Getting the “Google Slapdown” has become every webmaster’s greatest fear. If you feel like you’re on uncertain ground with Google, you’re not alone. Most webmasters expect their sites to eventually be hit by a Google penalty whether that penalty is official or just a consequence of changes to the algorithm.
Google penalties are serious because they have the potential to impact your traffic and cause your ranking to fall. Some penalties can remove your site entirely from Google’s search results.
Have you been officially penalized by Google or suspect you’ve been affected by an algorithm change? If so, there are several things you can do to recover, but first you need to know what you’re trying to recover from.
Differentiate a penalty from an algorithm filter
Both penalties and algorithm filters are serious matters, but they’re resolved in different ways. Your first order of business is to determine whether your website has been hit with an official penalty or you’ve just been caught in the wake of an algorithm change.
While some people refer to algorithm changes as penalties, it’s important to consider these issues separately. You’ll understand why in a minute.
The difference between an official penalty and an algorithm change
A penalty is a manual action taken by Google against your website. Penalties are applied when a website is manually reviewed and found to be in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Sites are manually reviewed after being flagged by Google’s machine algorithms or reported by a user. Common examples of why sites get reported include spam, paid links, and malware.
An official Google penalty will come with a notification in your Google Webmaster Tools inbox. For example, if your website has too many link redirects, you’ll get a notification informing you that your site is possibly in violation. The notice will tell you what the problem is and provide suggestions for resolving the issue. You’ll be given a link to submit your site to Google once you’ve fixed the issue.
The recovery process for manual actions
The recovery process is explained in further detail in seo.co’s guide to recover from a Google penalty. This guide will tell you what to expect as you move through the process of correction and appeal manual actions taken against your site. The guide also provides valuable advice for avoiding common penalties and problems associated with link building. For instance, the guide provides strategies for obtaining higher quality links and explains why nofollow links are part of a natural link profile despite not passing on authority to your site.
Tools to recover from algorithm filters
Anytime Google changes its search engine algorithm, site rankings will be affected. If your site seems to have lost organic traffic out of nowhere, it could be a sign that you’ve been affected by an algorithm change filtering out your site.
Moz.com keeps an updated list of algorithm changes
The first thing you need to do is check Google’s algorithm change history to find out if any changes correlate to your drop in traffic. For instance, if you noticed a drop around the end of October 2019 your site may have dropped in ranking due to the BERT update. The BERT update helps Google understand the context of search queries by applying a natural language processing model to searches. Other sites in your niche might be better optimized for this change, pushing your site further down in the SERPs.
Tidy up your site’s SEO strategy
Another way to recover from algorithm changes is to tidy up your site’s SEO strategy. For instance, make sure your backlink strategy is clean and relevant to your niche. Make sure you don’t have any backlinks on websites that:
- Publish content unrelated to your particular niche
- Publish spammy or questionable content
- Exist solely to publish sponsored content
- Utilize redirects or cloaked links
- Contain spammy links in comment sections
- Contain links from adult or gambling websites
Likewise, if you’ve published or linked to any of the above content you should clean it up to bring your site on par with the kind of sites Google deems appropriate.
Hire a professional content marketing agency
Professionally written high quality content is one of the best tools you can use to recover from a Google algorithm change. Content is the meat and potatoes of your website and high quality, relevant content on pages optimized for search will gradually climb higher in the SERPs.
Think of algorithm changes as an upgrade in the way Google perceives content. When the algorithm changes, sites with lower quality content slowly drop in rank. The only way to ensure you keep – and potentially improve – your rank is to increase the quality of your content.
Google is getting smarter by the day
As a search engine, Google is getting pretty smart and can tell the difference between high and low quality content. In the past, the trick was to use technicalities to outsmart the search engines.
Today, the only trick that works is to play by the rules and create content that benefits users. Good content and help from a professional marketing agency are all you need to avoid and recover from search engine penalties.