Monitor your email inbox as that’s where you’ll receive further notifications about your website.
What Are the Common Issues That Get Penalized?
Luckily, even if you’re penalized by Google, you can quickly find out what’s wrong and how you can fix it.
Here are the most common issues that cause Google penalties and how to deal with them.
Poor-Quality Backlinks
Google can recognize unnatural backlinks. There may be too many money anchors (anchor text that is the exact keyword you want to rank for), links from spammy websites, or links belonging to a pattern.
To prevent such issues, you should regularly audit your backlinks, but if you’ve already got a manual action, here’s how to fix it.
- Use the Search Console to download a list of all backlinks that lead to your website.
- Review the list and identify possibly problematic links that go against the Google guidelines. (Check the most recent and common links first.)
- Either ask the webmaster of suspicious websites to remove the links or use Search Console and the Disavow links tool to get rid of them yourself.
- When you remove all manipulative or spammy links, you can submit the reconsideration request and patiently wait for the verdict.
User-Generated Spam
Sometimes, it’s not you; it’s them. Yes, Google can penalize you for the spammy content that your website visitors submit. It often happens on forum or guest book pages. If your manual action report has identified this as the issue, follow these instructions to fix the problem.
- Locate where your website users could have submitted spammy content.
- Identify content that contains ads, off-topic text or links, commercial usernames, bot commenters, etc.
- Use the “site:” operator to search through your website more efficiently and identify possible spammy content quickly.
- Remove anything you find that may have triggered Google.
- Create an anti-spam strategy that you can implement after you’ve gained back your visibility.
- Submit the reconsideration request.
Keyword Stuffing
You’ve probably seen titles for products on famous online stores that you need to read several times to discover what they mean.
Although using keywords is a proper SEO strategy, always keep in mind that you write for humans, not search engines. Stuffing your content with excessive keywords that appear unnaturally may lead to a Google penalty. If any of your pages have hidden text or are stuffed with keywords, you’re violating the Webmaster Guidelines.
Fix this issue by using the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console.
- The tool will inspect the pages visible to the crawler, but not users.
- It will check for any hidden text on your pages, for example, text written in the same color as the background.
- Remove the hidden text and move on to identifying repeated words with no value – remove them, too.
- When you’re sure you’ve deleted all the hidden text and stuffed keywords, request a review.
Free Hosting Spam
Many website owners opt for free hosting since it seems like a more affordable choice in the beginning. But in the long run, this seemingly free service can cost you a lot if Google determines that the whole service is mostly spammy. Your website may become collateral damage.
If Google lists this as the reason why you’ve been penalized, make sure you:
- Notify your hosting service right away.
- Proceed to manually remove any spammy content that you can identify on your website.
- When you feel you’ve removed everything you could have found (or you’ve received assistance from your tech team), submit the reconsideration request.
Cloaking Redirects
Are you trying to lure users to specific pages of your website using sneaky redirects? Well, bad news – Google doesn’t view that action as something favorable. Suppose you show one page to Google but clicking on that link redirects users to a completely different page. In that case, you’ll get penalized soon enough, even if you’ve created the redirection by mistake.
How do you fix that?
- Navigate to the URL Inspection tool to find the problematic pages.
- Compare the links Google sees to where they take users after they click.
- Check the website code on the server to remove the parts that are causing redirections.
- Identify URLs that lead your users to pages different from the ones they expect to see.
- Identify URLs that redirect users conditionally (for instance, only organic traffic or specific IP addresses).
- You can request a review when you fix all the redirections that may have caused the penalty.
On Your Way to Recovery
As you can see, fixing website mistakes that lead to a Google penalty isn’t always too demanding. All you need to do is fix the issue by removing spammy content, checking your URLs, reviewing your backlinks, etc.
It’s all about transparency and quality content. As long as you’re not trying to manipulate anyone (either Google or your users), white hat SEO techniques will eventually lead you to the desired results.
If a Google penalty happens as an honest mistake, don’t panic – get down to work and fix the problem so your website can get back in the game as soon as possible.
