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.