Experts Roundup: The Most Annoying Google Penalties and Updates, and How to Recover from Them
From Experts
If you've been penalized by Google, you're not alone, and it's possible to recover from them.
Google imposes over 400,000 manual penalties monthly — and this number doesn’t even include the websites penalized by core algorithm updates.
Although recovering from any Google penalty is possible, it's still not so easy. You have to set up a proper process and commit to getting the desired results.
This post will show you how to deal with Google SEO penalties, how to manage them using Netpeak Software products, and what our experts recommend.
Identify the penalty that's hit your site before making any changes
The first thing you should do for a successful Google penalty recovery is identify the kind of penalty you stumbled upon.
The two main types of Google penalties include:
- Manual
- Algorithmic
The troubleshooting process will be slightly different for each type of penalty as they require different strategies or a combination of tactics to overcome them.
Were you affected by the manual penalty?
Manual penalties come from Google employees working on search quality or web spam teams. They review your website and, after considering it, decide to take action manually against your business’s site.
Manual penalties usually come from:
- Unnatural links pointing to or from your website
- Spammy content or pages
- Manipulative structured markup
- Cloaked images and redirects
You'll know you received a manual Google penalty — you'll receive a notification through Google Search Console.
Were you affected by an algorithmic penalty?
An algorithm is a series of complex mathematical equations determining what results should be displayed to a user. An algorithm also powers Google search.
Algorithmic penalties are mostly triggered by the Google search algorithm rather than by a real person.
The two algorithmic penalties you should worry about are:
- Google Panda penalty
- Google Penguin penalty
Google Panda went live in 2011 and since then has become an inalienable part of the core Google algorithm. Its primary goal is to target content-related issues. These issues include pages with very little value or the ones with tons of ads.
Google Penguin was launched in 2012 and has caused issues to thousands of websites. Its goal is to target pages using dodgy links to improve their rankings.
How to recover from a Google penalty
Now that you know what is a Google penalty and its types, let's see how you can recover from one.
Examine possible ranking issues
Before you can do anything, you need to detect the root of an issue. First, use the following sources for potential ranking issues.
Google Analytics checkup
First off, use Google Analytics to ensure you've properly installed the analytics tracking code. For that purpose, you can try the Google Analytics Debugger extension and make sure everything's in order.
Manual penalty review
You can also try Google Search Console to see if your website stumbled upon a manual penalty. Click "Security & Manual Actions" and "Manual Actions" to look for error messages here.
If you have confirmed the problem lies in manual action, contact a professional SEO agency to handle it. Manual penalties can be tricky to solve, so you'll need help from an experienced person.
Google Search Console checkup
Check to see if Google Search Console is reporting any errors. To do so, click on Indexing and then Pages.
GSC will help you detect the coverage issues. One last thing to do here: check your website experience.
Hit the Experience tab and then go through each of the following reports:
- Page experience
- Core Web Vitals
- HTTPS
If you've found any issues, just work them through and submit the fixes for validation to get approval from the team.
Recent website updates
Still can’t find the issue?
Make sure to see if anyone on your team has made any major website changes over the last three months.
Look into recent algorithm updates
Google’s algorithm gets frequent updates.
A change in the algorithm can be the culprit for a drop in traffic and site performance. In some cases, the update will mean you end up with a penalty.
That’s why it’s essential to:
- Keep your eyes on Google algorithm updates
- Take action when needed
Moz has a super helpful page that lists each Google update as it happens.
Check their page and see if any of the updates listed correlate to when your website performance dropped.
Found a correlation?
Investigate what the update targeted and make the appropriate changes to your website.
Over the years, there have been many tools to help you pinpoint which updates had the biggest impact on your site and why.
Use any of these Google penalty checker tools to really help you drill down into updates and overcome them.
Run an SEO audit with Netpeak Spider
Website audit is essential for solving Google penalties, and Netpeak Spider will help you with this. This powerful site crawler allows you to monitor your website's key metrics in real time, download crawling results conveniently, and integrate data from other SEO tools for in-depth data research.
On top of that, Netpeak Spider is super easy to work with. Here's how to start crawling your website in a few simple steps:
- Paste the URLs you need to check from a clipboard into the search bar.
- Select the metrics you want to analyze.
