Here’s how SEO services can make a difference and help recover from Google penalty: 1. SEO experts have a better understanding of Google Webmaster Guidelines, and they can help identify the problems with the website. A manual review of the site can be conducted to find out what’s wrong with it and why it was penalized. 2. After identifying the problem, a proper plan of action can be made to fix it, and then a reconsideration request can be sent to Google. 3. Without a proper understanding of the cause of the penalty, it’s very difficult to get rid of it.
SEO services can enhance your website performance and help recover from Google penalty in the most effective way. It is highly recommended to seek help from SEO experts because getting rid of a penalty is a time-consuming process, and without proper understanding, it is possible to cause more damage to the site instead of improving it.
Before we begin detailed analysis on how to recover from Google penalty, let’s have a clear understanding of Google penalty and its impact. Google penalty is given to a website after reviewing it to determine if it is not in accordance with Google Webmaster’s Guidelines. The penalty can be due to unnatural links, hidden text, keyword stuffing, or cloaking. There are two types of penalties: manual and algorithmic. Manual penalties are given when a manual review is conducted by a Google employee and appropriate action is taken. Algorithmic penalties occur when Google updates its search algorithms and sites that do not comply with the new update are affected. This results in a lower site ranking, causing the website to lose traffic and ultimately business.
Importance of SEO services
The general awareness of your company can also increase as a result of SEO services, as the idea is to get your website on the first page of search results. By doing this, your site will be seen by more people, even those who do not use search engines as a competitive place. SEO services can also take your company a long way as they can expand the opportunities available to it. With increased traffic to your site, it is possible for you to set up an online shop or advertising space, meaning that SEO services can open up new business opportunities and an increase in revenue.
A further importance of SEO services is that they are a cost-effective means of marketing your business. In comparison to other means of marketing such as TV, radio, or PPC advertising, SEO services are a relatively cheap way to market your company to a large audience. SEO services also increase the credibility of your company. Prospective customers are more likely to trust a website that is on the first page of a search engine result. This means that if your site ranks high enough, it can increase the likelihood of a return visit from a customer.
SEO services provide a major opportunity for companies to benefit from increased visibility and market exposure. It is that visibility which directly increases sales and profits. By appearing higher up in Google search engine results, your website will benefit from an increase in customer traffic. Studies show that the first three listings in a search engine results page get the majority of traffic when compared to lower listings. Therefore, by getting your site to appear higher up the page de resultados, you will increase the likelihood that browsers will click on your website.
Impact of Google penalties
Google penalties can be very severe, and their impact is felt by any business that relies on search engines for traffic. The most obvious consequence of Google penalties is a decrease in visibility within Google’s search results. This is a result of being down-ranked, where in most cases pages that were previously listed on the first page of results are moved to the second or third pages. In some instances pages may be dropped from the index altogether, and the only way to get them listed again is to submit a re-inclusion request, or wait for the penalty to be lifted. When this happens visitor numbers from Google will drop off dramatically, with the severity of the traffic decrease depending on the competitiveness of the keywords that were down-ranked. Visitors that arrive at a website via Google are often the most valuable, as they are actively searching for a website that provides a certain product or service. When they do not find the desired website on the first page of results, quite often they will refine their search to such an extent that they will find a competitor’s website, rather than the website that has been penalized. This is lost potential customers, and lost revenue. With a decrease in traffic comes a decrease in revenue from advertising, particularly for websites that rely on ad clicks as the main revenue stream. Advertisers will notice the traffic decrease, and lower their bids, resulting in even less revenue.
Understanding Google Penalties
With the exponential increase in the number of users turning to the internet for information, entertainment, research, and purchasing, turning up in search engine results has become more important than ever. For businesses and individuals who rely on their websites for generating income, or even simply maintaining a positive public image, ranking well in search engine results can be a make-or-break factor. And when it comes to search engines, there’s no disputing that Google is king. Google’s search algorithm is one of the most closely-guarded secrets in the industry, but over the years they have been quite forthcoming in making webmasters aware of what is and isn’t considered acceptable practice with regard to SEO. Unfortunately, there are still a large number of websites using tactics that are not in compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, whether they are aware of it or not. In some cases, webmasters legitimately might not realize that the methods they are using are in violation. For this reason, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what exactly constitutes a Google penalty and what can be done to recover from it.
