If your site used to rank well and suddenly dropped and you have done some previous SEO work – then there is a high probability that you have some form of penalty imposed by Google.
Google penalties come in different shapes and sizes – some are easy to fix – some require a bit of effort and patience to sort out – forensic seo.
Algorithmic Ranking Penalties
These are ranking penalties that are automatically imposed on a webpage if certain flags are triggered. They are sometimes complex to unravel and are directly influenced by the authority of the site in question. So if your site has a high authority then the threshold for triggering a penalty will be higher than that for a low authority site.
The good news is that algorithmic penalties will get switched off once the offending trigger has been fixed. So ‘all’ we have to do is work out what the problem is, fix it, and get Google to notice that we have sorted things and the penalty will be removed.
Manual Ranking Penalties
These are manual webspam actions imposed on a site by Google. They come in various forms but are usually imposed when Google detects, what it thinks, are unnatural inbound link profiles pointing at your website. The nature of the web is such that links pointing to a website can influence the rankings of the site. This is how off-page SEO works! So it used to be widespread practice to flood sites with all sorts of links purely to boost rankings. This was obviously way outside Google’s terms of service and they have been on a crusade to rid their search results of such ‘webspam’. Over the recent years they have devalued certain types of links and generally become far more sophisticated at detecting abuse. So if someone employed an SEO to improve their site rankings over the past 3 years and their website has tanked then there is a strong possibility that they have some form of penalty imposed.
Google will inform the website owner through the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) interface if they have imposed such a penalty. They will also indicate the severity of the problem. They also warn if they have noticed linking practices that are wrong but may be outside of the website owners control. In this case you would see a notice informing you that some links may be devalued.
The only way to resolve these issues is to identify the problems and try and get the links removed or by asking Google to disavow the links.
Website Penalty Recovery – warning
Don’t Throw away The Good with the Bad!
There are just too many examples of website owners and many SEO’s panicking and getting all their links removed. Some even ditch the domain name and start again! This sort of overreaction is very costly to business owners who have probably invested a large amount of money in their website and rely on it for business.
In many cases if you have a penalty – it may only be due to a few links. An experienced SEO will be able to identify these devise a website penalty recovery plan and sort the problems without you having to start from scratch again.
In a lot of cases – there is no penalty at all! If all of your links; be it 1 or 10,000; all come from the same type of site and Google devalues these. Then your rankings will suffer.
Talk to a SEO Expert
We have a lot of experience in advising and sorting various levels of penalty imposed by Google. Give us a call on 01767 654 878 to discuss getting traffic back to your business website.