How to recover fast if your site hit by search engine penalty?

Google penalty happens when a website content does not comply with Google updates. Google updates are regular regulation, procedures, terms, etc enforced by Google as a search engine optimization standard that must be observed by all webmasters or SEO pros. Every webmaster shares one basic goal, and that is to receive high Google ranking as it will ensure a continuous flow of organic traffic. There is another major fear that website owners have in common, and it is the fear of penalty. In the SEO sphere, it is normal to see a webmaster go from a profitable campaign to a penalty; this is what happens when one is ignorant about an existing update or new update. Because updates can occur suddenly, it’s important to learn how to recover fast. 

Recovering from Google penalty

What is the reason for the penalty?

The first step to recover from the penalty is to find out the reason for it. The first way to do this is to observe your traffic, if you noticed a sudden reduction, immediately find out the cause for the drop. 

As far as penalties go, two types can be applied by Google to any site, and they are algorithmic and manual penalty. 

Note that carrying out an effective penalty removal is based on the type of penalty.

Manual penalty: Locate the Google webmaster tool and take a look at the notification to find out if the type of penalty is manual. If it is, you can correct it right there. Usually, the penalty comes in a message form notifying you of a violation, you can make corrections right there. 

Algorithmic penalty

This type of penalty is complex and tricky to spot; therefore, administering penalty removal may take your time. Unlike manual penalty where you receive alert, in the case of an algorithmic penalty, Google will not notify you and that leaves you with finding out things by yourself. To help in the investigation, check when you start experiencing a drop in traffic, when you have, connect the time you discovered the drop of traffic to the history of the algorithmic change.

However, Penguin and Panda were the most significant algorithmic updates from Google, the older ones only targeted backlinks, content quality, and text dissemination. 

Carefully select contents

The next step is to manually select related contents and identify bad backlinks. There are different types of faulty backlinks, the common ones are,

• Backlinks that are unrelated to a site niche
• Sites with plagiarized or low-quality contents
• Directories sourced backlinks
• Sponsored advertorials and contents
• Auto approved contents sourced backlinks
• Adult oriented backlinks
• Hidden backlinks text 
• Sneaky cloaked and redirect links
• Backlinks generated from gambling sites

The above are some of the bad backlinks you should avoid. To end the bad backlink problem, first, try to scrutinize the backlink of your website. Conduct this removal procedure first; identify the link that caused the drop in your ranking. If you were able to identify the links, take immediate steps to remove them.

Using the 301 technique

If you are hit with a penalty, the 301 forward techniques are generally the first action path that any professional should take to save the lost rankings. This strategy is effective only if you are willing to surrender your domain for a new one.

First step:

The first step is to register a new domain, try to go for the same domain but with a TLD extension. 

Second step:

The second step is to build the penalized website backup and the objective for building the backup is so that you can easily install the backup domain on the newly registered one. 

Third step:

Create a new hosting account for the new domain; we advise that you use a popular hosting service. 

Fourth step:

The next step is to install the domain that you have just backed up into the new hosting account, configure the new account, and once it’s completed, simply install the backed up the domain. 

If you follow this procedure exactly as stated, your new domain will become a copy of the old one.

Fifth step:

Once you have your new domain hosted and running, the next step is to redirect the penalized domain to the new one; the process is called 301 redirects.

Everything should work perfectly, and if it does, bring your rank tracker up to date with the newly registered domain and hold on for 1 or two days. This is the method used by many professionals because it has a high success rate. In about 1 to 2 weeks, you will discover that the new domain will start going up in Google ranking.

All hope is not lost when you are hit by the Google penalty. However, you should avoid falling into penalty issues. One of the ways to avoid the Google penalty is to be up-to-date with information regarding Google updates. Secondly, webmasters should always conduct a website SEO audit to find out if your website complies with any current updates.