Penalty recovery refers to the process of identifying and addressing penalties imposed by search engines on websites for violating their guidelines or engaging in black hat SEO tactics. Search engine penalties can have severe consequences for websites, including loss of organic traffic, decreased visibility in search results, and damage to reputation and credibility. Penalty recovery involves identifying the cause of the penalty, taking corrective action to address the issue, and submitting a reconsideration request to the search engine to have the penalty lifted.
The first step in penalty recovery is identifying the type of penalty imposed by the search engine, whether it’s a manual action penalty or an algorithmic penalty. Manual action penalties are issued by human reviewers at search engines and typically result from violations of search engine guidelines, such as unnatural links or thin content. Algorithmic penalties, on the other hand, are triggered automatically by search engine algorithms and may result from updates like Google’s Penguin or Panda algorithms. Once the cause of the penalty is identified, website owners can take corrective action, such as removing or disavowing spammy backlinks, improving content quality, or fixing technical issues, to address the underlying issues and comply with search engine guidelines.
Also see: Black hat SEO, Gray hat SEO, Duplicate content, Thin content, Content silos, Site architecture, Internal site search, Local SEO, Google My Business, Online reviews, Local citations, Citation building
