GOOGLE PENALTIES- RECOVERY GUIDE - Upendra Rana (best books to read for beginners .TXT) 📗

order to understand what we are talking about.

 

 

  

 

All you Star Wars fans, don’t get over excited and let’s figure out why the xtremediesel link on this forum is considered to be unnatural. It looks clearly to us that the profile created on this forum has no other purpose than creating links. It doesn’t seem like bringing added value to the forum nor generating high quality content but just some random thrown links. And Xtreme Diesel seems to have still lots of active links from forum profiles like this one. Yet, they are probably still in the

 

“cleaning session” and whatever they did to make things right, they should be proud as their work paid off.

 

More Penguin 3.0 Recoveries

 

 

Penguin 3.0 brought good news for some other sites previously hit by its younger brother, the Penguin 2.1 Update. Let’s take a look on what we’ve found!

 

ItsHot is an e-commerce site specialized in jewelry, watches and all sort of accessories. Dropped on the same 6th of October, this site encounters a modest yet notable recovery thanks to the newest Penguin update.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roundgames (it’s not hard to guess what is their field of activity is) also got hit by Penguin 2.1 but was powered up by Penguin 3.0.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are to bring more utilities into your kitchen, shopworldkitchen.com is one of the places to browse. With a spectacular rise this month, it looks like this site is definitely Google’s cup of tea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voguewigs, a site specialized in synthetic and human hair wigs had the same faith as its predecessors. Penalized on October 2013, modestly but still going up recovery on October 2014.

 

 

  

 

 

 

It is possible that watchcartoononline.com might not have been on

 

Penguin 2.1′s taste due to some copywriting issues. The good news for them is that they are back on the track and it seems like they are on an ascending trend.

 

 

Detecting the Penalty

 

 

 

3.1. Auditing the situation

 

 

Firstly, you need to make sure that it’s a penalty you’re talking about and not just a simple drop, for instance. A penalty must not be confused with other situations where Google’s volatility plays a major role. If a site dropped just a few positions in the search results, it is very likely that it is not about a penalty.

 

Before putting the finger on a penalty, make sure that you take into consideration one or a combination of the following factors:

 

 

Google Algorithm Update – Google makes systematical and periodical changes to its algorithms, leading to ranking fluctuations.

 

Website Changes – Changes in the site architecture can lead to important modifications in the traffic index.

 

Lost Backlinks – It is possible backlinks are causing some specific keywords to become lost and, thereby, ranking fluctuations can occur.

 

Competition Outrank – Sites that were below might surpass your

 

Google Penalty Risk Analysis

 

 

With constant changes in the online world, the Google Penalty Risk analysis should be on the mind of every web master. Whether you are trying to avoid a penalty or are striving to recover from one, a back link analysis is absolutely necessary. A continuous monitoring of your link profile will help you stay in control.

 

 

 

It is unlikely that a site’s profile will be 100% natural but, from our in-house case studies at cognitiveSEO, sites with over 20 percent unnatural and suspect links are at a high risk of being flagged by Google for bad linking practices.

Constantly monitoring your link profile provides you with vital information about your risk of being penalized by Google. Having an unnatural link profile doesn’t necessarily mean you use shady tactics to manipulate the ranking. Negative SEO attacks could also influence the way a link profile looks like.

 

 

If you want to rank on the long-term in Google, it is highly recommended to closely follow Google’s Guidelines. Even so it is important to keep an eye on a potential penalty risk.

 

Monitoring the Unnatural Links Distribution allows you to avoid Google Penalties and also increases the changes of Google Recovery for penalized sites.

 

 

3.2. Manual Action Warnings vs. Automatic Google Algorithm Penalties

 

There is a lot of confusion regarding unnatural link warnings. There are two types of penalties Google uses: manual and algorithmic. This misunderstanding began with the first Penguin update was made and it’s still something lots of webmasters and website owners have trouble determining. To shed some light over this unsettling matter I am going to go over some differences between manual actions and Penguin penalties:

 

Manual actions, as the name suggests, refer to actions manually taken by Google employees who personally review your website and your link profile. If Google thinks you may have deployed some devious techniques in order to rank better in their search results, then you might receive a warning. Manual link warnings have nothing to do with penalties caused by Google’s algorithm updates like Penguin or Panda.

These types of warnings are deployed only when you’re in violation of Google’s guidelines. You will receive unnatural link warnings in the “Manual Actions” section of Google Webmaster Tools.

 

 

On the other side, penalties resulted from Penguin and Panda updates (called algorithmic penalties) are made when Google releases these algorithmic updates and automatically evaluates not only your links but your entire site. Google is putting a lot of effort in improving the algorithm in order to minimize the involvement of human reviewers. These penalties are automated, based on their algorithm, and evaluated on the spot.

The biggest difference between these two penalties is that if your site is affected by the Penguin or Panda update, you won’t receive any written warning from Google. You will just experience a sudden drop in rankings.

