Is your website organic traffic got down? Have you worried about that your website searches are affected by google’s panda or penguin update?
Most SEO experts and SEO agencies charge to answer this question.
A good new for you that here (Small SEO tools) me going to show a complete step by step guide with snapshots about how to identify Google penalties? And methods about how to recover from Google penalties?
Good news for you, I a going to show a complete recovery plan all for free and quickly with SEO tactics and Google instructions.
If Google throws your web pages away from searches or de-indexed and suddenly drop organic traffic, it means your website got penalized by Google.
Unfortunately, many webmasters start fixing the thing without identifying the source of penalty. They fix actually the things which are not responsible for Google penalties. An order to set up a recovery plan it is very necessary to diagnose the penalty source.
.png)
The first step is to identify that your site is affected by manual penalty or algorithms update. So, before finding the source of penalty you should have an idea about manual penalties and algorithms what they actually are? And how they work?
These happen when Google’s spamming algorithm is flagged by something on your website. After that Google decide to apply a penalty on your website ranking and searches. Manual penalties are easy to identify because google shows a notification in your webmaster account about the penalty.
Basically, penalties occur when Google updates its algorithm, a simple change or big one in the algorithm may cause the drop in your website search traffic or google searches. These penalties are about algorithms updates are to identify then manual penalties because they came without any notification. They directly hit the website without any notification.
.png)
Then manual penalty or algorithm changes that burn your website ranking, their source of penalty will be panda or penguin. Panda and Penguin are Google search algorithms. The penguin algorithm mostly hit the web pages with un-natural backlinks profiles / irrelevant backlinks and anchor text which over optimized.
The panda algorithm, it's mostly targeting the web pages having duplicate content and low-quality content with bad user’s experience.
Login to your webmaster account and choose your website which you think is affected. If you received the manual penalty against your site, first click on “search traffic” and go to manual action option. If your website is hit by a manual penalty, you will a notification under “manual action” tab.
.png)
As I discuss above, both manual and algorithm penalties occur due duplication or low-quality content and un-natural link building strategies.
The next step is to check about the recent algorithm update. It may be causes of your website drop in ranking and search traffic. Go to MozCast where you can find out about the recent algorithm update with date and also you can find more info about algorithm update whether it is a quality update or relevant to link building. MozCast provides the hotter and stormy forecast about change in Google algorithm.
.png)
Another Google algorithm forecaster is Algoroo which is an insightful tool and it monitor all the changes in Google algorithm and ranking. You can also find an update on algroo website it shows entire detailed with the graph.
.png)
It is a website with rich users experience and it was free to use in past but it’s free no more. You have signed up on penguin tool website and grant Google analytics access to penguin dashboard. The red bars are shown penguin update whether the blue bars shows penguin updates and orange bars show general updates about algorithms. The cool feature of this tool is explanation overlay. You can get more info about the update by clicking on bars with an algorithm update.
Fruition is another great and quick tool to check site against Google penalty. Just signup and create a free account and grant access to your analytics account and it will display all of your website traffic data. After that, it provides you an impact probability score. The higher percentage means that your website has been hit by google penalty.
It's one of the most powerful, free, fast and flexible tools which allow you to check your website penalty without any cost and registration. I like it and using it for very long time. It’s simple to use and provides the Google penalty recovery services and link disavow tool. It's have two boxes one is website insertion box and other is drop-down search engine selection box as shown in the figure.
.png)
The drop down bar allows you to select the search engine e.g. Google.com. or Google.co.uk or any other given in the list. After search selection insert your website homepage URL into insertion box and hit “enter”. The result will be in front of you within few seconds. The results will be shown in the graph with SEO visibility score. It also shows panda and penguin update on graph results. It’s free tool and available free of cost and you can access this most powerful tool without any limitation.
It is another cool tool to analyze your website against Google penalty. First, you need to signup and admin will approve your account. It’s usually taken two or three hours, after account activation login to your account dashboard and selects your favorite search engine and your website, and hit submit.
It will show the graph with website visibility score on your selected search. The jellyfish free account allows you only six search queries. It also shows the recent Google update under account dashboard.
Next steps once, you identify the penalty, start analyzing its causes. If your website facing a drop in ranking/traffic without any notification, it definitely means, it’s due un-natural backlinks or low quality/spam irrelevant back links or backlinks having un-relevant anchor text.
To recover from google penguin penalty, first of all, analyze your website back links and anchor text distribution. You have to collect all of your site anchor text distribution to recover from penguin update.
Go to Ahrefs and get your free account then click backlink report on the top of the page or your account dashboard. Go to an overview of backlinks report seeing exact your website’s anchor text distribution. Here you have to see backlinks contain exact match keywords, so it means your website hit by Google penguin update.
You can do same work to extract backlinks using your webmaster account. Simply log into your webmaster account, select your favorite website and find “links to your site” under search analytics. Here you will find all the backlinks pointed to your domain. On the left side, you will find the anchor text pointed to your backlinks, on the right side you can find out domains list pointed to your domain. You can download all this data with back links and anchor all in CSV file and open this file in Ms. Excel. You can see all of your backlinks info with complete anchor text information which is pointed to your domain.