- Click "Start" to launch the crawling process.
And there’s more! Let’s look at some of Netpeak Spider's key features:
Data filters and segmentation
Netpeak Spider segments and breaks down the research data into categories. Thus, you can select the parameters you need to analyze simultaneously. An interactive dashboard provides access to customizable filters. With its help, change the data overview mode for more convenient usage.
Internal PageRank calculator
The PageRank calculator is a handy feature that monitors each page's internal linking, link weight distribution on any page, and the link equity your pages use or don't get.
Integrations with Google Analytics and Search Console
Retrieve stats from Google Analytics and Google Search Console to enrich the research results. Also, receive essential insights on traffic, page goals, conversion, and other key eCommerce parameters.
Clean up a backlink profile
If you need to recover from Google penalties, cleaning up your website's link profile is a must-try. Let's see how you can do this on your own.
Detect all the bad links
Run a backlink audit to find and remove bad backlinks.
The two most effective tools for the job are:
- Google Search Console
- Moz
Google Search Console shows you a list of all domains that link to you. To run a backlink audit here, log in to your GSC account and hit "Links" on the left sidebar. Click "Export external links."
GSC won’t necessarily have a full list of backlinks to your site—that’s why you should integrate another SEO tool in the process. This way, you'll ensure that you have found all the backlinks.
To help you with that, try. Moz Open Site Explorer. Here, you'll need to set up a free account and add your domain.
Now, you can export Moz's list of links. Once you have it, you'll need to evaluate each link and identify the poor-quality ones.
Request the removal of bad links
Once you have a list of links you need to remove, contact each website owner and ask to remove them.
If you have a lot of site owners to reach out to, you can try a third-party app to find the contact information and track all the emails you've sent them. You can even set up automated follow-up messages.
Be friendly as you send your link removal request. Since the site owner is helping you out, being polite will go a long way.
3. Disavow the remaining poor backlinks
Naturally, some websites won’t respond to you. After several unanswered follow-up emails, it’s time to switch strategies.
Disavowing links involves asking Google to ignore certain links. If the link disavow is successful, those links will stop working against you.
Here’s how you can disavow backlinks:
- Create a disavow report and submit it to Google.
- Prepare a complete list of your backlinks to quickly find the ones you need to disavow.
- Upload that report to Google. Use the Google Disavow Tool and upload your file. Make sure you have selected the right backlinks before submitting it.
How long can it take your site to recover from a Google penalty?
Google penalty recovery isn't easy and requires significant effort to succeed. If you're not sure you can handle this using solely your own resources, it's always a good idea to hire a professional recovery service provider.
Speaking of manual penalties, the recovery period will last about 10 to 30 days. The duration will depend primarily on how quickly a Google team member will notice the changes you've implemented. To speed up the process, you can try reaching out to them via email.
At the same time, algorithmic penalties are a different matter. It can take more than six months to recover from this type of penalty. Many factors can impact this, so the best thing to do here is to rebuild trust with the Google search algorithm.
Check URLs for SEO parameters with Netpeak Checker
To make sure your website won't be facing SEO penalties any time soon, it's worth running regular website checkups. In this case, Netpeak Checker would be your perfect option. This powerful, handy tool offers multiple features and integrations with various SEO-related services.
Here's what else you can do thanks to Netpeak Checker:
Integration with 25 other services to analyze 450+ parameters
Netpeak Checker enables integrations with 25+ SEO services, including Moz, SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, Serpstat, Google Analytics, and more.
50+ on-page parameters
Netpeak Checker delivers research results in an interactive dashboard. Here, you can monitor redirects, titles, response time, status codes, mobile-friendliness, etc. Simply select the required parameters and click "Start."
Website traffic estimation
Netpeak Checker reflects the traffic volumes on a target page, potential link-building donors’ share ratios, and traffic by location. It also detects the prevailing types of traffic on a target page (search, organic, direct, mail, social, etc.).
Batch Core Web Vitals checkup
Retrieve data from Google PageSpeed Insights and analyze your website's page load speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.
Integration with Google Drive & Sheets
Connect your Google Drive account to Netpeak Checker and quickly export any report to Google Sheets and share it with your colleagues or partners anytime.
