Rand Fish has a very helpful article about “How to Handle a Google Penalty†and many other issues in an interview with Matt Cutts.
If your website has been penalized by Google, here are tips to help you:
- Confirm whether your website has really been penalized or whether it has only dropped in ranks
- Check whether your site is still indexed (site:url.com).
- If the answer is no that means, The site is most usually banned. Confirm from Webmaster Central after which submit a re-inclusion report after the spam has been removed.
- If the answer is Yes, then go to the next step
- If the answer is no: You are probably suffering from a penalty for manipulative linking activity or on-site spam (Cloaking, KW Stuffing etc). First, remove all potentially bad outbound links , drop any paid link campaigns (that Google has discovered) and get rid of your on-page issues. Then, go into Webmaster Central, verify and re-submit a re-inclusion request, own up to your spam and promise not to misbehave.
- If the answer is Yes, then head to the next question
- If the answer is NO: You've most likely had many of your links wiped of their value. Google's Spam team Ids and eliminates the link love passing ability of many sites & networks every day, so you're not alone. Then, go into Webmaster Central, verify and re-submit a re-inclusion request, own up to your spam and promise not to misbehave. Go get lots of great, high quality, natural links to help your ranking improve again.
- If the answer is yes: You don't have a penalty, you've only lost some rankings. Get more quality, Non-manipulative links and review your on-page SEO efforts.
- We'll start with Hgrealtor's site called oaklandhomespecialist.
- The site's still indexed – it has 94 pages in Google
- It ranks #1 on a search for the brand name – oaklandhomespecialist – that tells me we're not dealing with a "sandbox"-like effect
- It's ranking #67 on a search of the home page's full title tag – Oakland Real Estate | Oakland California Homes for Sale | Realtor – that's definitely a bad sign
- On the plus side, they rank #7 for – crocker highlands homes – so they're not as badly buried as others I've seen
- And, they're #3 for temescal homes.
This leads me to believe that while they might have had some of their links de-valued, the site isn't in grave danger, or even necessarily in need of a re-inclusion requestâ€.
Read the article/interview for a bigger understanding.
Does your Site Still rank for its domain name(or other unique branded names)?
When You search for 5-6 relatively unique terms in the title tag of your pages, Does your site still rank in the top 10-20 results?
An example to understand this better is through a “quick example from someone in the RealEstateWebmasters.com forum's thread:
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Navneet Kaushal, CEO PageTraffic is a trusted authority in the search engine marketing industry. He is a featured author at Web Pro News, Search Newz, Website Notes, DevWebPro, SEO Article and Web Help Now among many others.
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