Google Penalty Recovery Made Easy: A Complete Guide to Regaining Your Rankings

A sudden drop in website traffic can be alarming, often pointing to a Google penalty. These penalties are imposed when a website violates Google’s guidelines, leading to ranking losses or even removal from search results. Recovering from such penalties requires identifying the root cause and implementing the right strategies.

Understanding why your website got penalized is the first step toward recovery. In this article, we’ll cover a detailed analysis explaining all the possible ways for Google penalty recovery. Let’s get started to learn how to recover from Google penalty and regain your rankings.

Google Penalties: What They Are and Why They Happen

Google penalty is a punishment against a website that engages in manipulative activities and violates the guidelines of Google Search Console. Google penalizes the guilty websites in many ways. And its ultimate result is a massive loss of traffic.

Plus, it can negatively affect your overall online presence. There are various types of Google penalties and we can classify them into two categories: algorithmic and manual. We’ve covered in detail how to solve them in later parts of the article.

What Are the Most Common Reasons for Google Penalties?

Google penalties can stem from various factors, including producing low-quality content, acquiring unnatural links, employing black-hat SEO tactics, and more. Learn more from the following points.

Low-Quality Content

One of the primary reasons for Google’s penalties is the production of low-quality content. This includes thin content, duplicate content, keyword stuffing, and spammy content that is irrelevant, misleading, or low-quality.

Unnatural Links

Acquiring unnatural links is another common cause of Google penalties. This includes buying or selling links, acquiring low-quality backlinks from spammy or irrelevant websites, and excessive link building that involves rapidly acquiring a large number of backlinks.

Poor User Experience

Google prioritizes websites that offer a good user experience. Poor user experience can lead to penalties, including slow website speed, poor mobile experience, intrusive ads, and misleading redirects.

Black Hat SEO Tactics

Employing black-hat SEO tactics can result in severe Google penalties. These tactics include cloaking, which involves showing different content to search engines and users, sneaky redirects, and hidden text and links that are invisible to users but visible to search engines.

Hacking and Malware

Websites that are hacked or infected with malware can also be penalized by Google. This can damage your website’s reputation and negatively impact your search rankings.

Types of Google Penalties You May Encounter

Let’s now take a quick look at the types of Google penalties.

01. Algorithmic Penalties

Algorithmic penalties are automatically applied by Google’s algorithms when a website fails to comply with specific rules. Common algorithmic penalties include:

• Panda Penalty: Focuses on websites with low-quality, thin, or duplicate content and those with excessive ads.
• Penguin Penalty: This penalty targets websites engaged in manipulative link-building practices, such as buying links or creating irrelevant backlinks.
• Mobile-Friendly Penalty: This affects websites that are not optimized for mobile devices or use spammy mobile redirects.
• Core Web Vitals Penalty: Penalizes websites that fail to meet performance metrics like page speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

02. Manual Penalties

Manual penalties are imposed by Google’s human reviewers after manually inspecting a website. These penalties typically follow the same guidelines as algorithmic penalties. Common manual penalties include:

• Unnatural Link Penalty: Applied to websites engaged in spammy or unethical link-building practices.
• User-Generated Spam Penalty: Results from fake comments, reviews, or profiles on blogs, forums, or social media.
• Cloaking Penalty: Issued when a website deceptively shows different content to users and search engines.
• Hacked Penalty: Imposed on websites containing harmful or malicious content due to hacking attempts.

Recovery Time for Google Penalties:

Manual Penalties: Typically 10-30 days after fixing the issue and submitting a reconsideration request.

Algorithmic Penalties: These can take several months, or even longer, depending on the severity of the issue and the extent of the changes needed.

How to Check Google Penalty on Your Website

Without identifying the specific cause of why your website has been penalized, you can take recovery actions correctly. Here are some best possible ways you can follow to check if there is a Google penalty on your website.

Step 01: Visit Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google to know if the search engine has imposed any manual penalty on your site.

• Go to Google Search Console.
• Open with your domain.
• Navigate to Security & Manual Actions > Manual actions.
• You’ll see the site under the Manual actions section if the site is penalized.

Step 02: Analyze Traffic Using Google Analytics

We already said that a sudden drop in traffic flow indicates Google’s penalty. Google Analytics is another free tool for checking your website’s organic traffic flow.

