Have you had a sudden drop in rankings and loss in website traffic?
If so, your site could have been hit by a Google Penalty – the search engine’s punishment for abusing their guidelines.
Websites can incur penalties for various reasons, with spammy backlinks, duplicate content, and keyword stuffing being the most common culprits.
We can help websites recover their rankings from a Google Penalty, recovering their lost rankings and bringing back the lost traffic.
We do this by assessing undertaking a technical SEO and content audit including backlink profile research. Based on these results, we create an SEO recovery plan to eliminate penalties, restore your website’s organic visibility and traffic.
Google Penalty Removal: What Services We Provide
Removing a Google penalty requires a deep understanding of Google algorithms, their evolution, and the SEO best practices endorsed by Google themselves.
If you are unfortunate enough to have experienced a Google penalty it’s likely you have worked with an SEO provider that employed ‘black hat’ SEO tactics designed to manipulate the algorithm unfairly. Whilst this can see some quick wins in terms of fast ranking improvements, ultimately you will more than likely pay the price with a Google penalty at some point, losing all the momentum your site may have gained.
At Search Hog, we have been resolving Google penalties for many years, meaning we can quickly identify any SEO issues and take the right steps to rectify the issues a site possesses. Please note that whilst we can act quickly it can take Google up to 6 – 8 months in a worst case scenario to remove the penalty and the site to recover its rankings.
“Search Hog can get to the bottom of any issues with your website and create a strategy in clear and simple language.” Alex Deremez, MD at Checkpoint Safety
Types of Google Penalty
Google enforces penalties on websites for issues related to their links, which can be categorised into two primary types: manual penalties and algorithmic penalties. Let’s delve deeper into each type:
Manual Link Penalty
A manual link penalty is imposed after a review of your backlink profile by a member of Google’s webspam team. It is usually triggered by one of the following reasons:
- Detection of suspicious signals in your backlink profile by Google’s algorithm, prompting a manual review.
- A spam report filed by a user or a competitor, triggering a manual assessment of your backlink profile.
- A random review conducted by Google’s webspam team.
If your website incurs a manual penalty, Google will notify you through the Google Search Console. However, Google might also use a similar notification to alert you about the presence of unnatural links in your backlink profile, urging you to remove them before a penalty is imposed. The term “manual penalty” will be explicitly mentioned in Google’s communication if you have been penalised.
Algorithmic Link Spam Penalty
This type of penalty is harder to spot as unlike manual penalties, Google generally does not send out explicit notifications for algorithmic penalties. However, if your website experiences a significant and sudden drop in organic traffic it’s likely you are experiencing an algorithmic link spam penalty.
Google generally updates its core algorithm every 6 months or so and this is when your site will see a drop in rankings.
In extreme cases, your website may even be completely de-indexed, resulting in the complete loss of organic traffic, although this can possibly be caused by other technical SEO issues such as incorrect use of robots.txt or the noindex meta tag as well.
Google Penalty Removal Services
Once we have identified what the specific penalty your site has experienced, we will create plan to fix the errors and recover your rankings, some sites may be affected by more than one issue.
Our primary Google Penalty removal services are listed below:
Google Penguin Penalty Removal
Google’s Penguin update is designed to punish websites with spammy backlink profiles by reducing their search visibility. It punishes the sites that have undertaken spammy backlink practices such as buying links, gaining links from low-quality sites or PBNs (private blog networks).
When we assess a site for a Google penalty, we conduct a thorough backlink analysis to ensure that your backlink profile complies with Google’s guidelines. Once we have assessed your backlink profile, we will remove any harmful ones either by reaching out the site owner or disavowing the link using Google’s backlink tools.
Disavow File Setup & Implementation: Google provide a disavowal tool that allows you to submit a list of spammy and irrelevant backlinks, which in turn allows Google to understand that these links should be ignored when assessing your website.
The disavow tool should be used with caution as it incorrect use can mean you remove the signals for positive backlinks as well.
We also monitor performance after removal and develop a backlink strategy to ensure your website maintains a favourable standing with Google.
Google Panda Penalty Removal
Google’s Panda algorithm update targets websites with low-quality content by excluding them from search engine results. Low-quality content encompasses various elements, such as keyword stuffing, content with a low word count, duplicate or similar content, and irrelevant comment sections of blog posts.
Sites with a large number of URLs, such as ecommerce sites and large blog sites can often suffer from content quality issues due to irrelevant pages such as filter pages, tags or multiple product variants.
By undertaking a comprehensive content audit, we can identify the low-quality content on your site providing recommendations to remove or send signals to Google not to index certain content. Since the launch of generative AI content writing tools such as Chat GPT, Google is also monitoring sites for having AI-generated content, which again can cause a penalty to occur.
It may be that on top of removing the low quality content you also need to add content that sends positive signals to search engines. To do this, we will work together to create an on-site content plan that provides informative SEO-friendly content to users looking for your product or services.
Ready to Recover your Rankings? Get in Touch
At Search Hog we are experienced SEO experts, shown by the fact we are Google Partners – meaning we have undertaken industry qualifications and have managed a certain number of client projects.
Whilst the recovery service is a one-off project, we provide an ongoing strategy to maintain fully optimised websites, minimising the risk of future Google penalties.
Get in touch today to start recovering your rankings.
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Email: info@searchhog.co.uk
Phone: 01637 838164
