Google penalty recovery and prevention

Penalty
Recovery and Prevention
- A must have guide for all webmasters
This e-book covers all about Google algorithmic
and manual penalties, their effects, prevention of
penalties and recovery from penalty in case
you’re affected.
Guna Nadar
CEO, SubmitINme

©SubmitINme It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner.
For queries contact info@submitinme.com
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Contents
1. What is a Penalty? ………………………………………………..4
2. Why does Google penalize the sites? ……………………5
3. Types of Penalties ………………………………………………..6
4. The left, right& Centreof Algorithmic Penalties …….8
5. Google Manual Penalty explained ……………………….13
6. Symptoms of Penalties ………………………………………..16
7. Diagnosing Penalties ……………………………………………18
8. The cure and aftermath ………………………………………20
9. Preventing future Penalties …………………………………26

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Foreword
I believe in the fact that no job is accomplished successfully without any
help, either directly or indirectly. I would like to thank every one of our
Google Penalty team who helped with their knowledge, intelligence
and experience to revoke several penalties by the day while educating
me on the process.
My Special thanks to Karthick who had technically made it possible
what we thought will never be possible. I also thank Amarnath, Meena
and Nisha who improvise and implement the ever changing process to
have over 80% success rate. I am grateful to Jeenfer, who in spite of his
busy schedule voluntarily helped to finish this eBook in time and style.

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1. What is a Penalty?
On a football (soccer) field if a player(s) plays
against the rules intentionally he is bound to
get a penalty from a free shot to Red card
depending on the severity of the action. The
same is applied by Google when a site is not
following its Webmaster Guidelines
intentionally or unintentionally. Like a football
Penalty Google too has a series of Penalties
ranging from page level Penalty to sitewide
Penalty.
Same as a football penalty a single unruly action may cause havoc to a
website’s position on Google. Google too observes the actions closely
as a reference and warns website owners with a yellow card. When it
figuresout that the warning is not taken seriously in the right
perspective by the owners who continue to trick Google with black hat
techniques, Google shut downs permanently with a ban. This is a red
card which means the site has lost the trust of Google and will not be
available on Google’s searches. This is a very dangerous situation
considering that every business person and thing is searched for before
taking is searched for before taking an action. Missing on Google’s
searches is pretty much invisible online.

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2. Why does Google Penalize sites?
Google’s ideology is that everything about a site should be organic. Let
it be the content, links, backlinks, citations review or anything else
concerning a website is expected to be natural. Google hates
manipulation, which they have clearly said in their webmaster
guidelines and advice webmasters from time to time through
webmaster Blog, Mattcutts videos and webmaster central at YouTube.
However there are a number of site owners who want their traffic to
multiply exponentially in a short period of time. They employ black hat
techniques either by themselves or through agencies which adapt a
make-money-quick-and-exit strategy. Some innocent site owners also
get victimized choosing the wrong service provider.
Subscribe to Google Webmaster Blog
Subscribe YouTube channel of
Matt cutts Google webmaster Central

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3. Types of penalties
3.1 Onsite Penalty
Google Penalize sites for shady Onsite techniques such as
 Keyword stuffing
 Cloaking
 Doorway pages
 Corridor pages
 Duplicate content
 Lean content
 Content scrapping
 Excessive Ads
 Too many outbound links
 Paid ads which pass link juice and a couple of other
factors.
3.2 Offsite Penalty
Google keeps a close
watch on who is linking
to your site and how it is
linked as discussed
earlier Google comes
strong on sites which
employs unethical
strategies to get the

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backlinks. Below are the most penalty prone links. If a site with
these types of links has not been penalized until now one can be
sure of a penalty anytime
 Low quality Article, Directory, Bookmarking, Social Media
sites
 Links from SPAMMY Blog Comments
 Forum Signatures
 Links from Banned Network IP’s
 Paid Links
 Links from FFA, SPAM & Link farms
 Links from Malicious Sites
 Links from Irrelevant Sites
 Links from Foreign Language Sites
 Links from Content Scrapper Sites

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4. The Left, Right&Centre of Algorithmic Penalties
Algorithmic penalty, as the name suggests is based on certain
predefined penalty applies to violations Google has publicly but there
are several algorithmic penalties which is rolled out frequently. Only
the penalties which affect a significant amount of queries are publicly
made available.
Algorithmic penalties affect a site in a number of ways.
4.1 Major Impacts of Algorithmic Penalties
Page Level Penalty
If a particular page(s) violates the guidelines or if it has unnatural
backlinks then penalty is applied to that page(s)
Site wide Penalty
If the entire site violates onsite guidelines or if unnatural backlinks are
built to the home page then algorithmic penalty is applied to the entire
site.
Total Ban
Google Ban’s network sites contact scrapping sites, sites purely made
for AdSense, MCM, racist and terrorism related sites. This is a sure
death.