• Open Google Analytics with your website.
• Check the traffic history.
• Mark the date from which the traffic is flowing.

Step 03: Check Recent Algorithm Updates

Google comes with algorithmic updates every few days, weeks, or months and rolls them out over all the indexed websites online. Websites that fail to align with the core update rules and requirements get penalties.

• Check the Google Core update releasing dates.
• Cross-check if your web traffic started dropping the releasing date of any particular update.
• If two intersect, you can count your website as an algorithmic penalty.

Step 04: Run an SEO Audit

Running an SEO audit can help you identify potential issues that might have triggered a penalty. Some common issues can be thin content, duplicate content, keyword stuffing, technical issues, poor website performance, etc.

Below are some best Google penalty checker tools you can use to run SEO audits.

• SEMrush
• Mozcast
• Moz Pro
• Ahrefs
• Rank Ranger

Proven Tips and Techniques on How to Recover from Google Penalties

Recovery from Google penalties may take you time. It depends on how serious the problem is and how many issues you have to fix. We’ll now cover all the common problems that trigger Google penalties with proven tips and techniques to recover from them.

Tip 01: Request Review in Google Search Console

If Google gives you any manual penalty, you’ll see it with a notification ‘issue detected’ in Google Search Console. Clicking on the notification will give you a detailed report. Fix the problem and press the Request Review button at the end.

If you successfully fix the notified problem(s), Google will withdraw the penalty within a few hours or days.

Tip 02: Clean Up Unnatural Backlinks

Unnatural backlinks are also known as manipulative or spammy external links managed through unethical means. They are often purchased or built by spammers. You can find the list of all external links from the Google search console.

• Open your Search Console.
• Go to the Links section.

You’ll get the links of external links. But this free tool won’t tell you which ones are unnatural. You have to check them manually.

But SEMrush is an exciting tool by which you can audit all your external links and find out the unnatural ones. They usually term these links as ‘Toxic Links‘.

• Open SEMrush.
• Go to the section Backlink Audit.
• Add your Domain and search.
• It may take several minutes to complete the audit.
• You’ll get a below-link report at the end.

Create a list of the toxic and potentially toxic backlinks. Next, go to the Disavow Link page of Google Search Console. The page will provide a step-by-step guide on uploading the backlink list and starting the disavowing process. This will free your website from unnatural and toxic backlinks.

Tip 03: Remove Cloaking and Sneaky Redirects

Cloaking and sneaky redirections are black-hat SEO practices. They are used to promote content on search engines in deceptive ways. Suppose one has searched with the keyword ‘best Samsung smartphones’ and your web page has appeared on the top page.

But users are shown completely different products or information unrelated to mobile phones when they click it. There is no specific tool to track successfully all the cloaking and sneaky redirects as they are carried out deliberately. However, SEMrush can help you a bit.

• Open SEMrush.
• Navigate to Site Audit.
• Set up a new project.
• Type your domain address.
• Start the audit.

This may take several minutes. Once the audit ends, explore the Redirects and Have Issues sections. Find out the issues causing sneaky and cloaking redirects. Sit with SEO experts or developers to solve them.

Explore the best link-building strategies to grow organic traffic flow.

Tip 04: Solve AMP Content Mismatch

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Google introduced this framework to optimize and fast-load web pages on mobile devices. But when an inconsistency arises between the content displayed on the regular web page and the corresponding AMP version, it’s identified as a content mismatch.

Google usually notifies about the AMP penalty in the search console. Incorrect implementation of AMP, errors in the markup, using incompatible themes and templates, and custom modifications may cause this problem.

If you are a non-technical person with limited knowledge, you better take developers’ help to solve the problem.

Tip 05: Erase Hidden Text and Keyword Stuffing

Hidden texts refer to content only search engines can crawl but readers and visitors can’t see. This is usually carried out by matching the text color to the background color, adding words behind the images, and reducing the font size.

The sole objective of this practice is to add as many keywords as possible to rank up in search engines. Keyword stuffing involves inserting keywords and relevant phrases repeatedly in unnatural ways. Google strongly prohibits these practices.

