If you are a blogger or have your own business, then you know that receiving a Google penalty on your website is one of the biggest setbacks you can have. It can significantly decrease your traffic, and today many websites are penalized for violating Google’s guidelines.

According to Matt Cutts, Google performs more than 400,000 manual actions every month. Google penalizes many websites for the use of algorithmic updates such as Penguin and Panda. It is a known fact that only 20,000 webmasters submit a request for reconsideration.

Why were you penalized?

Before finding the solution, you need to find out the reason why you were penalized. There could be several reasons for this, and if you see a sudden drop in traffic, then you should check if all of Google’s guidelines are being followed.

Some of the reasons why you might have been penalized are listed below:

• You may have used low-quality links or backlinks. Website backlinks that violate Google’s guidelines may be liable for your penalty.
• You may have hidden some text from users using CSS.
• You may have used links from gambling or adult websites.
• You may have used duplicate content.

You also need to identify what kind of algorithmic penalty you have. You can do this by writing down the periods. You should note the time your website lost traffic and the time Google updated its search algorithm.

How to recover from the penalty?

Now there are many ways to recover from this penalty. It is reported that 95% of all Google penalties are linked to the backlinking profile of the website. Therefore, you must first remove all the bad and cheap backlinks that you have been using on your website.

Now you may need to see if your website has undergone a Google Penguin update. Like if you had a Google Penguin update, you may need to take a look at your anchor text layout. This update usually penalizes those websites that overoptimized their money keywords.

Another important issue is regarding the promotion of your business and website. Google is seriously against sponsored content that quickly outperforms PageRank. If you want to promote your business services on a blog, you should use a nofollow attribute so your rankings can be safe.

If you have a completely content-based website, you may have enabled comments for your content. You know that not all comments are genuine comments, so you need to get rid of those spam comments. Everyone hates spammers and Google knows it. If your website has a lot of spam comments, then your website could be penalized.

Another critical factor is the “niche.” Google places a lot of importance on relevancy. So if you have links from other websites that are not related to your niche, then this is a bad indication about your website for Google. This will quickly get your website penalized.

Well, these were some of the main reasons and remedies for the penalty. These solutions can help you get your website ranking back.