SEO Penalty: 4-Step Guide To Recover From Them

Do you feel your content is not getting the scope it used to? You could be facing something bigger than a lack of interest from your audience and, instead, be under a SEO penalty you haven’t realized yet. If you’d like to accompany throughout these lines, we’lle be giving a 4-step guide on how to recover from such situation according to the type and the causes that may have led to your site being invisible online.

It’s no secret search engine penalties represent one of the most challenging obstacles a website owner or digital marketer can face, so let’s keep calm and learn how to deal with them and prevent another one in the future.

What Exactly Is A SEO Penalty

Before getting down to business, you should have a clear picture on what a SEO penalty is and what are its consequences. This happens when a search engine — Google, for example — demotes your website’s rankings due to violations of their guidelines. There are two types of penalties —manual or algorithmic — but we’ll get to that very soon. In order to recover from this situation and get your site back to the top of the search engines results, we need to make a diagnose of the SEO penalty, fix the issues and submit a reconsideration request.

Step 1: Identify The Penalty

As we’ve mentioned just now, there are two types of SEO penalty and, before anything else, we want to check which one is affecting our website.

Manual Penalty Detection

If you suspect you site may be under a manual penalty, the first thing you’ll want to do is go to your Google Search Console and navigate to the “Security & Manual Actions” section. This is the place where we’ll find any manual actions that have taken place regarding our site, as well as specific details about the violation — if any. Google normally categorizes them into:

• Thin content with little or no added value
• Unnatural links to your site (inbound)
• Unnatural links from your site (outbound)
• User-generated spam
• Cloaking or sneaky redirects
• Pure spam

Algorithmic Penalty Detection

Unlike manual penalties, which are quite easy to detect, algorithmic ones need some more investigation. There are three main steps you need to follow in order to detect an algorithmic penalty on your website:

• Analyze your traffic patterns. Go to Google Analytics and try to find sudden drops that could correlate with known algorithm updates, which you can do with resources such as Moz’s Algorithm Change History, for example.
• Review ranking changes. This can be done thanks to tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs and a thorough look to your keyword portfolio.
• Assess content quality. Last, but not least, you can check Google’s recent quality guidelines in search of any violation or specific quality issues, specially after a major update has taken place.

Step 2: Diagnosis of SEO Penalty Causes

Content-Related Issues

Once you know the type of penalty your site is suffering from, it’s time to get to its causes. If we’re talking about content-related issues, we could be facing things such as thin content with pages that have little to zero substantive information and doesn’t satisfy user intent, duplicate content, keyword stuffing which makes the content very unnatural or misleading content, also known as clickbait strategy.

In order to detect any of these issues, you can make use of tools like Screaming Frog to crawl your site and identify thin pages that may have low word count or high ad-to-content ratio, for example. Another great tool is Copyscape, which will tell you if you have any duplicated issue on your website, and of course Google Analytics, where you can check bounce rates and time-on-page metric that speak about quality signals.

Technical SEO Violations

Another common issue is having technical issues that trigger a SEO penalty and also make recovery quite a challenge. Some of these are cloaking, which results in showing different content to users and search engines, sneaky redirects in order to send users to different pages than shown to crawlers, hacked content — there’s no need to explain this — and structured data abuse, which can be caused by a lack of awareness on how schema markup works.

Once again, you should focus on taking advantage of tools such as Google’s Rich Results for structured data issues or security scanners like Sucuri in order to detect any possible hacked content. Lastly, trust SEO crawlers to identify redirect chains or possible cloaking.

Step 3: Strategic Corrective Actions

Manual Penalties

1️⃣ Address specific violation.

• Thin content: Improve or remove those pages.
• Unnatural links: Remove if possible and disclaim the rest.
• Hacking: Clean the site and check vulnerabilities.

2️⃣ Document the process.

• Create a spreadsheet where you document every action you are taking.
• Include screenshots of removed/changed content.

3️⃣ Craft a reconsideration request.

• Own up the violation.
• Detail every correction you’ve made.
• Explain measures implemented for the future.

Algorithmic Penalties

1️⃣ Content revitalization.

• Audit your content against Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines.
• Combine thin pages into comprehensive resources.
• Remove any low-value content.
• Add original research and multimedia.

2️⃣ Technical SEO overhaul.

• Improve internal linking.
• Fix crawlability issues.
• Ensure mobile usability.
• Optimize Core Web Vitals.

Step 4: Monitoring and Prevention

Now that you have diagnosed and identified the issues causing a SEO penalty on your website, the idea is to not fall into another one in the future. Specially if we talk about algorithmic penalties, this can take up to months to be fixed, as they get solved whenever they release a relevant update. Manual penalties, on the other hand, usually take from 2 to 8 weeks after reconsideration approval to be removed from your site.

Your main goal now is to focus on building a better, more sustainable website rather than temporarily fixing past mistakes, which can be done by focusing on user experience, building expertise and authority on your niche, developing natural and earned links and maintaining a technical excellence as your foundation.