Can You Recover From A Google Penalty?

Hello and welcome to episode 81 of SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer, seo, and I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years. I've built sites from the Grand Oak Bortsites and Sold Sites in large X6. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built over the years.

Today, I'm going to ask the question can you recover from a Google Penalty? Big topic today can you recover from a Google Penalty? This is obviously very timely, as we're recording this, which is in March 2024, where Google are currently rolling out the biggest core update and spam update that they've done in years, and lots of people have been hit by Google Penalties. They're seeing the traffic decrease or they've been de-undexed or a whole bunch of things. The question is if you've been hit by Google, can you recover? Now there's two things we've got to think about here, because there's different kinds of penalties. There are algorithmic penalties and there are manual penalties. The difference between the two is a manual penalty is where someone from Google's web spam team has actually come along, reviewed your website like a real person reviewing it, and has decided to penalize your website for one reason or another. There's a whole bunch of reasons they can penalize you for. It can be spammy content, it can be doing things like cloaking proper black cat against a term, against a terms of service type thing having dodgy links. These penalties can be site-wide or sometimes running on certain parts of your site, and they can have very different effects. Sometimes some manual penalties they'll completely de-index your site so you're removed completely from the index. Other times they'll just suppress you in the ranking. There's a variety, but with a manual one, someone's actually come along and taken a look at the data they've got about you, your website, and the data they've got about your website, and said, right, this person is doing something that we don't like. It's going to start terms of service, for whatever reason. So we're going to manually put a penalty on the site and then we're going to inform the person. Now they will inform you through Google Search Console and you will also get an email from them via Search Console. That's assuming that you are in Search Console. I can only assume that they will manually penalize their sites where people haven't registered them in Search Console, because otherwise that's an easy way to get around ever being manually penalized.

Now you don't know what I'm talking about when I talk about Google Search Console. I would say, go back and listen to episode 61 of SEO is not that hard, because I cover it in detail what Search Console is. You can also go to Google and just Google for Search Console and just follow the link for Google Search Console. It's where you can register that you own a site with Google and Google will share information with you. Now, yes, you can check in your Google Search Console for your website whether you've been penalized. As I say, they should email you, but for some reason, if that's been missed or you don't know, or you just want to be sure that you haven't got a penalty, then just go to your Google Search Console for your website and then scroll down to the security and money actions option in the menu and click money actions. You're going to hope it's going to give you a big green tick and says no issues detected. Now, if you have got a money action, it will tell you in there there'll be a big red cross and it'll tell you exactly the details of what you've been penalized for. So you'll then know what you've done wrong and then you've then got to look to address that. If you want to get the penalty removed, you can also request that the penalty is reviewed. When you do that, they will ask you questions. You can provide supporting evidence as to what you've done, what changes you made, how you have addressed what they've done. So we'll talk a bit more later about what your likelihood of success will be.

So now let's move on to algorithmic penalties. Now an algorithmic penalty is where you've seen a decline in traffic and generally this will be a marked decline and you can tie it into a time when Google have done an announced update. So, for example, back in September, lots of people who were hit by the helpful content update saw big declines in their traffic. At the time of that, those penalties were being put in as algorithmic penalties. Some people might not call them penalties. Google themselves might not call it a penalty, but it's more that you know this. They changed their algorithms and sites like yours are now no longer deemed rankable enough and you see a big decline in traffic and it generates feels like a penalty. I mean, I've in the past have been had sites hit by that and it definitely feels like you've been penalized, even if Google might call it something different.

Now, with these, there is no reconsideration request and there is no manual sort of notification that you've been hit by that algorithm update. So you really have to work out for yourself what's happened by timing it, looking at the information you'll give on when they are rolling out updates, and sort of look at your analytics to see whether you know any drops tie in with things that Google have announced. It would be beautiful if Google would actually flag in Google search console where they've been hit algorithmically. I think it would be really good for webmasters if they could do that. Maybe they will one day, but right now they don't tell you. You just have to work it out for yourself. This also means there is no reconsideration request. You can't go to Google and say, please reconsider why you've done this, and you can't make changes and then go and say to Google please reconsider, because they don't do that. All you can do is try and work out for yourself what's gone wrong. Make changes then, if it essentially, keep your fingers crossed.

But let's sort of talk now about what you do if you have got a penalty. So go back to manual penalties. If you know you've been given a manual penalty. You've been given the reasons why. You know Google at this point has got their eyes on you specifically, and your chances of recovery are going to depend on what you now choose to do. What you need to do, clearly, is address the issues that they have raised with you. Now, sometimes this might be easier and less work for you to recover than others. It just depends on how badly you've broken their rules, essentially, and how egregious you've been in doing it. So if you've built huge numbers of huge numbers of backlinks really spammy backlinks into really spammy AI content, then you know to get your site back to a situation where you're no longer penalized could essentially be as much as essentially leveling the site completely, removing all your content, disavowing all the backlinks, getting as many backlinks as you can removed, doing all those kind of things to essentially get back to the point where you really don't have a site anymore. So you may take the may take the decision to say you know what this site is? Just toast. It's burnt. I'm going to start again from scratch with something new.

