Restoring Your Web Rankings After a Penalty: Why It Won’t Happen
Posted August 25, 2016
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As a business owner and marketer, your goal is to continuously gain and keep Google’s trust because this is what helps with rankings and lets more visitors find your site. Google feels that if everyone follows their basic principles, this provides a better user experience for all and your website rankings will reflect that. But what happens when they feel that there is deceptive or manipulative behavior and when links, keyword selection, meta page titles, URL structures and timing don’t follow their Webmaster Guidelines? Google will take action against your website and when you try restoring your rankings after a penalty, here are some reasons why it won’t happen.
Impacts of Google Penalties
Page Level Penalty
When your webpage(s) start receiving a large number of links in a short period of time, Google thinks this is new and useful information which can boost your page above other competing sites. But here’s where it gets tricky. You have a large number of links, but when your pages link to known spam and high volumes of keywords Google considers poison, or those paid to surf program keywords, both your traffic and rankings for these pages immediately drops. There are some innocent reasons this happens. Maybe your spam filter failed. Here’s what Google did recently. They sent out a warning a few months ago around bloggers giving links in exchange for free products or services. They told webmasters that if they decided to link to the company’s site, the company’s social media accounts or an online merchant’s page that sells that product, they were going to send out manual actions; and they did. These webmasters had to clean up these links to get back into Google’s good graces, submit a reconsideration request and then Google’s web spam team still had to double-check and remove the manual action. Those are a lot of acts those webmasters had to perform and it still doesn’t mean that those websites will automatically recover to where they were before they received this penalty.
Site-Wide Penalty
Google’s Panda algorithm has caused several shake-ups since its inception in 2012 and the message they want to send is that they require webmasters to have more high-quality sites on the Internet. With Panda, it seems that Google measures how well users interact with your content, if you provide quality content and if your reputation shows you are a trusted, reliable source. These are just a few of the factors that keep you from being penalized. If they feel you are in violation, a manual action lets you know that they have penalized your entire site and then they tell you why. The path to this recovery is a long one and will cause you to take a look at your entire business model on your site. And it’s hard to tell how many requests you’ll have to submit and how long it will take for Google to finally accept them. Google says that once you think your site follows the webmaster quality guidelines, you can then request a review of your site directly from their Manual Actions report. Even then, if your reconsideration request is successful, your site may still rank lower than it used to. You just don’t know. An example of how hard a site can get hit by Panda is with Halifax Bank, a company owned by Lloyds Banking Group and is one of the largest retail banks in the UK. Around the time of Penguin’s debut in 2014, they lost 20% of their visibility in Google overnight because of a site-wide ban.
As you can see, restoring your web rankings after a penalty is an arduous process and just cleaning up issues with your website won’t automatically recover it to where it was. Google’s John Mueller even said in a recent webcast, that after you “recover” from a penalty, “they almost never just restore your website to the previous state” of the rankings you had prior to the penalty. But where do you start? You start by engaging the services of a professional with a highly critical eye who evaluates your site, helps you restructure it and who will then, start you on the road to regaining your traffic.