Experts say: the most annoying Google SEO penalties
We've asked renowned SEO specialists about the most annoying Google penalties and updates, how they've recovered from them and which ones have become less disruptive. Let's find out what challenges SEO experts faced.
Marie Haynes
Owner of Marie Haynes Consulting
Which Google penalties were the most annoying and harmful this year?
Google is not giving out many manual actions any more. However, they dealt out some massive algorithmic changes that hurt a lot of sites. Although these aren't technically penalties, they can sure feel like one.
In my opinion, the biggest updates this year were:
- March 9, 2018 – this was a big update that Google confirmed was about their ability to show more relevant sites to searchers.
- August 1, 2018 – this was a massive update. The SEO community called it 'Medic' because it affected a lot of medical sites. However, many sites that are YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) were strongly affected.
- September 27, 2018 – this was likely a tweak to 'Medic'. We strongly feel that Google incorporated aspects of trust into the algorithm. Many sites that dropped had trust issues such as having lots of negative reviews or complaints, lacking medical references, lack of transparency, etc.
What can you underline as the biggest challenges in recovering from penalties?
We have been able to help quite a few sites see recovery. However, many of the sites that were hit were ones that may never rank well again. For example, if a site ranked well on the power of paid links or PBN's, it will be hard for that site to rank well again.
For the sites that did see recovery, we feel that most of that can be attributed to changes that they made that help the site look better in the eyes of Google's Quality Raters' Guidelines.
What penalties have become less noticeable?
Google is definitely giving out fewer manual actions these days. Years ago, we would receive at least one request for penalty removal help every day. Now, we'll get a request every few months. Google is getting better at handling things algorithmically.
Do you have any relevant advice to share with our readers on how to prevent the penalties?
Spend the time to read Google's Quality Raters' Guidelines. They are loaded with information on what Google expects to see in a high quality site. If you're building links, only go after links on sites that people truly read and that could possibly send you real customers. Those links are hard to get, but in our opinion, these are the only ones that Google wants to count.
Make sure your site is technically sound. Also, take a good strong look at the sites that are outranking you. In many cases, you will not be able to beat them unless you can truly become a site that is MUCH more valuable to users than those that currently rank.
Ann Smarty
Founder of Viral Content Bee
Which Google penalties were the most annoying and harmful this year?
There were a few core algorithm updates in October of 2018 which were not quite penalties but rather core algorithm updates. The annoying part is that there were many of them and Google wouldn't really conform much, so many website owners were quite lost.
I wouldn't call it a penalty but Google's 'SERPless SERPs' (also known as 'Zero Search Results' and 'Zero Blue Listings' update) update showing nothing but the quick-answer box. We've all known that's the direction Google is taking but it's still a bit disheartening. I get Google's goal to provide the best possible user experience satisfying each query but why remove organic results completely?
What can you underline as the biggest challenges in recovering from penalties?
We didn't have many clients affected, so not much first-hand experience here. I did witness one major recovery though. The tactic that was implemented was careful website consolidation and re-structuring:
- Consolidating several pages into one 'hub page' (see this article for reference)
- Defining the site structure clearly by using breadcrumbs
What penalties have become less noticeable?
Most Google penalties and updates have become less noticeable. They are either integrated into the algorithm or never officially announced or both. It makes it very hard to identify one single problem and you are left guessing what may be wrong with the site. It's still doable but both the audit and the fix are more complicated these days.
Do you have any relevant advice to share with our readers on how to prevent the penalties?
As much as cliche it sounds, content and authority building is still the best way to prevent the penalty. I am not saying it's easy to make sure you'll never be penalized. With Google's retrospective penalties in the past, we've learned the lesson: whatever you are doing might get you in trouble later on – whereas not doing anything means watching your competitors outrank you in search. I say, work on-site more than outside of it (meaning investing time and resources in content) is your best bet these days.
Matt Diggity
CEO at Diggity Marketing
Which Google penalties were the most annoying and harmful this year?
The August 1st updates definitely caused the most frustration in the SEO industry because so many people were affected and because the theories about it were so conflicting and confusing. Some are calling it the 'Medic Update' and are addressing E-A-T concerns, but there's plenty of cases of non-medical (or non-your money your life) sites getting hit where high E-A-T wouldn't be required.
What can you underline as the biggest challenges in recovering from penalties?
