Google penalty recovery

Examples of major algorithm updates

A prime example of a major algorithm was Penguin, which was released in April 2012. This update specifically targets backlinks to websites. Links from poor-quality websites, link farms or irrelevant websites are seen as “webspam”. Websites linking from them were penalised.

Backlinks have been an important part of Google’s algorithm, and it has now evolved to prevent unethical techniques from gaining ranking advantages. There have been many more similar, smaller updates – such as Penguin 2.0.

More recently, in March 2019 there was a broad core algorithm update that affected a large number of websites. This update was general, in attempts to strengthen the overall quality of search.

I think my website has been affected. What can I do?

Being affected by a Google penalty isn’t the end of the world.
Websites can recover from algorithm updates. There are a number of steps that we can do to help you recover:

Collate and analyse backlinks – identify the links that are hurting your website.
Put an action plan in place to request backlink removal, and follow up to check that the links have gone.
Ensure that future links are from relevant, trusted and good-quality sources. A well thought-out content marketing strategy can help attract natural back linking. White papers, blog articles and infographics create excellent sharing and linking opportunities.
Performing a content audit of your website to identify the pages that have duplicated and thin content, which do not add any value.
Ensuring that your website is E-A-T compliant, therefore it is fully matching the search intent of the users.