Google Updates SEO & SMO

Nothing could be more frightening for a website owner or a marketer than a Google penalty. Hundreds have faced the wrath of World’s Biggest Search Engine – that is Google – and many more hundreds will face the punishment sooner or later, since Google is aggressively taking on websites that do not comply with its guidelines and recommendations.

Over years, we have helped countless website owners and businesses recover their organic search engine that they lost to Google penalties. Often, these sites get back almost all of their traffic in a considerable shorter period of time since we employ an evolved process to identify and then fix the penalties that Google levied on those sites.

We wrote down this guide to help you to understand Google penalties better and the easiest ways to identify and fix them.

Before we start, we want you to understand that not all traffic drops can be attributed to Google updates or penalties; for example, if you have a business that is highly seasonal (say if you are a wedding planner), then your website might experience great traffic in certain months and significant drop rest of the year. So, you really need to be certain about whether it was a penalty / update in the first place that caused you lose all your rankings.

Google Penalties – Manual and Algorithmic

Google penalties can broadly be categorized into Manual Penalties and Algorithmic Penalties. It is only after identifying the penalty that caused your website traffic go down dramatically overnight, that you can fix it the best way. So, let’s first understand Manual and Algorithmic penalties.

Google Manual Penalties

“Google doles out about 400,000 manual penalties every month.”

400,000 manual penalties, every month!

Now, this is really a big number.

If you get penalized, you are sure to lose all your reputation (and rankings) in search engine listing overnight.

But, the good thing here is Google tells you specifically that it penalized you. All you have to do to find out what manual penalty hit your site is to log into your Search Console (SC), which was earlier known as ‘Webmaster Tools’.

Once you are into your Search Console, go to the ‘All Messages’ section. Else, you can find the ‘penalty message’ in ‘Search Traffic – Manual Actions’ section.

Depending upon the nature of penalty, either your entire site might be affected (site-wide penalty) or you may lose traffic from some specific pages of your site.

Google Algorithmic Penalties

Heard about Google Panda, Penguin, Pigeon, and Mobilegeddon?

These are Google Algorithmic updates that are aimed to rank ‘good websites’ up and ‘bad websites’ down.

Now there is no specific definition of what constitutes a good website or a bad website. You might have great content up on your website, but if you fail to comply with one or more major Google guidelines or recommendations, then your site might get into trouble. For instance, for its mobile search, Google prefers ‘responsive websites’ over ‘traditional / non-responsive websites’. So if your website happens to be non-mobile friendly despite having great content on it, chances are it might not rank well in Google’s mobile searches.

Besides its big updates like Panda and Penguin, Google makes about 500 algorithmic changes every year. After all, Google is no joke; it is responsive for over 68% of all search queries. In October 2014 only, it handled over 12.6 billion searches!

The big problem with algorithmic penalties / updates is Google does not tell you anything about it (the way it does in case of manual penalties wherein it sends you messages to your SC).

So if your website has lost all its organic search traffic overnight or got de-indexed and you cannot find any message in your Search Console, it might be an algorithmic trouble.

To identify an algorithmic penalty, you may like to dive into your Google Analytics (GA) or Search Console (SC) or both.

Your GA account is a good place to go to if the problem is with your site traffic – in case it is a de-indexing issue, SC is a better place to dig into.

Note down the dates – or, date range – during which your traffic began plummet.

Now look at any available ‘Google Algorithm Updates’ calendar and see whether the search giant ran any of its algorithms which might have caused the penalty (you can find one such calendar on any top rated SEO news site such as Moz).

If your site has got de-indexed, you need to adopt similar method: log into your SC and write down the date range when your site got de-indexed. Compare these dates with any update (s) that Google might have run during that period.

Please note that some of Google’s algorithms are so huge that they have taken weeks to full run; so even if your site was hit weeks later after an update was rolled out, the same update might be behind the de-indexing of your site.

The most common types of Manual Penalties

Manual penalties can of different shapes and sizes. And therefore, their effects vary – some might not affect you at all, while others hit some specific parts of your website; and then there can be penalties that might snatch away all your organic traffic overnight.

• Unnatural Links

You know the value links create for your website. But they can be equally dangerous if Google finds them unnatural.

Usually, you might see a couple of different messages in your Search Console.

‘Unnatural Links to Your Site – Impacts Links’ – this message isn’t actually a penalty. But you better see it as a warning from Google. Immediately look into what caused Google to think that you are attracting unnatural links to your site.

Though you need not to reply to this message, you should dig into research and removal of as many unnatural links as you possibly can remove.

‘Unnatural links to your site’ – this is another message that you do not like to see in your Search Console. ‘Unnatural Links to Your Site’ shows that Google has apparently believed that you are involved in some sort of ‘paid linking scheme’ and that you do not deserve a place in its search listing.

You’re likely to lose a lot of your traffic overnight.

‘Unnatural links from your site’ – you cannot be in the ‘good books’ of Google if your website is sending out a ton of unnatural / spammy links to other sites. Traffic will plummet for sure.

• Duplicate / thin Content

Content is King – but smart and engaging content, not the duplicate / thin content. See the aim of Google is to hold on to its dominance in the search market and it will do anything to maintain its dominance. The only way it can hook its users is by serving their interests. So it is clearly not going to tolerate content that stinks.

