Search engine traffic is the best form of traffic for any online business. But what if you suddenly lose that constant stream of traffic? Has that happened to your website in the past, if so there is a high chance your website has been hit by a Google Penalty?
There have been so many Google updates like Google Panda, Penguin, Mobile Friendly Update, Hummingbird, Pigeon and many others. If your site does not comply with any of these updates then you are likely to get a penalty from Google which will degrade you down from the rankings which ultimately will lead to loss of traffic.
How do you know if your website has been penalised?
If you see a drop in your website traffic then you must check whether you are hit by any Google penalty. There can be two ways to figure out whether your website is penalised by Google or not.
1. Manual Action by Google
Check your Google Webmasters account and read out notifications whether you have received that states your web pages do not comply with Google Guidelines.
2. Google Algorithmic Penalty
In this, you need to correlate the drop in your traffic with any major Google update or algorithm change that happened at the time of traffic drop. You can learn about the Google Algorithm Change History here.
Two of the major penalties are Google Panda which is related to the quality of content and Google Penguin which is related to the quality of backlinks.
How to recover your site from a Google Penalty?
To recover your website from a Google Panda Penalty, you need a deep content audit of your website. If any of your website pages have duplicate content, then it must be replaced by freshly written content with proper citations. Also, you need to check whether the web pages have enough content for a user to take action on your website. If your website has thin content then you need to add more content to it.
To recover your website from Penguin, you need to check whether you have made backlinks keeping Google Guidelines in mind.
Google penalize sites which have unnatural backlinks from following sources.
- Hidden Links
- Side-wide links to similar anchor text
- Links from pages with high outbound links
- Naked comment links
- Links from irrelevant websites
- Links from Gambling websites
- Cloaking
- Doorway pages and many other unnatural backlink techniques!
Now to recover your website from Penguin penalty you need to remove all the bad backlinks.
Firstly you need to figure out the links from other websites through Google Webmasters of your website. Then list out the bad links by checking the DA (domain authority) and PA (page authority) of a website. Also check manually if possible whether a link back to your site is a natural or spammy. If you have login details of a particular website such as a forum or social bookmarking website, then remove that manually.
To remove links from other websites where you have no login details, you can request the webmaster of a particular website to remove your website link from their website. If they allow you to do so then it is good for us, otherwise, we need to put that links together in a text file to disavow them through Google Webmasters.
After doing this it is most likely that you will start recovering your lost traffic and can finally recover your website from Google penalty. If you need support recovering your website from a Google Penalty please contact us and see our SEO services.
