By any chance, have you seen a recent sudden dip in your website traffic or ranking? It is possible that your website is affected by a Google penalty. These penalties can be manual or algorithmic, but either way, they have severe consequences: loss of visibilities, less organic traffic, and lesser brand trust. However, the good news is, recovery is possible, and with a few extra steps, your site will be back on its feet, standing stronger than ever.

Understanding Google Penalties

A Google penalty is when Google says your website violates its search guidelines, either intentionally or unintentionally. The search guidelines protect search users by ensuring spam, low-quality, or manipulation websites do not sit at the top of search engines. There are two forms of penalties: The first one is manual action from their webspam team, and the second one is the algorithmic kind, based on internal updates such as Panda, Penguin, or the Helpful Content Update. Either way, both have the potential to ruin your SEO performance.

Why Google Penalizes Websites

Google’s paramount goal is to provide the best user experience. Hence if your website is blatantly using tricks such as keyword stuffing, duplicate content sites, or manipulative backlinking, it gets flagged. Other common issues that cause penalties include slow loading speed, hidden text, poor mobile usability, thin or low-quality content, and cloaking. These indicate to Google that manipulation of search ranking is the goal of the website or has not offered any value for the users.

How to Know If Your Website Is Penalized

Signs of getting penalized by Google are the ones that could often be in-your-face. A sudden plunge into organic traffic or rankings is a serious red flag. You might even notice that your pages dropped from results. When it comes to manual penalties, you will get a notification about the penalty in your Google Search Console account. For algorithmic ones, you could be looking for traffic drop dates coinciding with known Google update rollouts to diagnose it.

Step 1: Perform a Full SEO Audit

Everything starts with a full SEO audit in your recovery. Google Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and other such tools can phish out the problems, like toxic backlinks, duplicate pages, broken links, and crawl issues. Fix your on-page and off-page SEO and consider what may have caused the penalty as a result. The audit gives you a clear direction of what all needs fixing.

Step 2: Fix the Core Issues

Once the root causes have been identified, it is about time to clean the house. Remove spammy backlinks by disavowing them with the Google Disavow Tool. Either rewrite or remove duplicate and thin content. Raise speed levels for usability on mobile platforms and follow best practices for on-page SEO. Make sure your site complies with the Google guidelines on every page.

Step 3: Submit a Reconsideration Request (If Needed)

If it appears the site suffered a manual penalty, the next step is to submit a reconsideration request. Explain what went wrong and give evidence of what you’ve fixed in Google Search Console. Provide truthful information because Google favors honesty and some effort. It may take some days to some weeks for Google to appreciate your efforts and lift the penalty.

Step 4: Monitor and Stay Consistent

After the recovery of your site, working day and night is not an option. Track performance and ranking and complete regular audits on your site. Develop and publish high-quality, original content that is of real value to users. Stay up-to-date about Google algorithm changes that may impact you in the future. Consistency and compliance with SEO practice go hand in hand.

Let SpectronX Help You Get Back on Track

SpectronX Technologies specializes in Google penalty recovery and technical SEO. Whatever your website situation, be it an algorithm update hit, or a manual reviewer hit, we’ll diagnose the problem, clean up the mess, and walk you through the recovery steps. Not only do we [fix the problem], but we will also help you re-build that stronger, faster, and search-friendly website.