Types of Google penalties
If you feel that your website has dropped significantly in the search engine rankings, there’s a possibility your website has been penalized by Google. Google has two different types of penalties. The first is an automatic penalty and the second is a manual one. Automatic penalties are given by Google’s algorithm updates such as Google Panda or Penguin. These updates can decrease the ranking of websites that have violated Google’s Webmaster Guidelines or use black-hat SEO techniques. Manual penalties are given by a member of Google’s web spam team. The member of staff will have manually viewed your website and decided to lower your website’s ranking due to spam activities. Session 5 goes into further details about this. To check if your website has received a penalty, login to your Google Webmaster Tools account, click on the Tools tab and then the ‘fetch as Google’ tab. Insert the URL of your website and retrieve it. If your website’s content does not appear and you receive an error message, it is likely that your website has been removed from Google’s index. This implies that Google has applied a site-wide match penalty to your website. To check that you have this penalty, Google ‘site:www.yourwebsite.com’ and if no results are displayed, it is certain that your website has site-wide match penalty. To identify whether or not you have a manual penalty, Google will usually send you a message in your Webmaster Tools account. This will be displayed in the ‘Manual actions’ tab and should inform you about why your website has been penalized. If there are no messages it is likely you do not have a manual penalty.
Identifying a penalty on your website
If you can pinpoint a date or a specific time frame in which your site’s traffic and or rankings dropped, this may correlate with a known Google update and this can help determine the type of penalty. You can use your Google Analytics account to check your traffic levels within that time frame and then compare them to your traffic levels prior to it. This can be done by narrowing the dates and then looking for any abrupt drops in your traffic and rankings and then comparing the data with historical data. This data can then be compared with a list of known Google updates (Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, etc.) and a bit of research on each of them can be done to identify the corresponding update to the traffic drop. During this process, it is important to rule out any other reasons for the drop in traffic such as any website changes, nofollow or noindex tags added, backlinks from other sites being removed, etc. As this will make it a bit harder for you to determine the exact cause of the drop in traffic to your website.
A penalty occurs when a website or some of its pages are negatively affected in search rankings. This can be a manual or algorithm penalty. Generally, you will be notified of a manual penalty via Google Webmaster Tools and you will receive a message in your account. An algorithm penalty can be a little more tricky to determine whether or not your website has been hit by one of these penalties and the type can be unclear at times. A telltale sign would be seeing a sudden or significant drop in your search traffic and rankings within the search engines. After you have determined that your website has in fact been penalized, there are a few steps that can be taken to pinpoint the exact type and reason for the penalty.
Common causes of penalties
Hidden text and/or hidden hyperlinks contain including text or hyperlinks in the same color as the background of the website. By doing this, someone can manipulate link exchanges with different websites or trigger your user to learn content that the human doesn’t see in an effort to influence the website’s ranking. Hidden text does not always have to be completely invisible because Google also considers very small text or using CSS to place text off-screen as hidden. Again, many times an attempt to control search engine ranking can be very obvious.
Keyword stuffing is the collection of too many keywords on a page to manipulate a website’s ranking inside Google search. In the past, an individual may discover a long list of keywords at the end of a website filled with different colored text. Another method to do this would be to have a section of every page dedicated only to keywords and nothing else. Google now penalizes any website that seems to overuse key phrases while providing little good content. Keyword stuffing is transparent and just doesn’t work, so keep key phrases to around 5% of total seen text.
Recovering from a Google Penalty
To effectively recover from a Google penalty, it is necessary to identify why the penalty was given in the first place. This can be achieved by accessing the manual action report provided by Google, which gives details about the reason for the penalty. If the penalty is algorithmic, check your analytics for a drop in website traffic and match it against known dates for Google updates. A drop in traffic can indicate that your site has been hit by an algorithmic penalty. Then, assess whether any changes were made to the website that may have caused it to be penalized. This information will be vital to the recovery process. After the reason for the penalty has been identified, rectify the issues and request a review through Google Webmaster Tools, ensuring that the problems have been fixed. If Google is satisfied that changes have been made to rectify the problem, the penalty will be lifted.
