What is a Google Penalty and How to Recover?

What is a Google Penalty and How to Recover

Ever heard of Google penalties? Perhaps you have noticed some websites disappearing from the rankings or even experienced a penalty yourself? Well, this article will explain what Google penalties are and how you can go about removing them.

Receiving a Google penalty can cause quite the shock, especially when you thought you were doing everything by the book. One day you might be flying high in the SERPs and receiving a great deal of traffic to wake up the next day to find that they have both plummeted. If that happens, there is a good chance that you have been given a Google Penalty. Below, cbmarketing explains about Google penalties and how you can recover from them.

What is a Google Penalty?

Any website that is seen to have breached Google’s search guidelines could face a Google penalty. These guidelines change regularly as the search engine is constantly making changes to the algorithm that calculates where a website should rank in their search engine ranking positions.

While there are many reasons why a website may be penalized, there are two ways in which this may happen:

Algorithmic Penalties

These are the most likely cause for a penalty. As Google releases updates to its algorithm, many sites are penalized at once when underhand ranking tactics are shut oy Google.

Manual Penalties

This occurs when Google manually checks your website and discovers that you are using spammy/blackhat methods to rank your website. When this happens, you will receive an email from Google detailing why you have been penalized.

Why Does Google Penalise Websites?

Some websites purposely try to cheat the system to gain higher positions in the rankings. Why? Simply because the higher your website ranks for certain search terms, the more likely you are to get visitors, leads, and conversions. All of this equals a healthier bottom line and a more successful business.

Google wants to reward sites that work hard to provide a good user experience for their visitors. High quality and valuable content, backlinks from authoritative websites, optimized websites, and no spammy links. If they feel that the user experience is poor, there is a good chance that your website will receive a penalty of some kind.

While it may take longer and cost more money to earn your rankings naturally, it really is worth it. You will be safe from a penalty, will please your visitors, and will reap the rewards of a high position in the SERPs.

Avoid using blackhat SEO tactics. They may work in the short term but Google will catch up with you eventually. Is it really worth the short term gain just to have your website delisted? You will have to do things the right way eventually anyway!

A few of these blackhat tactics include:

  • Keyword stuffing
  • Hidden texts and links
  • Low-quality spammy content
  • Low-quality backlinks

Google updates its search algorithm to stop many of these underhand tactics. An example was Google Penguin putting a stop to cheating the system by acquiring thousands of low-quality backlinks. The search engine is always looking at ways to improve how they rank websites and to ensure that only those that are deserving are able to occupy the higher positions.

Do things right and you could be one of those that are deserving of the lucrative top page Google listing.

How to Recover From a Google Penalty?

There is only one way to recover from a Google penalty and that is to fix the reasons why you were penalized in the first place. Remove the spammy backlinks, low-quality content, and anything else that may be causing Google to penalize your website.

Once you have done all of that, you are able to send a re-evaluation request to Google. This can take time though, Google has to deal with millions of websites worldwide. Patience is required and besides, Google obviously wants you to learn your lesson through suffering for a while.

Conclusion

As you might expect, a Google penalty can have a devastating effect on your business. When you lose your rankings, it makes it harder for visitors to find you. You lose money and all your previous hard work. This is why it is important to make sure that you are always sticking closely to the guidelines that Google sets. If you do find that you have been penalized, do all that you can to have that decision reversed. Clean up your site and send a request to Google to reevaluate your website. Hopefully, before long you will have your hard-earned ranking positions and traffic back to normal.