Google Penalty Removal (2022) – How to Recover Lost Traffic

Download my FREE SEO CHECKLIST

If you have spent valuable time and energy building a website and then driving traffic to that site, it can be absolutely maddening to experience a sudden drop in traffic!

Today, I’m going to talk about the 10 most common Google Penalties – what are they, how do you avoid them, and most importantly – how do you remove a Google Penalty if you find out you have received one. Let’s get to it!

First things first, you might be wondering “What is a Google Penalty?”

A Google penalty is essentially a punishment against a website that has violated their Webmaster Guidelines.

If you received a Google penalty, it means that your site has been removed from the Google Index. Now, this could impact just the portion of your site that is in violation, or worse – it could affect the whole dang website!

How can you tell if you received a Google Penalty?

Because a penalty results in one or more pages on your site being removed from the Google Index, you would experience a drastic drop in rankings and the resulting web traffic to your site. You might also notice that your domain authority has dropped (there are plenty of free services that will show you the Domain Authority of your site).

Now, a drop in traffic doesn’t ALWAYS mean a Google Penalty.  It could be that some of your most popular keywords have a reduced search volume.  This type of thing happens when you are ranking for trendy or seasonal keywords, or when a competitor starts ranking higher than you for your valuable keywords.

A drop in traffic could also mean that you have lost some backlinks.  Links that were generating traffic to your site from another site. Or, if you have recently done a website redesign, you may have unintentionally made changes to your content that impacted your SEO.

Google could have released YET ANOTHER algorithm update that impacted the way websites show up in the search results – this is not site specific, but it IS important to find out whether the update impacted your site so you can make any recommended changes.

Use Google Analytics to pinpoint the date you started experiencing the drop in traffic. If the date correlates with a Google Update, a Website Redesign, or if the drop in traffic is from referrals (backlinks), you can pretty much rule out a Google Penalty.

If it isn’t any of these – it’s very likely you have received a Google penalty. Google Search Console has a tool that makes it easy to perform a Google Penalty Check. Just click on ‘Security & Manual Actions’ in the side bar in Google Search Console and enter any url to perform an inspection. If you have received a Google penalty, it should tell you there.

 

What are the most common Google Penalties, and how do you fix them?

Hidden Text & Keyword Stuffing

Google Penalty Trigger: Google has detected a significant amount of content that contains either hidden text, or the unnatural use of keywords in the content!

Google Penalty Fix: Use the ‘Inspect URL’ tool in Google Search Console to enter each URL and compare your actual content to the results in the tool.  Remove any hidden text, which may show up as the same color to the background of the webpage. If it was unintentional, restyle the text so it is clearly visible to users visiting your site.  You’ll also need to rewrite any content with repetitive or unnatural overuse of keywords throughout your content.  Be sure to check title tags as well as paragraphs. Quality content wins the day, so make sure your content is written using natural language that speaks to HUMANS!  After all, that is who you are speaking to! Submit a reconsideration request in Google Search console.

Suspicious Links Pointing TO Your Site

Trigger: Google has detected suspicious or ‘unnatural’ links pointing TO your website.  This Google penalty almost always happens when buying links or participating in link schemes to manipulate your page rank. It’s important to invest your energy and resources into building links the right way, and steer clear of any link trading or buying schemes.

Fix: Download the links to your site from Google Search Console, or from another SEO tool like Ahrefs, MOZ, or SEMrush.  Audit all of the links carefully to find any that may violate Google’s linking guidelines. You can reach out to the site owner to have the links removed and disavow any that you are unable to have removed.  Once you’ve processed all the suspicious links, submit a reconsideration request in Google Search Console.

Low Quality Content

Trigger: Google has detected low quality or shallow pages on your site.  These could be content that was scraped from other sites, auto-generated content, low-quality guest posts, or other user-generated content.

Fix: There’s no simple fix here. Your best bet for Google penalty removal is to conduct a quality check of all content across your site to find out if there are similar pages with shallow content.  If you identify multiple pages on related topics, you can combine them into longer, more robust pages which will be more valuable to users visiting your site. If you have duplicate content, redirect one page to the highest quality similar page. Flesh out any thin content with valuable content so Google offers your site as a valuable solution that will satisfy their users’ search queries.

