Best Google Penguin Penalty Recovery Tips

Resulting due to aggressive link building campaigns, Google Penguin algorithm is the second most common penalty which affects websites. Released in April 2012, the algorithm looks for unremitting and unnatural link patterns to penalize websites that are trying to manoeuvre search engine rankings by building artificial links.

Google runs on the premise on that external links getting generated for your website is that should be natural and should be follow-on of the quality content that you have posted. Therefore, any artificial link created with an aim to increase your rank is seen as a violation of Google Webmaster guidelines. These guidelines comprise the following factors:

• Paid Links
• Asking for a link
• Automating link creation using SEO tools
• Negotiating link exchanges
• Mass syndication done with a purpose of affecting your website’s ranking

Once Google’s Penguin algorithm finds out that you are building links unnaturally to manipulate the ranking, it punishes your site for the keyword and/or group of keywords that you are targeting.

It is highly probable that your website has been hit by Google Penguin when:

• There’s a sharp drop in keyword-specific rankings within a span of 48-72 hours. (Example: Your page goes from position #3 to position #285 in the rankings)

• Deindexation of the the page containing the keyword while the rest is shown in the Google index.

• You might receive a message about unnatural linking inside your Webmaster Tools, under "Manual Actions" and ‘’Search queries’’.

• In some cases, pages which have nothing to do with ranking (for e.g. contact page or ‘thank you’ page) starts showing up for the penalized terms (main keywords being entered while searching on Google ).

• Sudden and sharp drop in traffic for a particular keyword

Penguin penalty is generally page specific. Most often it affects your home-page, but in some cases it might or might not affect sub-pages, which means that one page can lose its rankings while another one on the same site performs well. The extent of the penguin penalty can span from dropping a few positions to complete de-indexing with a manual action related to it.

How to Recover from Google Penguin?

• The first step is to locate the page and identify the keyword that has been penalized. For this, you will have to download the entire list of links and then detect links considered bad by Google.

• The second crucial step is to disavow/remove unnatural links using Google’s Disavowal tool. Disavowing is the processes of letting Google know that certain links from external sites are neither required nor wanted as part of Google's system of counting links to rank web sites. This could be a result of webmasters engaging in link-building techniques that have been categorized as ‘spam’ by Google.

• As a rule, the initial action from webmaster will be about removal of all links which are seen as violating Google’s guidelines. But there are a few links which webmasters simply cannot remove. At this juncture, you should use Google’s disavow tool as it allows webmasters to upload a file of all links they feel are going against Google’s rules — and have them disavowed. Here are some quick tips to help you use the tool and recover links.

• Begin the process of link removal; document it using Google docs to record your communication with webmasters about links to be removed.
• Upload a.txt disavow file (using Notepad) of every link that cannot be removed given the nature of the linked to the apposite Google Webmaster tool account.
• When suitable, disavow at domain level within the text file (e.g. "domain: spamsite.com")
• Clarify the reasons for link-disavowal for every single domain and related URL’s.
• Keep refreshing the data every two weeks to look for new links as putting together all link data will only give you 50%-60% of what Google sees.
• Remove white spaces at the end of lines within the file as this can invalidate the file.
• Wait until all the changes have been recrawled by Googlebot. Depending upon crawl frequency and number of links that had to be removed, this could take anywhere between 3 hours and 3 months.

In case a manual penalty has been levied on your website, you should submit reconsideration request by going into the webmaster tools. To track down a manual penalty, log into the webmaster tools account, click on ‘’search queries’’ and then go to ‘’manual actions.’’ Reconsideration request could be submitted in the following or similar scenarios:

• Toxic links pointed towards you website by an anonymous competitor

• Content duplication

• Content posted on low quality sites without the site owner’s awareness

Some websites might have to submit 6-10 reconsiderations for Google to help you recover from a manual penalty. You can also consider any good digital marketing agency providing Google Penguin recovery services.

Points to Remember

• If there are no links left after clean-up, you need to work on building good links to recover your website.
• It is possible that your website has been penalised bothways- i.e. in terms of algorithm as well as manual penalty.
• Recovery from an algorithmic penalty will be completed only when Google has crawled everything and updated the algorithm accordingly. Further, reconsideration request is a prerequisite to recover from manual penalty.
• Observing and managing your website’s incoming links regularly will help you detect toxic links and report them to Google before it is too late.

Helpful Tools to Recover from Penguin Penalty

• Google Webmaster Tools –

A website dash board from Google that provides all the important information related to your website. It includes penalty notices, crawl statistics, site query drops, errors etc and is the first step towards recovering from any kind of penalty.

• Majestic SEO –

An alternate link crawler that enlists all the links pointing to your website.

• Ahrefs -

Along with a full list of links pointing to your website, this crawler also provides additional data on link density, anchor text, link velocity and much more.

By following the pointers mentioned above and embarking on a new link building campaign will surely your website to recover, thus improving its rank on SERP’s and boosting traffic gradually. You may also go for any reputed SEO company for penalty removal service.

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Sanjana Singh works as a content writer at Techmagnate, India's leading digital marketing agency. In her spare time she loves to spend her time hanging out on Social Media and writing and sharing posts on various blogs.