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Getting penalized by Google is no picnic. You may think you’re doing good SEO, but your rankings and traffic can go south overnight for no apparent reason and your entire business can be put in jeopardy.
SearchWorks understands this and we’re here to help. We offer highly reliable penalty removal and recovery services for websites sandboxed by search engines. From situational assessment, penalty revocation strategy, and recovery advice, we’ll take your website by the hand and guide it back to good standing.
Contact us today for a free analysis and quote!
Just like any platform on the web, Google has a set of terms and guidelines that users and webmasters are expected to follow. These guidelines were put in place to preserve the quality of user experience on the platform by featuring the most relevant search results to queries. The terms of use also serve as a warning to webmasters not to use tactics that seek to manipulate the search engine’s algorithms to try and trick the system into ranking inferior pages higher than they deserve on the SERPs.
While many violations of Google’s Terms of Use fly under the radar, there have also been many cases where Google has taken punitive action against the rule-breakers. When that happens, a website’s rankings for its target keywords will tend to drop sharply with its organic traffic following suit. When the traffic declines can only be observed in organic search and there are no technical issues that might be causing it, most SEO experts will rule the situation as a Google penalty.
There’s a host of reasons why Google might degrade a website’s ability to rank on its search results. The following are the most common:
There are many other penalty triggers, though these are the most common. For more information on what activities might pose potential risks to a website’s search visibility, read up on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
To the inexperienced, any sustained decline of search engine traffic would look like a penalty. However, this isn’t always the case as filters and core algorithm updates can also inflict significant traffic declines on a website. Here’s a description of each and how to tell them apart once you encounter them:
Penalties
As discussed, these are traffic drops resulting from punitive actions due to violations of Google’s terms of service. The operative term here is violations as the website is found to be doing something that Google doesn’t approve of. Penalties can be classified into two main groups
Filters. There are cases when Google will push down the rankings of some webpages in a website or altogether exclude them from the index even when there are no violations to its terms and guidelines. Google itself does not refer to these cases as penalties since there is no malicious activity to warrant a sanction. Instead, it refers to these as “filters” that help maintain the quality of search results
An example of a filter that’s usually mistaken for a penalty is the way that Google handles duplicate content occurring across two or more pages on a website. If the content is identical, Google tends to include just one of the pages in its index. It doesn’t seem to be that consistent as Google sometimes allows two or more of the same pages to get on its index, albeit with only one page being ranked prominently.
Core Algorithm Updates. Google periodically rolls out updates to its core algorithms which can alter the way it “perceives” webpage relevance with respect to search results. Websites may gain or lose significant amounts of search traffic without doing anything because the changes in their search visibility are a result of changes in Google’s preferences and not necessarily in optimizations they’re applying.
When a website’s organic traffic suffers after a core algorithm update rolls out, Google doesn’t necessarily advise doing anything new because the website likely isn’t doing anything wrong. It’s not being punished like a penalized website would be, but Google may just be favoring other competing websites.
Not all penalties are equal. Some are more severe than others. From experience, the vast majority of penalty cases we’ve seen are reversible. What’s more, putting in a serious effort to rehabilitate the website can help it recover most, if not all, of the traffic it lost.
When trying to get a penalty revoked, we follow the simple process below:
The specific tactics that SearchWorks will apply will vary from case to case depending on the cause of the penalty and the severity of it.