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Your ultimate Google penalty prevention & recovery toolkit
Have you been hit by a Google penalty? Or is your site at risk? Detect existing penalties and potential threats and fix causes to keep your rankings and traffic safe.
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Google penalties are algorithmic or manual actions on the part of Google webspam team, intended to down-rank (or remove completely) websites from Google's search results based on various site features that Google believes are indicative of manipulative SEO techniques.

Whether your site has a penalty history or not, it's crucial that you monitor major Google updates and their effect on you ranks and traffic, and run regular site and link audits to stay penalty-free. Sound like a lot to handle? No worries, it's free and only takes a few minutes of your time if you use SEO PowerSuite.

Want to protect your site against penalties?
  • Audit your site and links to identify threats
  • Fix vulnerabilities to keep your site safe
Experiencing a traffic & ranking drop?
  • See which penalty you've been hit by
  • Recover from Panda, Penguin, etc. by addressing the penalty's core causes
1 Diagnose.

If your site has been hit by an algorithmic change, you won't always know it right away. SEO PowerSuite's Rank Tracker automatically matches up changes in your organic traffic and rankings to the dates when Google released its algo updates, so you can instantly see if your site has been hit by any of the penalties, and fix the problem that got you in trouble to recover quickly.

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1. Download and install SEO PowerSuite.

2. Open SEO PowerSuite's Rank Tracker and create a project for your site by entering the URL and specifying your keywords.

3. In the lower part of your Rank Tracker dashboard, switch to the Visits Graph tab.

4. Press Enter Account Settings and sync your Google Analytics account with Rank Tracker.

5. Click the button in the top menu.

6. Look at your organic traffic graph on a calendar of major Google algo updates, and spot any drops in visits that correlate with the dotted lines. Hover your mouse over one of the lines to see what the update was, and click Details for a brief description of the algo change.

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2 Audit your site against Panda threats.

Crawl your site with SEO PowerSuite's WebSite Auditor and see if you should be worrying about thin content, duplication, or keyword stuffing — all of which can get you under Google's Panda update. Found a problem? Instantly fix it right in the app, following WebSite Auditor's how-to-fix advice, and save newly optimized pages to your hard drive, ready for upload.

1. Launch WebSite Auditor and create a project for your website. Give the tool a few minutes to collect and list all of your site's pages.

2. Pay attention to Duplicate titles and Duplicate meta descriptions on the list of on-page factors on the left.

3. Switch to the Content Analysis module and select a landing page you're optimizing. Enter the keywords you're optimizing it for, and give WebSite Auditor a moment to analyze the page.

4. When the analysis is complete, take a close look at Word count in body on the list of factors on the left. If it's marked with a yellow Warning sign, that means your content is either significantly longer or shorter than the content on the pages of your top ranking competitors. If your word count is below the recommended limits, your content will likely qualify as thin content, which can result in getting penalized by Panda.

5. Make sure that keyword-related factors (Keywords in title, meta description, body, H1, etc.) are all marked with a green Correct sign. If some aren't, click on those factors and check the Keyword stuffing column to see if you're abusing your keywords.

6. Go to the Content Editor module to fix all the issues you've detected. Edit your page's content in the right-hand view, and see the on-page factors on the left and your overall optimization score recalculate in real time, as you type.

7. When you've fixed your Panda vulnerabilities, hit Save page to save the optimized HTML file to your hard drive and upload it to your site.

3 Stay safe from Penguin and manual link penalties.

Evaluate link penalty risks in SEO PowerSuite's SEO SpyGlass using the same factors Google uses (domain age, anchor text, sitewide links, Page/Domain Authority, IP diversity, etc.) and see just how dangerous every link is. Identify harmful links, and create a Google disavow file in a click to tell Google to discard those backlinks when assessing your backlink profile.

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1. Run SEO SpyGlass, enter your website's URL, and let the software collect all your backlinks.

2. Switch to the Link Penalty Risks tab, select your backlinks, and click Update factors to start the quality analysis for your links.

3. When the audit is complete, look through the Penalty Risk column to spot potentially dangerous links. Roughly, a link with a 0 to 30% risk value is usually considered safe. A link in the 30 to 60% range may potentially be harmful, so it's recommended that you take a closer look at it. A Penalty Risk of over 60% is considered high and calls for immediate action.

4. Contact webmasters to take down spammy, harmful links.

5. If you don't hear back from webmasters, or if you have a big amount of spammy links in your profile, you can disavow them in bulk. Select the dangerous links and right-click the selection; hit Disavow backlinks. Once you've done that for all dangerous links in your project, go to Preferences -> Blacklist/Disavow backlinks, review your list, and hit Export. Next, simply upload the disavow file to Google Search Console.


An ounce of prevention

Can you still get penalized if you've done nothing against Google's guidelines? While a lot of penalties are deserved, many happen due to the lack of SEO education or even by pure accident. Of course, you can always file a reconsideration request and recover; but it can take from weeks to months until your rankings go back to their pre-penalty state (imagine the traffic and sales drops that come with it!). There's no way to protect your site from getting penalized other than run regular site and link audits to identify threats before Google does; and you can do it all with the same toolkit that lets you manage all your SEO tasks, end to end.

Download SEO PowerSuite for free.
Don't let Google penalties destroy your SEO efforts — stay search engine friendly and keep your ranks growing.