What to Do When Google Penalizes Your Site
Appearing high in Google’s search engine results page is no easy task. Today, careful SEO and marketing strategies must be implemented to ensure success. It’s precisely because of this difficulty that website owners feel forced to resort to tactics that push them closer to the edge of what’s acceptable to Google. Many website owners will build extensive backlinks to stay ahead of the competition. This is referred to as negative SEO, and thousands engage in it. For a while, these types of strategies seem to work, until Google tweaked their rules.
Google’s algorithm updates can hurt your online presence and bottom line, and diminish all the work you put into your site. Matt Cutts, an official Google Webmaster, stated that initiates over 400,000 manual actions (often when Google feels a website is particularly “spammy”) on a monthly basis, and updates to Penguin and Panda can hit exceptionally hard.
Even if you monitor Google’s updates, there are still some changes the company makes that they don’t officially recognize. Because of this, it’s often difficult to find out where you went wrong. One minute you’re doing well and appear on the first page of Google for your business, and the next, you’ve plummeted to the second and third pages, with no clue as to what and how it happened. In some cases, it’s because the website is receiving too many low-quality backlinks. In other cases, it’s because of duplicate content.
However, of all the websites being penalized, only 5% of them submit a reconsideration request to Google to help recover their rankings. If you own a website that’s been penalized and don’t want to sit idle as you dip further in the rankings, proper action is necessary.
It can be overwhelming to try and recover your website after a hit from Google, especially if you’re not SEO-proficient. Consider working with SEO experts for Google Penalty Recovery to get you back on track. They can provide you with an effective rebound strategy to put you back in your place (or even higher). Furthermore, recovering from penalties comprises more than just fixing a single underlying issue.
Think of your website as an essay, and Google as the editor. If hastily written, Google would hit you with a series of “edits.” A great SEO firm wouldn’t just fix the essay’s main mistake or correct a few of the edits. They’d go through the paper thoroughly, changing organization and flow, fixing all errors, and adding and omitting where necessary.
A comprehensive analysis of your site will reveal gaping holes you may not have discovered on your own. This can go beyond low-quality backlinks and duplicate content. It’s not uncommon for competitors to purposely thwart your online reputation. In fact, it’s relatively easy for a competitor to hurt an established site — and they can do so just by pointing spammy links to your domain.
On Fiverr, a website where freelancers perform services on the cheap, you can easily find someone who specializes in hurting businesses with negative SEO. This is very dangerous, for both the person purchasing shady tactics, and the business being hit. Google’s answer to these practices, the Disavow Tool, can take weeks to work and isn’t foolproof. To stay safe, you need a long-term, custom plan for your site.
It can hurt to see your website suffer, especially when you’re doing your best to run a successful site and aren’t technologically adept. While being penalized or finding yourself the victim of a negative SEO attack can be extremely disheartening, understand that it’s not the end of the road for you. Take the opportunity to work with a professional in the field and come out better than you were before.