Google defines a manual penalty as a manual action taken against all or part of your site. It is triggered by a manual change to your site. The reviewers at Google assess your site following Google’s quality guidelines.
Actions that trigger manual penalties:
• Unnatural links to your website
• Unnatural links from your website
• User-Generated Content spam
• Hacked website
• Pure spam
• Spammy structured markup
• Hidden text or keyword stuffing
• Thin content with little or no added value
• Cloaking or sneaky redirects penalty
• Spammy freehosts
How to recover from a manual penalty
One of the most common penalties is the “thin content pages” penalty. As the name suggests, it is issued for sites with low quality and very thin content.
Best Examples:
• Pages with curated links
• Doorway pages
If your website has received this or any other type of content quality related penalty, you have two options. Either you can find the poor quality page, and update it with content that provides value to the users or you can prevent it from getting indexed by using 301 redirect.
When it comes to link related penalties, the following links can cause issues:
• web directories
• spammy article directories
• international links
• bad anchor text mix
• coupon codes
• poor quality widgets
• affiliate links
If your site is suffering from a link related penalty, you should do a thorough audit of your site to identify and remove the bad links. Also, trim those links that are following unnatural patterns. But make sure you remove only those links that are seriously hurting your site. Be informed that there are some links which CANNOT be removed from a site, so in that case, you can utilize Google’s disavow tool.
After updating the content and punning links, you can submit a reconsideration request.
Has your website received a manual penalty from Google? Get in touch with one of our search engine optimization experts to learn how they can help you recover from a manual penalty from Google.
