Search engine optimisation is an important part of all businesses but striving for digital dominance is difficult. Many companies employ an SEO company to take care of their search engine optimisation to reduce the risk of any issues arising. However, that’s not to say that it isn’t possible to do it yourself, nor that an SEO agency will guarantee a flawless relationship.

 

Google is constantly analysing websites to detect unfair play and that is what makes it so difficult to both achieve success and avoid penalty. A penalty may be short-term or long-term, but either way it results in a drop in traffic and revenue.

 

The first sign of a potential penalty will be a significant drop in rankings and a noticeable reduction in website traffic. The first step here is to determine why there has been a drop and the cause behind it. In order to do that, you need to find out whether it was a manual penalty handed down by Google or whether it is an algorithmic penalty.

 

To check for a manual penalty, go to your Google Search Console (sometimes called “Google Webmaster Tools”) and see if there are any notifications. Notifications will tell you which penalty has been handed down, should there be one. Alternatively, you can check Moz’s Google Algorithm Change History to see if it’s a site-wide change. This will help will correlating the loss in traffic to the date of a change.

 

Once the cause of the penalty has been identified it is about effectively and successfully bouncing back to improve performance and reduce the likelihood of it happening again.

 

 

Bad backlinks

 

One of the major causes of these penalties is bad backlinks. While it used to be acceptable to include lots of low quality backlinks in order to improve a website ranking, now it is about high quality backlinks which generally means providing relevant information from a respected site.

 

Google Webmaster Tools is an easy way to identify all of the backlinks that link to a penalised site. These links can be downloaded and imported into a resource like Monitor Backlinks which will help to identify the bad ones. You can also go through these links manually, although this will take a lot longer.

 

Once you have a list of the offending links, you need to remove or disavow these so that Google doesn’t associate you with them. After removing all your spammy links, you need to get started link building properly. As a general rule, creating links that people – not just search engines – find useful is a good place to start. There are many websites where you can find websites accepting guest posts for all niches.

 

 

Page quality

 

One of the crucial factors in achieving good Google rankings is the performance of the website for its users. Once the issue of backlinks has been rectified, improving the overall quality of site performance is important to protect your site against poor performance and ranking in the future.

 

There are a few tools that are very helpful in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of a site that will provide a good starting point.

 

The first one is Fetch as Google, which is part of Google Console. This resource simulates how Google goes through the site when determining its ranking. It also then gives the webmaster the option of submitting that URL to the index. Overall, this tool will give the webmaster information on the URL’s HTTP response, how Google sees the page compared to how users see it and the download speed of the page too. You can run separate tests for desktop and mobile versions of the site too.

 

Screaming Frog Web Crawler is another tool that provides a detailed assessment of the site’s performance. Screaming Frog identifies problems like dead ends, internal redirects, duplicate or thin content and other common problems encountered. Because this resource can handle large websites, it is likely that your chosen SEO company will use this, or something very similar, in order to rectify the encountered issues with the website.

 

As stated previously, Google Search Console and Moz’s Google Algorithm Change History are the two most valuable resources when it comes to identifying and then successfully overcoming a penalty from Google. Contacting an SEO agency is also a really beneficial step as they will have a deeper understanding of the internal and external workings of search engine optimisation.

 

Regularly checking these sites to stay on top of performance and anything that could be negatively affecting it is critical to avoiding and bouncing back from Google penalties.

 

This blog post was written for the Civic Web Media site by the team at SEO Shark in Sydney.