Due to the resurgence of online businesses these days, many marketers use different approaches to achieve a higher ranking on the SERPs. As a result, many of those who violate the Google’s Webmaster Guideline will be penalized by the algorithmic penalty and that will put all your hard work to waste. Fortunately, finding the source of of the problem and fixing it is possible.

So, what is a Google penalty? According to WebpageFX, a Google Penalty means trouble. It means your site is either no longer listed on search results, or the ranking for your targeted keywords has dropped dramatically. When you receive a penalty, you are technically invisble to your audience. When that happens, your traffic and ultimately your revenue, will drop drastically.

Did you receive a Google Webmaster tools warning?

If you want to know whether your website has been hit by a Google Penalty, the first thing you need to do is to go to your Google Analytic Account. How to use Google Analytics you ask (for those of you who are still new to this)? Here is a tutorial video for this from the Analytics Academy: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/course/6

Check on your traffic graph to see if there is a drop in traffic or if your site is nowhere to be found when your targeted keywords are used.

Below are some signs that you have been hit by the Google Penalty:

• If there is a sudden drop in ranking and your site is nowhere to be found when your targeted keywords are used.
• If you lose your current ranking position for almost all of your targeted keywords and find your site far lower than your previous ranking.

Go to Google and key in “site:yourdomain.com” and see what’s the result like. If there are no results, it is very likely that your website has been deindexed.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Getting A Well-ranked Website

Tips on How To Perform A Google Penalty Recovery Plan

• Avoid backlink penalty! Always have your backlink statistics checked
• Check Google Webmaster Tools to determine if the penalty is a manual action or an algorithmic penalty

(If your website has been penalized manually, perform the backlink recovery and then submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.)

This may sound a bit cliché, but there is more than just a kernel of truth to the old adage saying that prevention is always better than cure. Having said that, you need to focus on link earning, rather than link building, in order for your site to avoid being penalized by Google Penalty.

To learn more about link earning (which I think you really should), you can read it here at – 6 Valuable Lessons To Avoid Google Penalty.

(If there is an update in the algorithm penalty, you won’t be getting any warning messages – always perform your own checking of every new article or postings periodically)

• Analyse your whole website backlink
• Remove unnatural backlinks or any broken links
• Let Google know that you had no control over the inbound links by using the disavow link from the Webmaster tool
• Submit a reconsideration request
• Prevention is always better than cure
• Don’t challenge Google because you will never win the game

So here are some ways on how to recover if you have been hit by Google penalty. At the end of the day, it is always advisable to comply with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines rather than get hit by these penalties all the time. It is definitely not worth a single chance of risking your website by overdoing SEO optimization. Always remember to write semantically according to your audience’s needs rather than crafting unnatural marketing materials just to flood the web with your keywords and get penalized by Google’s algorithmic penalty.

For more details on this topic, here’s another post for you to read on: Understanding Google Penalty: How And Why Your Website Might Get Penalized. Stay safe!

[This blog post was originally written and published by Yi Yun Li on April 20, 2015. It is most recently updated by Jia Thong on Jun 02, 2020]

Updated: 11 December 2024

About Yi Yun

Yi Yun is an inbound marketer who specializes in UI/UX. He is constantly in search of new knowledge to quench his thirst for 'how things work'.

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