Google Penalty Recovery

Decoding Google Penalty Recovery and How to Go About it

As a website striving to achieve success in organic SEO, you don’t want to end up on the bad side of Google.

Google takes its ranking algorithm seriously, and comes up with constant updates to provide users with the best search experience possible. If a website or a brand tampers with that experience, Google doesn’t bat an eye before penalising the page.

But the question is, how do you know if you’re crossing the line? How do you prevent your website from facing the wrath of a Google penalty?

Google penalties are more common than we think as many businesses don’t realise when they’re violating the guidelines. To avoid the nightmare of getting such a message, it’s essential to understand what are Google penalties, their causes, and the steps you can take for Google penalty recovery.

Common Causes of Google Penalties

1. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing has long been a thing of the past in SEO, so much so, that it is now considered a deceptive SEO technique. Stuffed keywords are often placed in content pieces without context, and too many times. While adding keywords to the title, headings, meta-descriptions, and body helps Google understand the relevancy of your site, intentionally stuffing them without relevance is a black-hat SEO tactic that will most likely result in a Google penalty.

2. Cloaking

Similar to keyword-stuffing, cloaking is a black-hat SEO technique that aims at misleading users and manipulating search engines. The page targets easier keywords to rank on search engines but in reality, it shows something else when users access the content. This method of using alternate versions of content is considered deceptive, and can be penalised.

3. Thin Content

When site owners focus on quantity fluff content over quality, they’re drifting towards thin content practices where each page offers little to no value to its users. It can mean publishing extremely short articles for a topic that warrants details, duplicate content, thin affiliate pages, etc. Google has time and again emphasised content relevancy, and rolled out the 2016 Panda 4.0 algorithm update which detects low-quality content and reduces its visibility on search rankings.

4. Spammy Auto-generated Content

A lot of sites publish programmatically generated content that is full of errors and lacks coherence and value to users. Their only purpose is to manipulate search rankings and rank high. Google can easily detect such spam and eliminate them from the ranking pages. Some examples include, automatically translated text, merging content from other web pages that add no value, etc.

5. Hidden Texts and Links

Similar to cloaking, hidden texts or links that are solely there for SEO rather than adding value to the user is a black-hat SEO practice that leads to Google penalties. Websites hide links by setting the font size to 0, hiding text behind images, blending links with the background, etc.

6. Unnatural Links to Your Site

Linking has been one of the most important ways of defining a site’s SEO but the only catch is they have to be organic and relevant. Over the years, Google has also worked on penalising manipulative link practices that mislead users with its Penguin and SpamBrain updates.

7. Hacked Content

Hacked content is a result of breaches in the website’s security. Hackers can add content or codes to a site without the knowledge of the website owner which leads to hidden content links, deceptive pages, deceptive redirects, and so on.

A hacked website can pose a serious threat to the visitors as well as the site owners and tarnish the reputation they’ve worked so hard to build. Google usually sends a message to the site to inform about the hacking and puts up a warning on the SERPs. To check if your website is safe from hackers, you can do so from Google’s Transparency Report.

Google Penalty Recovery: What to Do in Case You Are Hit?

Let’s consider the worst case scenario — you receive a penalty. What do you do now? Listed below are some of the ways you can adopt for Google penalty recovery.

1. Conduct an SEO Audit

If SEO is an integral part of your strategy, then so is conducting regular SEO audits. It can help in diagnosing any dramatic or even minor drops in traffic.

When it comes to facing a threat from Google penalties, a technical SEO audit is your best bet for unravelling any SEO errors that are negatively impacting your site and optimising your site according to the top ranking factors.

And if that’s not your forte, you can always hire a professional SEO agency to do that for you. It helps with industry-based SEO and ensures your site is ahead of the competition.

