Google Penalty Recovery for Panda, Penguin and Manual Actions

How to Know You’ve Received a Google Penalty

Over the years as an SEO consultant optimizing websites for search engines, I’ve seen it all. Before you start down the confusing, time-consuming and potentially damaging path of recovering from a Google penalty in an attempt to gain rankings - which Google would consider against its policy in most cases - let’s define what a penalty is: Penalty: a punishment imposed for breaking a law, rule or contract. To be penalized means you are actively being punished for doing something wrong. Google will let you know this by sending you a message in your Webmaster Tools account clearly stating you’ve been penalized.

Losing search ranking does not mean you’ve been penalized.

Most websites out there that have lost search ranking over time aren’t actively being penalized. If you haven’t updated your website in a long time and traffic is declining, that is not a penalty; that’s a lack of effort on your part to compete in an evolving landscape. There are plenty of other reasons your website may be losing organic search traffic. If you’ve launched a new website and noticed a traffic drop, this is probably not a penalty. Check that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking Google and make sure you’ve redirected links appropriately. There’s no perfect formula for regaining your site’s lost web traffic after getting dinged with a Google penalty, but there are a few best practices you can roll-out in an attempt to mitigate or reverse Google penalty damage. The effect of some penalties takes only a few days to sort out, and others require several months to resolve. But, regardless of the seriousness of the penalty, it can be corrected. Simply identify the penalty that’s affecting your site, and take the proper steps to fix it.

A Summary of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Essentially, Google wants to rank different sites that provide useful, high-quality content. It does not want to rank websites that copy and paste from across the Internet or attempt to dominate the search results with numerous thin websites leading to the same website.

When to Worry About Google Penalties

Removing bad links from websites is a service I do way too often - if you ask me. Here are sample screenshots from a client of mine who needed their link profile straightened out: Suspicious links are something I see a lot. And suddenly acquiring tons of links from low-quality sources is a huge signal that you paid for links, which is against Google’s guidelines. The thing is, getting people to talk about you is usually pretty difficult; most websites take years to get links. Being ranked on Google’s search engine is a privilege - just like driving on the roads in the good ol’ US of A - not a right. If you feel like you’ve done something that would draw a penalty from Google, then read on.

The Difference Between Panda and Penguin Penalties

The two most common Google penalties are Panda, which typically stems from a site’s quality, and Penguin, which penalizes sites that attempt to exploit Google’s search engine.

What a Panda Penalty Looks Like

If traffic to your entire site experienced a sharp fall that eventually stabilized, and you’ve ruled out common technical issues -  like forgetting to redirect links - it’s likely been hit by the Panda penalty. Before you panic, note that nearly every site is affected by a Panda penalty, and it doesn’t necessarily mean your site is doing something wrong. In fact, the penalty is so common that Google stopped calling it a penalty and instead calls it a “quality algorithm.” Google evaluates the quality of every website, and a Panda penalty is a sign that your site includes some low-quality content, which hurts its search ranking. A Panda penalty could also be affecting your site if traffic has steadily declined over a long period of time. For example, if your website was averaging 900 unique visits a day a year ago, but has since dropped to only 650 unique visits, it could be a Panda penalty that’s causing it. Sometimes updates are to blame for that kind of gradual decrease; you can find out by comparing the timing of past updates with dips in your website’s traffic, using this tool.

How to Recover from a Panda Penalty

The best way to recover traffic after receiving a Panda penalty is to improve content that’s negatively affecting the quality of your site. Doorway pages, copied content and a missing contact page are examples of things that would hurt your site’s quality score, and subsequently, its search ranking. If you’ve been hit by a Panda penalty, Google is telling you that your website content isn’t useful. You need to add unique, useful content and remove spammy content that visitors aren’t engaging with. Use Google Analytics or other metrics tools to see which content has high bounce rates, and do some keyword research and tweak the content title tag, description and on-page copy to be more in line with what your visitors are looking for.

