How to Recover from a Google Penalty

When you were little and misbehaved, your parents punished you by not letting you leave the house or not receiving your weekly allowance. Google does the same when you repeatedly ignore its rules, but your penance is simply watching your website drop in search rankings or perhaps even disappear from them.

We will tell you how to detect a Google penalty and, if that is the case, what type of sanction it is, what you can do to reconcile with the search engine, and how to avoid suffering new ones in the future.

Have I been penalized by Google?

Don’t think that every drop in your website’s ranking is due to a Google penalty. There are many other factors that could be the cause, and you should analyze them before assuming you’ve been penalized.

To know for sure if the hand of the famous search engine is behind your page's downfall, you should look for these symptoms:

• Has your organic traffic decreased significantly?
• Have you lost ranking for some of your main keywords?
• Have your pages disappeared from search results?
• Or is your domain no longer indexed?

If the answer to most of these questions is yes, dear friend, we regret to inform you that you have been penalized by Google.

However, since there are online tools for almost everything, here are a couple that help you discover if you have received a Google penalty: Google Penalty Checker by Fruition and Panguin Tool by Barracuda.

What did I do to receive the penalty?

This question is almost rhetorical. And you know it. If you have reached the point of being penalized, in 95% of cases you know very well why, you rascal.

To be generous, we could attribute the remaining 5% to contraindicated actions carried out unconsciously by people who neither minimally analyze their metrics nor ever check their Google Search Console.

Because Google, one way or another, warns. And those who warn are not traitors. If it has shown you the red card, it has previously shown you a yellow one, and you continued kicking.

Actions that Google hates

Among the reasons for reprimand or sanction is the wide catalog of "black hat SEO" actions, that is, all those that violate its specific quality guidelines to, through manipulation or deceit, try to grow fraudulently.

For example, placing hidden texts or links, creating pages from copied or automatically generated content, negative SEO, deceptive redirects, excessive link exchanges, participating in blog networks, having your website load very slowly, comment spam, etc.

The most recent novelty, launched just a few days ago, on January 10, is its announced battle against pop-ups and interstitials. Google wants to eliminate those that are not strictly necessary, although for now it starts with those who use them on mobile devices, where they are particularly annoying and intrusive.

If you don’t want to fail, before doing something on your website, ask yourself if it goes against the user experience. That is what Google prioritizes above all else.

Types of Google sanctions

The catalog of things that annoy Google is very broad, but it has two ways of trying to get you to correct them.

The first is the penalty executed by its algorithms. As good robots, they detect that you are not doing something right and apply the sanction without warning. The main and most common ones are Panda and Penguin. The first monitors that your content is not rubbish (duplicate, sparse, low quality, with keyword stuffing...). The second tracks external links that it does not consider natural and spam, to summarize it broadly.

Manual actions, on the other hand, occur when your site has triggered an alarm. Also when someone has reported to Google that your website is misbehaving. Yes, the search engine encourages snitches in pursuit of the common good.

It is then that your case reaches a human operator. That agent will send you a notice to your Search Console to pull your ears.

What to do to make Google love you again?

The first thing you can imagine: stop doing what it doesn’t like. Remove what bothers it, correct it, do what it asks, and you will be back hand in hand.

When the problem is solved, and an agent has intervened, you must notify Google. Use your Search Control to ask it to revisit your site and check that everything is in order.

If the Google penalty was the work of one of its friendly little animals, you will have to detect and solve it yourself. You have some very comprehensive guides to better understand Panda and Penguin and avoid their claws.

Often the process is not as fast as one would like. It is, therefore, better to prevent than to cure, as with everything in life.

Has Google ever penalized you? What was the reason? What did you do to fix it and how long did it take you to recover?