penalty prevention and recovery - submitinme · penalty prevention and recovery updated -...

Penalty

Prevention and Recovery Updated - 9/28/2016, Penguin 4.0

- A must have guide for all web masters

This e-book covers all about Google algorithmic and manual penalties, their effects, prevention of penalties and recovery from penalty in case you’re affected.

Guna Nadar CEO, SubmitINme

9/28/2016

www.submitinme.com Google Penalty Prevention and Recovery 2

Updated 28th Sep 2016

What is Penguin 4.0 update and how will it impact your website?

Google just rolled out Penguin 4.0 on 23rd September 28, 2016, which will impact search results

real-time and at page levels. Penguin 4.0 Google update is based on page level backlinks rather

than the entire site as it was used to be in the previous updates. For e.g. if an inner section or a

particular page is linked from a relevant high quality webpage, it will rank on the SERP’s no

matter the home page is ranked or not. It is the vice versa for a link from Spammy or

manipulated page.

All this happens in real time, as and when you gain a high quality backlink chances are your

pages will get on SERP’s in a couple of days or even hours based on Google crawling & indexing.

While it is too good to have a real time update, the ranking will be affected

negatively if Google picks up a bad backlink to your site/page.

The Solution: - Backlink Audit & Disavow at Regular intervals. “We haven’t changed the

disavow feature or our recommendations for it,” a Google spokesperson confirmed with The

SEM Post when asked on backlink audit for Penguin 4.0. Google recommends to contact site

owners to that you try and remove those links from the websites, before using the disavow

tool.

Google's webmaster trends analyst, John Mueller confirms no changes in disavow post penguin 4.0


Contents

1. What is a Penalty? ……………………………………………….

2. Why does Google penalize the sites? ……………………

3. Types of Penalties ………………………………………………..

4. The left, right & Centre of Algorithmic Penalties ….

5. Google Manual Penalty explained ……………………….

6. Symptoms of Penalties …………………………………………

7. Diagnosing Penalties ……………………………………………

8. The cure & aftermath ………………………………………….

9. The Prevention of future Penalties ………………………


Foreword

I believe in the fact that no job is accomplished successfully without any

help, either directly or indirectly. I would like to thank every one of our

Google Penalty team who helped with their knowledge, intelligence

and experience to revoke several penalties by the day while educating

me on the process.

My Special thanks to Karthick who had technically made it possible

what we thought will never be possible. I also thank Amarnath, Meena

and Nisha who improvise and implement the every changing process to

have over 80% success rate. I am grateful to Jenifer, who in spite of her

busy schedule voluntarily helped to finish this eBook in time and style.


1. What is a Penalty?

On a football (soccer) field if a player(s) plays against the rules

intentionally he is bound to get a penalty from a free shot to Red card

depending on the severity of the action. The same is applied by Google

when a site is not following its Webmaster Guidelines intentionally or

unintentionally. Like a football Penalty Google too has a series of

Penalties ranging from page level Penalty to site wide Penalty.

Same as a football penalty a single unruly action may cause havoc to a

website’s position on Google. Google too observes the actions closely

as a reference and warns website owners with a yellow card. When it

figures out that the warning is not taken seriously in the right

perspective by the owners who continue to trick Google with black hat

techniques, Google shut downs permanently with a ban. This is a red

card which means the site has lost the trust of Google and will not be

available on Google’s searches. This is a very dangerous situation

considering that every business person and thing is searched for before

taking is searched for before taking an action. Missing on Google’s

searches is pretty much invisible online.


2. Why does Google Penalize sites?

Google’s ideology is that everything about a site should be organic. Let

it be the content, links, backlinks, citations review or anything else

concerning a website is expected to be natural. Google hates

manipulation, which they have clearly said in their webmaster

guidelines and advice webmasters from time to time through

webmaster Blog, Mattcutts videos and webmaster central at YouTube.

