A large number of businesses have websites. Their basic requirement is to get as much organic traffic as possible. But getting the organic traffic is not so easy. Also, if the link-building process is overdone by marketers and SEOs, it can be penalised by Google. The algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin have penalised so many websites. Among the owners of penalised websites, the percentage of people who tried to recover are only 5%. If a penalty hits you then you should first identify it and then try to recover from it with the help of a recovery plan. The penalties are basically of two types: Algorithmic and manual.

1.Manual- When Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are breached by your website then it is flagged by the spam team of Google and this will be called as a manual penalty. To identify whether your website has been penalised or not you have to see the search console of Google after logging into it and seeing if it has been penalised manually. Your site will not have any manual penalty if there is no message or warning. Our backlink profile is responsible for manual penalties. Manual penalties are basically of 3 types:

(a) For the sites having unnatural links– Sometime some unnatural links to your website are detected by Google. It does not mean that you are responsible for those unnatural links. The link juice will not pass to your website via unnatural links any more. To recover from it there is no need to do anything. Its purpose is to use it against negative SEO. In order to kick you out of SERPs a large number of spammy links may be sent to you by a person who can be your competitor.   

(b) For sites having unnatural links– It is the same as discussed previously. But here, for all the unnatural links to your site you will be blamed. Depending on the unnatural links some web pages or entire site can be affected. If you will try to buy backlinks then this penalty can be imposed on you.

(c) For sites sending unnatural links– It is just opposite of the above two penalties. If you are using the same anchor text again and again for making a link to a particular site then this penalty will be imposed on your site. It will affect a few web pages or your entire website.

How to recover from a manual penalty– Once you notice the spammy links you should find about the webmasters of those websites who have sent those links and request them to remove the links. If this idea gets failed then you should use a disavow tool to disavow those links.

2. Algorithmic- If your website is flagged by a search algorithm of Google then automatically this penalty is imposed on your website. The reason behind this is the update of a new algorithm. Detection of these penalties is so much difficult because there will not be any message to you about the penalty from Google. You can only notice a great decrease in the traffic without any reason.

These penalties are caused by some algorithm updates.

(a) Google Panda– To make sure that your site has content of high quality, Google Panda is used. Panda will start updating if a low-quality content is present in your website. With this, a penalty will be imposed on your website and will affect your ranking.

(b) Google Penguin– To detect bad links, Penguin is used. For unnatural backlinks, Penguin will start updating. As a result, a penalty will be imposed on your website. But only some web pages will get affected by it.

How to recover from algorithm penalty– To recover from these penalties you have to fix the problem. Panda update occurs after some months at regular intervals. When the update tells that there is no need for a penalty any more, you will recover from it.

To recover from the penalty imposed by Penguin you have to disavow bad links.

You can take the help of a digital marketing company to know more about penalties and also how they can be recovered.