Detecting and dealing with a Google penalty

It seems that any conversation about Google search touches on penalties, pandas and penguins. You may even have experienced a big rise in search traffic to your site as a result of one of these updates. Sadly however, the converse is often true.

By Jaspal Sahota

Panda is very broadly about the overall quality of content on your site and Penguin is about the quality of links to your site.

In this article, we will:

1. Help you recognise the signs of a Google-applied penalty
2. Explain what to do to recover the situation
3. Let you know when to think about throwing in the towel and starting afresh.

For our purposes we will treat Panda and Penguin as types of penalty, though strictly speaking they aren’t.

When traffic to your site drops you need to understand what’s causing the drop in order to address the issue – it’s all very well to talk about creating ‘great content’ on your site, but in some cases, particularly with penalties, unless you understand the issue it is going to be a long road to recovery.

Firstly, what is a penalty?

Google quality raters manually review tens of thousands of websites every year, when a webspam analyst identifies something that appears to be in breach of Google’s webmaster guidelines the site is likely to receive some kind of manual penalty. The nature of the penalty can vary from very specific page-level or keyword-level penalties all the way up to dropping an entire site from the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The triggers for manual reviews are many and varied and include triggers such as a sudden increase in links or a big increase in traffic – in fact, there’s a good chance your site has already been through a manual review at some stage in its life.

In contrast to a manually applied penalty, Panda and Penguin are algorithm-based, which means that no human has actively chosen to ‘hit’ a specific website with Panda or Penguin, instead, Google’s software automatically applies the relevant downgrade to the affected sites. So, manual penalties typically require a different approach to Panda or Penguin problems. (Note: a site could be hit with manual and algorithmic downgrades at the same time.)

Is it a panda, is it a penguin…no, it’s a penalty!

How do you tell if the drop in traffic to your site is due to a penalty, algorithm hit or some other factor?

1.    What has changed?

You should look at any changes made to the site in the last few weeks before the problem arose and ensure that no technical issues crept in along with any updates, examples include updates to robots.txt files or the site becoming very slow. If you’re lucky a simple technical fix will see traffic pick up over the next few weeks.

2.    Check Google Webmaster Tools

Look in Google Webmaster Tools, look to see if there are any messages relating to your site or malware warnings (if you haven’t got Google Webmaster Tools setup, go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/ and get signed up now, you should do this even if you don’t have a problem with your site).

3.    Try to identify whether the traffic drop is a trend or a sharp fall

If you can pin the drop down to a specific date you may be able to tie that in with the date of an algorithm update. Use Google Analytics to look at organic search data to find out when things took a turn for the worse. Barracuda Digital’s Panguin Tool is great for seeing important updates overlaid on top of your analytics data. Searchmetrics is also good for seeing historic changes in visibility (pro tip: Searchmetrics data is best used when comparing similar sites rather than looking at one site at a time).

If you can link the traffic drop to a specific algorithm update (or series of updates) you can probably get started on the solution.

4.    Submit a reconsideration request

When manual penalties are applied by Google, a notification (via Google Webmaster Tools is usually, but not always sent). You can find out for sure if you submit a reconsideration request – the response should tell you whether a manual action has been taken and if you’re lucky, you’ll get some hint about what the quality raters think is in breach of the guidelines.

Before submitting the request make an effort to find things that might be an issue with your site, look at the links to your site and try to find some that look like they’re from low quality sites or were purchased (Google Webmaster Tools can give you some of that data if you don’t have access to other tools).

If you find problems, fix them before submitting the reconsideration request and explain what you’ve done in the request. If the problems you found are related to links, try to get the links taken down or use the disavow tool.

5.    If you’re still at a loss…

If you’ve tried a reconsideration request and been told no manual action has been taken, but can’t identify whether there is a penguin or panda problem you could take a guess and try Panda and Penguin recovery actions, but in the long run you’re probably going to be better off getting help from someone experienced in this area.

I know what the problem is, it’s a manual penalty

If you’re lucky this will be easy to solve, but often this category can be the hardest.

When the issue is related to links you will, at best, only get a small sample of the offending links in any communication from Google. What you’ll need to do is review all the links in Google Webmaster Tools (and ideally other tools such as MajesticSEO and OpenSiteExplorer if you have access) and categorise each link as good or bad (use the webmaster guidelines to help you).

Try and get the bad links removed and keep a log of all the actions and correspondence with webmasters – include all of this information in a reconsideration request after you’ve removed as many bad links as you can. If you’ve been unable to remove some links, use the disavow tool for those.

I know what the problem is, it’s Panda

Panda issues can be multi-faceted, but largely revolve around how well your site meets the needs of people conducing a particular search – in other words, the quality of your site. This Google Webmaster blog entry about quality pages is an excellent guide for evaluating site quality.

If you’re hit by Panda, improve the content, remove duplication etc. as described in the blog entry. If your site is aimed at selling blue widgets, ask yourself whether someone searching for ‘buy blue widgets’ would get everything they needed to see and know about buying blue widgets? If not, fill in the gaps – make your pages the best resource they can be on that topic.

With Panda recovery, you’ll have to wait until Google’s algorithms run again to re-evaluate your site; in the past this could take many months, but recent changes to Panda mean that you could see results in just a few days or weeks.

As with most Google related updates, make your site improvements then don’t panic if nothing happens for a couple of weeks – it can take that long for the updates to filter through to changes in the SERPs.

I know what the problem is, it’s Penguin

Penguin is aimed primarily at penalising sites that have links (paid-for and otherwise) pointing to them from low quality sites. What’s a low quality site?  A good rule of thumb is to look at a page and ask yourself, would you pay to read the content on that page – if yes, then it is unlikely to be a low quality site.

Common examples of some low quality sites and pages include the following, though I’d like to stress that not all sites in these categories are ‘bad’:

•    free directories (but not all free directories)

•    free or low cost press release distribution services

•    blogs with many posts on unrelated topics, particularly where the content is low quality and there is no evidence of social interaction (likes, tweets etc.)

•    site-wide footer and blog-roll links

Use the Google Webmaster blog post mentioned in the Panda section above to help you recognise which of the pages linking to your site are likely to be low quality and contributing to a Penguin hit.

The remedial action for Penguin issues is straightforward, work your way through the low quality links getting them removed or (if necessary) added to your disavow links file. The difficult part is identifying which of the links are ‘bad’.

Penguin has not yet been rolled into the core of the Google algorithm so it only runs periodically (typically every few months), so it may be a long time before you see any improvement in traffic and rankings after making your Penguin related updates.

Jaspal Sahota is Director at Vitis PR and works on search marketing at WebSearchOne