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Google Penalty Recovery Services for Enterprises

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Google Penalties are Tough to Diagnose. Let's work through them together and get your site ranking.

Google Penalty Checker Setup

Here's how you setup the Google Penalty Checker. Fruition's Google penalty checker is the fastest way, and with a high degree of statistical confidence to detect algorithmic penalties. Using statistical analysis Fruition's Google Penalty Checker provides a clear understanding into which Google updates have the most significant impact on your website. Then, Google Penalty Checker's recommendation engine tells you What To Work On Next™ ("WTWON") to boost your traffic, and to recover from a Google hit, while also maintaining long-term website health.

Sign up for the Google Penalty Checker

We created the Google Penalty Checker to prove sites weren't penalized
Since 2008, our in-house math and statistics team leveraged our SEO knowledge and straight-up text book statistics to determine which Google algorithm changes impacted your website. We created this to prove, with a high degree of statistical confidence, that sites weren't penalized.

Why we created the Google penalty checker

We have a client that thought they were penalized (specifically their in-house seo analyst thought they were). We disagreed. We were certain that the dip in organic traffic that we were seeing was primarily seasonality and an adjustment made with the sites content because of a tweak in their business model. We told the client we'd prove it with statistics. We built out that model first in R and then later in python.

Using the first model we were able to show with a high degree of confidence that the site wasn't penalized and the seo analyst agreed. It was a win win. Because we were able to focus on the right SEO efforts with less guess work. That is how Fruition's Google Penalty Checker was created. And yes, the original client that we created GPC for is still a client going strong after 20 years!

Use GPC to understand which Google algorithm updates impacted your website

Site traffic is affected by site downtime, changing seasons, and other factors. GPC cuts through the noise to help you better understand your site’s health. By combining data from hundreds of thousands of other websites, GPC can determine when an algorithm has affected your site.

How do you sign up for GPC?

Because of Google's rate limiting, Fruition's Google Penalty Checker tool is only available to existing clients. Contact us and we'll get you setup.

How do you manually check for Google Penalties?

If you don't want to use Fruition's Google Penalty Checker tool then you can use the following steps to help narrow down if your site was penalized.

  1. Dig into Google Analytics.
    If you notice a sudden drop in organic traffic, which is probably why you're reading this blog post, this could be a sign that you have been penalized by Google. Do a comparison of Google organic traffic from about two days before the known Google update and two days after with a range of at least 21 days. Sometimes Google updates roll out in waves so you may need to compare a larger time period. This will help you narrow down if there was an organic drop or not.
    1 a. Compare individual pages
    Using the same time period above compare the organic performance of individual pages. This will help you understand which pages have drops. You can then compare the pages that improved or stayed strong with the ones that dropped. If you're getting less organic traffic across all of your pages you might have a bigger technical problem.

  2. Check your website's rankings
    Checking rankings in Google Search Console is a way to cross reference your organic visits. However, with so much SEO personalization going on with individual keyword positions along with localization it's difficult to check individual keyword rankings with a high degree of confidence. However, if you notice your website has dropped in rankings for keywords that you previously ranked well for, this could be a sign of a penalty.

  3. Look for new messages in Google Search Console.
    This should probably be number one on the list but it's a pretty boring recommendation. If you see any new messages from Google, it may contain information on a penalty or other issue. If you have received a manual penalty from Google, it will be listed in the Manual Actions section of your Search Console account. If you're not setup in Google Search Console you can contact as and we'll help you get setup. This is what the message looks like. google penalty notice

  4. Check if any pages or content have been removed from Google.
    If you find any pages or content have been removed from Google's index, this could be a sign of a penalty or an issue with your site.

Ensure that pages or sites aren't noindexed. We've even seen websites hacked and the only change was noindexing the site! You can use a Chrome extension that we developed to called Noindex Alerter. The extension creates a Google Chrome Notification if you visit a website that is issuing a noindex directive through an X-Robots-Tag, a robots.txt disallow, and or a meta tag noindex. This extension is meant for QA'ing websites and not for using for regular browsing. You can easily turn it on and off. We encourage our team to use it after

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Google Penalty FAQs

We've seen it all when it comes to Google knocking down businesses online. From manual beat downs, to coordinated social driven SEO attacks, to algorithmic adjustments that crush a site.

