If your site has experienced a sudden drop in rankings, you may have fallen victim to a Google manual penalty.
Manual penalties are imposed by Google on websites which violate their quality guidelines. These violations can take many forms, including buying do-follow links or using automated link building.
If you’ve had a manual penalty imposed on your site by Google, there’s no way you will be able to use SEO to revoke it. The only way to get a manual penalty revoked is to issue a reconsideration request to Google.
Cleaning Up Your Site Health
Before you submit a reconsideration request, you should take steps to clean up your site and bring it back into alignment with Google’s ToS. This means conducting a thorough analysis of your site, including your backlink profile. Analysis will not only help you to determine why the penalty was imposed, but will also provide you with guidelines as to what you will need to do to have it removed. If, for example, bad links have caused your site to be penalised, you may be able to fix this problem by removing links, or disavow those which cannot be removed.
Framing Your Reconsideration Request
When you come to submit your reconsideration request to Google, it’s important to be as detailed as you can. Real people will be reading your request, so you should be as clear and concise as possible. But unless you have already taken action to fix the problem(s) which caused the manual penalty to be imposed, there’s no point submitting your request. Google will want to see that you have taken pro-active steps towards moving your site into alignment with their quality guidelines. This includes making an effort to contact other sites whose actions may have impacted yours. Even if you aren’t able to clean up a bad backlink profile, due to the actions, or inactions, of other webmasters, detailing this in your request will go a long way towards persuading Google that you’re serious about abiding by their rules. If you’re not sure how to go about cleaning up your site health, it may, at this point, be worth hiring the services of a professional SEO company to help you out.
How to Submit Your Request
A reconsideration request can be easily submitted to Google using Google Webmaster Tools. From the dashboard of your Webmaster account, you should be able to find the reconsideration request tool under the ‘Tools’ section. From here, you will be able to send your request directly to Google, using their message function. Google will then review your site and make a decision as to whether or not your manual penalty can be removed.
