Imagine your website having a decent amount of traffic, then suddenly, that traffic is gone. I know how it feels given the amount of work you put into it to acquire traffic and ranking. Just like other site owners who were hit with the penguin penalty, you would probably think it something temporary, until you start seeing your traffic dropping lower and lower in the SERPs. Good news – recovering your site’s traffic lost after Google’s Penguin update has penalized you is difficult, but not impossible. This is how I recovered from a google penguin penalty.

1. Find all your backlinks

Creating a list of all your backlinks is the first step to performing penguin penalty recovery. There are many different tools that you can use to build this list, including Google Webmaster, Ahrefs, and many more. If possible, draw your links information from three tools so that you can compare your data. This will ensure you are not missing some links.

Most of these tools have an export option. So, to stay organized, export this list to a spreadsheet. This list will not only be useful now but will help in the future to monitor your backlinks to ensure Google does not penalize your site again. Hoping you understand and differentiate between a useful link and a bad one, you can then go to the next step.

2. Analyze your links for quality

Do you know why you were penalized? Here is when you get the answer to that question. The reason why you are penalized is likely because you have a lot of unnatural links pointing back to your site. However, this doesn’t mean that all your backlinks are bad. By analyzing your link list, you should be able to determine the good links and bad links.

Pluck out all the links coming from spammy sites. These are some of the links that Google tend to scrutinized, and that should be removed from your list:

• Links from websites with low page rank
• Links from non-indexed sites
• Links from irrelevant and untrustworthy sites

Depending on the number of bad links, this process can be time-consuming. Once you have the list of links that need to be removed, you have to contact their webmasters and ask for link removal. To automate the process, you can use tools that can find email addresses of each domain’s webmaster and contact them for you.

3. Disavowing Links

The process of contacting link webmasters does not bear much fruit, as most of them may end up not removing their links. And other links cannot be removed manually. Fortunately, you can use the Google disavow Links tool to get the remaining links removed. All you need is to create a text file with all bad links and submit it to Google webmaster tools. When your site is re-crawled, Google will know to ignore these links, and gradually regain your ranking.

This process may take longer but will help you with penguin penalty recovery.  Once you recover from the Penguin penalty, it’s essential to make sure you don’t get hit once again by actively keeping track of your links.

Getting a penalty hit means devastating consequences: lost traffic, visibility, and revenue, the Search Engine Journal notes. How do you recover from that blow? Here’s what you need to know.

Know the Difference

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking the Penguin and Panda updates are a type of penalty. However, there’s a big difference between triggering a manual penalty versus an algorithm. If your site gets a penalty hit, you’ll get a manual action report. Once you’ve fixed the violation, you’ll need to send a Reconsideration Request. When you trigger an algorithmic penalty, though, you won’t need to file anything.

Find Out Why

Your penguin penalty recovery efforts will go much better if you understand why you’re being penalized. Knowing is half the battle, so you can avoid making the same mistakes. For instance, some of the most common ways that you’ll get penalized include the following:

• Having unnatural links to and from your site
• Your site has been hacked
• Your content adds little to no value
• Your content is pure spam
• You have sneaky redirects
• Your stuffing your text with too many keywords
• You have a spammy free host
• You have a spammy structured markup

Identify Which Penalty

There are two main types of penalties: the manual penalty and algorithmic penalty. However, there’s the third penalty to keep in mind: a combination of both. The first one is when someone at Google sends you a manual penalty. The second one is when your site triggers an algorithm filter, the Hackernoon says. And the third is when both happen. Again, knowing what you’re dealing with will help you devise effective recovery efforts.

Learn Common Fixes

Now that you’re aware of the common reasons for penalties, you can go over your pages and fix the problem. If you have sneaky redirects, remove them. If you have cloaked images and you didn’t put them there, check your plugins. They may be the source of the issue. If your site is hacked, deal with that problem. Even better, prevent your site from getting hacked by improving your security. Identify the vulnerabilities in your site and fix them. If you’re stuffing your text with too many keywords, resist the urge.

