Website recovery after Google penalty
Has your website suddenly dropped down the search-results rankings? Have
you lost traffic? Did you get an ‘unnatural links’ notification? The problem is that many search-engine optimization (SEO) tactics that worked well in the past can now get you ‘punished’. Google has been cracking down hard on websites that use high-risk link-building tactics.
Other issues are web pages with low-quality or duplicated content. These will also lower your rankings. The consequences for online businesses can be serious – not just for the visibility of your business on the Internet, but on your revenue. You can’t afford (literally) to lose your ranking.
The Google algorithms involved are Penguin, Panda and the latest big one, Hummingbird. You’ll find a brief summary of each below.
Have you lost traffic?
If you’ve suffered a substantial drop in your organic traffic and don’t know why, we can carry out a site audit for you. We’ll check for technical issues that may be affecting your site and also check your link profile.
The same applies if you got a message in your Google Webmaster Tools account with a heading such as ‘Unnatural inbound links’.
Torc Web Design recovery service – What we do is:
- Analyse your site in depth to identify where it fails to comply with Google best practices – specifically, Penguin recovery and Panda issues
- Identify what repairs are needed to recover from (and avoid) a drop in ranking
- Prepare a list of tasks and procedures needed to correct the problems
- Complete the Google penalty removal and clean-up
When your website drops seriously in the rankings, it can be highly stressful. We will give you all the advice and support you need, and take action to get your website back on track, so get in touch: today.
Penguin attacks spammy backlinks
Google introduced the Penguin update in 2012 to hunt out spammy backlinks and penalise websites using low-quality backlinks.
If Penguin has hit your website, you may not even know you were hit. You need to check your site traffic as well as carry out various other checks.
What’s needed is removal of all medium and high-risk backlinks, followed by a request for reconsideration by Google.
After that, you need to build high-quality backlinks from authoritative domains. Then your rankings and traffic will start recovering.
Panda de-ranks ‘low-quality’ sites
Panda was a Google change applied in February 2011 that aimed to lower the rank of low-quality sites. It reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12% of all search results. There have been several updates since then.
In brief, Panda issues include pages of poor quality or with duplicated content. These should be rewritten, removed, or blocked from being indexed by the search engine, or rewritten. Content that is overly general or not substantially different from what is available elsewhere on the Internet will not rank well. It’s all about ‘adding value’ to the Internet.
Hummingbird doesn’t like keyword stuffing
While reinforcing Penguin and Panda, Hummingbird, the latest Google update, shifts the focus away from keywords to the searcher’s intent. In other words, stuffing your website with keywords and using black-hat SEO techniques won’t work anymore.
What this essentially means is that websites with high-quality, unique content and use the social media in the right way will be rewarded in the search results.