The nightmare of every marketer or business owner is to have their website blacklisted by Google. When that happens, you discover a dramatic decrease in organic traffic. If you do nothing, you’ll lose everything.
Many SEOs and digital marketers are striving to make it to Google’s first page, which often compels them to push their link building strategies to the limit. When Google discovers something fishy, getting penalized manually by Google or by an algorithm is likely to happen.
Here is a fact that will disclose this article’s seriousness: over 400,000 manual actions are initiated every month by Google. Your website can be penalized by a Google algorithm update like Penguin and Panda, aside from manual efforts.
To ensure you avoid or perhaps, recover from this nightmare, continue reading.
Why You Were Penalized
If your website has been penalized by Google, manually, or via an algorithm update, you need to discover why.
In that case, we’ll be looking at the manual and algorithm action. It would help you to determine the best measure in recovering your website.
When your website is manually penalized by Google’s spam team, you’re likely to get a notification alert on your webmaster console.
Most of the time, the cause of these penalties is backlinks coming from websites considered harmful by Google.
Getting backlinks from unrelated websites, websites with duplicated contents, spam comments, etc. can be a red sign.
You have to pay attention to your backlinks since 95% of penalties are backlink related.
How To Recover From Google Penalties
To recover from a Google penalty, whether manual or algorithm, you need to evaluate your backlinks. Identify links that cause your rankings to drop and clean them up or, perhaps, disavow them.
There are lots of tools that will help you identify your backlinks, like Google Webmaster Console. Here, you can discover all backlinks pointing to your domain.
Export the table so you can have a detailed view of links to your website.
Discover Bad Backlinks
You can use numerous tools to uncover unhealthy backlinks to your website, but using the data imported from the webmaster console is enough in most cases.
If the website linking to your domain doesn’t relate to your niche, nor is the website offering any value, endeavor to disavow or contact the webmaster to remove your link.
Avoid spamming forums or blogs with your website link, as it causes issues in the long run.
Clean Up Bad Backlinks
When you have identified some links harming your website, contact the webmaster, and request link removal.
You have to be polite and address them by name, instead of ‘dear webmaster’ or ‘dear blogger.’ Send the request once, and avoid sending the messages numerous times to prevent your mail from getting flagged as spam.
Conclusion
Getting penalized by Google isn’t the end, nor do you need to give up. All you have to do is discover the cause of the penalty and work toward ratifying the issue. When you offer value and helpful resources, you will build backlinks naturally without having to spam.
To learn more or if you have any questions regarding marketing, web design and development, contact Windy City Web Designs today.