What a Penguin Penalty Looks Like

A Penguin penalty is less about quality control and more about preventing sites from manipulating Google’s search engine by using artificial or unnatural links. Google considers any link that exists only to draw in web traffic - as opposed to routing users to high-quality content - a violation of its webmaster guidelines. Paying for links, asking for links, negotiating link exchanges and automating the creation of links using things like Scrapebox for mass syndication are all off limits. A Penguin penalty is typically indicated by specific keywords or a group of keywords experiencing a sudden drop in rankings. And, unlike sites affected by a Panda penalty, those rankings do not stabilize. A Penguin penalty is also page-specific, which means only pages that contain those keywords are penalized and may be de-indexed from Google. Another indicator that your site has received a Penguin penalty is that pages that are not supposed to be ranking will sometimes show up in place of pages that are. A site’s contact page may be ranking in place of its homepage, for example.

How to Recover from a Penguin Penalty.

Recovering from a Penguin penalty is more straightforward than recovering from a Panda penalty; simply remove the links that are damaging your site. There’s plenty of software out there for diagnosing bad links - our main vendor is Ahrefs. You can’t beat them; they’re constantly adding new features and they have the best backlink analysis in the game. However, a more manual approach without using tools is also effective.

The Process for Removing Bad Links

The process for removing bad links is finding your Backlinks, identifying which ones are bad and removing them.

How to Find your Backlinks

If you haven’t set up Google Webmaster Tools, you need to do this ASAP. Another useful free tool is Moz’s Open Site Explorer, but it’s not going to give you the full list of URLs that Webmaster Tools will. However, we’ll use Open Site Explorer in our next step.

How to Identify Your Bad Backlinks

At this point, it gets a little grey in terms of deciding which links to remove and which links to leave alone. I avoid manually removing links  - if I can help it - because Google “penalizes” you for over optimizing your website, and excessive removal can be classified as over optimizing. Every website is going to have crappy links pointing to it; it’s just a fact of Internet life. But people can get overzealous and start removing every link they think is bad and end up doing more harm than good. With that being said, if you have hundreds of links from one off-topic domain pointing to a single page on your site, you may want to consider marking those for removal. I would define off-topic as being illogically linked to your site based on the content themes. For example, if I sell cupcakes, why is a German aftermarket auto-parts forum linking to my website 1,000 times?

How to remove your bad Backlinks.

After you have identified the links or domains that need to be removed, go to Google’s disavow tool and upload your file. You need to be super careful because you can destroy your link profile if you disavow natural, helpful links. In September 2016, Google rolled out a massive update to their Rank Brain search engine software that applies and removes penalties in near real-time (more on that here). But, once you’ve disavowed your bad links, you can always try re-fetching your website using Google’s fetch tool in Webmaster Tools to speed things up, too.

Manual Actions: What to Do if Google Removes You from Search Results Entirely

In extreme cases, Google may take manual action to demote, or even remove from its search results a site or pages that violate its webmaster guidelines. To be clear, we’re not talking about losing page ranking, we’re talking about not showing up on Google at all. If that’s the case, you’ll have to submit a reconsideration request asking Google to review it after making changes to your site. It typically takes three weeks for Google to respond to reconsideration requests. Log in to Google webmaster tools, click on “search queries,” then click on “manual actions” to check for manual actions against your site. To find out if your site has been de-indexed due to miscellaneous penalties, Google “site:yoursitename.com,” and see if it shows up in the search results. If it doesn’t, your website may have been de-indexed.

Resources for Recovering from Google Penalties

• Google Webmaster Tools will show you just about everything you need to know about your site, including organic traffic numbers, penalty notices, crawl stats and errors. You need this tool.
• Panguin is a Google penalty checker used for overlaying Google updates over your Google Analytics traffic.
• Xenu Link Sleuth is a link crawler that can locate broken links, pages and other issues affecting the quality of your website. It can also help find issues like duplicate and thin content.
• Is My Website Penalized? Will estimate whether a website is penalized by Google.
• Open Site Explorer is an excellent tool that shows Backlinks and also lets you know if they are spammy or not.
• Google Disavow Tool is what you use after identifying spammy links pointing to your site that you want to have removed.

Our Manual SEO Penalty Recovery Services

We’ve cleaned up and reversed some of the worst SEO penalties. We can do a full SEO audit on your website and do the onsite optimization and link work necessary to get your search rankings back. Get in touch with us to discuss your situation.