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30+
For reasons unknown Google Algorithm penalty slaps and they are
pushed beyond the third page even for their brand name searches.
Sand Box
When the algorithm is not sure if a site is violating the guidelines are
not, but suspects something unusual then the site is sandboxed for the
algorithm observes the site and decides whether to penalize or not.
4.2 List of Algorithmic Penalties
Penguin 2.1 or Penguin (ver-5) Algorithmic Penalty
Period: Oct 1st week 2013. This is another refresh
of the original Penguin 2 Update
Cause: Bad Backlinks- From article directories, paid
links, low quality directories, PR sites, social
bookmarking, Sitewide links, Link farms
Effect: The sites hit by this update almost lost 80% of the organic traffic
from Google leaving several website owners devastated with no clue on
what to do next.

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Humming Bird Algorithmic Update
Period: August 4th Week 2013. This is an
updated version of Caffeine with LSI content.
Cause: Lean content and long tailed keywords
Effect: Pages which ranked higher for long tailed
keywords disappeared in the SERPs while pages
with LSI content especially with question answer style content ranked
good.
The Panda Refresh Algorithmic Penalty
Period: June 2nd Week 2013. This is yet another
panda pounding on the sites missed out on the
previous Panda update.
Cause: Duplicate content, thin content, Scrapped
Content, Low quality content, Copied Content
Effect: Pages with the above content where totally wiped out of the
search results, no matter how much backlink juice they had. In some
cases the domains were also penalized.
The Penguin 2.0 Algorithmic Penalty
Period: May 4th Week 2013. Although this penalty was rolled out a

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couple of months back, Google officially announced that they have
rolled out Penguin 2.0 which is all about links as
Penguin 2.1, but sites where mainly hit on their
home page rankings.
Cause: Same as Penguin 2.1 Bad Backlinks but
links pointing to the home page- From article
directories, paid links, low quality directories, PR
sites, Social bookmarking, Sitewide links, Link farms
Effect: Unlike Penguin 2.1 only the homepage and domains where
affected. Millions of sites disappeared from the index of Google and
their searches.
The Phantom Algorithmic Penalty
Period: May 2nd Week 2013. No official announcement
but a large number of sites where affected by this
Unknown aka Phantom Update
Cause: Unknown- Speculated to be an Untold Penguin
Update
Effect: Single page sites and sites with too many backlinks were hit
hard.

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The Panda Algorithmic Penalty
Period: March 3rd Week 2013. Jan 4th week 2013 This was the
devastating algorithm update officially announced in the first week of
Jan and subsequently by March.
Cause: Duplicate Content, Lean Content, Content
Scrapping, Syndicated Content, Spun Content, thin
Content
Effect: Almost all the article directories, content
syndication & content scrapping sites were taken
down. Sites like ezinearticles.com, amazines which dominated the
SERPs for years disappeared overnight.

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5. Google Manual penalty Explained
A human brain is incomparable to any algorithm
which makes it a double edged sword, finding
loopholes in the algorithm to find those who
utilize the loop holes. While Google employs the
best of the brains to enhance their algorithm to
make it invulnerable, there are passionate
individuals, groups etc. Who find their own
methods to trick the algorithm?
To tackle this Google has employed hundreds and thousands of
searches evaluates across the world. Their job is to find out sites,pages
which doesn’t follow the guidelines,yet appear on the top positions.
This team work day in day out with their watchful eyes and report
those sites and associated sites, Network etc. which has bypassed the
algorithm penalty. They will evaluate the site for onsite, offsite factors
especially look for unnatural links and if found offensive send a warning
to the website owners. Google manual warnings should be considered
very serious as it is their way of saying “Look we know what you did to
trick us.”
5.1 List of Manual warnings
The Most Dreaded Manual Action – “Unnatural links to your site”
Cause: Bad links- From irrelevant sites, other languages sites, article
It is believed that
Google had sent
millions of such
warnings

