A Guide to Google Penalty Removal and Recovery

In this modern era, search engine traffic is considered as very important. However, the process of getting high Google ranks is easy said than done. Most digital marketers have pushed link building techniques to a new limit. As a result, Google has penalised websites. According to SEO experts, Google initiates 400,000 manual actions to penalise websites. The Panda and Penguin algorithms are improved regularly to identify websites that are not search engine optimised.

Ways Google Penalises Sites

There are several reasons why Google penalises websites. And, Google penalised websites using two techniques. One, Google’s spam team analyses websites and takes manual action. Two, Google uses algorithmic methods to penalise websites.

1. Using manual methods, Google checks websites on the Webmaster tool. The webmaster tool gives notifications of websites that have unnatural links. If your website does not get warning messages from Webmaster, you should dig deeper to understand more about the root cause of traffic drop.
2. An algorithmic penalty is based on what your website has. These algorithms are updated frequently. This means you are likely to lose traffic over a period of time. To know more about algorithm updates, you should read through Google’s Algorithmic ChangeLog. You can learn about Google’s new search algorithms through the following methods:
   • Follow “Matt Cutts”, he announces Google’s Penguin and Panda’s algorithmic changes.
   • Follow “Google Webmaster” to master SEO
   • Check “Algoroo” and “MozCast” to know about Google’s new algorithms (these sites may have content that is not official too).

How to Avoid Google Penalties?

For Google Penalty removal and recovery, you should remove backlinks that are really bad for your web page. Websites with poor quality links are strongly penalised by Google’s algorithms. Common backlinks that can harm your website are as follows:

1. Links to websites that are banned or penalised
2. Websites that have duplicate content
3. Websites that don’t relate to your industry
4. Websites with forum profiles and spam comments
5. Websites with hidden texts (especially target keywords)
6. Site Wide backlinks (sidebar, widgets and footer links should be avoided).

Most of Google’s penalties are connected to the website’s backlinks. If you have poor backlinks, you will lose most of your page ranks. This is why you should find and recover all your backlinks for better page ranks. Whether it is an algorithmic or manual penalty, you must analyse your site’s backlinks properly.