In today’s age of digital marketing, having a website is a basic necessity, and ensuring that it ranks well on search engines has become essential. However, sometimes things may not go as smoothly as planned, and your website may get penalised by search engines like Google. This can happen for several reasons, including violations of web admin guidelines, low-quality content, spammy backlinks, etc. If your website is penalised, your search rankings can drop significantly, drastically affecting traffic, leads, and revenue. Therefore, it is crucial to identify if your website has been penalised and take the necessary steps to recover. This blog post will cover specific ways to determine if your website has been punished, mainly about Google penalty recovery.
Search For Your Website:
The first thing you need to do to identify a penalty is to search for your website. Open Google Search and enter your website’s name or URL in the search box. If your website is still visible and appears at the top of the search engine result page (SERP), chances are, your website is not penalised. If your website is not visible, it might indicate a penalty, and you need to investigate further.
Check Your Search Visibility:
One of the best ways to track if your website is visible on search engines is to use search visibility tools like Semrush, ahrefs, or Google search console. These tools can help you monitor your website’s visibility on search engines, keyword rankings, organic traffic, and backlink profiles over time. A sudden drop in organic traffic or a decline in keyword rankings might indicate that your website has been penalised.
Look For Changes In Traffic And Rankings:
A sudden drop in organic traffic and rankings can often indicate a penalty. Google’s algorithms regularly update, and sometimes ranking fluctuations can happen due to these changes. However, if you see a significant drop in traffic, that’s not usual; you might have been penalised. Review your website analytics to check for a sudden decline in traffic or a specific landing page.
Spotting Manual Penalties:
Google’s webmaster guideline violations and manual reviews can cause manual penalties. If you receive a notification message about a manual penalty from Google in your search console account, it’s an obvious sign that you have been penalised. Additionally, you can use search operators, like [site:] and [link:], to check if your website’s pages are indexed or if backlinks have been removed or tagged as spam.
Look For Algorithmic Penalties:
Algorithmic penalties are automatic penalties due to updates in gGoogle’salgorithms. These penalties may not have explicit notification and can be challenging to identify. If you see a sudden drop in organic traffic or rankings around a significant algorithm update, like panda or penguin, it might suggest that your website has been algorithmically penalised.
Review Your Backlink Profile:
Backlinks are critical for improving your website’s rankings and traffic, but they can also negatively influence your rankings if they come from spammy or irrelevant sources. Conducting a backlink audit can help you identify backlinks that violate Google’s web admin guidelines, including paid links, low-quality links, excessive anchor text links, and links from irrelevant or irrelevant niche websites. If you identify such links, you must remove them immediately or disavow them in the Google search console.
Identify Thin Content And Keyword Stuffing:
Thin content and keyword stuffing are significant violations of Google’s webmaster guidelines. Narrow content refers to pages with little or no content, while keyword stuffing refers to the excessive use of keywords in page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and page content. These practices can harm your website’s rankings and traffic and can be detected through a site audit.
How To Recover From A Google Penalty:
If your website has been penalised, you must take the necessary steps to recover. Firstly, identify the reason for the penalty by reviewing your website and following the above steps. Once you have identified the issue, please take steps to rectify it.
If you have been manually penalised, you must correct the violation and submit a reconsideration request to Google. In your request, explain the steps you have taken to address the breach and ensure it will not happen again.
If you have been algorithmically penalised, you need to identify the specific algorithm and the reason for the penalty. Once you have identified the issue, please take steps to correct it. Use the disavow tool to remove spammy backlinks, improve content quality, and optimise the website according to the specific algorithm update.