Google Penalty Recovery

There are several reasons why your website traffic or your keyword rankings go down dramatically. A penalty from Google is one of the most common reasons.

It does not take a lot to receive a penalty from Google. Links to low-quality sites, questionable inbound links, hidden text, keyword-stuffed content or poorly designed content, and other factors all can contribute to a penalty from Google that will cause your website to disappear from search engine rankings. This can cause significant harm to your business.
Google penalty recovery is designed to assess the problem with your site, and then take the steps necessary to get your site back into compliance with Google's rules.

Penguin

While the release of Penguin is not a penalty in the true sense of the word, it is a filter Google has deployed to devalue links to your website that come from spammy or questionable sources. This can harm the quality score of your site, and your rankings. Our team can review your inbound links, and work to clear you of problems caused by Penguin.

Panda

Panda is an algorithm-based filter for on-site issues. Low-quality content, large amounts of duplicate content, and other circumstances all can weigh-down your website's score in Google. Since Panda will gauge the quality of your site when determining rankings, it is important that these issues get fixed - either to repair damage that has been or to prevent a future penalty from being assessed.

Manual Penalties From Google

Manual penalties are given by a Google team member. When Google’s spam algorithm identifies a potential problem on your website, a person at Google reviews the problem and decides whether or not to take action. If a penalty is assessed, a message will be sent to your Webmaster Tools account. This makes penalties easier to identify, and fix.

Google Penalties Require Immediate Attention

Based on earlier estimates, out of 400,000 manual actions per month taken by Google in terms of penalties, only 20,000 or 5% of all webmasters were filing reconsideration requests. That means approximately 95% of all websites are doing nothing or very little to recover from penalties assessed by Google.

Some Resources For Evaluating A Google Penalty

Google Webmaster Tools

MOZ - Google Algorithm Change

MOZCast (A weather report showing turbulence in the Google algorithm over the previous day.)

Our Penalty Recovery Process

Google's penalties have a direct impact on your website's traffic, because they impact your website's position in search engine results. The farther down you are in search engine results (knowns as SERPs), the less likely people will discover your website's content.

As with every SEO engagement or project, we start a Google penalty recovery process with a discussion and a review of the data.

We will conduct a complete website audit, review Google Analytics (and other website analytics data), examine all your page links (onsite and inbound), and review your Webmaster account to see if any messages / alerts have been sent. This is necessary to determine if you have been assessed a penalty or are facing a negative impact from an algorithm change.

The kinds of things we will look for include:

Unnatural links to your site
Unnatural links from your site
Do you have a "hacked" website, or have you been engaged in phishing
Low / poor quality content
User-generated spam content on your website (in forums, blog posts, etc)
Hidden text
Keyword stuffed pages
Redirects that are cloaked to try and gain SEO advantage

Once we have determine the nature and scope of the problem, we will create an action plan and timeline for you to review and approve. After it is approved, we get to work.

It is important to know that removing bad links, submitting removal requests, asking for reconsideration, content edits, and other changes will take some time. While the problem may have occurred suddenly, repairing damage done by a Google penalty can take several week to months of hard work - depending on the size of the problem.