While you may benefit temporarily in this process, Google may permanently downgrade your site once they catch it. So rely on the natural content creation process with semantic SEO.

Tip 06: Take Your Site Out from Spammy Hosts

Spammy Hosts are the servers that host a significant number of low-quality websites that deliberately carry out spammy activities. These hosting servers either have inadequate security measures or are also involved in spamming.

Google will penalize you if your website is hosted on such a server. So try to host your website on a well-recognized server. If you’re already hosting somewhere that isn’t much popular, check whether there is any hosting-related notification in the search console.

If thorough investigations conclude your hosting server is involved with spamming, move somewhere else immediately.

Tip 07: Resolve Structured Data Issues

Structured data is a set of standardized formats that help Google quickly understand and index particular types of content. FAQ, review, local address, how-to schema, product, event, recipe, breadcrumbs, videos, etc., are the most popular structured data.

Search engines also love structured data, enabling them to enhance search results with rich snippets and other features. But if they are implemented incorrectly and violate Google’s guidelines, it can result in penalties.

Below are some key structured data guidelines introduced by Google:

• Relevant the data with your post and page content.
• Never show deceptive information with keyword stuffing.
• Recheck the data after every website update so they work fine.
• Make sure each individual content uses a separate markup.

Note: Example of the last point. If you are listing multiple products, you must use a separate markup for each product. Incorporating multiple products in the same structured data markup will confuse the search engine.

Tip 08: Improve Thin Content or Delete Them If Unnecessary

Thin content refers to web posts and pages with little or no user value. They usually lack originality, relevance, depth, and ability to provide solutions. Duplicate content also belongs to the thin content category.

Google promotes highly informative content and provides comparatively better solutions than others. So if you still focus on generating thin content, it will be a waste of time. Plus, Google has a special policy to penalize duplicate content.

But SEMrush can help you find duplicate content.

• Open SEMrush.
• Go to the Audit section.
• Type your domain and start auditing.
• Go to the Issues section afterward.
• You’ll get a report like the one below.

Tip 09: Stop the Incoming Flow of User-Generated Spam

User-generated spam is low-quality promotional content created by fake user profiles. This method involves promoting web content by submitting reviews and comments with links in the blog section of other websites, forums, and social posts.

Human users or spam bots may come to your website to deliberately do the spamming. Allowing them to make a way to your site indicates to Google you have vulnerability issues. Implement the following solutions to barricade this spam.

• Use an anti-spam security plugin.
• Use Captchas to filter out bot users.
• Review every user-generated content before publishing them.
• Regularly audit and cleanse spam content from your site.

CAUTION: Not All SERP Falls Are Caused by Google Penalties

A sudden drop in your website’s search engine rankings or traffic can be alarming, but it’s essential to determine the root cause before assuming it’s a Google penalty. While penalties can significantly impact your website’s performance, other factors can lead to a decline in SERP positions:

• Algorithm Updates: Google frequently updates its algorithms to improve search results. These updates can sometimes lead to fluctuations in rankings, even for high-quality websites.
• Increased Competition: If competitors improve their SEO efforts or launch new campaigns, it can impact your website’s ranking.
• Changes in User Search Intent: If user search intent changes, Google may prioritize different websites.
• Technical Issues: Technical problems like broken links, slow page load times, or mobile-friendliness issues can negatively impact your website’s ranking.
• Seasonal Fluctuations: Certain industries may experience seasonal fluctuations in search traffic.

Therefore, it’s important to consider all these factors when analyzing a drop in SERP rankings.

FAQ on How to Recover from Google Penalty

We have tried our best to present all effective methods to recover from Google penalties in this article. Still, you may have some questions in your mind. We’ll try to cover them in the FAQ section.

Final Takeaways!

Penalties aren’t a new thing in the web industry. You’ll hardly find any established website that never got a pental from Google in their entire lifetime. Google never gives penalties intending to destroy your website.

Rather they want to ensure the online space is a safe haven for all types of activities like eCommerce, education, career build-up, and more. So they regularly introduce new guidelines to protect online users from any potential harm.

A penalty imposed means some glitches on your site must be corrected. We’ve tried to cover all the latest tips and techniques by which you can recover from the penalties. If you benefited from this article, please let us know by commenting.