Hire SEO Pros

Digital marketing experts can provide you with a plan and strategy to ensure that your recovery efforts succeed. Getting pros to help you will not only ensure faster and efficient results; it will also reduce the damage to your traffic and revenue. By getting help as soon as the penalty hit happens, you have a better chance of coming out of this unscathed. Or, at the very least, your pages can recover that much sooner.

Master the Guidelines

There are plenty of ways for you or your SEO team to fix the problem. However, the best way to build a sustainable presence on the web is to know and follow the guidelines that Google sets out. Don’t cut corners and get help from pros if you want to achieve online marketing success.

 

For an SEO professional, there’s nothing worse than receiving a message that your page has been penalized. Don’t let visions of doom overtake your mind, though. There are plenty of ways to reduce the damage that it will have on your website traffic. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you fix the problem.

Start with the Basics

Determine the why, how, and what. What was the cause? Why were you penalized in the first place? By knowing what the problem is, you have an idea of where to start. If you’ve been penalized because of your website design, you’ll need to change that as soon as possible.

Know the Different Penalties

What kind of penalty did you get? Knowledge of the two types of Google penalties will help you narrow down the reasons for getting a penalty. Whether it’s an algorithmic or manual penalty, expect your traffic to drop.

Look for Other Causes

That’s not to say that a dive in your traffic automatically means that you’ve been penalized. There are other signs that indicate e a penalty hit: server problems, crawling issues, blocking access to your robots.txt, and improper redirects. If you see all these happening, then that means you’re dealing with a penalty. The next course of action is to plan your penguin penalty recovery efforts.

Know the Common Penalties

Common penalties that affect website pages include unnatural links and thin or duplicate content. If any of your pages contain that, then fix them. Make a list of your backlinks and analyze them for quality, the Entrepreneur suggests. An outdated website design or poor user experience will also trigger a penalty. If you want to prevent penalties in the future, fix these problems.

Hire Marketing Pros

Digital marketing pros can know what to do to get your pages optimized, whether that means giving your site a much-needed upgrade, overhauling your content to ensure that they connect to your target market, or improving the quality of your links.

Fix Your Reputation

Sometimes, the penalty can even be the result of your competitors attacking your site. That could include spreading bad comments about your services, products, and company. One way to fix that is to hire pros to manage your online reputation. Why does that matter? People believe in reviews. While some may take them with a grain of salt, they’ll still go over the comments and feedback and pay attention to any details that stand out. If you have a small team, you likely don’t have the time to deal with this problem. By getting pros to take care of it, you can focus on your core tasks while experts work to get your online reputation back on its feet.

Hire the Right Team

Look for SEO experts to help you. Given the constant updates that Google rollouts, the only way to make sure you don’t get a penalty hit is to hire an SEO team that would ensure your pages are compliant with Google’s algorithms. Let them fix and maintain your pages so you can focus on your business.

Discover what a Google penalty is, why it happens to some sites and not others, as well as how to successfully make a full Google penalty recovery

It happens to many webmasters across the globe. You think you have been doing everything SEO right, even by the book. But your website traffic and search engine results performance (SERP) drops rather suddenly. You check around the interwebs and discover the big issue: Google recently released an algorithm change. It is likely that your website just got hit by a Google Penalty. It could be a Google Penguin Penalty or a Panda Penalty. Either way, it’s not a good thing and you’ll want to marshal legit Google Penguin recovery techniques to get your site back on top of SERPs.

Here’s the thing:

• The top five search results take close to 95% of all search clicks, leaving just 5% to the rest of all other rankings combined
• A 2014 Google organic search on desktops study showed CTR rate dropped from 71% to less than 6% when a site missed out on or dropped in rankings from the first page of search results.
• Ranking at the top of the first search results gets you 33% of all traffic for that search

Clearly, a drop in rankings is a real threat not only to your rankings, but also your revenue and profitability hence your ability to stay in business.

But how do you pull off a successful Google Penguin recovery when you may not even know what caused it?

Here’s what you need to do next.

1.    Understand what is a Google penalty

 

Since April 2014, Google has occasionally rolled out Search algorithm updates and other actions that seek to root out unethical webmasters trying to game the search engine system to gain top rankings.