We've had a few slow recoveries for new clients we brought on at The Search Initiative. I won't take credit for the cases where the algorithm just simply rolled back.
Honestly, the strategy we've been using to approach the algorithm updates of the past 2 years is to 'Do All the Things'.
These updates are so complex and convoluted, and involve many different parts to the ranking equation. So it becomes a fallacy to just focus on one aspect (like backlink cleanup) to hopefully spur recovery. Instead, we're doing full technical audits, onsite optimization tweaks, search intent exploration, content overhauls, backlink investigation… all of it. Probably 90% of it is overkill, but the 10% makes all the differences.
What penalties have become less noticeable?
Penguin. The algorithms have gotten much better at detecting spam and many low quality links are simply ignored now. You don't see nearly as many Penguin penalties springing up, nor negative SEO working… Thank goodness.
Do you have any relevant advice to share with our readers on how to prevent the penalties?
Do all the things.
Adam Chronister
Director of Operations at Enleaf
Which Google penalties were the most annoying and harmful this year?
We usually do things pretty above the board so it's rare that we have long-standing clients that get affected by major Google penalties. If anything we usually inherit clients who come to us from other agencies after getting hit. We end up cleaning up a lot of messes.
I would say the biggest 'penalty' we saw this year was ranking drops related to the Google Medic update that rolled out last August, but according to Google, drops related to this update we're not penalties. Sure felt like one!
What can you underline as the biggest challenges in recovering from penalties?
Not all of our clients were affected by the Medic update, but the few that were saw some pretty big drop in rankings. Most of those did eventually recover.
What penalties have become less noticeable?
Because we don't experience a lot of penalties it's hard to say, but the biggest thing we have noticed as of late is a pick up in day to day ranking volatility. This seems to be true across multiple clients and business verticals.
Do you have any relevant advice to share with our readers on how to prevent the penalties?
- Knowing how Google evaluates search is an important way to understand what tactics have a greater risk of penalty. For this, we suggest looking at their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
- Understanding how the previous Google algorithm changes affect search is important. We have an outline of this on our blog.
- Keeping track of your Google Search Console notifications is also an important way to know if there are things you need to correct before they become more serious issues.
Kevin Indig
Mentor for Growth at German Accelerator
Which Google penalties were the most annoying and harmful this year?
I wouldn't say 'penalties', but Google's NLU updates (Natural Language Understanding) had a huge impact on lots of sites. The problem here is manifold: some sites got hit hard, others not. Some sites lost rankings for crucial keywords, others not. Some sites lost rankings across the board, other just for certain query types. The issue with NLU is that it's hard to recognize because it doesn't follow a simple pattern. It's improved language understanding, which can show in lots of ways!
What can you underline as the biggest challenges in recovering from penalties?
I was able to help most sites I worked with. In many cases, adjusting content to the intent it's targeting was key. Every query targets an intent that reflects a chain of steps. The question is not how well you target a keyword anymore but how well you can help users in each of the steps.
Say, you want to buy insurance. There's a huge load of information you need before you make a choice. Trying to rank in that topical space with a single article is foolish. You need a whole library of content to cover each sub-topic.
Working on such a library has shown to be most effective to counter negative impact from mentioned NLU updates. In some cases, it's really just rewriting of content. In others, there's not much that can be done because ranking for a query wasn't relevant in the first place.
What penalties have become less noticeable?
I'm seeing fewer link penalties, even though I'm sure they still exist. However, Google doesn't seem to notify webmaster as often anymore, either because they're able to punish sites algorithmically or they've simply stopped notifying them. However, my experience is that link penalties – algorithmically or manually – are still alive and well.
Do you have any relevant advice to share with our readers on how to prevent the penalties?
Obviously, know the Google guidelines really well and operate within them. Also, we need more differentiation between a hard 'manual penalty' and 'algorithmic penalty'. I've seen the word 'penalty' been thrown around way too quickly without differentiating. I think that's dangerous.
Maria Cieślak
Head of Technical SEO at Elephate
Which Google penalties were the most annoying and harmful this year?
To be honest, I'm not that focused on matching a rankings decrease with a particular update. So I don't have my 'favorite' one. However, if I were to point out the trickiest and most difficult path to recovery, I'd mention the updates related to the users' intent. In most cases, it's quite easy to find empty or duplicate content, broken links, and so on, but understanding why a given page doesn't serve the intent is more complicated.