Sometimes, though, they might have pulled you up for something that's not actually too bad, really. I know there was one. There was a niche site lady who got hit a few weeks ago with a manual penalty for some guest posts that she'd done a few years ago and that one would be a much simpler one to request a reconsideration on, because all she has to do is remove those links. We'll get those links changed to no follow or to sponsored links so that patron doesn't pass through them, and she can go to Google and say I've made these changes on these guest posts, I've cleared up all the other things. Can I be reconsidered please? And that one where you know for the amount of work she has to do to get over that manual penalty is not huge. It's worth doing it and putting in that reconsideration request. Google went always necessarily take your first reconsideration request. It might take you a few times to get it sorted out, but yeah, you can get through. You can do it and then, once it's been lifted, you'll be notified that this penalty no longer applies to you and hopefully you should also then force it. Start to see you know the effects of that penalty being lifted and your traffic rising back up.

So now moving on to algorithmic penalties. So if you've been hit with an algorithmic penalty, then your situation is in some ways easier and in many ways harder. The easier thing is it's not going to be subjective to get a fixed right With some of the manual penalties. I think you know there's a bit of subjectiveness and some people will probably never get their sites past a manual review because you've probably got a black mark on Google. But with algorithmic stuff, you know you've only got to convince the algorithm and the algorithm will be impartial. It won't penalize you personally. That's about the only thing that's easier. In effect, everything else is generally much harder because you have so much less information to go on. You've only really got the clues that Google give when they talk about each of the updates that they've done. Now, to be fair to them, they've been better with this last one in terms of explaining what the kind of things are they're targeting.

But I still think there's a long way to go and to really really give people the right information to make decent choices. And I know there's plenty of people who have been hit by the helpful content update from September, who still aren't seeing reversals, who have done work and really aren't clear on what to do. And I don't think there's many SCI experts out there, you know who have really got a clue on how to solve some issues. So the helpful content update, for one, I think there's still a lot of there where people don't completely know Other updates. Yeah, it does become clearer over time and you know it might be that in a couple of years' time we've really sorted out what helpful content isn't and isn't and how to sort out helpful content issues. So that's the frustrating thing for people when they've hit algorithmically in the first instances, you just don't know what to do. But the one thing is that eventually, I think every type of Google algorithmic update that I've seen, eventually people have figured out at least how to mitigate it to a certain extent. So what you really need as much as anything is patience with this one and don't do anything rash until you've got a clear idea of and consensus within the community as to what the things are to do, things that if I was looking to experiment, I would try would be to try, especially if it's an update which clearly is only affecting certain pages on your site, and you can check that by going to analytics and seeing which parts of the site have seen traffic drops and which haven't.

I'm quite often get clues as to what types of pages you need to work on. I remember many years ago in Broadbund at KDUK, our review section had a definite hit with us A bunch of traffic. But it was all around pages that were reviewing Broadband providers and had user-generated content of those reviews of Broadband providers on. And so we went back, looked at that and then we changed the design of those pages. We put a lot of things like schema markup in around the reviews. We did a whole bunch of work around those review pages and then over time they did actually then recover and recovered to the point where they actually started getting more traffic than before we had the penalty. So in many respects getting the penalty wasn't a bad thing in the long run for us.

So that's the real key thing is to try to identify what areas of your site have been hit. It's hard if it's your whole site that's been hit and nothing's doing well. But even if you just find a single part of your site that is still doing well compared to others, you can start to get clues on where to look at making changes. But I'll just reiterate that while updates are actually in progress, like we are at the moment with the Google Core update, I wouldn't be looking to make any changes until that update is completely rolled through and Google have announced it's done, because you, just with all the changes they can be doing, you might not be making the right changes and be able to figure out whether those changes have been positive or negative, while in the middle of an update, you really need the update to have run through before you move on to trying to fix that penalty.

So to summarise yes, you can get penalties removed. You can recover. How difficult it's going to be going to depend on whether it's a manual or an algorithmic penalty. It's going to depend on how bad you've been. If it's a manual penalty and with algorithmic penalties which tends to be just when Google have changed their mind on what isn't good, it all depends on how easily you can work out what it is that's gone wrong. Ultimately, with all these things, how much effort you're going to put into it will depend on how much work you think it is going to be to succeed and how much of a point you think you can recover to.

But personally I would say don't give up. You might have to look for other things to do in the meantime. You might have to look to other income streams If you've had your income hit. There are plenty of things you might have to do, but I would recommend that you talk to other people who've been hit. Try and find other people that have been hit with a similar penalty and do research online. See what other people are saying. I would say beware. There is never seen a silver bullet for fixing penalties, so if anyone says they can sort it for you for a dead, simply for a one-off payment, ignore those people. If you're listening to this after having been hit by a penalty, then I just want to say good looking, getting it sorted out. I'm really interested to hear anybody's stories of penalties and of any recoveries, so just give me a shout if you've got any of those. I just could look if you're trying to sort one out. Thanks for watching.