A penalty from Google can be extremely detrimental to your website. Unfortunately, it can be hard to tell if you’ve been penalized, and harder still to handle the penalty and make a full recovery. A penalty occurs when your website gets flagged by a manual review team, or negatively impacted by an algorithm update. Penalties typically result in your website dropping in the SERPS, seeing less traffic, or even being completely de-indexed in extreme cases.
There are two general categories of penalties: Manual and algorithmic. A manual penalty (or manual action) occurs when Google’s spam team flags your website, usually for breaching one or more of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Another penalty is Algorithmic penalties occur automatically when one of Google’s search algorithms flags your website. This can happen as a result of a brand new algorithm update, or “data refreshes” of previous algorithm updates.
Recovering from a Google penalty
Luckily, you have some recourse available to handle a manual penalty quickly and efficiently. Because manual penalties are almost always link-based, you have more control over the situation than you would under other penalties. For this simply check whether you’ve been penalized for unnatural inbound or outbound linking practices, and address the problem. For example, if you have lots of spammy links pointing to your website, do your best to remove them. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which links you’re getting penalized for. You’ll need to do a bit more exploring. Its better to start is by digging into the anchor text of your inbound links. You can do this with a combination of free and paid tools like AHREFS, SEMrush, and more. In general, Google doesn’t like exact match anchor text.
Algorithmic penalties are very different from one another, there’s really only one path to regaining your rankings: Fix the problem, then wait. 36Google only runs data refreshes of these algorithms once every few months, and your penalized site won’t recover until a data refresh determines that the site no longer deserves a penalty. These algorithmic penalties can be truly devastating for certain websites
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