Recovering from Google Penalties comes as a relief when marketers are snared in the nightmare of Google Penalties. The nightmare it poses to every digital marketer and business owner is their website being blacklisted by Google. Why? Either due to a dramatic decrease in organic traffic or other reasons.
If nothing is done about it then business owners are at the risk of losing a lot of things related to both their business and the website.
Here is a fact that can potentially disclose the seriousness of the nature of Google penalties; more than 400,000 manual actions were started each month by Google and they still are. Anyone’s website (including yours) can be penalized by an update in the Google Algorithm update like Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird, apart from the manual efforts.
Websites need to be careful when they put content on themselves. If it is copied, spun out or made in a way that makes it look and sound unauthentic, then penalties are bound to be applied.
Experts from a well-known web design company based in Toronto have decided to share their experience and tips in recovering from such nightmares:
Why was the website penalized?
If the website was penalized by Google either manually or through an algorithm update, then businesses, marketers and website owners need to discover how and why. Let us first examine the case of both manual and algorithm actions. This would help them determine the best measure in recovering their respective websites.
When a website is penalized manually by Google’s spam team, website owners, marketers and business owners get a notification alert on the Google Search Central Console (formerly webmasters console). Most of the time, the cause of such penalties come from backlinks coming from websites considered as harmful by Google.
Getting backlinks from websites that are not relevant, having duplicate content, content that is spun instead of created, spam comments and the like are a definite no-go zone, a red sign. Hence, site owners, business owners and marketers must pay attention to all of their backlinks because approximately 95% of all penalties are related to backlinks.
Recovering from Google Penalties – how is it possible?
To recover from a Google penalty, whether manual or algorithm based, site owners and marketers must evaluate their backlinks. They must identify links that cause their rankings to drop and clean them up. Alternatively, those backlinks can be disavowed.
There are numerous tools that can help identify the needed backlinks. Google Webmaster Console is now Google Search Central. Being a major update, it can help professionals discover all the backlinks pointing to their domain. The table should be exported so they can have a detailed view of links to their website.
Discovering backlinks that are bad
A lot of tools can be used in uncovering unhealthy backlinks to any website. Using the data imported from the search center console can be enough in most instances.
However, if the website linking to the business’s domain does not relate to their niche, or the website is not offering any value (or both), it would be wise for professionals to disavow the links or contact the webmaster to remove their link.
Also, marketers should avoid spamming forums and blogs (or either) with the link of their website. This can cause long term issues.
Cleaning up backlinks that are bad
Once the harmful backlinks have been identified, especially those that are harming the website; no time should be spared in contacting the webmaster to request removal of the harmful links.
When contacting the webmaster, marketers and site owners should address them politely and address them by their name (instead of using dear webmaster, dear blogger and the like). Such requests should be sent once. Sending the request multiple times will result in the request itself to be flagged as spam (sales techniques).
Conclusion
Getting penalized by Google for bad backlinks does not mean the end nor should site owners/business owners/marketers give up. All they need to do is discover why the penalty was issued and the issue should thus be worked upon and ratified. When the site owners/business owners/marketers offer value and other helpful resources, they will hence create backlinks without the need to do spam.