How do I get my website to rank higher in Google?+

To get your website to rank higher in Google, a number of different SEO strategies can be employed, and these different approaches should all be pursued in combination for best results. First, you should ensure that there are no immediate severe issues like manual penalties or delisting; these can be checked through tools like Google Safe Browsing and Google Search Console. If nothing requires fixing, then SEO involves improving your site in a number of areas: content quality, technical SEO, and offsite SEO. Content quality involves the material posted on your site: ensuring that it is original rather than copied from elsewhere, valuable and relevant to your visitors, and contains your targeted keywords. Technical SEO involves ensuring that your site is functioning properly: that your pages load quickly and are accessible from different platforms including mobile devices, that your navigation links are functional and not broken, and that Google’s crawlers aren’t blocked by your robots.txt file. Offsite SEO involves acquiring natural backlinks from other high-authority sites relevant to your industry and obtaining positive reviews from customers.

How do we increase Google organic search traffic?+

You can increase Google organic search traffic to your site by following good SEO practices. Here are five basic SEO tips. One, have a strategy to generate natural backlinks from high-quality, high-authority sites relevant to your industry. (Do not pay for links, as this is a spammy practice that is penalized by Google). Two, create unique and original website content. Sites hosting unique content are more likely considered high-quality by Google than ones which simply recycle material that is readily available elsewhere. (Of course, it should also be useful and relevant to your users). Three, make sure your site is mobile-friendly. As mobile devices are responsible for an increasing number of searches, Google is increasingly prioritizing it as a ranking factor. Mobile-friendliness includes such factors as having responsive design to display on different screen sizes and loading quickly even for less-powerful computers. Four, include relevant keywords in your content to optimize it for search. Including long-tail keywords in your content can target more specific queries, while placing keywords in important positions like titles elevates their importance. Five, make sure your site is secured by an SSL certificate. Security is a Google ranking factor, with https sites ranking higher than http ones. Beyond these five tips, further information on how to improve your website to meet Google’s standards can be found in Google’s webmaster guidelines.

What is blacklist SEO attack?+

A blacklist SEO attack is when a malicious actor hacks a website to subvert it for their own ends. This might involve phishing to collect personal information such as passwords or bank account details from visitors, or installing malware on the computers of visitors, or redirecting visitors to their own websites. In order to protect users, Google places warnings on such compromised pages, advising visitors not to proceed. You can check whether your website’s URL has been blacklisted using such Google Safe Browsing. If it has, you can request Google restore it by re-securing it and removing any malware (either yourself or with the help of a professional service) and then submitting your website for reassessment on Google Search Console. This is often talked about but there haven't been too many instances where an attack has been successful.

What are the best offsite SEO strategies?+

The best offsite SEO strategies are building organic backlinks and encouraging positive customer reviews. Backlinks from popular, relevant, and high-authority sites pass PageRank to your site, increasing its importance in the eyes of Google’s algorithm. The higher the status and authority of the linking page, the greater the benefit to your site. However, such backlinks must be built and acquired naturally; paying for backlinks is against Google’s webmaster guidelines and may result in your site being penalized. Likewise, numerous and largely positive reviews from customers will be seen a sign of business quality and raise your site’s significance for the algorithm, but bribing customers to leave positive reviews or generating fake reviews are against Google’s rules.

Do user interactions on a page matter?+

The average number of active actions (clicks, keystrokes) for users when the user is continuously on the host pages after clicking on a request from a search engine (the factor depends on the pair (request,domAttr)).

How does SEO work?+

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It works by designing your site’s structure and content to meet the criteria Google’s search algorithm uses when determining how high-quality a site is, and therefore how highly to place it in the search results delivered to users. Important ranking factors include keyword placement, natural backlinks, mobile-friendliness, loading speed, usefulness of content, and avoiding forbidden practices that can result in Google imposing penalties.

