Google Penalty Recovery – What To Do

Google Penalty Recovery

If your website is underperforming and not driving enough organic search traffic to stay competitive in your industry, you need to perform a Google penalty recovery.

You’re probably aware that Google uses algorithms to analyze websites. It is essential to ensure that your page keeps up with the various updates released at all times. They revise their algorithms several times each year with some of these penalty recovery service updates including minimal changes that won’t affect your website traffic. However, there are others that can negatively drastically impact your organic traffic if you fail to comply with the latest regulations.

Google refers to these negative impacts as penalties. SEO penalties are distributed manually but most are implemented by their algorithms in an automated manner. Fortunately, you can resolve these issues with a well-thought-out penalty recovery plan.

Below, we teach you everything you need to know about the algorithm-based penalty system. We address the benefits of professional Google penalty recovery services and show you how to restore your website to search inquiry prominence.

Basics of Major Google Algorithm Updates

Ideally, we would like to cover all of the major algorithm updates over the last five years. However, doing so would take hours while still not getting you any closer to the first page of Google search results. Not to mention, the inner workings of core algorithms can be quite bland.

Because of this, we will stick to the basics, covering a few of the most recent algorithm updates while ensuring that you don’t miss out on anything too important.

As noted above, we are limiting our discussion solely to Google’s most significant recent updates. These changes are the ones that are the most likely to impact SEO best practices and are generally announced before implementation. However, it’s important to note that they do not notify users of every algorithm update because minor algorithm updates are often made daily, with multiple updates occasionally implemented in a single day.

Which Algorithm Updates Are Announced?

Google typically only announces “broad core algorithm updates.” While they are generally coy about offering specific changes included in these updates, it has been stated by the company that these broad core updates are always focused on one thing: improving search results for users.

They’ve also indicated no definite way to “fix” a site that has dropped in rankings, claiming there is nothing wrong with your site, even if you lost rankings after an update. They have never disputed that their updates are focused on website content but have stated that updates aren’t based entirely on the quality of your pages.

With that said, SEO is about being proactive and driving organic web traffic. Despite the claims of many tech giants, we’ve learned that Google penalty recovery services are a proven way to overcome penalties and improve your organic search rankings.

What Is a Google Penalty?

If you’re a sports fan, then you likely associate the word “penalty” with a loss of yardage, a player ejection, or free throw shots. Google penalties, which result from violations of core update parameters, function in much the same way.

The goal of these penalties is to punish websites that have not complied with search algorithm requirements. As noted above, Google’s algorithms give these search penalties. However, especially egregious offenses are manually flagged as penalties by their moderators. Google’s moderation team performs several hundred thousand manual actions every month.

If your website receives a search-based penalty, your business will suffer. Your target audience won’t find you, leading to a natural decline in sales numbers. As you can see, Google penalties can quickly derail revenue streams and leave your website stuck in digital limbo.

Search engines are not forthcoming with specific details about each core update. Therefore, you are almost guaranteed to incur a search penalty at some point. The only way to overcome the potential pitfalls of these frequent algorithm updates is to implement Google penalty recovery services and consistently maintain alignment with their expectations of a “good website.”

How to Implement a Google Penalty Recovery

Google uses complex algorithms to issue penalties. Since these algorithms are continuously updated, a multifaceted approach is required to keep your website content relevant. If you’ve found that your search rankings have suffered from an algorithm update, implementing Google penalty recovery practices is a sure-fire way to get your rank back to where it needs to be.

Review Recent Site Traffic

The first step in implementing a Google penalty recovery plan is to identify when your site traffic dropped. You can do this by reviewing your Google Analytics account.

If you see a drastic change in site traffic, you have almost certainly been hit by an algorithm update penalty. Keep in mind that traffic naturally fluctuates based on the day or day of the week. So, don’t be overly concerned with slight drops. Be sure to keep your business model in mind, such as whether your company is closed on certain days of the week.

Review Your Google Rankings

Overall site traffic is not the only category that you should review, however. You should also keep up-to-date with your latest rankings. As with site traffic, your ranking information can be found in your Google Analytics account, but working with experienced SEO experts can help analyze this information with additional tools and more robust reporting capabilities. 

After discovering affected rankings, compare your webpage traffic. More than likely, your ranking change will coincide with this loss in organic traffic.

You need a targeted penalty recovery strategy after you identify these trends. Knowing the exact date or time frame of these penalties will help you zero in on which ranking criteria may have potential violations.

Update Your Links and Review Backlinks

In recent years, Google algorithm updates have placed a significant emphasis on high-quality backlinks. It stands to reason that they have also begun targeting low-quality tags and implementing search-based penalties to websites with questionable backlinks leading to your site.

A backlink refers to another site that links its content to your page. Ideally, you want several blogs or other content to link to your site. Having multiple bloggers or companies reference your content on their pages can be a sign of high-quality content on your website.

However, when it comes to the Google algorithm, backlinks serve as a two-way street. Penalized backlinks make your search results suffer. Some examples of poor-quality backlinks include:

• Sites with duplicate content
• Penalized pages
• Links from gambling or adult webpages
• Redirects, link schemes, or irrelevant content
• Unrelated sites
• Spam and outdated forums
• Bare-bones websites with minimal content
• Advertorials

The best approach is to review all of your backlinks and remove your page from any concerning or non-complying sites. You should perform these reviews regularly to continuously optimize your organic search traffic.

remove bad links

If you find that some of your backlinks are hurting more than helping, getting these backlinks removed from these sites can be a tedious process. The first step is to use Google’s Search Console to identify all of the backlinks to your website. Once identified, this list of backlinks can then be imported into your preferred SEO search tool.

Using this tool, you can identify which of these backlinks are negatively impacting your ability to rank. Once you’ve done so, you will need to email each individual web admin that has backlinked to your site. Request that they update their page to remove links that lead back to you.

Unfortunately, many of these bad backlinks will be spam (or other questionable content), meaning that the respective webmasters will likely ignore your update requests. When this happens, you will need to send a Google disavow report.

A disavow report should include links to any websites that did not respond to your update requests. When you submit the disavow information to Google, you must communicate the efforts made to clean up your website. When approved, links that hurt your site are disavowed.

As you can see, implementing a Google penalty recovery plan without help can be pretty complex. This is why many organizations instead turn to professional Google penalty recovery services. These services are the most proven way to improve search traffic and overcome algorithm-based penalties. This prevents spending seemingly endless hours hoping to achieve results on your own.

Professional Google Penalty Recovery Services

Does your site need a high-quality penalty recovery plan? Would you like to update your website and get rid of outdated backlinks? Do you need help navigating the complexities of Google penalty recovery? If so, then it’s time to partner with Firetoss.

Firetoss is a full-service web design, SEO, and PPC agency. Our diverse in-house team includes experts in various fields, including search engine optimization, penalty recovery, marketing, and web design. If you are ready to take your business to new heights, we are the right people to make that happen.

The first step to improving search results is to contact our experts. During your free consultation, one of our team members will gain additional insights into your industry. Our professional Google penalty checkers will hear concerns about your current search rankings and help to resolve them.  

If you decide to move forward, we will then conduct a thorough audit of your site. Our team will analyze the content on your website, look at every single backlink, and generate a comprehensive strategy to improve your online presence. One step in this process may be sending emails to respective web admins to remove bad backlinks leading to your pages. If we get no response, we will complete a detailed disavow report and submit it to Google per their policies. Firetoss provides Google with all required documentation to approve your disavow request.