Google Penalty Recovery: A Complete Guide

Have you noticed a sudden drop in your website traffic, or perhaps you received a warning message in Google Webmaster Tools? 

If yes, then in all likelihood, you have been hit with a Google Penalty. 

If you are not sure if you have been penalized, try typing your brand name or relevant keywords into Google and see if your business comes up. If it is nowhere to be found or it has been pushed back several pages, then chances are you’ve been penalized.  

As frustrating as this is, a Google Penalty isn’t permanent, and you can regain all your hard-earned traffic. You just need to learn how. 

Within the below guide, you will find out everything there is to know about Google Penalty Recovery, including: 

• What is a Google Penalty? 
• Why have you been hit with a Google Penalty? 
• How to remove Google Penalty 

• How to recover from a Google Penalty 
• How to avoid Google Penalty 

Ready to get started? In just seven minutes, you will be a Google Penalty Recovery Pro! 

What is a Google Penalty? 

We all know that Google’s main aim is to provide its users with the best possible search results based on their queries. One way in which they do this is by punishing websites that break their rules.  

For example, say you overstuffed your content with keywords; this would diminish the overall user experience, and Google would issue you with a penalty for this so that your content would stop showing up in SERPs.  

To find websites that have done something wrong, Google uses its constantly changing algorithms to crawl and inspect web pages. Some actions will result in an immediate penalty handed down from a Google employee, while others are not publicly advertised and can gradually affect your rankings over time.  

Why Have You Been Hit with a Google Penalty?  

You don’t think you have broken any of Google’s rules, so why have you been hit with a Google Penalty?  

Unfortunately, while some websites are using black hat techniques to manipulate search engines, others have simply made a mistake or overlooked a technical issue on their site.  

If you fall into the latter, then you may be scratching your head to try and work out what you have done to annoy Google.  

To find out what has caused your Google Penalty, you first need to know that there are two types of penalties.  

Manual Penalty 

A manual Google penalty involves your website being penalized by a manual action. You can check to see if you have been manually penalized using Google Webmaster Tools on Google Search Console. If you have been handed a manual penalty, you will have a notification about it.  

Some of the most common causes of manual penalties are: 

• User-generated spam 
• Structured data issues 
• Unnatural linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. – both to and from your website  
• Thin content  
• Sneaky redirects  

Algorithm Penalty 

An algorithm penalty is a little more complicated to uncover. To find out what type of algorithm penalty you have been hit with, you need to correlate the date and time that you lost your website traffic with the time and date of a new algorithm update.  

There are two main algorithm updates that have the ability to demote websites in SERPs: Panda and Penguin.  

Google Panda 

Google Panda is a site-wide penalty that affects the rankings for all of your organic keywords. This type of penalty is typically issued if a site has low-quality content.  

If your website has been penalized by Panda, you may notice: 

• A sharp or gradual decline in traffic  
• Webpages struggling to rank regardless of the number of high-quality backlinks  
• Your website is found on page 2 or lower for the majority of keywords 

Google PenguinGoogle Penguin is one of Google's many algorithms, first released in April 2012 in order to identify and filter out spam webpages from search results. 

Google Penguin, on the other hand, looks at sites that have implemented aggressive link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. strategies. This could involve the use of artificial links, paid for links, or being in a link scheme.  

If your website has been penalized by Panda, you may notice: 

• A sharp decline in ranking for a specific keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. or group of keywords 
• Specific web pages being deindexed  

• Certain web pages which are not supposed to be ranking are showing up for the penalized keywords 

How to Remove the Google Penalty? 

If you are keen to remove your Google penalty and restore your rankings to their former glory, there are four actions that you can take: 

Use the Disavow Tool  

If you have been hit with a link building penalty, the only way that you can remove this is by removing the backlinks that caused the penalty.  

You can do this by creating a disavow file that contains all the bad links you found in your backlink profile. Once this is complete, you can then submit this file to Google’s Disavow Link Tool, and these linking signals will be immediately devalued.  

Read the Google Guidelines 

If you are not sure what you have done wrong, then it can be a good idea to familiarise yourself with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. In a nutshell, these guidelines contain the best practices to help your website rank well on Google. This means that they are a great resource for helping you find out why you have been penalized.  

Plus, they can help you to make your site more SEO-friendly.  

Improve Your Content 

Content is king, so if your website contains low quality or spammy content, you are highly likely to be penalized by Google. The easiest way to remove a penalty that has been issued due to poor content is to post content that is helpful to users.  

If you struggle to create high-quality content on a regular basis or you are not sure if your existing content is up to scratch, you may want to enlist the services of professional content writers.  

Submit a Reconsideration Request  

Once you have made the necessary changes to your website, it is now time to show Google. To do this, you need to document your actions and upload these together with a brief summary of what you have done and why. Google will then recrawl your site and, fingers crossed, remove your penalty.  

You can find the Google reconsideration request form via Google Search Console.  

How to Remove a Manual Penalty? 

In terms of manual Google penalty recovery, there are several common manual penalties that you need to be aware of and know how to remove. These are as follows:  

Unnatural Links  

If your Google penalty notification says that you have been penalized due to the use of unnatural links, you need to clear up your backlink profile to remove your penalty.  

