Getting hit by a Google Penalty can lead to disastrous results when it comes to your traffic, as if you end up suffering a really hard slap on the wrist then it can see your rankings go from somewhere to nowhere, which overnight could lead to you losing most of your site visitors. Of course, very few of the penalties that Google hands out are this harsh, but even if you suffer a small rankings decrease due to some dodgy links and subsequent penalties, the traffic loss can be hard to stomach, especially if you relied on Google for your main business objectives.

It is important to say that there are two types of penalties – Manual and Algorithmic, with manual always being instigated by a member of the Google Webspam Team and Algorithmic which is where you have fallen fowl of the search algorithm that controls how Google returns search results. With a manual penalty, you know you have done wrong because you will get a message in your Google Webmaster Tools and you will then have a chance to place a reconsideration request, which if successful, will see the penalty lifted. Algorithmic is slightly harder to initially identify but when you manage to fix the issue, you can often see a recovery much quicker. Either way, they are both worth avoiding, but in this day and age, more and more websites are falling foul of link building activities that may have happened many years ago.

If you have been hit with a manual or algorithmic (Penguin) penalty for links pointing back to your site then life can become quite difficult, because not only can it be harder to recover from this type of action, but your results will often not be the same as they were even if you manage to escape the penalty. Far too many people just assume that once a penalty is lifted then all of their rankings will return to normal, but, because these rankings were often built on “disputable” links, once these links are taken out of the equation, your rankings will often be where Google thinks they should, hence there is often no overnight return to glory as you need to start rebuilding your link profile but properly this time around.

So, if you are facing a linking penalty, most notably Penguin, there are some things that I would take into consideration before you decide whether to try and recover or simply start afresh and these factors include:

Age Of Website

An established and aged web domain is worth its weight in gold from an SEO perspective as many of the bids on some famous domain auction sites will testify. If your website is over 5 years old, you should be doing everything in you power to get the penalty lifted and to get clean again, as it will take a long time for a new domain to reach this level of age authority for obvious reasons. New domains take a long time to start earning trust, but the older ones have that trust even if you have made dubious SEO mistakes, because once these get cleaned up then you can still retain the age trust you have established previously.

Content On Website

Quality content beats most other things when it comes to ranking in Google, so if your site has tons of unique, relevant, quality and related content, and I am talking hundreds of blogs and articles, then it does make sense to try and get the penalty issue sorted rather than pack up shop and move to a new domain name. The search engines love content and even if they do not necessarily love the links that you have built to that same content, you should still be able to gain the trust back when you have sorted the issues through having a wealth of decent pages. Even if you have been hit by a penalty don’t just stop adding content and focus on link removals, as you need to still keep writing and publishing but at the same removing bad links.

Link Profile

Dealing with 100 bad links is a lot different to dealing with over 13 million, and believe me, I speak from experience, but I have worked with recoveries for small link profiles right the way through to huge sites, so I know how hard it can be. My point with this is that if you only have a small set of links that are causing you issues, then it is going to be a lot easier to solve with a mixture of removal and the Disavow tool, but, if you have millions of really poor links then you have to weigh up whether it is worth your time making a big enough effort to get the penalty lifted in comparison to starting again.

Other Traffic Sources

Although Google is probably always going to be your number one source of traffic (pre-penalty of course), if you have a ton of traffic coming in through other sources then you should think about how long this would take to replicate on a new site. Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, PPC and all of the referring sites you may have are going to need to be changed to point to your new URL, so if this is the case and you do get a decent stream of visitors from other areas, it makes sense to think about the impact of moving to a new domain and whether you are better off trying to clear up the linking mess that landed you with the penalty.

Your Brand

If your domain name is your brand or company name then it is going to be tough for you to resist cleaning up, because you do not want to lose the domain name with your brand in and move to a new URL, mainly because it could be tough for customers to find you again and also because it probably does not reflect very well. Brands and company names are generally worth trying to get a clean-up going on, or, starting another site but trying to clean up the brand name site as well. Customers get used to what they know and feel comfortable with, so changing everything due to a penalty is sometimes not the correct decision to be making.

The Waiting Game

How long can you wait? Pretty big question but the answer can often determine what your next action will be. You have to bear in mind that if you have been hit big time by the Penguin penalty then you will usually have to wait for Google to refresh it. The last one took a year to update, but with Penguin 3 which launched a few weeks ago, there is talk that the updates will be more frequent so it could be less time to wait in the future. If you are going to set out on the road of clean up and rebuild then be prepared that this is going to take time, as if you are expecting your rankings to return overnight then this is just not going to happen, it can take months, or even years in some cases.

So, To Conclude

The point of this article is to say that for some, fighting for recovery, cleaning up and generally working with what you have is the right way, especially for brands and older web domains, but if you are a new site with not much going on, then it is often quicker to buy a new domain and this time, go about SEO in the right way. For those that make mistakes then it is often cleaning up that makes sense, but for those that have played the system and really gone Black Hat SEO, you are better off starting again and realising that you got caught and the chances of be caught again are pretty high. Always make a rational decision based on your circumstances, as there is no one glove fits all answer when it comes to a Google Penalty, only you can decide.

 

By Ian Spencer at IS Digital Marketing

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