Google Penalties: What They Are and How to Recover

by Moises Hamui November 27, 2023

Google penalties are punishments imposed by the search engine on websites that do not comply with its quality guidelines or that use illegal techniques to improve their positioning.

These penalties can negatively affect a website's organic traffic, visibility and reputation, so it is important to know how to detect, prevent and solve them.

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What is a Google penalty?

A Google penalty is an action that the search engine takes to lower or eliminate from its search results web pages that it considers do not offer a good user experience, that have low-quality content, that are spam, or that violate any of its rules.

These rules are found in the Google Webmaster User Manual, which specifies the best practices that must be followed to create and maintain a website that is useful, relevant and safe for users.

There are two types of Google penalties: manual and algorithmic.

Manual penalties are those applied by a Google employee after receiving an alert or report of spam from a user or a detection system. These penalties are reported to the webmaster through the Search Console tool, where the reason and how to solve the problem are indicated.

Algorithmic penalties are those applied automatically by Google's own algorithm when it detects any irregularities on the website. These penalties are not communicated to the webmaster, making it more difficult to identify and correct them.

How do I know if my website has been penalized by Google?

To find out if your website has been penalized by Google, you should keep an eye on metrics analysis tools, such as Google Analytics. and Google Search Console. These tools allow you to monitor the performance of your website, the traffic it receives, the keywords it ranks for, the errors it presents, etc.

If you notice a sudden and drastic drop in these metrics, your website may have been penalized by Google.

Additionally, you can use other external tools that help you detect possible penalties, such as Google Penalty Checker, which analyzes SEMrush traffic data and compares it to the dates of Google algorithm updates to determine if your website has been affected by any of them.

How to recover from a Google penalty?

To recover from a Google penalty, the first thing you need to do is identify the type and reason for the penalty. If it is a manual penalty, you must follow the instructions given by Google in Search Console. to resolve the issue and request reconsideration.

If it is an algorithmic penalty, you should analyze your website and correct the aspects that may be causing the penalty, such as content, links, optimization, etc.

Here are some general tips for recovering from the most common Google penalties:

Penalty for content

If your website has been penalized for having low-quality, duplicate, hidden or over-optimized content, you should review and improve the content of your website, following these guidelines:

Remove or modify duplicate content, both internal and external, using tools such as Copyscape or Siteliner to detect it.
Create original, useful, relevant and valuable content for your audience, using natural language and avoiding keyword stuffing.
Review the external links you include in your content, making sure they are quality, related to the topic, and have the nofollow attribute if they are paid or sponsored.
Avoid hidden content, which is content that is not shown to the user but is shown to the search engine, such as text that is the same color as the background, text that is hidden with CSS, or text that is inserted with JavaScript.
Use appropriate HTML tags to structure your content, such as headings (h1, h2, h3…), lists, tables, etc.

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Link Penalty

If your website has been penalized for having an unnatural, poor quality, purchased or spammy link profile, you should review and clean up your link profile by following these steps:

Analyze the links that point to your website, using tools such as Ahrefs, Moz or Majestic, and evaluate their quality, relevance and authority.
Identify and remove toxic links, i.e. those coming from low-quality, penalized, irrelevant, spammy websites or those that use black hat techniques.
Request removal of links that you cannot remove yourself by contacting the webmasters of the websites that generate them and asking them to remove them or add the nofollow attribute to them.
Use Google's disavow links tool to tell the search engine which links you don't want it to take into account when evaluating your website.
Create and obtain quality links, naturally and organically, by offering valuable content, establishing relationships with other websites in your sector, participating in forums, blogs and social networks, etc.

Optimization Penalty

If your website has been penalized for being over-optimized, that is, for using excessive or artificial techniques to improve its positioning, you should moderate and balance your optimization, taking into account these aspects:

Avoid keyword stuffing, that is, the excessive and forced use of keywords in content, titles, meta tags, links, etc.
Use keywords in a natural and varied way, including synonyms, related terms and long tail terms, that is, more specific and less competitive phrases.
Optimize your website's technical SEO, improving loading speed, navigability, usability, adaptability to mobile devices, security, etc.
Optimize your website's semantic SEO using natural language, structured data markup, rich content, etc.

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How to prevent Google penalties?

To prevent Google penalties, the most important thing is to follow the quality guidelines established by the search engine and avoid practices that may harm the user experience or the relevance of your website. In addition, we recommend that you:

Stay up to date with Google's algorithm updates, which occur frequently and can change ranking and penalty criteria.
Monitor the performance of your website using the metrics analysis tools we have mentioned, and correct any errors or problems you detect.
Conduct regular SEO audits to assess the status of your website and apply the necessary improvements to optimize it.
Generate quality content that is original, useful, relevant and valuable to your audience, and update and renew it regularly.
Build a natural, quality link profile that reflects the authority and trust of your website, and avoid artificial or low-quality links.
Optimize your website in a moderate and balanced way, using keywords in a natural and varied way, and improving the technical and semantic SEO of your website.

What are the benefits of avoiding Google penalties?

Avoiding Google penalties has many benefits for your website and your business, such as:

Improve your positioning in search results, which will allow you to increase your visibility and your organic traffic.
Improve your online reputation, which will allow you to generate trust and credibility among users and potential customers.
Increase your loyalty, which will allow you to create a long-lasting and satisfactory relationship with your current and returning customers.
Increase your profitability, which will allow you to obtain more income and benefits from your online activity.

Written by Moises Hamui Abadi : I am an entrepreneur, founding partner of Viceversa and SoyMacho. After leading several digital businesses and advising several other businesses, I decided to form MHA Consulting, a digital marketing consultancy dedicated to growing and empowering digital businesses in more than 7 countries and generating more than 1,500 million pesos.