Success or failure of your website hinges upon the appropriate use of Google to rank your site in search listings. Unfortunately, Google has the ability to hand out penalties which can adversely affect how far up the search rankings your website is listed. These penalties are put in place usually because Google believes that your site manipulates the ranking data through various spamming or black-hat SEO techniques. This can result in your website appearing way down the pecking order of sites in your category of keywords making it difficult for potential visitors to find your site at all.

Thankfully, there are a number of steps which can be taken to recover from Google penalties which we will outline below. Follow these steps and your site will hopefully be given a fair search ranking.

First Step: Find Out The Nature of The Penalty

In order to begin recovery you will need to know exactly what type of penalty has been levelled against your site. There are two categories of Google Penalties, Manual and Automatic.

• Identifying Manual Penalties: There are two types of manual penalty which your site may be effected by. To assess whether or not you have been given an Unnatural Link Warning, log in to your Webmaster Tools account which is provided by Google to help site owners maximise their search rankings. From there look for any alerts directly from Google in your inbox which states that your site violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines in the form of unnatural links which lead to your site, unfairly effecting PageRank. The second type of manual penalty is De-Indexation. To find out if you have fallen foul of this penalty, go to Google.com and type in Site:yourdomain with the appropriate ending (com, org, net, etc.) into the search box. If your site doesn’t appear in the resulting search, you’ve been de-indexed which means that your site is ‘off the radar’.
• Identifying Automatic Penalties: To find out whether or not you’ve been hit with an Identifying Algorithmic Filter penalty, log in to your Google account and click on your analytics reports. Look through the graph presented which shows your site traffic, if at some point there is a complete drop in visitors which never rises, then your site has most probably been de-indexed from searches.

Second Step: Recover From Manual Google Penalties

If you have found that your site has been struck by a manual penalty in the form of unnatural linking, then do the following to recover a fair search ranking:

1. Do as Google Asks!: In the original notification mentioned above, you will have been told to look for artificial or unnatural links which point to your site and are being used to manipulate your PageRank. Familiarise yourself with the forms of unnatural or artificial links available so that you can identify them more easily. This will involve a bit of online research, here are is a video from Google about this to get you started.
2. Locate & Remove Unnatural Links: To remove these unwanted links, log in to your Webmaster Tools and look for the Traffic section. Here you should be able to find stats on the links to your site from other sources. Look for ones which appear unnatural and often added together on the same day in large numbers. Take a note of these then go to this website and type in your URL. Here you will be given a report about the sources back-linking to your site, and which ones may be ‘bad’. Now here is the tricky part, if these links have not been created by yourself you will need to contact the Webmasters of those sites directly and ask them to delete the links. Be warned, they do sometimes try to charge you for this, if they try this scam take a screen capture of the request and attach it to your correspondence with Google about your penalties. Now, use the Google Link Disavow Tool which will let you report these links directly to Google who should remove them from consideration when calculating your PageRank.
3. Resubmit Your Site For Ranking: Finally you will need to resubmit your website for ranking via Google. You can do this by following Google’s guidelines.

If you believe your site has been de-indexed then you will also be required to apply for reconsideration directly.

Third Step: Recover From Automatic Google Penalties

If you have identified automatic penalties via algorithmic filters, you will need to follow these steps to recover your PageRank:

1. Find Duplicate Content: The majority of these penalties are brought about by the existence of duplicate content. To find duplicates, take a portion of the content and paste it into Google search exactly. If you have used a piece of content more than once on your sites, then removing the duplicates will help recover your PageRank. If it is the case that someone else has used your content and created a duplicate, then you unfortunately have only three options. First, contact the site owner and inform them that you hold the copyright for that content, providing links, and request that they remove their duplicates or you will have to take them to court. Second, you could contact the web-host who could remove the offending website completely if you can prove the content is yours. Finally, you may have to use a lawyer to threaten legal action if they do not meet your requests.
2. Remove Low Quality Content:Familiarise yourself with Google’s Quality Controlguidelines. After this, delete any pages you might have which do not pass this benchmark, often pages with little or no content in them.
3. Remove Over Advertising: Delete advertising which is overtly excessive which could slow down your site and drown out any content.
4. Increase Page Load Speeds: If your site is really slow to load, Google might not index it properly. Follow these recommendations to increase your site’s speed.
5. Resubmit: Finally, when you are convinced your page is in a better position to be evaluated for PageRank, resubmit your site for reconsideration.

Author’s bio: Alice McLean is a writer at bestessays.com  with a background in history, sociology and internet marketing. Now she is writing her first book on internet marketing.