Sometimes its not your fault when you get a penalty, you either didn’t know that what you were doing was wrong - or you were doing something that was quite suddenly banned in Google’s algorithm update. Times like this can be hard, as it feels like you pretty much have to start all over again, and all your hard work has gone to waste. Particularly with Google’s recent change of heart towards paid directories, it’s left a lot of people wondering what to do.

So where do you start?

Well there are a number of ways that you can go about recovering, but most of them depend on how badly you’ve been affected.

If you’ve noticed a couple of pages drop positions then it may just be a general penalty. The first thing to do here is review your link strategy, do your best not to link to any sites more than 2 page ranks below you, and do not link to anything that is PR1 or lower. (The exception here is a PR of N/A as the site has not yet been through a PR update)

Once you’ve (hopefully) cleaned up your outbound links, you can apply for ‘reconsideration’ in your Google Webmaster Tools account in the form pictured below, whereby you promise to be a good boy/girl from now on.

If you’ve received a manual ban from Google, then it may be best to try the ditch ‘n dash method;

To do this you simply apply a 301 redirect from your site, to all your content on a new domain, this way you keep your PR and power, even your users - but your site is associated with a new domain and not affected by the ban. A word of warning though, if your site was manually banned, then it was for a reason… and Google will see straight through this old trick if you haven’t cleaned up your act!

What exactly is ‘cleaning up your act?’

Well, you’ve been penalised for a reason (intentional or otherwise) and you need to ensure that you not only resolve the initial issue, but also remove anything else on your site that is even slightly dubious.

Here are some points to get started with

• Key phrase saturation - check how many times you’re using key phrases throughout titles, descriptions, meta keywords, page copy, navigation, and baselinks. Too many = spam, and as you may have figured out, Google is not a fan of spam. You can use a keyword density checker to assess whether or not your site is overkill in the key phrase dept.
   
• Hidden elements - are you using css display:none on certain things? or matching any text to the background colour? (you have to be a really special kind of stupid to do that second one) Or maybe you think you’re being really clever by using javascript to mask certain elements of your site, or having different content served to bots vs users. You may think you’re tricking Google, but chances are that you’re really not. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, real SEO is not spam, and real SEO is not an attempt to trick search engines. So don’t do it!
   
• Inbound links - have you set up a massive network of sites (or social media platforms) that all link back to your site? If so, consider trimming that right down. Overkill on inbound links is the quickest (and most obvious) way to get yourself a penalty. Instead of trying to build thousand of backlinks yourself, write some decent content that people will WANT to link to.
   
• Outbound links - what sites are you linking to? If you’re linking to a site that has just received a PR penalty then it could well have filtered down to you. You need to be meticulous about only linking to high quality sites - as linking to a ‘questionable’ site can seriously damage your reputation amongst the Google spiders.
   
• Still confused? - If you still have no idea why this has happened and to your knowledge, your site is squeeky clean; review Google’s terms of use. They have some pretty detailed information as to what is and isn’t ok, and you should be able to get yourself going in the right direction.

And finally, if you’re still stuck - you’ve done everything you can think of and you still don’t know how to get out of this big hole that you’ve dug for yourself.. drop me a line in the comments and I’ll see if I can help.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 10:23am and is filed under Google, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Saturation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.