So if your content is duplicate or shallow, you might come across this message in your SC – “thin content with little or no added value.’

• Spam

Google doesn’t like anything spam. So, you might get a message “User generated spam”, if the Google team finds a lot of spammy content on your website. In some cases, it might not be your fault.

For instance, “User Generated Spam” indicates spamming through blog commenting and on forum profiles.

Another manual action is ‘spammy freehosts.” Now, this could be your sheer bad luck that you have your website hosted with a host that has hosted a ton of spammy websites on its services. In such a case, Google might penalize all the websites with that host. In such a case, you need to find a new host for your website.

The most common types of Algorithmic updates / penalties

• Panda Update

Panda first made appearance back in 2011. It was a bold move by Google to punish sites that are replete with thin / duplicate content. Hundreds of websites with low quality content lost their traffic and had hard time getting it all back.

Since its first launch, the update has been run many times.

Through Panda, Google aims to serve its users with high quality content that serves their queries. The primary focus of Google Panda Update is to ensure Quality Content that is unique, smart, and engaging.

• Penguin Update

Penguin is a massive update that Google came up with in 2012. It is a page-specific update (that means it often hits some specific sections / pages of your site). So, if you are seeing a sheer drop in some particular sections of your site, Penguin might be behind it.

Since Penguin primarily looks at your backlinks portfolio, your site might get into trouble if it is caught for –

1. Link Velocity – a trend in which your site strangely gets a ton of links in a very short period of time and loses most the steam after that period (this is a common sign of spam),
2. Link Quality – usually a site should have a mix of both high quality links and bad quality links; so if you have way too much good links or bad links, your site might get into trouble. Though there is no specific rule as to what constitutes a healthy portfolio of high quality links and low quality links, we suggest you use common sense. Nothing in your link strategy should smell fishy.
3. Link Diversity – now this is important from Penguin perspective. Link diversity means you should leverage multiple legal channels to get and spread links. So, make sure you are not getting most of your links from just one type of link exercise. Say, if you are currently leveraging blog commenting for most of your linking exercise, you might be the next to face a Google penalty.

How to Fix Google Penalties?

• Fixing Manual Penalties

(i) Unnatural Links – now that your site has been found guilty of attracting or sending out unnatural links, the best way before you is to remove these links and submit a request to Google team from your Search Console.

A big site might have hundreds of thousands of backlinks, and sorting them all is a really big, tiring task; but you really have to do it. To save you time and tons of efforts, you may like to hire an SEO company that specializes in identifying and fixing Google penalties.

In your Search Console, you will find a portion of these unnatural links which you can remove. But to identify the rest of the unnatural links spread across the web, you may have to use a couple of paid tools.

If the links are on your site (s), you can easily remove the links that might count as unnatural; but what about the sites you do not own?

Just send them all a request to remove your links from their sites. You can submit a disavow file containing a list of URLs or links that you request Google to not look into while considering your request to life the penalty.

(ii) Thin / Duplicate Content

To identify duplicate content that might be present on your site, log in to your Google Search Console (SC). Now go to ‘Search Preferences – HTML Improvements.’

Get rid of this thin / duplicate content that you might have picked from elsewhere on the site or from some other sites.

To give life to your site smart and engaging content that speaks to your audience first and search-engines second, we recommend you hiring a creative copy writer.

(iii) Spam – if it is ‘user generated spam’ message in your SC, just wipe all that spammy user generated content off your site. This might take a bit of time, but you’ll be able to restore all your lost search engine rankings and traffic.

If it is ‘spammy free hosts’ issue, then you better find a good host as early as possible.

• Fixing Algorithmic Penalties

(i) Panda – if you are hit by a Panda update, then you first need to review your content. Get rid all the thin / shallow content that does not seem to create any value for users who come to your site through Google.

You can choose to rewrite your existing content or scrap it and write anew. The choice is yours. But make sure you write totally awesome content that can help you engage with your audience for long.

If you lack writing talent, you better hire a creative writer who is well-versed with writing for the web.

(ii) Penguin – this update is about backlinks. So the best you can do to make Google lift this penalty is to overhaul your linking portfolio.

To begin with, you need to identify all the links that Google might find suspicious / unnatural. The next step is to remove them all. You can also choose to spend your energy on building high quality links for your site, instead of spending too much time in the removal of bad quality links.

But make sure you don’t overdo with high quality links; remember, you need to have a healthy balance of high quality and bad quality links.

We’ve come to the end of this guide

It’s time to say goodbye. We hope you must have learnt one thing or other from this guide. Yes, it gets messy once your site gets penalized. Seeing all organic search traffic disappearing in a matter of days is a scary thought. So the wisdom lies in complying with Google’s guidelines and recommendations. After all, it’s your major source of acquiring qualified traffic for your site.

If you have been hit by a Google penalty and you have no idea about how to get back your organic traffic, then you should immediately get in touch with a professional, white hat, SEO Company. Whether you are in Dubai, Oman, or in some other parts of the world, a professional SEO company with hands-on experience in helping sites with Google penalties can also help you get back your rankings, traffic, and revenues.

Need help with a Google Penalty? Drop us a comment below. Or, call us up on our numbers.