What can you underline as the biggest challenges in recovering from penalties?
Yes, we helped them, but it required additional steps like identifying segments of the users and understanding their needs. We also had to make a hard decision on cutting out many pages. As a result, the whole structure was reorganized.
There are no quick fixes so you should be ready to bring in many people to the improvement process – not only a good SEO, but also content writers, developers, and web designers. A huge challenge is explaining to the website owners that superficial cosmetic services are not enough for recovery. In many cases, they need surgery and sometimes they must remove 3/4 of their subpages.
What penalties have become less noticeable?
I think the least noticeable are the ones where sudden issues are caused by unnatural backlinks.
Do you have any relevant advice to share with our readers on how to prevent the penalties?
If you want to lower the risk, you should:
- Review your website section-by-section in terms of the users' needs
- Create regular crawls and analyze the data to see if your website is in good shape
If you have issues with thin or duplicate pages and you have problems with filling them with meaningful content, maybe it's time to remove/rebuild/merge them.
Ross Tavendale
Managing Director at Type A Media
Which Google penalties were the most annoying and harmful this year?
Realistically, nothing was particularly harmful. Just don’t employ tactics that could result in a penalty. If anything, link based penalties are annoying in a way because it makes the task of seeking out links and gaining links more particular owing to the need for a more pragmatic approach, but it keeps us honest.
What can you underline as the biggest challenges in recovering from penalties?
Recovery isn’t the right word, the question is more how did we adapt? It sounds a bit cliché but employing tactics that align to creating genuinely useful or entertaining content that deserves to have links. This just means that old tactics, such as contributing content to online publications, need to be developed. Instead of asking for a guest post, let’s create content that’s perfect for that publications audience but requires the knowledge that comes from your own or your client’s expertise. This way it’s impossible to separate you from the content. The big dogs have been doing it for years, embrace your inner BBC or Guardian and generate the news.
What penalties have become less noticeable?
Not to sound like a broken record but link based penalties have become less noticeable. With Penguin 4.0’s ability to devalue spammy, harmful links, the need to disavow has become somewhat redundant (hooray!). Unless you’ve got issues with people hacking your site (it’s happened to us), then realistically you’re in the clear… assuming you’re being honest.
Do you have any relevant advice to share with our readers on how to prevent the penalties?
Adapt or die. Look at old link building techniques, guest posting, directory links, link exchanges and see how you can bring them into 2019. How do you do this? Really understand the algorithms and what it’s looking for. Don’t take Google at its word, listen to your audience and your client’s expertise. Link building isn’t exclusive to SEO, see how your other media channels can help to bolster your profile and have people knocking at your door to get a taste of your action.
Finally, don’t scramble to get links. We often promise clients X,Y and Z and when we can’t deliver we resort to old methods that will either result in a penalty or just be a complete waste of time.
Justyna Pruszyńska
SEO Executive / CM Creative Support at Bluerank
Which Google penalties were the most annoying and harmful this year?
I have never received Google penalty for my client's website. We can say that I was fortunate because I worked with clients that have never received them.
For me and most of my colleagues the most harmful 'Google penalty' or just 'Google interference' was Google Update (YMYL or Medic) that happened on 1st of August. A lot of our clients were affected by this update. Some because they had on-site thin content, duplicated content or little content in general. But also some of our clients took a great advantage of it, because their website, often underestimated by Google, after 1st of August was gaining a lot of SEO visibility. Here's the example of one of my client's website:
My client had a lot of content on his website, but since 2017 he was slowly losing the SEO visibility every month because of other issues. After YMYL update all the content on his site was appreciated by Google. We also worked very hard on new content to keep that trend.
What can you underline as the biggest challenges in recovering from penalties?
After YMYL update we worked harder with our clients on on-site content - we identified and removed duplicated content, we encouraged our clients to focus on writing useful, informative articles etc. But for the most part of the 'recovery' we were just doing 'our usual thing' as we strongly believed that our white hat SEO and a good care of the website will do wonders. Many of our client's websites were good enough before the update, so we believe that it was the main reason that after a while they gained a lot of their visibility back.
What penalties have become less noticeable?