Conducting a comprehensive SEO audit
When diagnosing a traffic loss in the absence of a notification from Google, it is important to first determine if a site-wide issue exists. Exact match branded searches are a great initial indicator of the brand’s vitality. Should significant traffic be lost from this, the brand is likely to have issues appearing clearly for its brand searches. Checking the message history in Google Webmaster Tools, or newly migrated to the ‘Manual Actions’ tab, will give an indication if the site has recently been hit with a penalty. If no message is visible, it is important to analyze the traffic loss further to determine if a site-wide issue exists. This can be achieved by comparing traffic data pre and post penalty hit. If traffic is fairly consistent on non-impacted areas of the site, it indicates that the issue is isolated to a section which has relatively incurred the penalty. A worldwide drop in traffic is a clear indication that a site-wide issue exists and it may also indicate an issue with another form of offline marketing such as a radio or TV campaign not running as expected. With an isolated issue identified, if the penalty is suspected from a recent Google update, then checking the dates of major search engine algorithm updates will help. If no major update coheres with the traffic loss, utilizing the ‘fetch as google’ tool in Webmaster Tools to identify when Google last successfully accessed the page will help determine if the penalty is recent or has a historic cause. Fetch as Google will also highlight any issues with server connectivity. Prior to the Penguin update, a comprehensive tool to check backlinks was to compare the number of backlinks indexed in Google to Yahoo. A significant difference in the two numbers would indicate Google had devalued a number of backlinks. Unfortunately, this is no longer possible due to the retirement of the Yahoo Site Explorer. The next step would be to use a backlink comparison tool.
Removing or disavowing harmful backlinks
If you already have an idea about the backlinks that caused the penalty, and this could have been from an over-optimization of anchor text like we mentioned earlier, or maybe from buying links from a link farm, you can attempt to contact the owners of the website on which your links reside and ask for them to be removed. This can be a very time consuming and often fruitless task, however it is an essential first step and if you are unable to remove the links you can then use Google’s Disavow Links Tool as a way to tell Google to ignore these links when assessing your site. To remove or disavow backlinks effectively, it is important to build up a list of links pointing to your website. Using tools such as Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO or ahrefs, you can download a list of links that these services have found by inputting your domain or subdomain. Be sure to have all of the data in one place with each backlink and the source URL in different columns. You can then use Excel to filter through these links and mark which ones you are going to try to remove and later which ones you will use as the disavow file. It is then a case of visiting each link and taking the appropriate action. If you are trying to remove links, it can be useful to keep a record of your correspondence with the webmaster and a list of links that you have attempted to remove. Ensure that the emails are polite and to the point. A typical email may be:
Optimizing website content and structure
This step is crucial because without optimizing the site content and structure, it’s almost certain that another penalty will be given by Google in the future. In February 2011, Google’s Matt Cutts announced the Panda update which had a new focus on site content. The Panda update was designed to reduce the prevalence of low-quality, thin content in the search results, and to reward unique, compelling content. Sites that were hit the hardest were content farms – sites with a huge amount of poor quality, generic content. Although some of these sites have cleaned up their act to some extent, using the disavow tool or by removing content, it’s clear that to recover from a Panda algorithmic penalty, a site must have high quality content. Reoptimization of your website’s on-page SEO elements is also an important factor. This includes optimizing meta titles and descriptions, header tags and on-page copy for your target keywords. Identification of target keywords and the pages which those keywords should rank on is a crucial part of optimizing– it may be necessary to change the keyword focus for some pages, or to consolidate pages in order to strengthen the keyword targeting and internal link anchor text. An SEO penalty is a sign that your website is not currently meeting Google’s quality guidelines. For that reason it’s important to have a clear understanding of exactly what your site’s target audience is, and the action you want them to take when arriving on each page. This can be reflected in the meta data and on-page copy, and should help your site avoid similar penalties in the future.
Utilizing SEO services from experts
- Give your site a health check. This means conducting a thorough analysis of the website to check for any underlying issues that may have caused the penalty. An example of this would be a site with two different versions of a page, both the www and non-www version, that has duplicate content, which could be seen as an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings.
- Quality content creation, such as articles, blog posts, and press releases. This type of content is used to gain high-quality, natural links to the website and also to recover the traffic that may have been lost due to a drop in search engine rankings.
- Link removal. This is one of the most time-consuming and frustrating tasks but also one of the most important. In some cases, Google expects that an effort has been made to manually remove harmful links to a site before submitting a disavow file.
