How to recover from a manual Google penalty

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SEOWe talk aboutSEO on Google
A manual Google penalty can compromise our SEO traffic acquisition

One of the worst scenarios you can find yourself in if you are working on the SEO of a website is a manual penalty from Google . Unlike an algorithm change that makes us lose positions and SEO traffic, this type of penalty will almost always lead to the complete deindexing of our website on Google.

In such a catastrophic situation, and especially if SEO is one of the main channels for attracting customers on our website, we have little room to manoeuvre, as we will have to correct the Google guidelines that we are violating and demonstrate to Google itself that we have already solved the problem. And this process is not particularly fast: it can take weeks.

Therefore, one of the keys to avoiding these situations is prevention. However, it is possible that one day you will find yourself in this situation, so in our SEO agency in Barcelona we are going to analyze how to detect and act in the event of a manual Google penalty .

Check if our website is really penalized by Google
The disappearance of our website from Google results is not always due to a manual penalty . There are several reasons why this can happen , such as:

Improper use of the No-index directive in HTML tag or header format.
Google indexing bot unable to access our website due to incorrect configuration of the robots.txt file.
Inappropriate response codes.
In addition to reviewing these and other points to rule them out, using Google's own Search Console tool will denmark telegram data give us a lot of information on the subject, with a specific section "Search traffic > Manual actions" in which they will tell us if our website or part of it is affected by a manual penalty.

Other useful tools to check if SEO traffic is being affected are Google Analytics, the search operator “site:mydomain.com” in Google, or checking if other search engines (such as Yandex or Bing) have indexed our website.

Why can we receive a manual penalty from Google on our website?
Google makes it quite clear in its quality guidelines for websites what type of content is susceptible to a manual penalty, which we can summarize as follows:

The website has been attacked.
SPAM has been uploaded to portals where users generate content (forums, blog comments, social networks).
Fraudulent content.
Artificial links to/from your website.
Cloaking.
Keyword stuffing.
Low quality content.
Misleading redirects.
Discrepancy between the content of the website and its AMP version.
You can consult the complete list in Google's documentation on quality guidelines .

Another point to keep in mind is that our website may not currently violate any quality guidelines, but it may have done so in the past and the penalty is still in place .

One of the most common cases is the acquisition of a new domain : even if we incorporate a completely new website under the same domain, if there was a penalty previously, it will probably remain in place until we prove to Google that we are no longer breaking its rules. Although it may seem like an extraordinary case, at La Teva Web we have already dealt with this type of situation, as in the case of the website marctorrens.net.

How to avoid a manual Google penalty
Register the website in Search Console (if we haven't done so before)
Check the “Search traffic > Manual actions” section to see what type of penalty you are facing.
Fix the issue on the affected website or pages.
Check that Google can access the website correctly.
Submit a reconsideration request through Search Console, including detailed information about the corrections applied.
Patience.
Google's official documentation defines a period of several days to 2 weeks , so you will have to wait a while until the penalty is removed.

If you have any issues with a website penalized by Google or any other aspect of SEO, please do not hesitate to contact us.