However there are a number of site owners who want their traffic to

multiply exponentially in a short period of time. They employ black hat

techniques either by themselves or through agencies which adapt a

make-money-quick-and-exit strategy. Some innocent site owners also

get victimized choosing the wrong service provider.


3. Types of penalties

3.1 Onsite Penalty

Google Penalize sites for shady Onsite techniques such as

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking

Doorway pages

Corridor pages

Duplicate content

Lean content

Content scrapping

Excessive Ads

Too many outbound links

Paid ads which pass link juice and a couple of other

factors.

3.2 Offsite Penalty

Google keeps a close watch on who is linking to your site and

how it is linked as discussed earlier Google comes strong on sites

which employs unethical strategies to get the backlinks. Below

are the most penalty prone links. If a site with these types of

links has not been penalized until now one can be sure of a

penalty anytime

Low quality Article, Directory, Bookmarking, Social Media

sites

Links from SPAMMY Blog Comments

Forum Signatures

Links from Banned Network IP’s


Paid Links

Links from FFA, SPAM & Link farms

Links from Malicious Sites

Links from Irrelevant Sites

Links from Foreign Language Sites

Links from Content Scrapper Sites

4. The Left, Right & Centre of Algorithmic Penalties

Algorithmic penalty, as the name suggests is based on certain

predefined penalty applies to violations Google has publicly but there

are several algorithmic penalties which is rolled out frequently. Only

the penalties which affect a significant amount of queries are publicly

made available.

Algorithmic penalties affect a site in a number of ways.

4.1 Major Impacts of Algorithmic Penalties

Page Level Penalty

If a particular page(s) violates the guidelines or if it has unnatural

backlinks then penalty is applied to that page(s)

Site wide Penalty

If the entire site violates onsite guidelines or if unnatural backlinks are

built to the home page then algorithmic penalty is applied to the entire

site.

Total Ban


Google Ban’s network sites contact scrapping sites, sites purely made

for AdSense, MCM, racist and terrorism related sites. This is a sure

death.

30+

For reasons unknown Google Algorithm penalty slaps and they are

pushed beyond the third page even for their brand name searches.

Sand Box

When the algorithm is not sure if a site is violating the guidelines are

not, but suspects something unusual then the site is sandboxed for the

algorithm observes the site and decides whether to penalize or not.

4.2 List of Algorithmic Penalties

Penguin 2.1 or Penguin (ver-5) Algorithmic Penalty

Period: Oct 1st week 2013. This is another refresh

of the original Penguin 2 Update

Cause: Bad Backlinks- From article directories, paid

links, low quality directories, PR sites, social

bookmarking, Sitewide links, Link farms

Effect: The sites hit by this update almost lost 80% of the organic traffic

from Google leaving several website owners devastated with no clue on

what to do next.


Humming Bird Algorithmic Penalty

Period: August 4th Week 2013. This is an

updated version of Caffeine with LSI content.

Cause: Lean content and long tailed keywords

Effect: Pages which ranked higher for long tailed

keywords disappeared in the SERPs while pages

with LSI content especially with question answer style content ranked

good.

The Panda Refresh Algorithmic Penalty

Period: June 2nd Week 2013. This is yet another

panda pounding on the sites missed out on the

previous Panda update.

Cause: Duplicate content, thin content, Scrapped

Content, Low quality content, Copied Content

Effect: Pages with the above content where totally wiped out of the

search results, no matter how much backlink juice they had. In some

cases the domains were also penalized.

The Penguin 2.0 Algorithmic Penalty

Period: May 4th Week 2013. Although this penalty

was rolled out a couple of months back, Google

officially announced that they have rolled out

Penguin 2.0 which is all about links as Penguin 2.1,

but sites where mainly hit on their home page

rankings.


Cause: Same as Penguin 2.1 Bad Backlinks but links pointing to the

home page- From article directories, paid links, low quality directories,

PR sites, Social bookmarking, Sitewide links, Link farms

Effect: Unlike Penguin 2.1 only the homepage and domains where

affected. Millions of sites disappeared from the index of Google and

their searches.