“Cloaking” or Sneaky Redirects

Trigger: Your site is showing different variations of a page to users than it is showing to the search crawlers. If you’re redirecting users to content that isn’t visible to Google, it could be that your site is attempting to redirect to mobile friendly content.  If the final destination is virtually the same content, that shouldn’t trigger a penalty.  Unfortunately, sneaky redirects to unexpected content will always trigger a penalty – so avoid sending your users to any page they didn’t expect to visit.

Fix: You can enter each url into the ‘Inspect any URL’ tool in Google Search Console to compare the content on your site to the results shown in the tool. Remove all redirects that send users to an unexpected page. Remove any third-party scripts or website elements that you don’t control. Once you have made the changes, check the url to be sure the redirect has stopped.  Once you have made these changes to your site, submit a reconsideration request on Google Search Console.

User generated SPAM

Trigger: This Google penalty happens to websites that allow users to freely post comments, guest posts, or other content without requiring review or approval. You can often spot these as comments that are off-topic, look like advertisements, include irrelevant links, or are posted from spammy usernames.

Fix: You’ll need to audit your blog comment section, and any other source of user generated content, and remove any posts or comments that are malicious or spammy. Then go back to Google Search Console and submit a reconsideration request.

Spammy Free Hosting Services

Trigger: Google has detected that the majority of sites hosted on your free hosting service are SPAMMY! Unfortunately with this penalty, your entire site will be affected.

Fix: The only real way for Google penalty removal is to migrate your site to a quality hosting site.  Free hosting services make their money with a low-quality service, supplemented with a whole lot of questionable spammy ads.  Fortunately, there are some reasonably priced, high-quality hosting services. Once your site has been migrated, submit a reconsideration request in Google Search Console.

Structured Data Issue

Trigger: This means Google detected that some of the structured data on your site isn’t being used appropriately, and is considered manipulative or misleading. Structured data markups can do some really cool things to your search results, but if you use them in a sneaky way – Google will penalize you!

Penalty Fix: Follow the guidelines given by Google. Make sure you check all of your content, not just the sample url provided. You can use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to check for any other errors.  Once you have made changes to ensure you are using structured data properly, submit a reconsideration request in Google Search Console.

Suspicious Links Located ON Your Site

Trigger: Google has detected suspicious or ‘unnatural’ links that live on your site. These links could be in the footer, author bios, guest posts, or blog comments.  Often these are also the result of link exchange schemes, paid editorials, and other shady content practices.

Fix: Conduct an audit of all links across your site.  You can use a tool like Screaming Frog to identify all of the links located on your site. Once you’ve identified all of the links, remove them, or modify them by adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute in the html code to indicate to the search crawlers that these are to be ignored. Again, it is important to build links to and from your site naturally and avoid any shady link exchange or link buying/selling schemes.

Pure SPAM

Trigger: Google has detected auto-generated gibberish, cloaking, or scraped content from other sites.  It has determined that there is no value to the content on your page or pages, and they consider this an aggressive SPAM technique.

Fix: To ensure a Google penalty removal here, you need to conduct a full-quality audit of all content on your site, and make sure your content is valuable to users. Again, there is no shortcut to great search rankings, and engaging in blatant shenanigans like this will get your site permanently excluded from Google’s search results. Get it together people!

Why Does Google Issue Penalties?

Users on the Web are actually Google’s customers! Websites like yours that show up in the search results are the ‘product’ that Google offers. Using any of the Black Hat SEO techniques that we talked about today is a clear indication to Google that you are offering a shoddy product.

NEWSFLASH: Google only wants to serve up the best to their customers!

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to great search rankings. Follow the steps I outlined today for Google penalty removal and try to avoid falling back into bad content habits. Regularly conduct a  Google penalty check using Google Search Console to make sure you’re consistently following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

The good news is that if you focus on creating great content with the end user in mind, you’ll pretty much always be on the same page as Google. You’ll stay out of Google’s crosshairs, and your site will consistently climb the ranks for high-value keywords.

I really hope this helped! If you learned something valuable today, be sure to like and subscribe for more nitty gritty marketing content!

If you have any questions that we didn’t get to, be sure to leave them in the comments so I can answer them for you. Who knows, I may just feature your question in a video!

Thanks for reading and subscribing!

Watch this instead: