Google Penalty Audit – Analysis and Recovery
Google has been turning up the aggression in dealing with what it sees as low quality content and over optimised websites since early 2011 and if you have gradually lost traffic since 2011 or have had a sudden precipitous drop since that point then odds are your site has fallen foul of one of the many recent penalties.
Types of Penalty
It is important to understand that strictly speaking, in Google terminology, there is only one kind of penalty and that is a manual action taken against your site by Google. This kind of penalty will usually have a fixed time period during which you will see reduced rankings and whilst it will expire, if actions are not taken to remove the underlying issue then it can be reapplied just as quickly for another fixed period.
A manual penalty will always generate a notification in Google Webmaster Tools giving you an indication of the problem and once you have identified and acted upon the issues you will need to file a reconsideration request to see speedy resolution.
The more common problems we see are algorithmic updates which are known as Panda and Penguin. The Panda penalty is an attempt to remove what Google sees as low quality or thin content from the search index. This is content that may be duplicated from elsewhere, pages that have little or no unique elements or are substantially similar to other pages on your site. This may take the form of product pages where only a colour or quantity may change. The Penguin update is more focused on webspam and aggressive linking tactics and predominately looks at links from low quality sources, over optimised anchor text, links from unrelated sites and any kind of link schemes designed to inflate the sites rank in Google search results.
Google Penalty Check
The simplest way to check whether you have fallen foul of one of these algorithmic penalties is to simply compare a loss of organic traffic against the known dates of these search quality updates. To do this, simply log into your chosen analytics tool and segment the Organic Search Traffic (Google Analytics: Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic). Then, browse through the history and check for drops in traffic on the following dates:
Panda – February 23, 2011
Panda – April 11, 2011
Panda – May 9, 2011
Panda – June 21, 2011
Panda – July 23, 2011
Panda – August 12, 2011
Panda – September 28, 2011
Panda – October 5, 2011
Panda – November 18, 2011
Panda – January 18, 2012
Panda – February 27, 2012
Panda – March 23, 2012
Panda – April 19, 2012
Penguin – April 24, 2012
Panda – April 27, 2012
Penguin – May 25, 2012
Panda – June 8, 2012
Panda – June 25, 2012
Panda – July 24, 2012
Panda – August 20, 2012
Panda – September 18, 2012
Panda – September 27, 2012
Exact Match Domain Update
In our experience many sites have multiple problems that may have started back at the first Panda update and have got increasingly worse since. Often, if there are a series of issues the first Panda update will have taken around 20% of the traffic with the Penguin update removing another 50% of the remaining traffic resulting in a net loss of around 60% and above for most sites. Often, the results are worse or more subtle.
If you would like to further review the problems then please take a look at our Penguin and Panda diagnosis and recovery guides linked in the references below this article.
Google Penalty Audit
Time is money and if you have a penalty then every moment you spend looking into this or just hoping it will get better is more money you are leaving on the table. We can provide a detailed report identifying any likely penalties allowing with actionable points covering what you can do to recover. In extreme cases where recovery is unlikely, we can provide guidance on the best way to start over and work on a safe, stable and long term SEO strategy.
Our standard penalty audit where Google Analytics is available is only £500 and will identify Penguin and Panda issues and provide a series of action points and procedures you can follow to resolve issues that are resulting in the penalty.
For more details please fill in our our contact form or call the office on 0121 314 2001 (+44 121 314 2001 for international calls).
Figure 1.0 – Google Penalty and Recovery Diagram
References
Google Penguin Diagnosis & Recovery Guide
Google Panda Diagnosis and Recovery Guide
Google Webmaster Guidelines - support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
SEOMoz Algorithm Changes - www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change