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directories, paid links, low quality directories, PR sites, social
bookmarking, Site wide links, Link farms, reciprocal links, 3way links etc.
Effect: If you have received this warning then chances are that the
traffic must have fallen from the cliff and from my experience these
sites witness a drop in organic traffic from a minimum 40-80% in some
cases 90 plus. This is one message no webmaster would like to see in
his lifetime. Don’t get carried away by the smile of Matt & his colleague
as they are delivering a sugar quoted quinine pill.
I know what you did – “Unnatural links to your site-Impact sites”
Cause: Pattern of backlinks, Paid networks, unnatural, artificial,
deceptive, or manipulative links. This s a way of Google telling you that
“Hey I know what you did to get these links and get rid of it”
Effect: As “Unnatural links to your site”
Links that pass the juice – “Unnatural links from your site”
Cause: Selling text links at site to pass link juice.
Effect: Sites are not affected initially but failing to take action may lead
to a 20-40% drop in traffic.
Doom & Disaster – “hacked site”
Cause: Site attacked by Malware, Virus, Trojan or any other hack.
Effect: Almost 100% drop in traffic.

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Cheating Googlebot – “Cloaking & Sneaky redirects”
Cause: Showing different version of pages to Googlebot and the
Visitor, tricking Googlebot with keyword rich content, while showing a
lighter version to the visitor. Using doorway pages.
Effect: 20-40% drops in organic traffic. The pages which employ the
above technique are dropped from index
Cheating Googlebot: over optimization “Hidden text and/or
keyword stuffing”
Cause: Trying to cheat Googlebot with hidden text in form of layers,
divisions or by camouflage and excessive usage of keywords only for
the sake of optimization.
Effect: 40-60% drops in organic traffic. Pages or sometime the entire
site is de-indexed by Google.
Useless Junk – “pure SPAM”
Cause: Spun content, Scrapped content, automatically generated
Gibberish, Translated content by automated tools, MFA content.
Effect: Almost 100% drop in traffic.

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6. Symptoms of Penalties
The impact of penalties differs from one type to other. While every
penalty result in lower ratings on SERP (Search engine result pages) and
subsequently a decrease in organic traffic. This cannot be determined
in a day or two unless the site is slapped by a massive penalty.
Here are some of the symptoms and possible penalties.
Falling from the cliff
If the analytics graph shows a sudden decrease in traffic like falling off
from the cliff and no significant rise from the fall, most likely the site
had attracted a sitewide penalty.
To the absolute bottom

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When the organic traffic falls to zero or negligible percentage
compared to the existing traffic, then the site is blacklisted or harmed
permanently.
Crests &Troughs
When you see a zigzag in the site is under surveillance prior to penalty.
Linear drop
This is related to onsite issues. Google algorithm detects that the pages
of the site are no longer updated or fresh and reduce the importance of
the pages. The Graph will be a gradual decrease like a slanting line.

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7. Diagnosing Penalties
A penalty is not so hard to diagnose, however a
number of site owners panic and misjudge penalty
impacts, confusing them with seasonal holiday
impacts. A most common reason overlooked while
diagnosing penalty is the crawling and accessibility
of the site. Due to various reasons the pages may
not be accessible to Google bots. We discover
time and often that webmasters block Google bot IPs by mistake which
is a disaster. Also half-baked SEO’s configure the robot.txt wrong which
affects the site largely.
When you sec a drop in traffic, do not panic give it some time, find out
if there was any algorithm updates rolled out at the period of time.
 Check webmaster tools for crawls & index
 Check webmaster webpages
 Check with your SEO provider or your team to see if any changes
had been made to site recently.
 Make sure it is not a holiday or off season. You can do this by
comparing the organic traffic for the same period of time with the
previous year.
 Check the Google trends, for e.g. If your site is about “swineflu”
the traffic would have decreased abruptly after the outbreak is
contained and situation become normal
 Check the landing page traffic with the previous period and , sec if
there is a drop in traffic

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 Check if any pages are removed or renamed and if so properly
configured with 301, 404 redirects.
If all of the above are ok, then you have to check for the period in which
you experience drop in traffic and whether there are any corresponding
penalties rolled out during that period. The complete list of algorithmic
penalties with their date of release is given under 4.2 List of Algorithmic
Penalties.

