My Site has been Penalised! What should I do?
There you have it; you finally have a well-positioned website and lots of good keywords. You've worked hard or spent a lot of money hiring SEO consultants and now you have good visibility.
You’re getting visits, useful leads for your business, and saving lots of money through web marketing and social campaigns. Everything is going well, until… you get penalized by Google.
Suddenly your site is losing positions on Google. It happens every day; millions of sites even experience huge big fluctuations.
What is a Google Penalty?
Google has been changing its algorithms for almost a decade now. After it released its toolbar extension in December 2000, it changed the SEO industry significantly.
Between 2000 and 2010, Google continued to refine the quality of its search results, gradually eliminating weak or poor-quality content whilst improving the ranking of better quality content to the top of search engine results pages. This is where we started to see penalties cropping up.
In 2012, we witnessed The Penguin update, which hit more than one in 10 search results overnight. Some sites were wiped out of search completely, as poor-quality content was pushed off the map. This forced SEO specialists to think much more meticulously about their content strategy.
Since The Penguin update, SEO professionals have kept a close eye on Google’s plans, and many people remain in fear of the next update in case it leads to a penalty for their website.
Recognizing a Penalty
Penalties can either be implemented manually or automatically. In the case of a manual penalty, you’ll probably be informed, however if the situation is algorithmic then you may not necessarily be informed.
In the case of algorithmic penalties, if one or more of the following factors occurs, this almost definitely means you have received a penalty:
· Your website has stopped ranking well for your brand name
· Any page one positions you had have slipped back to page two or three
· Page rank for your site has suddenly dropped from a respectable two or three to a zero
· Your entire website has been removed from Google’s cached search results overnight
· When you run a site search for your domain, no results are found
How to Handle a Penalty
First of all, don’t panic. Through analysis and a comprehensive method, you can understand what is going on and get a clear understanding of how you can gain back a lost position – and earn back your traffic.
One of the most important things you can do after receiving a penalty is to remove troublesome links. you can then send a request to Google to reconsider the penalty.
Most penalties can be fixed with a little effort and an ethical approach, so be sure to rebuild the areas of your site that caused the penalty. Alternatively, simply wait out the penalty until your site is re-crawled.
SEO is not like a diamond; the work you put in doesn’t last forever, and once you get to the top you really have to continue working hard.
It’s important to understand the intricacies of SEO, and that SEO is changing on an almost daily basis.
The problem is, not only do you need to index and position a website on the search engines, but you also need to work to maintain the result obtained and to improve them day after day thanks to the analyses and tools that the market offers.
These tools are an added value that allows you to save time and therefore optimize your work, but in principle, you must have strong SEO skills.
SEO tools are used to analyze how your SEO is doing, and where you need to make adjustments. You must understand and implement clear SEO concepts, and educate yourself continuously.
Lots of skills for one goal: Growing traffic
Correct indexing and positioning of a website is quite complex. It’s not necessarily difficult, but it can be time-consuming, especially if done professionally. You have to bring different skills together in order for your work to be effective.
A good SEO specialist is usually someone who also has a web programming background. He or she has systemic training, and is familiar with the working mechanisms of servers and the programming of dynamic web pages.
EWM, a leading web development agency in Geneva, will help you regain your web traffic and get out of a penalty.
Contact our team today to discuss your needs.