The Phantom Algorithmic Penalty

Period: May 2nd Week 2013. No official announcement

but a large number of sites where affected by this

Unknown aka Phantom Update

Cause: Unknown- Speculated to be an Untold Penguin

Update

Effect: Single page sites and sites with too many backlinks were hit

hard.

The Panda Algorithmic Penalty

Period: March 3rd Week 2013. Jan 4th week 2013

This was the devastating algorithm update officially

announced in the first week of Jan and subsequently

by March.

Cause: Duplicate Content, Lean Content, Content Scrapping,

Syndicated Content, Spun Content, thin Content

Effect: Almost all the article directories, content syndication & content

scrapping sites were taken down. Sites like ezinearticles.com, amazines

which dominated the SERPs for years disappeared overnight.


5. Google Manual penalty Explained

A human brain is incomparable to any algorithm which makes it a

double edged sword, finding loopholes in the algorithm to find those

who utilize the loop holes. While Google employs

the best of the brains to enhance their algorithm to

make it invulnerable, there are passionate

individuals, groups etc. Who find their own

methods to trick the algorithm?

To tackle this Google has employed hundreds and

thousands of searches evaluates across the world.

Their job is to find out sites, pages which doesn’t

follow the guidelines, yet appear on the top

positions. This team work day in day out with their

watchful eyes and report those sites and associated sites, Network etc.

which has bypassed the algorithm penalty. They will evaluate the site

for onsite, offsite factors especially look for unnatural links and if found

offensive send a warning to the website owners. Google manual

warnings should be considered very serious as it is their way of saying

“Look we know what you did to trick us.”

5.1 List of Manual warnings

The Most Dreaded Manual Action – “Unnatural links to your site”

Cause: Bad links- From irrelevant sites, other languages sites, article directories, paid links,

low quality directories, PR sites, social bookmarking, Site wide links, Link farms, reciprocal

links, 3way links etc.

Effect: If you have received this warning then chances are that the traffic must have fallen from

the cliff and from my experience these sites witness a drop in organic traffic from a minimum

40-80% in some cases 90 plus. This is one message no webmaster would like to see in his

It is believed

that Google

had sent

millions of

such

warnings


lifetime. Don‟t get carried away by the smile of Matt & his colleague as they are delivering a

sugar quoted quinine pill.

I know what you did – “Unnatural links to your site-Impact sites”

Cause: Pattern of backlinks, Paid networks, unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative

links. This s a way of Google telling you that “Hey I know what you did to get these links and

get rid of it”

Effect: As “Unnatural links to your site”

Links that pass the juice – “Unnatural links from your site”

Cause: Selling text links at site to pass link juice.

Effect: Sites are not affected initially but failing to take action may lead to a 20-40% drop in

traffic.

Doom & Disaster – “hacked site”

Cause: Site attacked by Malware, Virus, Trojan or any other hack.

Effect: Almost 100% drop in traffic.

Cheating Googlebot – “Cloaking & Sneaky redirects”

Cause: Showing different version of pages to Googlebot and the Visitor, tricking Googlebot

with keyword rich content, while showing a lighter version to the visitor. Using doorway pages.

Effect: 20-40% drops in organic traffic. The pages which employ the above technique are

dropped from index

Cheating Googlebot: over optimization “Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing”

Cause: Trying to cheat Googlebot with hidden text in form of layers, divisions or by

camouflage. Excessive usage of keywords only for the sake of optimization.

Effect: 40-60% drops in organic traffic. Pages or sometime the entire site is de-indexed by

Google.

Useless Junk – “pure SPAM”

Cause: Spun content, Scrapped content, Automatically generated Gibberish, Translated content

by automated tools, MFA content.

Effect: Almost 100% drop in traffic.

6. Symptoms of Penalties


The impact of penalties differs from one type to other. While every penalty result in lower

ratings on SERP (Search engine result pages) and subsequently a decrease in organic traffic. This

cannot be determined in a day or two unless the site is slapped by a massive penalty.

