Ultimate Guide to Recover from a Google Manual Penalty

  Google, the major search engine continuously fine-tune their algorithm updates to extract accurate search results. Every year, Google rolls out many minor and major algorithms to catch websites that violate Google webmaster guidelines and participate in unnatural link building strategies. Google penalty updates are fearsome thing for most of the webmasters.

What do you mean by penalty?

Google penalty is a term that refers to a manual spam action given to a website with the algorithm update. If you search for a website that has been hit by a Google penalty, you can able to see a message in Google search results stating that it has been hacked or penalized.

Most common penalty

Most of the webmasters receive a common penalty like "unnatural link penalty" when they participate in unnatural link building strategies (link schemes). Google considers "links that are used to manipulate page rank or website ranking in search results and violate Google webmaster guidelines" as a part of link scheme. Henceforth, site owners should not participate in link scheme strategies to increase their website ranking.

Filters Vs Penalties

Google uses both filters and penalties to improve and organize search results in an accurate way for better user experience. There is a lot difference between a filter and penalty. If you have well knowledge on purpose of update and target, you can easily recover your website from an update when it is hit by a filter.

Where as a penalty is occurred when website owners break Google webmaster policies. Filter may lead to manual action, penalties are caused due to panda and penguin updates. Moreover, steps to recover from a filter drastically vary from steps to recover from a penalty.

You will receive a message in Google webmaster tools, when your website got penalized by a Google update. Message in the Google webmaster tools helps you to identify the cause of penalty but it will not provide specific examples.

Not appearing in search results

Find out whether your website is showing up in search results by entering your website URL or brand name. If you're site is not displayed in search results, it could be due to two reasons. First reason is that, your website has not been indexed. Second case is, your website got penalized by Google update.

Identifying Bad Links

If you have been hit by a Google penalty, then you should identify your website bad links with the help of tools and the process depends upon the Google policies you have broken. If you've been actively indulged in link building practices, focus more on it, to filter those links. You can make an use of many tools to identify such kind of bad links. You have to give foremost priority to Google webmaster tools which is the best source to find unnatural links.

Link Removal and Clean Up

After identifying bad links, next step is to send an e-mail to website owners about your link removal request to clean up your website to make it free from spam and the message should be in a pleased way. Put an effort to clean up all those links. At last, sort out the remaining links which are not removed and place them in a sheet for further process.

Disavow

You need to send link removal request for website owners at least twice or thrice. If you didn't receive any reply from them, then you need to use disavow tool to clean up the remaining links. You need to show a proof for Google about your link removal request before submitting remaining links via disavow tool.

Reconsideration Request

Next step is to write a reconsideration request to Google, when writing, be honest and mention about your efforts which you made for removing bad links. It takes at least two to three weeks of time to remove those links.

What's Next

After few weeks, Google will send you a message in GWT stating that, your penalty has been removed and it will take some time to re-index your website. If the penalty has been removed and still the message exists in GWT, redirect your domain, this can speed up the process.