While performing a technical SEO audit, ensure that you tick off these three things:

• Back-end hosting and indexing
• Front-end factors (meta, keywords, content)
• Outside references and link quality

After the audit, you may come across various factors that were contributing to penalties and demoting your rankings such as keyword stuffing, spammy links, and so on. If you don’t find errors in any of these areas, you can continue the audit process by performing a content audit.

1. Conduct a Content Audit

Content negligence is one of the primary causes of algorithmic penalties. A content audit can review your current content performance and also help you determine why your SEO is not up to the mark and what update or changes in Google’s algorithm is disadvantageous for you.

Some of the most common content issues that brands discover are outdated content, content gaps, metadata, image data, word counts, etc. For Google penalty recovery, you can either use tools to run different stages of a content audit or outsource the work to a content or an SEO agency that understands the mechanism of content protocols on Google.

2. Analyse Your Backlink Profile

Analyse the different types of backlinks. Look out for all the bad backlinks on your website as they can result in both manual and algorithmic Google penalties. Google’s Penguin algorithm is structured to recognise low-quality backlinks and penalise sites that are manipulating search result pages.

Link spamming can even lead to manual action from Google. Hence, a website’s link profile needs to be of high quality. Check for too many artificial links, links from irrelevant domains, paid blog networks, and too many outbound links from a single page.

How to Choose the Right SEO Agency for Google Penalty Recovery

There is a constant influx of new information in SEO each day and it can get overwhelming for businesses to keep up with the latest updates to avoid penalties. To avoid confusion and still ensure you ace your SEO game, it’s ideal to opt for an SEO agency that can take over this job for you. Here are some of the tips you can keep in mind before making your choice.

1. Experience With Google Penalty Recoveries

While you can fix some penalty issues by yourself, there can be some issues which require vast SEO knowledge about fixing algorithmic Google penalties. Ask your SEO agency if they have dealt with Google penalties before, what were the issues they encountered, and how they helped clients not just recover but avoid penalties altogether in the future.

Check if they have experience in providing Google penalty recovery assessment services that identify the barriers to SEO and use the right SEO tools that help with Google penalty recovery.

2. Costs Associated with Google Penalty Recovery

The budget overall is an important consideration when you opt for an SEO agency. However, you need to specifically decode the costs associated with Google penalty recovery and penalty assessment services. Pricing is an important aspect of SEO services and you get what you pay for. Remember that SEO is a gradual process.

So agencies that charge a one-time fee won’t commit towards maintaining results and improving your progress over time. Choose an agency that handles SEO on an annual basis or half-yearly basis.

3. Compare Multiple Agencies

Get unbiased opinions for every agency. Read their online reviews, and compare their pricing structures, case studies, and customer testimonials. Read all the recent information about the agency and check if they are at the top of the current SEO trends. Once you’re sure about the quality, compare other factors like if the company aligns with your SEO objectives, fits into your budget, and uses the techniques you need for uplifting your SEO.

Supple is an all-in-one SEO agency that can work with you rather than for you to fulfil your SEO goals. With a range of experience working with different industries and platforms, we have the ability to create tailor-made SEO plans for your business website that fits to your budget and trends.

4. Get to Know The Team

You need to know if the agency has a diverse team of SEO specialists. A well-informed and skilful team is what will get you higher rankings, website visitors, and leads. Knowing the team ensures that your job is in the right hands and your agency is not freelancing your work to freelancers or other online platforms.

At Supple, we have an efficient in-house team of SEO experts, digital marketers, and content specialists who not only understand your campaign values, integrity, and quality, but also work closely with internally, and with you, to troubleshoot and optimise your website performance.

Resurrect Your Website After Google Penalties

No business wants a Google penalty. Period.

But that’s easier said than done. Staying away from black-hat SEO practices is not the only way to avoid penalties. As Google continues to upgrade its engine and focus on improving the user experience, you never know when an ongoing SEO practice becomes inconsequential.

An agency that considers the new updates and predicts the best possible outcomes within the parameters of guidelines is what you need in that case. Contact us at Supple to know more about Google penalties and how you can avoid the same.