- A list of backlinks will be analyzed, and any harmful links will be identified and added to a disavow file. The disavow file is then submitted to Google, requesting that they ignore these links when assessing the website.
When a business owner is hit with a Google penalty, they have the choice of trying to fix their site themselves or utilizing a professional SEO service. This section is a simplified list of the type of work an expert SEO firm would carry out to help restore a website that has been given a manual action penalty for unnatural links.
Sotavento Medios: Your Trusted SEO Service Provider
Following the writing of the reconsideration request, our most recent client has successfully had a partial manual penalty removed and been re-included into Google’s index. They are now able to experience normal levels of search traffic after a 70% drop and have a clean slate to work with moving forward. This client’s penalty was assessed in just two weeks, which we feel is a very reasonable snapshot of time for smaller companies who need to fix specific and isolated problems. Most cases of partial penalties go away with the first one or two changes to the request with no waiting period between.
Removal of content was not enough. This tactic would not pass pagerank to the intended new landing spots of this content in most cases. During the next penguin update, Google wanted to see evidence that sites were actually giving up on spammy tactics and sacrificing some of their existing search traffic to start over with a more shareable, promotable, natural, and eventually higher quality approach to SEO. This meant taking a 30% traffic loss so that we can execute a subdomain swap for an international site into the correct target country and language. This meant taking slightly outdated content with great links and social signals and redirecting it to current content on the same topic with the intent to look more responsible. These were large-scale sacrifices but intentional and executed with precision and correction of old mistakes.
To ranch our beanstalks, we have had to place large quantities of content with restricted interlining and old-school link building tactics back into the box. We began with pushing an altered form of most existing content off to subdomains and URLs that are not accessed via the global navigation of a site. We marked much of this content as “noindex” or set the pages to 404 status. Any links pointing to these pages were removed and new navigation was made to point to the newer, higher quality content.
4.1 Introduction to Sotavento Medios
Considered a leader in providing digital communication solutions, Sotavento Medios is a specialist SEO service provider located in Singapore. It serves as an agency for proactive businesses that require a customized digital strategy to enter and grow in Asian markets using SEO. A vast majority of its clients and website owners suffer from Google penalties or loss of traffic in some form or another because they do not understand SEO or have implemented poor quality and often cheap services. These clients are generally small to medium enterprises that have seen significant drops in their search rankings and traffic from Google, which has significantly impacted their business. In many cases, some businesses may totally lose awareness of what has happened but simply notice a decrease in customer calls and/or email inquiries inquiring about their services. Sotavento Medios provides search engine recovery and quality SEO while diagnosing and eliminating the problems that adversely affect clients’ website rankings and traffic from Google.
Range of SEO services offered
Upon penalty removal, we feel that a change in strategy is best for most companies moving forward. Sotavento Medios provides top-quality link building through the generation of highly relevant and high-quality link bait, ensuring that our actions will never jeopardize the customer’s site. This is backed by detailed, themed content building and well-informed on-site SEO alterations that will enhance site value and provide better results long into the future. All recent clients that have suffered from penalties have seen great improvement and sustained ranking increases.
Our experienced professionals will methodically look through both on-page and off-page content to locate offense triggers and build up a pattern of issues that caused the penalty. During the recovery phase, we will access the links and build strategies to remove any that are hurting the site and disavow those that cannot be manually removed. This process will usually involve a resubmission of the site for reconsideration.
We understand that penalties, whether they are link-based or a manual action, can be detrimental to a business. Different penalties require different methods to recover from, and Sotavento Medios is qualified to solve them. A partial recovery process is outlined below as an example of how we aim to remove past issues and bring a site back to its former glory.
Sotavento Medios is a reliable SEO service provider with a reputation for thorough and quality services to its clients. To this end, we have the skills and knowledge to ensure sustainable results are achieved. This is seen in our commitment to both methodically ‘white hat’ activities as well as an acute awareness and reaction to search engine changes. Our expertise helps our clients recover from Google penalties and gives them a platform to drive their businesses forward. Sotavento Medios is made up of industry professionals trained to fix a range of SEO problems and give new, fresh, and value-adding insight into existing and future SEO tactics. Our team is truly prepared to identify and resolve the issues preventing your site from achieving its full potential.