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8. The Cure & After-math
If you had received a manual penalty (unnatural link warning) from
Google web spam team then you need to follow the below process in
the same order. Remember you have to strictly follow the procedure
and give attention to details. If you miss any of the steps, or do it in a
different order, the penalty will never be revoked.
Step 1 - Analyzing back link profile
Step 2 - Audit bad links
Step 3 - Audit Anchor text
Step 4 - Send link removal request
Step 5 - Send two reminders
Step 6 - Create a disavow file
Step 7 - Disavow links
Step 8 - Send reconsideration request
Step 1 [Analyzing back link profile]
Download the backlink profile from webmaster tool and analyze the list
for site wide links, unique domains and segment them.
Step 2 [Audit bad links]
Browse through every domain and check for the following
 Low quality Article, Directory, Bookmarking, Social Media sites

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 Links from SPAMMY Blog
Comments
 Links from Banned
Network IP’s
 Paid Links
 Links from FFA, SPAM &
Link farms
If the domains falls in one or more of the above then separate then into
a sheet and mark as bad domain. While analyzing the domains consider
a machete approach.
Step 3 [Audit Anchor text]
Identify the Anchor text density from the incoming links. Anchor text
density is a major criterion and if you have a high density you need to
connect the webmaster to change the Anchor text to organic and not
the exact keyword (key phrase)
The ideal density of Anchor text will be approximately
30% – Exact match Main Keyword (E.g.: Nike shoes)
15% – Exact match Variation (e.g.: cheap Nike shoes, discounted

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Nike shoes)
20% – Secondary keyword (Nike Sport Shoes)
5% – Secondary Keyword variation (Cheap Nike Sport Shoes)
10% – Brand (e.g.: Nike)
10% – URL (e.g.: Shoebazar.com)
10% – Generic (e.g.: Click here)
More on Anchor text density
Step 4 [Sending link removal request]
Get the contact email of the website owners for which you need to
remove the backlinks compile a list. If the contact email is not available
on site you can use the contact form. If you don’t find both, you can use
the “whois.com” database to collect the owner details. Try every
possible way to collect the details, let it be LinkedIn, or FB fan page or a
yellow page.
Write a detailed courteous mail requesting the site owners to remove
the links. Include a sample link from where your site is linked.
Send every mail individually and have a proof of that. Use an email
from your domain and creating an email in the name
of“backlinkcheck@yourdomain.com” is recommended to send the link
removal request.

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Sample link removal request mail
Hi,
I am [Name], working for [Insert your Domain]. I am trying to remove
some backlinks pointing to our website [Insert your Domain].com from
[Backlink domain]. I would really appreciate your help in removing these
links.
Here is a sample link
Sample Link URL: [backlink]
The links may hurt both our rankings and I will be grateful if you can
remove the link. If you could please send a confirmation note letting me
know that the link has been removed, I would really appreciate it.
If you have any queries please feel free to enquire at [E-mail]
Thanks in advance!
I hope to hear from you soon.
Webmaster,
[Insert your Domain]

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Step 5 [Sending 2 reminders]
Wait for 3-5 days’ time and if you don’t hear from the site owners, send
another reminder and subsequently send the second reminder after 5
days from the first reminder
Step 6 [Create a Disavow file]
Only about 20-30% of the site owners will respond. Some of them even
demand money to remove the links which you need not pay. Create a
well formatted Disavow file. While creating the disavow file try to
disavow the entire domain rather than individual URLs unless the URL
has a better value than the domain
[More info on how to create a disavow file]
Step 7 [Disavow links]
Login to your WMT account Go to
[https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main] and
upload the disavow file
Step 8 [Send Reconsideration Request]
As soon as you have submitted the disavow file you have to send a
detailed reconsideration request with the details of your effort to
remove the bad links along with proof.

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(Reconsideration Request Sample mail)
Hello Google Search Quality Team,
Since receiving your response to our original reconsideration dated 11/07/2013 we
have been diligently working to remove all unnatural links pointed towards our site
at www.domain.com. We believe we have been successful in making our site
compliant with your search quality guidelines and have reviewed the quality
guidelines multiple times before submitting this reconsideration request.
Here are the specific changes we‟ve made since our original reconsideration
request:
We have closely examined the links report in Google Webmaster Tools and
assessed whether these links were likely to be considered to be „unnatural‟ by
Google. We have made a concerted effort to remove these links by contacting the
webmasters controlling these domains. Evidence of this communication is
available in the following Google Docs document:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_Q08Ai87aabdUh5bzFDTW9NZkU/edit?usp=sh
aring
(Add screenshot in drive)
We were unable to remove (domain count) domains due to no response after
multiple attempts from webmasters who control domains which have unnatural
links pointed to our domain. We have disavowed these links using the Google
Disavow Links tool and the file name “domain.com Disavow Nov 2013.txt”
We are committed to doing whatever it takes to meet the Google Search Quality
guidelines. If you or your team still finds links that do not meet the guidelines, we
would highly appreciate an example of the specific links that are outside the
guidelines to help our efforts in removing these links.
Thank you for your time and your consideration.
Sincerely,
yourdomain.com

