Google Link Penalty Removal

How to handle a Google Link Penalty Removal

If your Organic Traffic has dropped off and your website has unexpectedly dropped out of the Google Organic results page, it’s possible that it’s been affected by either a Google algorithm update. Or, more worryingly, you’ve been a penalised by Google for using ‘black hat’ SEO techniques.

Google Link Penalty Removal

Sometimes website owners (or sadly, agencies. use unethical tactics that sooner or later result in a slap on the wrist from Google. In other cases, marketers simply don’t realise they were doing anything wrong (e.g. paying for an advertising opportunity).

Whatever the reason, the loss or reduction of Google Organic traffic can have a detrimental impact on your business and needs to be resolved immediately.

 

Manual Actions may include warnings such as:

  • > Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
  • > Unnatural links to your site
  • > Unnatural links from your site
  • > Hacked site
  • > Thin content with little or no added value
  • > Pure spam
  • > User-generated spam
  • > Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects
  • > Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing
  • > Spammy freehosts
  • > Spammy structured markup

Manual Actions vs. Algorithm updates

In order to troubleshoot the decline in Google Organic traffic, it’s important to distinguish between two types of Google demotion – Manual Actions and algorithm updates.

In serious situations where a website contravenes Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Google will notify you directly via Google Webmaster Tools on the Manual Actions page and provide some guidance on how to rectify the problem.

Less easy to troubleshoot are their algorithm updates (such as the regular Google Panda and Google Penguin updates) which requires a more comprehensive review to help diagnose the problem.

Manual Actions

If you receive a Manual Action notification email from Google Webmaster Tools, Site Reach are able to guide you through how to fix the issue and recover your ranking positions as quickly as possible.

The notification may affect all or part of your website.

Here’s how the notification appears in Google Webmaster Tools;

manual-actions-site-reach

Google algorithm changes

If you haven’t received a Manual Action notification, it’s possible that you’ve been affected by a Google Panda or Google Penguin algorithm update. These algorithm changes are rolled out by Google to improve the quality of their search results. Sadly, there will be no Google Webmaster Tools notification – it’s up to you to troubleshoot these issues unaided.

Recovering from a Google manual penalty can be a long and arduous task. We pride ourselves on never receiving a penalty for any of our clients' websites, but have a lot of experience rectifying the damage done by other agencies!

Patti Thomson, SEO Manager, Site Reach

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