Here are some of the symptoms and possible penalties.

Falling from the cliff

If the analytics graph shows a sudden decrease in traffic like falling off from the cliff and no

significant rise from the fall, most likely the site had attracted a sitewide penalty.

To the absolute bottom

When the organic traffic falls to zero or negligible percentage compared to the existing traffic,

then the site is blacklisted or harmed permanently.

Crests &Troughs

When you see a zigzag in the site is under surveillance prior to penalty.

Linear drop

This is related to onsite issues. Google algorithm detects that the pages of the site are no longer

updated or fresh and reduce the importance of the pages. The Graph will be a gradual decrease

like a slanting line.

7. Diagnosing Penalties

A penalty is not so hard to diagnose, however a number of site owners panic and misjudge

penalty impacts, confusing them with seasonal holiday impacts, confusing them with seasonal

holiday impacts. A most common reason overlooked while diagnosing penalty is the crawling

and accessibility of the site. Due to various reasons the pages may not be accessible to Google

bots. We discover time and often that webmasters block Google bot IPs by mistake which is a

disaster. Also half-baked SEO‟s configure the robot.txt wrong which affects the site largely.

When you sec a drop in traffic, do not panic give it some time, find out if there was any

algorithm updates rolled out at the period of time.

Check webmaster tools for crawls & index

Check webmaster webpages

Check with your SEO provider or your team to see if any changes had been

made to site recently.


Make sure it is not a holiday or off season. You can do this by comparing the

organic traffic for the same period of time with the previous year.

Check the Google trends, for e.g. If your site is about ” swineflue” the traffic

would have decreased abruptly after the outbreak is contained and situation

become normal

Check the landing page traffic with the previous period and , sec if there is a

drop in traffic

Check if any pages are removed or renamed and if so properly configured

with 301, 404 redirects.

If all of the above are ok, then you have to check for the period in which you experience drop in

traffic and whether there are any corresponding penalties rolled out during that period. The

complete list of algorithmic penalties with their date of release is given under 4.2 List of

Algorithmic Penalties.

8. The Cure & After-math

If you had received a manual penalty (unnatural link warning) from Google web spam team then

you need to follow the below process in the same order. Remember you have to strictly follow

the procedure and give attention to details. If you miss any of the steps or do it in a different

order the penalty will never be revoked.

Step 1 - Analyzing back link profile

Step 2 - Audit bad links

Step 3 - Audit Anchor text

Step 4 - Send link removal request

Step 5 - Send two reminders

Step 6 - Create a disavow file

Step 7 - Disavow links

Step 8 - Send reconsideration request

Step 1 [Analyzing back link profile]

Download the backlink profile from webmaster tool and analyze the list for site wide links,

unique domains and segment them.

Step 2 [Audit bad links]


Browse through every domain and check for the following

Low quality Article, Directory, Bookmarking, Social Media sites

Links from SPAMMY Blog Comments

Forum Signatures

Links from Banned Network IP‟s

Paid Links

Links from FFA, SPAM & Link farms

Links from Malicious Sites

Links from Irrelevant Sites

Links from Foreign Language Sites

Links from Content Scrapper Sites

If the domains falls in one or more of the

above then separate then into a sheet and mark as bad domain. While analyzing the domains

consider a machete approach.

Step 3 [Audit Anchor text]

Identify the Anchor text density from the incoming links. Anchor text density is a major criteria

and if you have a high density you need to connect the webmaster to change the Anchor text to

organic and not the exact keyword (keyphrase)

The ideal density of Anchor text will be approximately

30% – Exact match Main Keyword ( E.g.: Nike shoes)

15% – Exact match Variation (e.g.: cheap Nike shoes, discounted Nike shoes)

20% – Secondary keyword (Nike Sport Shoes)

5% – Secondary Keyword variation (Cheap Nike Sport Shoes)

10% – Brand (e.g.: Nike)

10% – URL (e.g.: Shoebazar.com)

10% – Generic (e.g.: Click here)

More on Anchor text density

Step 4 [Sending link removal request]


Get the contact email of the website owners for which you need to remove the backlinks compile

a list. If the contact email is not available on site you can use the contact form. If you don‟t find

both, you can use the “whois.com” database to collect the owner details. Try every possible way

to collect the details, let it be LinkedIn, or FB fan page or a yellow page.