The tricky part is you may have followed Google Webmaster Tools Guidelines (Google Search Console) to the letter but still suffer a penalty.

The Google antispam team drops a penalty in either of two ways:

• Manual action: this is a hands-on penalty the Google antispam team will slap on your site for a specific reason
• Automated algorithm updates: naturally comes into effect when your website fails to effect renewed ranking factors

And then there are the two popular types of Google penalties:

1. Panda Penalty: results from having low-quality content on your site
2. Penguin Penalty: results from suspicious, black hat, and straight-out link building schemes and techniques. If low-ball backlinks or inbound links link to your site, and you remain unaware, you could be penalized and not know why it happened.

 

2.    See why you got hit by a Panda or Google Penguin penalty

 

If you got a manual action against you, you may find an “unnatural links detected” notification in your Google Search Console inbox. The alert usually offers good pointers on what you need to fix.

Other times, you won’t receive a heads-up and have to dig into your site’s fabric to uncover which inbound links could be causing you trouble with Google.

Also check if the top SEOs in the industry are talking about a recent Google algorithm update, which could have automatically demoted your website rankings on PageRank.

Do follow Google’s head of SEO and the antispam team Matt Cutts Twitter page as well as Google Search Console’s YouTube Channel for more insights into new Google updates.

Algoroo and MozCast do keep a running track record of all recognizable algorithm changes so you can check with them to see what’s new and could be affecting your site so you can begin your Panda or Penguin recovery.

3.    Start your Google penalty recovery

 

After identifying what hit you specifically, you’ll have a great head-start to recover from a manual action or algorithm update.

Recovering from a Panda penalty requires you recreate your content to make it more useful and authoritative. For example, Backlinko found the best-ranking content length in 2019 averages out at 1,890 words.

Recovering from a Penguin penalty takes a bit more work, depending on the number and intensity of unnatural backlinks you have pointing to your domain, for example. You have to conduct a manual link profile assessment, meaning assessing whether each inbound link comes from a suspicious source or blacklisted site.

If you have thousands of inbound links, this can be painstakingly slow, keeping you in the penalty sandbox until you can manage to figure which links to slap with a no-follow tag so they don’t hurt your rankings again in future.

If you keep receiving low-quality and black hat links, you can see how long and nerve-wracking a process recovering from a Penguin penalty can be.

In fact, only about 5% of webmasters are actively trying to recover from an algorithm update penalty such as Penguin or Panda because it takes a lot of work.

4.    Get the help you need

 

But you can skip the manual labor and not knowing what to do next by using a credible Google recovery service help out. Be sure to see their portfolio, especially how many past clients and how deep they understand Google penalties.

Also, choose expert Google penalty recovery services that are experts certified by LinkResearchTools (LRT).  Time to get back to your deserved top ranking on SERPs.

How I Recovered from a Google Penguin Penalty – Case Study

Recovering the site traffic you’ve lost is hard when you’ve been penalized by Google. But it’s not impossible.

Imagine this: your pages used to get a decent amount of traffic. Then all of a sudden, that traffic was gone. Like a lot of site owners who were hit with the penalty, you probably thought it was something temporary. Until the next few days saw your pages dropping lower and lower in the SERPs. That’s when you knew: you’ve been hit by the Penguin update.

Is recovery possible?

Some site owners would rather have a new website built than going over the mistakes of their old one. However, that plan is flawed. If you don’t fix what’s broken, how will you know you won’t make the same mistakes—and open yourself and your business up to the same penalties? The answer is simple: you’ll need to fix your old site. That’s where Penguin penalty recovery help comes in. By hiring pros that provide Penguin recovery service, you can get to the bottom of things. Once you know what you were penalized for, you can start taking steps to remedy the situation.

Know the importance

The first step is knowing the importance of high-quality links. Knowing and understanding the difference between a good link and a bad one will help you figure out which links you need to lose, Hongkiat says. This will include links from bad and irrelevant sites.

Pluck out bad links

When you hire pros for Penguin penalty recovery, you can count on pros to weed through your pages and get all the bad links out. This will include low-quality links, many of which you may not even know you’ve had. Pros can also remove links coming from websites that have little to no relationship with yours as well as links coming from pages with poor user experience.

