Google Penalty Recovery


SEO recovery from manual and algorithmic penalties

Google Penalty Recovery Agency

Learn how we can help you with manual and algorithmic Google penalties. We have been helping London, UK and worldwide business recover from Google penalties since the days of Panda and Penguin, famous pre-AI spam algorithms 2011/2012. Did you know in SEO and search there is Spam that looks just like email spam? Ensure you have the latest unbiased information.

SEO Penalty Recovery

Google Penalty Recovery Experts

Has your site suffered a sharp decline in traffic? This may have been caused by a known or unknown algorithm update from Google. If you have a manual penalty you would have been notified via search console and got an email notifying you of the fact.

Other common scenarios include websites being hacked, migrations to a new server or website redesigns.

If this is your current situation now is the time to think how you can recover. We are a very reliable SEO recovery agency with over a decade of experience and a track record of educational SEO consultancy and training. As opposed to the majority focused on outdated link building strategies and “SEO secrets” and myths.

My site, ghacks.net, a fairly popular technology news blog, was hit by Google Panda back when the algorithm first hit. It lost a lot of traffic from Google, and I knew that I needed expert help. I picked Pedro from Anglux after I read one of his articles on Panda, and how he recovered sites. He is very knowledgeable, analysed the site and created an actionable list that I worked on. Communication was very good, and he answered questions quickly and efficiently. I can recommend Anglux wholeheartedly when it comes to SEO, and have hired them again already for help in monitoring the site’s move to HTTPS.

Martin Brinkman

Martin Brinkman

JOURNALIST & WEBMASTER + SUPERGEEK

SEO recovery and growth

SEO PENALTY RECOVERY AND GROWTH

SEO penalty recovery and growth

SEO Recovery Plus Growth Graph in 2022

The same site continued growth to December 2020.

SEO recovery and growth

SEO Penalty recovery for London project THP accountants

What is SEO Recovery

Why you might need to consider it?

SEO Recovery comes after an SEO disaster. This often happens when companies hire black hat SEOs, typically heavily relying on keywords and link building. Often come alongside fast results and sharp rises in traffic, which, may sound great at the time but soon prove not to be the case.

The most common issue and the one we come across regularly happens with companies that hire SEOs that are not forthcoming with the practices they employ and do not explain the full spectrum of SEO from whitehat to blackhat.

Have you been affected by the Google Broad Core Quality Updates? Pandits of all colours and shapes including Google’s own spokespeople may tell you that you can’t really recover from it. The truth is you can in all but very extreme spam cases make a recovery from any Google algorithm update, given time, patience and a long term thinking strategy.

Obviously, this does not apply if your site is not a real business and ranked with some link spam for a little while. Those are dead and so they should. If you do though, you can see results such as the below.

Over 50% growth > SEO Audit + 6 months work

Over 50% growth > SEO Audit + 6 months work

Are Panda and Penguin a Thing still?

The short answer is no. Not per se as in the old days when they were released. However, they are still important and part of what Google now calls Core Quality Updates.

In other words, the Panda considerations for Content quality and Penguin for healthy and natural link profiles are still as valid today as when Panda and Penguin were released. They are simply part of bigger updates.

SEO Penalty Recovery

Google Penalty Recovery: Identifying and Removing Bad Backlinks

  • Websites that have duplicate content.
  • Websites that are not related to your site’s niche.
  • Sneaky redirects.
  • Cloaked links.
  • Site-wide backlinks.
  • Backlinks that come to your site from directories.
  • Advertorials and sponsored content.

Manual Penalty Recovery

To check if you have been hit by a manual action, you need to go to Google Search Console. Go there and check your notifications. If Google has taken manual action against your site, you’ll be notified about it clearly. They will also mention the reason for the penalty. Based on that, you can work on the recovery process.

Algorithmic Penalty Recovery

Looking for manual actions is easy. It’s a straightforward process. When it comes to algorithmic penalties, it’s not the same.

You don’t get a notification from Google, so you need to search for the reason yourself. For this, look at the total time period for which you saw a drop in your traffic. Jot it down and check if Google had announced any algorithm updates during that time.

Know that each update comes with its own set of changes. While Panda focused on content quality, Penguin was more about anchor text distribution and backlinks. Broas core updates are more complex to diagnose what the issue is, this is why you need someone with experience and expertise on the subject.

Recover From Broad Core Quality Updates

The issues are usually in our experience either some critical technical problems with your website, possibly related to recent migration or site updates. Or are also of a more “core quality” issue nature and some niches that relate to health and finance, but not only seem to be the most affected.

E-A-T Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.

Y-M-Y-L Your Money Or Your Life.

These much like in real life on the internet are more difficult to manipulate. So if your content and site are full of sales soundbites without a real person, with full name, mugshots and a historical social presence of some sort. It is going to be hard to convince your users and by proxy Google that your site falls under the “quality criteria” and has E-A-T and Y-M-Y-L to make it live up to expectations.