How do you find good ideas for website content?+

The most helpful content addresses your audience's problems or needs and provides a solution for them. Our team of content strategy experts can help you identify your audience's unique problems and develop content that addresses them.
If you're researching your own ideas for content generation, here are a few ways you can get inspired:
-Research trending topics to find out what keywords are currently the most popular. This can indicate what content people are most interested in seeing.
-Research what type of content is being put out by your direct competitors. Since they are targeting the same customers as you, their content will likely interest your audience.
-Directly poll your customers about what type of content they would like to see from you. Polls like this can easily become part of your social media or email strategy.
-Look at websites geared towards providing content ideas, like Quora, Answerthepublic, Ubersuggest, Buzzsumo, and Exploding Topics.

Are negative keywords applicable to SEO?+

Negative keywords are keywords that prevent an add from being triggered. Unlike positive keywords, which trigger your site to be delivered to a searcher when they match the users query, negative keywords cause your site to not be delivered to searches which include those keywords. For instance, if you are selling Apple computer products, adding “fruit” as a negative keyword to your ads will prevent them from being delivered to searchers looking for the food rather than the electronics brand. The reason you may wish to do this when paying for Google Ads is that you are charged for clicks, meaning that every result delivered by mistake to a searcher it’s not relevant to costs you money. The use of negative keywords in SEO for organic search results is a more difficult matter, as you can include positive keywords in your content, but there is no way to make a list of negative keywords. The most you can do is to deliberately avoid including any phrases you deem to be negative keywords in the content on your site. The impact of this is much less significant than it is for paid advertisements, as you do not pay a cost for mistaken organic clicks, but it may improve certain metrics like conversion rate by reducing the amount of mistaken traffic to your site.

What is offsite SEO?+

Offsite SEO factors are anything that contributes to how your website is ranked by Google that is not hosted on your website itself. This includes the number of backlinks pointed to your site by other websites, the authority and relevance of the sites hosting those backlinks, and reviews of your company or product written by customers.

How many clicks should I be getting from organic search?+

Typically, the amount of clicks one should be receiving from organic search is measured not in terms of absolute number of clicks, but rather in click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of people who see your site in the search results that click on it. The average organic CTR for any business is 2%. What is considered a “good” CTR varies depending on the source; some say that anything above 3% is good, while others advise aiming for ranges like 4-6% or 6-7%. This can vary by industry; for instance, sites in the customer service industry generally have a higher average CTR than sites in the legal industry, so two sites with the same CTR might actually be performing above and below average with regards to their respective industries. And, of course, how many specific clicks a CTR translates into will depend on how many impressions a page is getting; a widely-seen page with a low CTR can be getting more clicks than a a rarely-seen page with a high CTR. As such, how many clicks you should be getting depends on a wide variety of different factors including your industry and the type of SEO strategy you are pursuing.

Do the number of visits to a site that are not from links matter?+

Yes, percentage of visits to the site not by links (typed by hand or from bookmarks

What are the most effective SEO strategies?+

Four of the most effective SEO strategies are keyword research and placement, producing high-quality content, structuring your site architecture well, and building natural backlinks. Keyword research and placement refers to determining what search terms are most used by your target audience and including them on your landing pages, particularly in important positions like page titles and headers. Producing high-quality content refers to creating page content that meets the standards set out in Google’s webmaster guidelines. This includes hosting content that is accurate and useful to searchers while avoiding spammy practices intended to deceive them. Structuring your site architecture refers to having clear, easy-to-use navigation and internal links. This assists Google’s crawler in indexing your pages and makes for a better user experience for customers. Finally, building natural backlinks refers to developing legitimate links to your site from other high-quality sites. Backlinks are an important ranking factor for Google’s algorithm.

What is the single most effective SEO strategy?+

There is no single most effective SEO strategy. While different sources might emphasize different specific tactics, it is widely agreed that SEO is a holistic process that requires work in multiple different areas. Having highly searchable keywords is meaningless if your content is useless or irrelevant to your target audience; even the highest-quality content will fail to be discovered if it has no backlinks pointing towards it; no amount of backlinks will help a site if it is delisted from Google for violating their webmaster guidelines, and so forth. No single magic bullet can guarantee SEO success; rather, one must pursue many different strategies and improve in many different areas in order to build the best overall site.