Pre Google Penalty, there was a flood of websites. And the Internet was flooded by so much information that the right ones could not be distinguished from all the fake activity going on. There were so many risks doing business online and nothing was trustable. Once Google started penalizing websites, the risk factor has reduced by a whopping 89% because of a 25% reduction in the number of websites. This indicates that as much as one fourth of the total content was pure spam or was spammed.

Of the one fourth penalized websites, only a third of the webmasters actually apply for reconsideration. Of this, the spammed ones actually recover too. But the trickiest part is realizing how and where you were spammed, or on what basis Google penalized you. There is a common misconception that Google penalties vary with the type of updates such as Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, etc. Penalizing is simply Google punishing websites for their spammy behavior.

The fact that your site has been penalized can only be known for sure if there is a message against you in Webmasters Tools reporting that you have performed activities to ‘manipulate PageRank’ and that Google ‘has applied a manual spam action’ to it. If you do not have such a message and still there is a significant decrease in the traffic to your site within a fixed interval of time and that correlates with the time a new algorithmic update has occurred, then you might be imposed with an algorithmic penalty. If there are more cryptic kind of messages, then Google might have penalized you with a more severe action for a more severe cause.

Overcoming Manual Penalty

Google issues two types of manual penalty:

  • Partial Manual action – When Google has issued you a message regarding the presence of undesirable backlinks on one or few of your pages, then only a partial manual action had been imposed. In order to recover from that, review all the inbound links present on your page and remove all those which are spammed. You can ‘disavow’ all the erring links from all other pages as well, if present. If your actions have proved successful, you will get a message from Google announcing that the penalty is revoked.
  • Sitewide Manual action – This is a more crucial action and would involve your entire content. Recovering from sitewide manual action is not as easy as the partial one. This penalty has been imposed on websites which Penguin determines has purchased links, put up endless spam links and the like. The rankings will suffer a serious drop and will affect all queries related to your brand name. The actions to be taken to recover from this are the same as manual but the results won’t be as immediate as that. Certain additional actions would have to be performed for recovering your previous rankings and to invite more traffic. Professional help from SEO experts is essential for long term benefits.

Google Penalty recovery for Penguin is only mentioned here. For recovering from Panda penalties, you can add high quality content and make it more specific with your meta-tags.