The same Google Update that caused all this trouble in 2018 became less noticeable after some time. Most of our sites that were affected by this update (and didn't have lots of thin content, duplicated content etc. to begin with) gained all of their visibility back:
And in many cases clients that GAINED visibility after that update – kept it, and they are still growing!
Do you have any relevant advice to share with our readers on how to prevent the penalties?
My only advice is to keep the good work. If you are doing white hat SEO and really taking a good care of your client's site – you don't have to worry. Google will not punish you!
David Iwanow
Global Search & Traffic Manager at Danone Early Life Nutrition
Which Google penalties were the most annoying and harmful this year?
The ones that annoyed me the most were the E-A-T and Medic updates as you had a whole bunch of SEOs sharing random pieces of conflicting advice about the impacts/solutions without a decent dataset to base their claims on.
What can you underline as the biggest challenges in recovering from penalties?
We saw barely any impact on the sites I look after related to any of these updates, most impacts could be tracked to technical issues, marketing spend and cannibilisation due to overspending on retartgeting tools like Criteo.
What penalties have become less noticeable?
On the types of sites I look after the content quality (Panda) style updates as the user generated content is transient so hard to baseline or control.
Do you have any relevant advice to share with our readers on how to prevent the penalties?
The one site that experienced a manual penalty for suspicious links got caught doing crappy 'content marketing' which when digging into it was nothing more than poorly executed link building. It was lucky it was one of the first things I flagged well before the penalty was applied that had to be stopped, so it wasn't due to current activities but doing dumb stuff in the past may catch up with you.
Bonus:
Here is a bonus for those who have read till the end ;) Lada Kalashnickova has shared with us her opinion about 2019 challenges in SEO.
Lada Kalashnikova
Head of Global SEO at Acronis
It looks like we will face in 2019 the following challenges:
Mobile-first indexing, which means that Google uses mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking. Keep in mind that the Google index remains to be a mixture of mobile and desktop pages. For the desktop sites, Google keeps desktop version in its index and uses it for rankings.
Action Item: Go mobile. What to choose, mobile or responsive version, is up to you.
Page load speed as a ranking factor. Although in some cases page load speed does not correlate much with rankings, for example, in Chrome extension site could be scored as slow, often rankings stay the same. However, strongly recommended to improve your page load speed.
Action Item: Page Load Speed: you could check out handy instapage's guide.
Voice search is on the rise. According to Google, every fifth search query on mobile devices is now made via voice input.
Action Item: Focus more on long tail keywords when optimizing content. In addition, it can be helpful to anticipate possible user questions that your content will answer.
Tools:
- answerthepublic.com
- Google Trends
- Google Suggest
- ubersuggest.io
Google is now answering more queries directly on the results pages and the number of voice-activated search queries is increasing.
E-A-T stands for 'Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.'
- 'expertise' – You need to be an expert in your field.
- 'authoritativeness' – You need to show that you are an authority or the authoritativeness of the field.
- 'trustworthiness' – You need to show users they can trust the creator or company and the website. Trustworthiness is especially important for Ecommerce websites that ask users for their credit card information.
Action Item: Try to do your best in earning maximum E-A-T.
GDPR. If you have European customers or plan to:
Review all the sources collecting user data on your site.
- Make sure you do not accidentally send some private data to Google Analytics;
- Update your Privacy policy file by GDPR requirements;
- Revise your cookie consent form. It should have the following content: what information you collect, why you do it, where you store it, affirm the info is protected;
If you use Google Tag Manager, activate IP anonymization. Do not worry, you will still have a general idea where your traffic comes from. It just will be a bit less precise.
Structured Data is on the rise – we should provide search engines with well-structured, logically organized information.
Useful Links:
And what penalties and updates were the most harmful for you? Share it in the comments below ;)
Bottom line
You now have all of the insights you need to know about Google penalties your website can encounter and, more importantly, how you can recover from them.
For a successful Google penalty recovery, you'll have to remove poor-quality backlinks and duplicate content from your website, ensure proper handling of other on-page SEO factors, and run regular site checkups to see if there's anything you need to fix.
Keep in mind that Google penalties don’t have to be permanent.
As long as you are determined and follow the steps and tips we've covered above, you'll be just fine and recover from any SEO penalty you encounter.
