Has your website ranking experienced a sudden and dramatic decline in Google’s SERP?1
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Google Penalty Recovery Services
Bizeeo Marketing Agency provides Google Penalty Recovery Services in Montgomery, Alabama for business websites penalized by Panda, Penguin, and other Google algorithmic updates.
We’re located in Midtown Montgomery near Zelda Rd.
My Website’s Been Penalized!?!
It’s very likely your website has been “penalized” by Google for what it considers a serious infraction of their webmaster guidelines.
A dramatic drop in rankings can be devastating to a business because it leads to poor online visibility, or decreased “findability”. This, in turn, can result in a loss of customers and decreased sales and revenue.
Google SEO Penalty
The reasons behind a violation of Google’s guidelines can be summarizes as follows:
- User ignorance (unintentional)
- Over-optimization (aggressive SEO techniques that push the limits)
- Black Hat SEO (intentional manipulation of Google’s search algorithm)
- Negative SEO (malicious actions taken to disrupt the ranking performance of a competitor’s website)
The good news is Google typically provides a path to recovery when they have imposed a serious penalty.
But it’s NOT as easy as you might think.
Google Search Recovery
The challenges include:
- Recognizing the symptoms of a Google Penalty
- Knowing where to look for the messages (some explicit, some subtle) provided by Google that a penalty is in play
- Understanding the nature of your infraction
- Determining what must be done to get the penalty removed
- Executing the steps necessary to recover from the penalty
Website owners in search of services to help with this process typically refer to the process as:
- Google Penalty Recovery
- Google Penalty Removal
- Google Penguin Recovery (more about Penguin below)
- Link Removal
Whatever you choose to call it, the recovery process is not an exact science and can require a LOT of time and patience.
Search Engine Overview
A basic understanding of how Google works is helpful.
Google attempts to provide quality and relevant results in response to a keyword search using a 3 step process:
- Crawling: Googlebot (Google’s web crawling bot) discovers new and updated pages and “crawls” (reads) them.
- Indexing: Googlebot processes each page it crawls and stores them in a database.
- Serving results: When a keyword search is performed, Google searches their database for “relevant” pages and return the results to the searcher.
Google evaluates many factors in its core algorithm to determine relevancy, but they don’t disclose how they weight these signals or precisely how your website is affected.
“When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors…” ~ How Google Search Works 2
Some of the signals, in no particular order, that Google’s algorithm evaluates include:
- Website content
- Quality
- Relevance
- Originality
- Diversity
- Freshness
- Backlinks from other websites
- Link quantity
- Link quality
- Page download speed
- Website-friendly status
Reputable SEO Service Providers know how to maximize your online visibility for the above ranking signals WITHOUT violating Google’s guidelines.
Google Penguin Recovery
In April 2012, Google launched a new algorithmic update code-named “Penguin”.
The intent of the Penguin update was simple – penalize and drop the rankings of sites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. 3
Penguin’s biggest impact was felt by websites that employed “link building” techniques considered spammy and manipulative by Google. For example, website owners could hire a 3rd party, or participate in “link farming” schemes, to create massive amounts of backlinks that point to their website.
This usually results in a (temporary) boost in rankings in the SERP (remember, it’s a ranking signal).
However, once the Penguin algorithmic update, also called a “refresh”, was released, many of these websites were severely penalized. Symptoms include dropping 8 to 10 pages in rank for a specific keyword search. Even worse, some websites were effectively removed from search engine results for ANY keyword search.
Penguin Recovery SEO
Unfortunately, there is no quick fix.
There aren’t any Penguin Recovery SEO “tricks” to make things right. Remember, it was your bag of tricks that may have gotten you in trouble to begin with, don’t make things worse!
There are basically 2 options for recovery from Penguin:
- Remove or request removal of the unnatural, spammy backlinks
- Make use of the Disavow Tool requesting Google to “ignore” the backlinks
And it can be a combination of both.
- With option 1 above, you are often at the mercy of hundreds or thousands of websites you do not control, and dealing with webmasters that may or may not be cooperative. There is also a large investment of your time.
- With option 2 above, think of it as a “get out of jail free” card. The catch is you must wait for Google to “refresh” the Penguin algorithm to recover completely, and as of the date of this blog post, approximately 1 year has passed between the last Penguin algorithmic refresh.
That’s a long time to wait for relief.
It’s important to note that Google is vague as to the best approach for removing the Penguin penalty, so there is a good bit of guesswork and patience involved on the part of the website owner, especially considering there may be other factors (or signals) impacting your website simultaneously.
Google Panda Recovery
Another algorithmic update from Google is code-named “Panda”.
It’s worth mentioning here because many people confuse it with the “Penguin” update. The Panda algorithm, or refresh, is mostly intended to target websites with poor quality content.
Our experience has been it is easier to recover from a Panda penalty because you are in full control of the content on your own website. Whereas, with Penguin you are at the mercy of other websites and webmasters to remove backlinks to your website, and you may have to wait a long time for Google to refresh the algorithm. Google claims they are currently in the process of making Penguin run in “real-time”, so perhaps time (and/or effort) will be less of a factor in the future.
Of course, if you’re hit with the double whammy, a penalty from BOTH algorithms, you’ve got BIG problems!
If you have employed an SEO service provider and things are going very wrong, ask them for specifics regarding the online marketing techniques applied to your website.
Are you listening?
Ask them EXACTLY what they have done, how they did it and to whom they may have outsourced any SEO tasks. I’m not saying you should be accusatory, but you deserve to know if there is a problem and from where it originated.
A reputable, qualified service provider will have nothing to hide and be happy to share all the details of their activities.
Contact Bizeeo Marketing Agency if you have concerns about your website ranking and are in need of Google Penalty Removal Services.