 

 

3.3. Unnatural Link Warnings and How to Deal With Them

 

 

Warning 1: Unnatural Links from Your Site

 

 

The first type of unnatural link warning is received by the webmaster when Google finds your link profile contains unnatural outbound links. This is what that warning will look like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Screenshot taken 02/08/2015 from https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

 

 

This means you are ranking using techniques that are against Google’s guidelines. The warning “Unnatural links from your site” is associated with a manual action that affects only the concerning part of your site.

 

This type of actions are classified as “Partial matches”. The other type of actions are called “Site-wide matches”, which affect the whole site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After you’ve acknowledged the violation, you need to attend to the problem and solve it. To do so, you need to identify which links are unnatural (Google won’t specify which links are violating their guidelines). Then, you should work to remove them or apply a rel=”nofollow” tag. Another way to fix the situation would be to use a 301 Redirect attribute through a page that’s blocked by robots.txt.

 

After you’ve identified and dealt with all the unnatural links, you should create a reconsideration request for your site. This request lets Google know that you’re on the correct path and you want the manual action to be revoked.

 

 

 

Warning 2: Unnatural Links to Your Site

 

 

The second type of warning comes when you get a message in Google Webmasters Tools announcing that Google exposed some unnatural links pointing to your site. Moreover, with this kind of warnings, Google provides a few links as an example of bad links pointing to your website. The main difference between this message and the warning above is that in this case Google detected a pattern of unnatural links that are pointing to your site.

 

 

This is also a violation of Google’s guidelines and will be penalized.

 

Because this may not be a devious scheme on your part in order to influence the search results, there will only be a penalty on the areas of the site which have many unnatural links pointing to them. As in the case of unnatural links from your site, this is also classified as “Partial matches”.

 

In order to get rid of your penalty, you need to get rid of the unnatural links. It’s a little bit more difficult than in the case of links from your site because you don’t know which domains have unnatural links pointing to your site.

 

 

You need to undergo a couple of steps:

 

 

Download a list of all your links to your site using Webmaster Tools

 

Check every link to see whether it’s unnatural or not. To make your job easier you should start checking the domains that have the most links to you. You can ease this job by using third-party tools which specialize in identifying types of unnatural links, such as cognitiveSEO (disclaimer: this is my company). There are a lot of types of unnatural links and you need to identify them all in order to get rid of your penalty

 

After you’ve identified the rotten links that are harming your ranking, you could contact the webmasters of those domains and request that they remove the link or add a rel=”nofollow” tag

 

Google recommends only after you’ve done a serious work contacting webmasters to remove the links should you use the Disavow links tool. Google created this tool to help you get rid of the links you were unable to get removed. Only after you’ve made an effort to remove the unnatural links that were violating

 

Google’s guidelines you might have the manual action removed.

 

 

In some cases, Google will remove all the bad links, and your penalty will be lifted. But usually, it takes more than a couple of reconsideration attempts to make Google lift your penalty and begin the recovery process.

 

Google wants to see you make a real effort to contact webmasters for link removal before you use the disavow tool. It is likely that Google won’t accept your reconsideration request in the first try.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warning 3: Unnatural Links to Your Site (Impacts Links)

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a little bit more nuance when it comes to unnatural links that are pointing to your site. The difference between this warning and the one above is pretty much contextual. Google figured out that your site was involved in some unnatural link building schemes that point back to your site; if this is still unclear, Matt Cutts (former head of webmaster team at Google) did explain the impact links here.

 

As he states, this may be a result of your own doings or may appear without any involvement on your part. Google takes that into account when they’re considering a manual action. They will only penalize the affected part of your site.

Be aware! Google will want proof of your efforts dealing with unnatural links and removing them.

 

 

To clear the confusion out, even if you don’t have any control over these type of links, you should try to identify them and do your best to remove them. If you don’t control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google’s perspective, the links already won’t count in ranking.

 

If you want your penalty to be revoked you should include any proof of the process with your reconsideration request. You can show emails sent to webmasters that have unnatural links pointing to your site, requesting a link removal.

 

Every step that shows your intentions of cleansing the site should go with the reconsideration request. It shows Google that you are committed and willing to do anything to go on the right path.

 

 

 

 

Recover from Google Penalty

 

 

 

4.1. When to use and not to Use the Google Disavow Tool

 

 

The Google Disavow tool became such a popular topic in the aftermath of the Penguin 2.0 update. It became clear that this tool was developed in order to help webmasters solve their issues regarding penalties. The process is simple. You have to create a file in order to show which links you want Google to disregard. The changes made to the algorithm, “dissolved” a lot of abused black hat SEO techniques and affected a lot of webmasters that found themselves on the wrong side of the street all of a sudden. The effects were harsh and visible and the website owners were desperate to recover their dropped rankings.

 

 

 

A lot of webmasters see this tool as the ultimate salvation for their problems when they get an algorithmic or manual penalty. Even though, overall, the objective of the Disavow Links