Suggestions To Help You Recover From One Of Google’s SEO Penalties

As we all know, Google is an ever-changing entity that changes what it does and doesn’t like to see in our websites on what seems like almost a daily basis. And if you are unlucky enough to have used a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy that Google now deems to be unethical, you may find that you website has been penalized with a severe drop in or even loss of ranking. There is some hope, however – use some of these suggestions to help your website recover from an SEO penalty:

• What caused the loss in rankings?
  The first thing that you must look at is what has actually caused your loss in rankings – it may be due to a penalty, some technical issues on your website, or some mistakes in the SEO techniques you are using. The best way to determine this is by comparing when Google made an update with the date that your rankings dropped.
• Have you got a content inventory?
  If the answer is no, create one as soon as possible. A content inventory is a spreadsheet of information (such as the page title, URL, meta tags, keywords, and so on) for each page of your website. This document can actually give you a pretty good idea of where your website stands in terms of SEO and where mistakes or oversights may have occurred.
• Have you keyword stuffed or over-optimized?
  These are black hat SEO techniques and are constantly penalized by Google and the other search engines (in fact, Google’s Panda update specifically targets keyword spam). Even if you do not think you have done either of these things, it is worthwhile checking over your site and re-analysing your SEO content to make sure.
• What is your link building strategy like?
  Building up an arsenal of external links really is one of the best SEO strategies out there, as this tells Google a lot about the authority and trustworthiness of your website. If your current SEO links don’t look natural or are from other penalized websites, you should immediately start a new link building campaign.

Unfortunately, an SEO penalty of some kind from Google is an issue that anyone who owns a website will have to deal with at some point – the search engine simply makes too many updates for such problems to become unavoidable. If you find that your website has received a penalty for bad SEO practices, however, it is not the end of the world – as you can see from the suggestions above, there are a number of ways that you can attempt to rectify this problem and improve your ranking once again.