How to Recover from Google Penalty?
Web developers and SEO-marketing specialists know that popularity of a website depends mainly on its rank in search results. Therefore, search engine optimization (or SEO) is used to attract new visitors who can potentially become clients. The most terrible thing for each SEO manager is Google penalty. If your site has suffered from Google Penguin penalty (a specialized algorithm of search engine ranking), it would be very difficult to restore its previous position in search results. So, the question “How to recover from penguin penalty?” is pressing for all programmers and SEO specialists. Let us explain how to act in such a situation.
Is My Site Being Penalized by Google?
The very first thing for each SEO manager to do before starting optimization of a site is to learn whether this site has been penalized by Google search engine. Here are some ways to check it:
- Look at the page traffic and the number of pageviews per visit.
These numbers show how many people visit your website, and how many pages visitors look through while they are at the site. These numbers are extremely important because they reflect the popularity of your source. You need to remember that penalized sites usually have very limited page traffic compared to non-penalized ones. Hence, low page traffic is a bad sign, which shows that your site must have been penalized by the Google search engine.
- Try to look for your own domain in the search engine.
Another simple way to learn whether your site was penalized is to go to the Google search engine and try to find your domain name with its help. Penalized sites either disappear from search results completely or lose their position at the top rankings. They can only be found somewhere on the tenth page of search results.
- Use free Google Penalty checker tools.
To make your life a little bit easier, it is also possible to use specialized SEO-tools created for automatic checking of Google Penalties. There is a great number of programs with free access, which were created by different developers like Rank Ranger, Moz Change History, and others. These tools will help you to check a website for google penalty quickly.
If you learned that your web page was penalized, the next step is to determine what can be done to restore the position of your source in search results.
Potential Ways of Google Penalty Recovery
Each search engine has its own algorithms for sites ranking, and Google is not an exception. Specifically, it has two algorithms – Penguin and Panda, which work differently. Penguin punishes different sites for the low quality of external links, while Panda works with content. Therefore, you have only two ways to recover your site from penalty:
Analyze the quality of all external links.
- This is the first thing to do if you know that your web page was punished by Google Penguin or its new update. Try to analyze all external links because they form your link profile. In case your link profile isn’t clear enough, contains bad links, or doesn’t look well, it can be a good reason to penalize your web page. Therefore, all you need to do is to clear your link profile from bad links.
Check uniqueness of content and its quality.
- Google Panda is a more difficult algorithm used by the Google search engine, as it evaluates the quality of content. If your domain was banned by Panda, it would be difficult to restore it, but it is nevertheless possible. First, you should check all texts for uniqueness. It is very easy to do with the help of Copyscape or any other content checker. If texts are not unique or were copy-pasted from other sites, it can be a reason for Panda to penalize your web page. In this case, it is necessary to rewrite such content properly to make it unique.
Another reason to ban your site is page duplication. If your site contains two pages with similar texts, it is better to delete one of them or work on redirecting. Don’t forget that texts published on your web page should include keywords; however, there should not be too many of them as they affect the quality of content.
Now you know how to check a google penalized site and what to do to restore the website position after severe Google penalty for bad-quality content or bad link profile.