SEO Broad Core Quality Updates Recovery

Another very common SEO issue comes with Growth Hacking agencies, by definition focus on very short-term results and they may even manage to get the “high growth” they proclaim to achieve, however, it is often at the expense of long-term business goals and tend to come with a sharp decline with 6 to 18 months of fast results.

Can we promise recovery from SEO results decline?

The short answer is no! Nor should anyone else, if they do, they’re simply not telling you the truth.

We do promise “our trademark” commitment and persistence! This has in the past returned recovery even in very complex black hat networks, such as one of the most extreme cases we’ve worked on so far in 2018, with multiple layers of PBNs from different sources.

Why you should hire us for your SEO recovery in London and the UK?

We have almost a decade of common sense SEO strategies and results of our own and many of our clients, that corroborate our claims. Please read our clients reviews going back quite a few years.

If you are a large corporation, we do have NDA examples of our work in SEO recovery, SEO strategy and a combination of SEO and CRO from large companies and multinationals. We may be able to provide samples or a personalised testimonial of our work with them, ranging from one-off audit reports to SEO recovery audits, followed by SEO strategy and hands-on implementation with teams that involve interacting, liaising and leading teams with 10 or 20+ members, from CEOs and C-level to copywriters and developers.

How to do SEO recovery in 2023?

Pretty much as before, there have been some major changes since 2018 with HTTPS, the mobile-first index and the advance of AI. However, the basis of SEO and SEO recovery seat on the same pillars of common sense and best practices as before.

2023 is an exciting and “terrifying” year for SEO. Bard, ChatGPT and Google’s Project Magi code name for the new AI based search engine make the future uncertain. However, we suspect the foundations of good SEO will endure.

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We look forward to making a difference to your business

SEO Consultancy FAQ

Here you will find some of the most common and frequently asked questions our clients and prospects have in the initial enquiry phases.

What are common reasons for significant ranking drops?

The most significant ranking drops reasons are:
– Manual penalties
– Spammy link profiles
– Server migrations without SEO considerations
– Website redesign without SEO considerations
– Algorithm changes: e.g. June 2019 Core Quality Update
– Technical issues, e.g. blocking Google from crawling the site
– Site speed – if your site becomes considerably slower

How to check if my site has a manual penalty?

If you have (GSC) Google Search Console, you should get a notification by email when the manual penalty is applied. You can also check the new GSC under >> Security & Manual Actions >> Manual Actions. If your site does not have GSC, I suggest you add and verify your site.

How to tell if my site has a spammy link profile?

If your site has a spammy or unnatural link profile, this may be caused by unscrupulous SEO companies or consultants you hired before, or you may even have paid or used guest posts to boost ranks.
You can initially see some of these links in Google Search Console under the link section. Note these will be just a portion of those links and other tools may show you different links, an experienced SEO agency such as ourselves will be in a position to evaluate your incoming links and entire website and business to determine which links might be toxic.

Migration to new server and rankings dropped?

This is more common than you think if your web designer or company did not consider SEO prior to and during the move, it is possible, even highly likely that something is not working as before, broken links and broken link redirects are very common reasons, but blocked pages and other technical issues are also likely.

Website redesign and rankings dropped?

This is also very common and the reasons are the same as the ones above with server migration, sometimes as a combination of a new site and a new server.
New site designs are often accompanied by a change of platform (CMS). From WordPress to Squarespace or any other and vice versa. Also to note that in most instances the new content may be substantially different from the old one. While you may have attempted to provide better content, “Google may think” otherwise. And again in this scenario unless you involved an SEO prior to and during a site redesign, some of the technical issues above are likely to be present.

My rankings dropped was it an algorithm change?

This is very common too, Google makes small adjustments on a daily basis, in addition, major releases are sometimes announced such as the “June 2019 Core Quality Update”. In the past, we had Panda (content-related) and Penguin (incoming links related) that would give website owners a clearer idea of the type of issue affecting their websites. An experienced SEO should be able to match the data from your site to known algorithm changes to begin scoping what may have impacted the ranking drops.

What common technical issues cause rank droppings?

One of the most common rookie mistakes is blocking Google from crawling the site or parts of the site, this might happen during theme and plugin updates on your site.
Others include the redirection of old to new URLs, and for example, HTTP to HTTPS migrations not properly redirected, e.g. a server update recently stopped https://anglux.uk from 301 (that’s the technical name of the redirect btw) to https://anglux.uk.

Does site speed affect Google rankings?

Site speed has been a ranking factor for a while now, and this is even more relevant in the mobile version of your website, as we now have the Google mobile-first index enabled on most sites since mid 2018. Every millisecond counts, it might be time for a new server, a new website or just simply pay attention to the size of your image files, by size I mean in MBs and KBs as opposed to pixel dimensions. There are a variety of tools to test the speed of your site on both desktop and mobile versions.

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