Some ways in which you can do this include: 

• Remove any spammy anchor text  
• Remove any links from unreputable sites  
• Ensure that the context of the links is legitimate  

To remove spammy links, you will need to contact the webmasters and ask for them to be removed.  

Pure Spam  

If a website has been purely created for the purpose of spamming, then Google will issue it with a “pure spam” penalty. This includes websites that use aggressive advertising techniques that offer little to no value to users.  

Even if your website, or a particular web page, has not been created for spamming purposes, you can still be hit with this type of manual penalty.  

To remove this type of penalty, you first need to find out why Google has deemed your website as pure spam. For example, maybe a user considered your website to be a spam site, or it could be that the previous owner of the domain used the site for spamming.  

Ways in which you can clear up a spammy site include: 

• Remove any auto-generated content  

• Eliminate any black hat signals  
• Create new and useful content  

Thin Content  

If you have created content that provides little to no value to the user, then you could have been issued with a manual penalty for this. Autogenerated and duplicate contentDuplicate content is content that appears more than once across a single website. Duplicate content can be a sign of poor resource management, low trust, or a lack of quality control. is also frowned upon and could result in a penalty.  

Ways in which you can remove this type of manual penalty include: 

• Add more depth to thin content  
• Post informational content such as how-to guides and lists  
• Add a Rel=canonical attribute to pages where you accidentally made duplicate content  
• Remove any scraped content and create original content yourself  

User-Generated Spam  

You often find this type of spam on forums and multi-user blogs, as users can write and publish their own content without any editorial control.  

This manual penalty is designed to ensure that any content published is of high quality and provides real value to the users.  

Ways to remove this penalty include: 

• Ask users to modify any offending content  
• Enforce new guidelines for the creation and management of content on your site  

Sneaky RedirectsA redirect is a web page that loads in place of another web page. 

If a web page shows users one thing and Google something else entirely, then you may receive a sneaky redirects penalty.  

Fortunately, this issue is very easy to fix. All you need to do is use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console to see how your pages are viewed both by Google and users. If you find there is a difference, you need to correct the two versions and remove any redirects.  

If you run a subscription site, you should use structured data to show the algorithm that you are not using sneaky redirects to deceive users and Google.  

Keyword Stuffing 

Keyword stuffingKeyword stuffing is a technique that attempts to give pages higher rankings in search engine result pages by inserting the same keywords over and over again. has always been an issue of contention with Google as it solely exists to try and manipulate search engines into giving sites higher rankings.  

If you are guilty of keyword stuffing or hidden text through the use of HTML or CSS tricks, then you are highly likely to receive a manual penalty from Google.  

To remove this penalty: 

• Clean your website of hidden text 
• Remove any non-relevant or repeated keywords 

How to Avoid a Google Penalty? 

Ideally, you want to be actively preventing Google penalties rather than trying to fix them.  

While there is no way to 100% stop your site from being penalized by Google as the algorithm is a complicated beast, there are ways that you can minimize your risk.  

Do Not Buy Links  

To stay on the right side of the Google Penguin update, you need to ensure that you build links as naturally as possible. This means you should avoid buying links, stay away from link schemes, and make sure you add a “nofollowThe nofollow attribute is an HTML tag that tells search engine crawlers not to follow a link.” attribute to any paid links such as ads.  

If you are struggling to build a strong backlink profile, you may want to look into hiring an SEO agency to help with your link building strategies.  

Do Not Overuse Keywords 

As mentioned above, keyword stuffing a big SEO no-no and should be avoided at all costs. Ensure that you do not use too many keywords in any new content that you publish; you also need to check all your existing content as you can be penalized for this.  

Focus on using keywords appropriately and applying them in a natural-sounding way that does not detract from the overall user experience.  

Publish High-Quality Content 

If you want your pages to rank well and not be hit with a Google penalty, you need to make sure you are creating high-quality, original content. Again, if you struggle to write consistently high-quality content that is relevant to your users, then you may want to enlist the services of a professional content writing team.  

Another good tip is to always write for humans rather than search engines. Although, of course, you need your content to be SEO-friendly, your main aim should be to offer value to the readers.  

Do Not Include Intrusive Ads 

Google created the Page Layout algorithm specifically to flag up websites that are overly filled with ads or pages that are frustrating to view. Websites that use intrusive ads are often referred to as top-heavy, as they tend to place too much content at the top of their web pages which can make users feel overwhelmed.  

Intrusive ads can also lead to a higher bounce rateBounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who visit only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not satisfied with your website. as site visitors cannot find the information they are looking for. 

While it is ok to include some ads within your content, you need to ensure that they do not harm the user experience. You also need to ensure that users can easily determine the difference between ads and content.  

Conclusion  

It can be a bit of a headache to remove a Google penalty, but the longer you leave it, the harder it will be to regain your hard-earned organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page..  

If you are worried about Google penalties, remember that most are easy to fix and that they also offer you the chance to make your site even more SEO-friendly.  

If you need any help with Google Penalty Recovery or any other aspect of SEO, get in touch with our talented team of SEO experts here.