I believe
it’s everyone’s dream to have their own business or to be their own “Boss”.
However, in this day and age starting and growing a business successfully needs
a strong Internet presence and most of all a website that attracts new
customers regularly. But If the ‘king of web search” Google, with all its various
algorithm updates and penalties now more than ever, discovers any form of
violation of its Webmaster Guidelines or doesn’t find your website valuable
then, finding new customers and keeping old ones can be challenging.
When a
website receives a Manual action penalty Google usually sends a notification
via Google Webmaster Tools. Violations of Google Webmaster Guidelines have to
be corrected and upon correction a reconsideration request can be
submitted.
Websites may
also suffer from Algorithmic penalties – these are unfortunate penalties that usually
occur when Google updates its search algorithm. There are tools available that
can analyze your website and present data on major and minor Google updates
affecting it, therefore you can pin point any problems affecting your site.
Fruition’s Google Penalty Checker is one such tool.
I have
experienced some of these problems before therefore; I am aware of the level of
stress which may come about. Here are some things you should not do if you want
to recover from penalties sooner.
1. Don’t
destroy your site unless it’s completely necessary.
Your first
step towards recovery should be “Cleanup”, remove bad links and add fresh
content to your site. After all this is done you can submit a reconsideration
request from your Google Webmaster Account, if the website does not recapture
its current rankings then you may have to kill it. Bear in mind, however, if no
effort was made to correct the Google violation, even if you move to a new
domain there is still a possibility that the Google Penalty can follow your
site. Additionally, your website will have to start fresh in the search rankings.
Sometimes
removing bad links can be time consuming, hence recovering from a penalty may
take a while in this case designing a new website might be easier. Both options
however, can come with a cost therefore, it’s important to evaluate the
advantages and disadvantages of both choices.
2. Don’t ignore the penalty
if it suddenly goes away.
Some manual
penalty may expire after a short period of time, others may take years. The
length of the penalty depends on how severe the Google Webmaster violation is.
Matt Cutts,
who is head of Google’s webspam department, stated in a video that Google
penalties are “time outs” but these expirations are definitely not a free
ticket. The penalty might have gone away in Webmaster tools but it doesn’t
actually mean that the penalty on the domain went away.
It’s best to
correct the initial cause of the problem, solely because your site could receive
more than one manual penalty.
If your site
receives a second manual penalty then Google will lose its trust, thus
punishing it even more harshly. Recovery at that time would be even more
difficult.
3. Don’t
rush be patience is the key
Patience is very
important. If your website has a lot of unnatural links linking to it, then
cleaning will certainly take a significant amount of time. Best advice is to
take as much time as possibly to rectify the problem before submitting a
reconsideration request.
Additionally,
If enough work is not done to remove bad links then Google may refuse
reconsideration request and approval of a second request will be delayed
considerably so, be wise spend enough time to correct all Webmaster violations.
Also, bear in mind that manual penalty reviews do not happen overnight, Google
receives hundreds of request daily; consequently your website search rank
improvement may take weeks.
4. Don’t
submit your reconsideration request incorrectly or incomplete.
Submitting a
reconsideration request form is not “rocket science”, it’s very simple and
straightforward but although submission is simple many individuals still make
mistakes which can cause request refusal.
Speedsheets
or Google Docs should be used to include evidence and not links to external
sites. Head of Google webspam Cutts stated that “we generally don’t open links
to external sites because of malware fear.
Moreover, if
you need Google to disavow links (ignore links), just upload them in a .txt
file (only the links no comments). Text file submitted to be disavowed are
automatically processed so although Google guidelines states that comments can
be submitted please don’t waste your time, no one will read them
.
5. Don’t
ever return to any SEO tactics that caused the issue in the first place
If
your website has recovered from Google penalty after link clean-ups and
successful reconsideration request, don’t ever revert to any spammy SEO
tactics, Google will definitely punish your website again, but this time more
harshly. Change your SEO tactics or SEO Company, avoid a second penalty, maybe
a second recovery won’t be as successful.
Google
controls more than 50% of web search so any Google penalty a company’s website
receives can really affect its expansion. Therefore, if it requires sending a
reconsideration request or not, it’s important to fix all errors or issues that
may affect the development of your growing business online negatively.
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