Your search rank dropped suddenly and you don’t know why. None of your keywords are showing up on SERP and your Google Analytics chart looks like a rough sketch of Victoria Falls. Anxiously, you feel a creeping sense of dread and slowly realise you must have earned a Google penalty.

Now what?

A Google penalty is earned for a variety of SEO misdemeanours, many of which are known only to Google’s spam controllers. The most likely causes are from past actions to manipulate PageRank that now fall foul of the Penguin, Panda, and recent mobile-friendly updates. Google releases one or two major updates and makes five to six hundred smaller algorithm changes every year.

Did your rankings drop occur around the same time as a change in any of the Google algorithm updates in this timeline?

Panda update (2011): Targets low quality content, keyword abuse like keyword stuffing, content scraping and irrelevant and duplicate content.

Penguin update (2012): Targets low-quality links and unnatural link building strategies like payed backlinks and manipulating search results using exact-match keywords in anchor text.

Mobile “Mobilegeddon” (2015): The recent mobile update targets websites that are not mobile-friendly on mobile search. If your mobile rank drops but your desktop search is unaffected, this is probably the cause.

Thankfully, offences most likely to incur sanctions are relatively easy to avoid with a little SEO behaviour modification.

This means ditching outdated habits and dodgy link-building that was the norm with website owners and SEO practitioners long before the recent algorithm updates. In fact, many websites benefited greatly from those widely accepted practices that Google now wants to eradicate, and are unaware of negative implications, today, of their actions in the past.

How can I tell if I’ve got a Google penalty?

First of all, identify the problem to see why you fell out of Google’s favour, like dropping standards in content creation, slow page loading speed, or shady SEO practices. Once these are ruled out, you need to assess the extent of your ranking drop by searching for your brand and main keywords through Google search. Do you notice anything unusual, like not appearing for your brand keyword, or can you gauge how far you have dropped by position or pages?

Try using this tool from Pixelgroove to check your status; though it can be unreliable, it will give you a starting point.

Otherwise, your website may have been:

De-indexed: Your domain is completely removed (or banned) from Google. This is probably the result of a “site-wide penalty” and a sign that Google flagged your website as spam. Try typing site:yourdomain.com to see if you are indexed.

Penalised: Your domain or page still exists but none of your pages can be found through very direct search queries. This penalty can be applied automatically by the Google algorithm or by a “manual spam action”. Type site:yourdomain.com yourkeyword into Google [substitute “yourkeyword” for one of your own search terms that you previously ranked for]. If none of your pages appear in the SERP, you may have a “partial Google penalty”.

Sandboxed: Your Goole traffic drops significantly, but your domain or page was neither de-indexed nor penalized. Sandboxed is probably the least severe of all three and a sign that Google hasn’t completely written you off, so recovery should be quicker. 

Log-in to to Google Webmaster Tools and check for any warning messages. A site-wide Google penalty or partial penalty will be visible at Dashboard > Search Traffic > Manual Actions if applicable; otherwise you’ll get the all-clear.

Be aware that Google is not obliged to inform you of a penalty and will usually take action without warning or explanation. Increasingly, penalties are imposed automatically and unannounced, making it even harder to diagnose the cause and set a course of action for recovery.

How can I fix a Google penalty?

Now, it’s time to take an honest look at your website and undertake an audit of past link-building and SEO practices. Look closely at your website content usability, website speed, mobile optimisation, possibility of negative SEO, and linking structure. Seek professional advice if these terms mean little to you and you don’t know where to start. And if you are still paying for links, stop. Seriously.

Use tools like Moz Open Site Explorer or Open Link Profiler to examine links to your website and check for low link value and spammy backlinks that could be causing you harm. Make a list of all suspect links and contact the host website to get them removed. If you paid for links or used link directories or other grey/black hat schemes in the past, you need to undo the damage and try to get these removed. Contact each website to remove the backlinks and keep a record of your attempts to make contact. You will need this information if (or when) you ask Google to disavow links that you fail to get taken down. Google expects you to make a genuine effort to clean up the mess before they will do anything, so you need proof to show you actually tried!

A simple recovery checklist would look like this:

• Do an audit of your website content, quality, speed, and links (on-page and off-page).
• Try to diagnose the problem by examining past actions and possible causes. Compare occurrence against Panda, Penguin and Mobile updates for likely violations of Google’s guidelines.
• Assess the seriousness of the problem. Can you handle this in-house, or do you need outside expertise. Is it viable to repair the damage, or would it make more sense to rip it up and start again?
• Outline your recovery plan. Get help if unsure of what you’re doing.
• Examine backlinks and make a list of anything suspect and save in spreadsheet.
• Document efforts to contact webmaster to get spammy backlinks removed.
• Disavow links that you were unsuccessful in removing. Use Webmaster Tools to upload list of links to disavow.
• Submit reconsideration request to Google.

Finally, don’t panic and be patient.

It is important to realise that this is a slow process and may take some time before everything is back to normal. You may never get back the rank you enjoyed before the penalty, because those dodgy links that invoked Google’s wrath were actually passing link juice, and now they’re gone…

So, from now on, if you align yourself with Google’s ideology to focus on “promoting a quality user experience”, and continually monitor your website compliance with Google’s guidelines, then you should be fine. Hopefully.

Or failing that, you can always contact us to find and fix any problems with your website SEO.