If you found unnatural and bad backlinks with spam anchor text info, simply collect all the info with bad sources in the text file with format “Domain:yourdomain.com” and one per line. First, write text “Domain” then colon “:” and put domain name right after colon sign. Go to webmaster account and submit this file to Google using “Google Disavow Tool” and also save this file for future use. It will take a week or more links to be removed. Save this bad links file if you found new bad links in future simply insert the new links in existing file and then submit it to Google for removal.
If mostly backlinks pointed to your website home page, so Google consider it unnatural. So, to get rid of this issue, try to build backlinks with all pages of your website and interlink relevant pages with one another. And this will make your website all pages popular and Google like internal link structure. Make sure that all outgoing links are no-follow and internal links are do-follow. Choose conical URL to identify conical URL for some important pages. Now the next step is to concentrate on link building to all web pages of your website and build solid internal link structure also. Also, try to use the only keyword targeted and relevant anchor text on your backlinks.
Google panda mostly hit the web pages having duplicate content or low-quality content with over optimization e.g. keywords stuffing etc. The main cause of Panda penalty is duplicate content. So, first, we need to analyze our web pages for duplicate content and then move to recover from panda penalty.
First of all check all of your web pages for the duplicate content issue. You can use CopyScape, PlagSpottar, and small SEO tools to identify copied content. Here me giving a short overview of some powerful and reliable plagiarism detection tools to detect on-page duplicate content and off page duplicate content.
If your website has duplicate content on pages, it is called on-page duplicate content. And Google does not like same pages and marked same pages and Google panda algorithm hit website ranking.
SiteLiner is a free service which allows you to analyze your website for whole like site audit. It provides complete detail with broken links, on-page duplicate content with sources, meta title tag and meta description tag error and much more. You can analyze your website on-page errors at one place and which is Siteliner. SEO masters and SEO agencies recommend SiteLiner because it provides complete website analyst.
.png)
First of all, go to SiteLiner and enter your website URL and hit enter and then go to “duplicate content” tab left side under the header and you will found the list of on-page duplicate content with similarity score and it also show entire website unique content score. You can find out all the on page duplicate content and fix it. Another you can do this step with webmaster tool account under HTML improvements.
.png)
Here are a few tools which allow you to detect and remove off-page duplicate content.
It’s world no.1 website to detect duplicate content for your website. Guest and free account show limited results. To see the full result you have to upgrade your account. Create the list web pages that thieved your content and submit it to Google for removal.
It’s online tool to identify the duplicate content of your website with similarity score and their sources. Just enter your domain and hit “find duplicate pages” and the result will be in front of you within few seconds. Here you can also collect the source of duplicate content for remove.
“Small SEO tools” is another perfect choice to identify duplicate content with their sources. Go to Small SEO Tools homepage and select the “Plagiarism checker tool” and submit your website URL and hit “Check for Plagiarism”. After that tool will start scanning the similar results available on Google with duplicate content and output will be in front of you within few seconds.
If you content is unique then it will show a unique content sign with green color although if your content is plagiarized then the result will be shown “Already Exists” with red color.
You can also check your content sentence by sentence using Plagiarism checker tool. You can verify the duplicate content or unique content just by clicking “Unique” or
“Duplicate” and it will redirect you to Google with exact duplicate sources or with “no result found” for unique content.
Use any one “content uniqueness checker” tool from three above mentioned tools and create a list of duplicate content sources list and submit it to Google for removal with solid information. It will take a week or more to be removed.
After the successful removal of duplicate content and un-natural backlinks let’s go to on page error analysis. Here me going to show the two master tools for on-page errors.
Screaming Frog is a completely free tool to analyze on-page site errors. First of all, download screaming free software from screaming frog website. Run the software, and enter your domain to “enter URL to spider” box and click the on-page content which you want to an analyzer for errors also have the option to choose “duplicate” from the list.
It will give you a list of entire on-page errors such as duplicate title, headings errors, descriptions and error response codes such as 404’s.
If you want to analyze your website indexed pages by Google and others search engine than indexation discrepancies is a perfect choice for you. Using this tool you can verify that how much your website pages Google have indexed. Go to “Google index” and choose the option “Index Status”.
.png)
If Google indexed more pages than in your sitemap, it creates URL duplication problem. If you see duplicate pages and these are mostly due to if you don’t setup 301 redirect on your website. Choose www or non-www version and use custom 301 redirects on you web pages. You can find all about 301 redirect types and methods to setup 301 redirects in detail in the previous post proudly published by small SEO Tools.
1. Delete the duplicate content
2. Use Noindex and follow for tags and categories
3. Setup 301 custom redirect
4. Use conical URLS.
Once you successfully identified about which algorithm update is causing the penalty, you can setup the recovery plan (action) for your website/blog.
If you think your website hit by penguin, try to analyze your site backlinks for anchor text distribution using Aherfs and webmaster tool account.
If you think the Google panda is responsible for the penalty, begin your site do an audit of an entire website along with duplicate content and structure of the webpage.
Submit reconsideration request to Google after finishing the recovery plan on your website.
In this post, I have tried to explain the things in detail with examples and snapshot to guide our visitors. In short, if you are sincere with work so, it’s possible to broke up every hurdle. If you give some time to study this complete post, I hope you will learn a lot about website SEO, Google algorithm, content issues and link building strategies to grow up yourself with new aim and idea with real things. If you have any confusion about any above discussed tool or any problem related to this post don’t forget to comment below. We will happy to receive your feedback and give the response you within a day.
