[TUT] How to Recover From a Google Penalty

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Getting penalized by Google is a frustrating and costly event. There are a lot of misconceptions about Google’s penalties, as well as a lot of confusion over recovery. We’ll try to help you get through the trauma and come out on the other side with as little trauma as possible.

The First Question: Should I Try to Recover?
As you will see below, recovering from a Google Penalty is time consuming, and there is no guarantee that your site can recover:
1. If you’ve been extra naughty, your domain may be toast, and irrecoverable.
2. Part of the process may be removing or disavowing links. You will be removing the links that gave you the ranking power in the first place, so when you’re done, your rankings will not be what they were.

Our first piece of advice: the only way we would get involved in trying to recover from a penalty is if the domain was corporate, or a brand. If it’s an affiliate site, kiss it good bye.

There are 2 Types of Penalties
Manual: The only way to find out that you’ve got a manual penalty is through Google Webmaster Tools. If you’ve gotten a manual penalty, there will be a delightful nastygram waiting for you in the messages area of GWT. The good news is that Google will give you some clues about what’s wrong, and how to remedy it. They will also tell you when it’s been lifted.
Algorithmic: These aren’t really penalties, per se. Something in either your backlink profile or your on-page SEO caused one of Google’s Algorithms (Penguin, Panda, Payday Loans), etc. to devalue your site. These algorithms are actually “filters”. Think of a machine that sorts rocks by size. As rocks move down a ramp filled with holes, the small ones fall through a hole. The algorithms work the same way. If your site meets a filter requirement, it triggers, and your rankings go bye-bye. The problem with an algorithmic penalty is that you don’t get a message from Google, so you don’t know what triggered the penalty.
Summary: Recovering from a manual penalty is far easier than recovering from an algorithmic penalty because with a manual penalty, you know what needs to be done, and Google will tell you when the penalty has been lifted.

What Tools Do You Need?
So, you’ve decided to plow ahead. We wish you well. Stock up on no-doze, Ritalin, and Tylenol. You’re going to need it.
 Google Webmaster Tools: This is a must-have. If you haven’t set it up, it’s easy. We won’t tell you how to set it up, but here is the link: http://www.google.com/webmasters/
 MajesticSEO or AHRefs: You will need this to figure out your toxic links.
 Google Docs: (If you’ve gotten a manual penalty)
 Scrapebox: Good for checking to see which links are alive and which ones are dead. Understanding Penalty Types

Manual Penalties
There are 2 types of manual penalties (this is taken from https://support.google.com/webmasters/an...4824?hl=en)
 The Site-wide matches section lists actions that impact an entire site.
 The Partial matches section lists actions that impact individual URLs or sections of a site. It's not uncommon for pages on a popular site to have manual actions, particularly if that site serves as a platform for other users or businesses to create and share content. If the issues appear to be isolated, only individual pages, sections, or incoming links will be impacted, not the entire site.
 Unnatural links to your site—impacts links: This is an easy one. Google hasn’t penalized your site. It has devalued links pointing to your site. You can choose to do nothing, but we still recommend a link cleaning, which we describe later.
 Unnatural links to your site: This one is bad news. This is going to require a lot of work.
 Unnatural links from your site: Google has nailed you for selling links from your site, or being involved in a link exchange. Remove the bad links, and apply for reconsideration (described later)
 Hacked site: Google has detected that your site has been hijacked. You need to clean up the damage and apply for reconsideration.
 Thin content with little or no added value: Google has hit you for on-page violations. Clean up the pages and apply for reconsideration
o Automatically generated content
o Thin affiliate pages
o Content from other sources. For example: Scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts
o Doorway pages
 Pure spam: This is a bad one. Time to walk away. You’ve been extra, super naughty. The chances of ever getting rankings back are very slim. The site appears to use aggressive spam techniques such as:
o automatically generated gibberish
o cloaking
o scraping content from other websites
o and/or other repeated or egregious violations of Google’s quality guidelines.
 User-generated spam: If you see this message on the Manual Actions page, it means that Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles. When a site leaves a door open and gets blasted by SER, this is what happens.
 Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects: it means that your site may be showing different pages to users than are shown to Google, or redirecting users to a different page than Google saw. Your chances of recovery are slim. Give it up.
 Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing: This one can likely be fixed by cleaning up the mess you created.
 Spammy free hosts: Google has nailed your hosting provider and penalized all of their customers. Time for a new hosting company. Change providers and apply for reconsideration.

Algorithmic Penalties
If your site has tanked, and you haven’t gotten a message in Webmaster tools, your penalty is Algorithmic.
Algorithmic penalties fall under 2 well known algorithms:
Penguin: Penguin identifies spammy link profiles. One of Penguin's identifiers is possibly having only part of your site penalized. Instead of your entire site tanking, only a few related keywords get penalized. This does not mean, however, that if your entire site got hit that it’s not Penguin.
If only part of your site got hit, it means that you are getting penalized for links going to an interior page (or more). This makes detox a lot easier. Penguin is also tricky, because the algorithm does not run constantly.
When you hear about an update, they’ve launched Penguin. The tough part about Penguin is if your site got hit, it’s possible that it will stay that way until the next update.
Panda: Panda hits sites that are using thin or spammy content. If your content sucks, fix it before you start tackling your bad backlinks.

Simple Fix for Partially Penalized Sites – Penguin
Just take down the penalized pages. Don’t 301 them – they just get a 404. You don’t want to redirect the bad JuJu to another one of your pages. Reuse your content on a different URL. Partial penalties will vanish. We would also run through the detox process, just in case.

Link Detox For Site Wide Manual or Penguin Penalties
If you’ve gotten hit with either Penguin or a manual unnatural links penalty, you will need to detox your site. Here are the steps:
1. Go to Majestic SEO, and check your own site. If you’ve got a big split between Trust Flow and Citation flow, and you’re not sure what kind of penalty you have, it’s Penguin. A bad link profile built with Spammy links could have a Trust Flow of 5, and a Citation Flow of 40. Any time that citation flow exceeds trust flow by more than 15 points, you can be fairly certain that it’s Penguin. If you received a manual penalty, you can skip this step.
2. Go to Google Webmaster Tools and download all of your links. If you received only a partial penalty, download the links for the pages that were penalized. From the Site Dashboard on the left select Search Traffic=>Links to Your Site. Under “Most Linked Content” click “More” and then “Download This Table”. From here, you can also select specific pages to download if you’ve gotten only partially penalized.
3. Now take this list into Scrapebox, and use the Live Link Checker to see which links are alive or dead. You want to maintain a list of both.
In order to get a manual penalty lifted, you can’t just disavow links. Google will tell you to pound salt. They want the process to be painful so that you never Spam again.
You must show Google that you have made every effort to get links removed yourself. That’s why you need to keep spreadsheets to use as evidence for your day in court.
You also don’t need to remove all of your bad links. Removing most of them will do the trick.