If you are a blogger or have your own business, then you know that receiving a penalty from Google on your website is one of the most significant setbacks you can have. It can significantly decrease your traffic, and today many websites are penalized for violating Google’s guidelines.
As reported by Matt Cutts, Google performs more than 400,000 manual actions each month. Google penalizes many websites with the use of algorithmic updates like Penguin and Panda. It is a known fact that only 20,000 webmasters submit a request for reconsideration.
Why did they penalize you?
Before finding the solution, you need to find out why you were penalized. There can be several reasons for it, and if you see a sudden drop in traffic, then you should check if all Google guidelines are being followed.
Some of the reasons why you might have been penalized are mentioned below:
-
You may have used low-quality links or backlinks. Website backlinks that violate Google’s guidelines may be liable for your penalty.
-
You may have hidden some text from users using CSS.
-
You may have used links from adult or gambling websites.
-
You may have used duplicate content.
You should also identify what type of algorithmic penalty you have. You can do this by noting the periods. You should note the time your website lost traffic and the time Google updated its search algorithm.
How to recover from the penalty?
There are now many ways to recover from this penalty. It is reported that 95% of all Google sanctions are linked to the backlinking profile of the website. Therefore, you must first remove all the bad and cheap backlinks that you have been using on your website.
Now you may need to see if your website has undergone a Google Penguin update. As if you’ve undergone a Google Penguin update, you may need to take a look at your anchor text layout. This update usually penalizes those websites that over-optimized their money keywords.
Another important issue is regarding the promotion of your business and website. Google is seriously against sponsored content that quickly exceeds PageRank. If you want to promote your business services on a blog, you should use a nofollow attribute so that your rankings can be safe.
If you have a website that is completely content driven, you may have enabled comments for your content. You know that not all comments are genuine comments, so you should get rid of those spam comments. Everyone hates spammers and Google knows it. If your website has a lot of spam comments, then your website could be penalized.
Another critical factor is the “niche”. Google places a lot of importance on relevance. So if you have links from other websites that are not related to your niche, then this is a bad indication about your website to Google. This will quickly get your website penalized.
Well, these were some of the main reasons and remedies for the sanction. These solutions can help you get your website ranking back.