Write a detailed courteous mail requesting the site owners to remove the links. Include a sample

link from where your site is linked find a sample link request

Send every mail individually and have a proof of that. Use an email from your domain and

creating an email in the name of “[email protected]” is recommended to send the

link removal request.

Step 5[Sending 2 reminders]

Hi,

I am [Name], working for [Insert your Domain]. I am trying to remove some backlinks

pointing to our website [Insert your Domain].com from [Backlink domain]. I would

really appreciate your help in removing these links.

Here is a sample link

Sample Link URL: [backlink]

The links may hurt both our rankings and I will be grateful if you can remove the link.

If you could please send a confirmation note letting me know that the link has been

removed, I would really appreciate it.

If you have any queries please feel free to enquire at [E-mail]

Thanks in advance!

I hope to hear from you soon.

Webmaster,

[Insert your Domain]


Wait for 3-5 days‟ time and if you don‟t hear from the site owners, send another reminder and

subsequently send the second reminder after 5 days from the first reminder

Step 6[Create a Disavow file]

Only about 20-30% of the site owners will respond. Some of them even demand money to

remove the links which you need not pay. Create a well formatted Disavow file. While creating

the disavow file try to disavow the entire domain rather than individual URLs unless the URL

has a better value than the domain

[More info on how to create a disavow file]

Step 7 [Disavow links]

Login to your WMT account Go to [https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main]

and upload the disavow file

Step 8 [Send Reconsideration Request]


As soon as you have submitted the disavow file you have to send a detailed reconsideration

request with the details of your effort to remove the bad links along with proof.

Hello Google Search Quality Team,

Since receiving your response to our original reconsideration dated 11/07/2013 we have

been diligently working to remove all unnatural links pointed towards our site at

www.domain.com. We believe we have been successful in making our site compliant with

your search quality guidelines and have reviewed the quality guidelines multiple times

before submitting this reconsideration request.

Here are the specific changes we‟ve made since our original reconsideration request:

We have closely examined the links report in Google Webmaster Tools and assessed

whether these links were likely to be considered to be „unnatural‟ by Google. We have

made a concerted effort to remove these links by contacting the webmasters controlling

these domains. Evidence of this communication is available in the following Google Docs

document:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_Q08Ai87aabdUh5bzFDTW9NZkU/edit?usp=sharing

(Add screenshot in drive)


(cont….)

We were unable to remove (domain count) domains due to no response after multiple

attempts from webmasters who control domains which have unnatural links pointed to our

domain. We have disavowed these links using the Google Disavow Links tool and the file

name “domain.com Disavow Nov 2013.txt”

We are committed to doing whatever it takes to meet the Google Search Quality guidelines.

If you or your team still finds links that do not meet the guidelines, we would highly

appreciate an example of the specific links that are outside the guidelines to help our efforts

in removing these links.

Thank you for your time and your consideration.

Sincerely,

yourdomain.com


Appendix

Videos

Sharing Webmaster tools access Downloading Backlinks from webmaster tools

How to prepare disavow file? Recovery from action

Unnatural links to your site


Infographics

P2p deadly Google Algorithmic Penalties of 2013

How to create a disavow file?


News

1. Matt Cutts: Use the Link Disavow Tool Even if Your Site Hasn't Been Penalized

Read the news

2. Google Manual Vs Algorithmic Penalty Explained

Read the news

3. Google's Disavow Tool Works - Penalty Removal

Read the news

4. 8 Reasons Your Reconsideration Request Will Fail

Read the news

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