Recovering from Google Penalties: Steps to Restore Your Website's Ranking

If you are a website owner you know the struggle to make it rank well on search engines right? But despite following the right recipe sometimes the dish tastes too salty or less salty. Similarly, even after following the right SEO tips, sometimes your website can be penalized by Google. This can happen for a variety of reasons, such as building backlinks in a manipulative way or using spammy content.

In this article, we will learn what are Google penalties and how to recover from them.

What are Google penalties and how do they affect websites?

Google penalty is an action applied by Google that negatively ranks the website when it violates or doesn’t match the webmaster guidelines. This often results in a sudden rank drop of a website and sometimes even the removal of the website from the search index. But the world doesn’t end here, it can be recovered.

Different types of Google penalties and what causes them?

Algorithmic Penalties: As we are aware that Google’s Algorithm changes from time to time. You have generated your website following the old algorithm and When the algorithm changes, Google automatically applies the penalty as it violates its current guidelines. Such penalties are Algorithmic Google Penalties.

Manual Penalties: This type of penalty is applied when a human reviewer discovers fault in your website. The reviewer assesses your website as a reader and audience, and if it doesn’t meet Google’s guidelines, a penalty is applied. Manual penalties are like the yellow light of the traffic signals which acts as a warning that you need to change the behavior.

How to identify a Google penalty:

Google Search Console: You can check your Google Console Account to check if any penalty is imposed on your website. A message will pop up if your website is penalized. This message will tell you the reason for the penalty and what you need to do to fix it.

Monitor your Website’s Traffic: A sudden drop in your website’s traffic. For example, if you typically get 10,000 visitors per day and suddenly your traffic drops to 1,000 visitors per day, this could be a sign of a penalty.

Compare your website with similar ones: Do a website comparison with similar websites. If your website’s ranking has dropped significantly compared to similar websites, it could be a sign that you have been penalized.

Reasons for Google penalty:

There are many reasons that your website could get Penalized by Google some of the common ones are:

1. Use of low-quality or spammy content
2. Building of backlinks in a manipulative way
3. Cloaking (displaying different content to search engines than to your visitors)
4. Doorway pages (pages that are designed in a way to rank for certain keywords, but don’t provide any real content)
5. Spam-paid search ads

How to recover from a Google penalty:

Identify the actual reason by checking Google Search Console. Which will tell you the cause of the penalty and what you need to do to fix it.

By fixing the underlying problems. After knowing the cause of the penalty, fix the underlying problems. This may involve removing spammy content, retracting bad backlinks, or making changes to your website’s code or design.

Submission of a reconsideration request to Google. After fixing the underlying problems, submit a reconsideration request to Google. For this, you need to provide evidence that you have taken the necessary steps in fixing the problem. Your request will be reviewed by Google and later it will decide whether to remove the penalty.

Provide proper evidence when you submit your reconsideration request. This could include screenshots of your website’s new content, backlink profile, or code.

You have to be patient as a reconsideration request takes several weeks or even months to get reviewed by Google and your Penalty to get lifted. In the meantime, you can continue to improve your website’s content and backlink profile.

While sending the reconsideration request, keep in mind, to be honest with Google about what you did wrong and what you have done to fix it. Your honesty will be appreciated by Google and this will make your request more likely to get approved

There might be a situation where your reconsideration request gets rejected. But don’t give up. You can send another reconsideration request after a few weeks or months. Just make sure that you have made significant improvements to your website in the meantime

Conclusion:

Getting a Google penalty is indeed a setback for your website, but it is not the end. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can increase your chances of recovering from the penalty and getting your website back to its former ranking.