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9. Preventing Future Penalties
It is very important that you protect your site against any vulnerability,
activities which may lead to a penalty. Creating a trust with Google is
hard to achieve but losing it can happen within a moment if google
detects something wrong or fishy. You should be very careful on your
promotional strategies, content etc. Let us see how a future penalty
can be avoided.
1. Monitor Back Links: Whether you like it or not your site may be
linked back from forums, blogs, social media and other sources.
Rarest of rare cases a disgruntled staff or competitor may buy bad
links to your site. You have to monitor closely on what type of
back links you get and if they are relevant. This can be achieved
by downloading the links from webmaster tools and analyzing the
“first found” date. I recommend doing this at least once in a week.
2. Choosing The Right Service Provider: Most of the damage is done
by amateur service providers, freelancers you find at places like
digitalpoint forum, warrior forum etc. I had done a case study
with the service providers of a couple of forums where I hired a
number of service providers for a new site to build links. It was a
disaster and had to close the site eventually.
3. Be Aware of the Strategies: Let it be your in-house team or your
service provider, get a detailed plan on what they intend to do.
That will give you a clear idea on what type of links and how they
are built for your site. You have every right to ask your service

27
provider or your staff on the strategy and do not shy away. If the
plan includes any of the below, then reject it outright.
 Low quality Article, Directory, Bookmarking, Social Media
sites
 Links from SPAMMY Blog Comments
 Links from Banned Network IP’s
 Paid Links
 Links from FFA, SPAM & Link farms
4. Links from your Site: You may be tempted to link to your partner
sites, but never do that unless the site is related. If you are to link,
use the “rel=nofollow” tag.
5. Content Management: Check for plagiarism when you hire a
content creation service provider. You can use copyscape.com to
check for duplicate content. Google hates duplicate content, lean
content, content scrapping etc. Make sure the content is
Unique Fresh and informative with the right amount of keywords.
In some cases your site may generate user created content in the
form of reviews, comments etc. You need to check it out from
time to time and remove SPAM
6. Protecting the site from vulnerabilities: Host your site at the right
web server with not too many sites hosted on the same server.

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Choose the right hosting provider which assures a 99.99% uptime
with tight security. Malware attacks, downtime will ruin the site
performance and lead to a penalty. So choose your hosting wisely.
I hope you have enjoyed my writing. I appreciate your feedback,
positive or negative which you can send to guna@submitinme.com
You can connect to me at LinkedIN
Circle me at Google+
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Free manual backlink audit by experts at SIM
Manual backlink audit, removal and disavow services by SIM
Free Website Analysis Tool

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Appendix
Useful Videos
Sharing Webmaster tools access
Know how to share webmaster tool access in this short screencast
Downloading Backlinks from webmaster tools
This screencast explains how you can download backlinks from Google
webmasters tools

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How to prepare disavow file?
Preparing a disavow file as per Google guidelines is not an easy task. Watch this
video to know how to prepare one.
Recovery from action
In this video, Mattcutts explains how a site can recover from penalty

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Unnatural links to your site
Matt explains the actions you must take when you get a manual warning from
Google.

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Infographics
P2p deadly Google Algorithmic Penalties of 2013
How to create a disavow file?

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News articles
1. Matt Cutts: Use the Link Disavow Tool Even if Your Site Hasn't Been Penalizedby
Jennifer Slegg, SEW
Read the news
2. Google Manual Vs Algorithmic Penalty Explainedby Jenifer Renjini, SIM
News
Read the news
3. Google's Disavow Tool Works - Penalty Removalby Duke Tanson, Moz Blog
Read the news
4. 8 Reasons Your Reconsideration Request Will Failby Marie Haynes, SEW
Read the news

34
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Free manual backlink audit by experts at SIM
Manual backlink audit, removal and disavow services by SIM
Free Website Analysis Tool

Google penalty recovery and prevention

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