Disavow those links

Hiring a firm for Penguin recovery service also means you have someone to talk to webmasters on your behalf and start disavowing links. They can help you get all the low-quality links removed. That’s going to help improve your rankings on the SERPs.

Conclusion

Recovering from a Google penalty is possible. With the help of a team of search marketing pros, you can get your pages back on track. You can also regain the traffic you’ve lost. With enough patience and by using white-hat search engine optimization and link building techniques, your site should start going up the SERPs once again.

When a site has a dip in expected traffic, it can be a warning of a more extensive issue. Google, the biggest search engine, deploys multiple algorithms that index and parse web pages and promote those that conform to Google standards. Unfortunately, in their zeal to knock spammers off the front page of search engine results, algorithm Penguin can deal a mighty blow to websites that are unaware of the new standards or may have had less than stellar and aboveboard web design and SEO practices. When this happens, your site can disappear from search engine results and lead potential customers and clients to other businesses.

Penguin is not new. The Penguin update debuted in April 2012, with the stated intention to reduce sites spamming Google search results and rendering them meaningless. Some of the sites used black hat SEO to draw in searchers and infect their computers with malware. Unfortunately, when a new Penguin update comes out new sites may erroneously wind up on the business end of the banhammer. Recovering from being Penguined means bringing the penalized website into compliance with Google Webmaster guidelines. Those affected may need a Penguin recovery service that they can turn to for diagnostics, fixes, and recovery.

 

How to Find Out if Your Site has Been Penguined

First, you should understand that Google does not see penalizing as punishment. Instead, Google views these penalties as a way to cultivate organic traffic to relevant websites. Typically this means removing useless links, or links to low-quality or questionable sites. If you have backlinks from these sites to yours, you will need to disavow them and work with an experienced Penguin recovery service. Working with professionals will not just clean up your keywords and links, but may result in an overhaul of your website’s HTML code and an upgrade to security from HTTP to HTTPS. The first step to take is to use online tools to ascertain whether or not your site has been penalized, or to match dips in traffic to Penguin updates.

 

Going Pro

 

Remember that the stupidest question is the question that is never asked. If you are able to deal with a Penguin penalty on your own, and bring your search results and traffic back up to spec, that’s terrific! Unfortunately, not many people have the time or energy to devote to the study of SEO or the ability to carry out the dozens of different tasks required. In this case, an experienced Penguin recovery service should be retained without hesitation.

When your website or webpage has been penalized by Google, this can drastically damage your online presence and hinder your projected future growth. Here are 8 effective Penguin penalty recovery tools that you should consider implementing to resolve this issue and restore your online presence in a timely fashion:

Screaming Frog Web Crawler

This tool will crawl through your website to find any detectable problem that may have caused you to receive a penalty in the first place. It detects such problems as dead ends, duplicate content, internal redirects, orphan links and other common scenarios.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is primarily known for scoping out bad links within your website. It is also an effective tool for backlink report generation and inbound link analysis.

Copyscape

As mentioned above, duplicated content could easily be the root cause of your penalization. Use Copyscape to scan your content to determine if it exists anywhere else online.

Majestic SEO

This tool can help you to effectively analyze your link profile along with the website profile of your competitors for added value.

Fetch as Google

This tool makes it possible for you to simulate the process Google takes to render a specific URL within your website. It will also provide you with an opportunity to submit your URL to the overall index.

Moz’s Google Algorithm Change History

This is a solid resource to assist you with diagnosing relevant algorithmic issues.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google offers its own tools that can efficiently notify you of manual penalties imposed by Google. This tool also lets you know the cause of the penalty so that you can focus on developing a plan of action to fix it.

Monitor Backlinks

Once you have imported each link from Google Webmaster Tools into this specific tool, you can search for any do-follow backlinks and use filters to switch to an external setup that allows you to manually verify all your backlinks.

Regardless of which tool you use, it is highly recommended to consult with a professional SEO firm, such as SEO Tuners, to conduct a thorough examination of your overall online presence. This worthwhile investment will ensure your website restores and/or maintains a positive reputation with Google and your growing customer base.