How To Recover From A Manual Google Penalty – A Step By Step Guide

Sometimes while designing your website, you put in a number of links to increase the website’s visibility in search engines, but you may often come across a typical problem where Google reviews your website citing a problem with your links. Here is a step by step guide about recovering from physical link problems.

Whenever there are irrelevant or unnatural links on your website, the Google Webmaster Tools starts giving you warnings. Sometimes, if a warning is not given it might be an algorithmic problem caused by Google Penguin. With Google Penguin, you will not have to submit any reconsideration requests because this is a process where you can discuss the manual penalty with Google.

Now, if you have received any waning from Google Webmaster Tools, then it is time to analyze your back links seriously. This can be a time consuming process, so you need to be very patient. First, sketch out an entire image of your back links. While analyzing the back links, you might need a number of back link analysis tools because there is no such tool that can provide you with an overall profile. Some of the useful and important back link analysis tools are Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO, Bing Webmaster Tools, Link Detox, Open Site Explorer and LinkRisk.

An important thing about backlink analysis tools is that you should never ever consider Google Webmaster Tools as the only weapon that can help you out just because Google has warned you about the problem. Google only provides you with an example of the links causing problems and does not give you an entire image of the links on your website. So, you need a handful of different weapons to analyze all your back links properly.

A Google warning indicates a problem. There could be different problems: paid links, advertorials or manipulation of PageRank. So, first identify which problem Google is talking about. The category of the links will be chosen according to the cited problem. Anything in your website that is unnatural or irrelevant anything that is there just for SEO purposes, should be piled up and simply removed from your website.

The next step is link removal. Whenever you are aware of the list of links that are causing trouble to your website, it is time to remove them, but this process is very painstaking and not very effective at the same time. At the end of the removal process, you may come up with a very poor removal rate. But you have to carry out this unlinking process repeatedly to remove all the unnatural links from your website.

The next step is Disavow which enlists all the unnatural links and asks Google to reject those while providing a Google ranking to the website. This will help you to remove all those unnecessary links from your website that you could not remove. This step helps you to remove all the unnecessary links as a whole and not individually. Hence, it is easier to disavow all the links of a particular domain without deleting individual links from the same domain.

By completing all these tasks, you can proceed further by submitting your website to Google for reconsideration. But make sure that you are honest about your activities.

Reasons to Invest in SEO

There’s never a time when your website couldn’t use a little more love at the search engines. After all, is there such a thing as too much traffic?! From time to time, you’ll notice some onsite factors that are a clear indication that you should start spending more time on your website before things get out of hand. Many of us see our websites as a backyard garden, something that we’ll tend to one of these days but just never really get down to doing.

Here’s a quick list of issues and tips for fixing up your website.

Dead Pages with Links Pointing to Them

During the course of maintaining your website, you will add new pages, update pages and remove pages. You may have removed pages because you stopped offering a product line or service. However, each page of your website can have external pages pointing to it, and search engines like to use these links as a signal about the quality of your website. When you have dead pages, you will generally have a new page that has come up in its place. You can set up a simple page redirect via your .htaccess file or via your CMS to ensure that the links you already have don’t lose potential and that your visitors have a seamless experience.

Slow Loading Pages

When your website loads slowly, it makes a difference in the end user experience. It also makes a difference in search engine rankings. If search engines notice your website can’t take the load, they will stop sending you as much traffic as you would like. The simple answer to fixing your speed problems is to get a better hosting company. The technically correct way of figuring out why your website is not working the way it should is to do a test on the loading pattern. You can run a test at tools.pingdom.com. Pingdom will give you a stat on how long each part of your website takes to load. The initial time taken is generally because of the programming code/logic. If you have a high first-byte time, you need to ask the programming team to clean up their code by caching or optimizing. You can also add a subdomain to store images, CSS and JavaScript files. This will make the load time quicker as you won’t have overhead data in your requests.

Checking Alternate Keywords

When you’ve optimized your website for a few keywords and have hit the sweet spot at search engines for traffic from those terms, you can always do more from there. A quick method to ensure that you are not leaving out ancillary products for your competition to snatch up is to look at your keywords log. Look at what phrases your customers are looking for when they visit your site, and see if you can create a product or service that would be useful to them. Quite often you will notice that people search for slightly similar terms to your products, and search engines will send you traffic thinking that your website has the required services available. It would be wise to invest some time and effort into making the most of that traffic and having something that your customers can use in those niches as well.

Mobile, Social and More

If you haven’t already created a mobile experience for your users, you need to look into that  soon. Mobile browsing isn’t just a fad anymore. It’s here to stay and it’s everywhere. People are looking at your website from their phones, and they need to see the data that is relevant to them quickly and easily before they move to alternate providers. Social websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are a great connection point. There’s nothing like hearing the pain and pleasure points so quickly from your end users and making changes to ensure that you are ready for the next big wave that people are looking for. The new media options available today allow us to hear what people want in an instant. If we don’t adapt to those demands, someone else will.