How to Recover From a Google Penalty
This is a service we sell, so the first thing worth saying is that a good many people reading this do not need it. Recovery work on a site with no penalty achieves nothing and costs money. Establish that you have one before anybody, including us, starts charging you to fix it.
Make Sure You Have One
Recovery work on a site with no penalty produces no recovery, because there was nothing to recover from. It also produces an invoice. That combination is common enough to be worth putting at the top of this page.
The check that settles it. A minute of your time.
The manual actions report either lists something or it does not. That is the only part of this subject where certainty is available. Do it before reading further, in how to check for a Google penalty.
Why we are telling you to leave. The alternative is worse for everybody.
A business that pays for recovery it did not need gets no result, concludes the work was poor and tells people so. Nobody benefits from that engagement, including the firm that took it.
What frightened buyers agree to. Almost anything.
Somebody whose revenue has fallen and who has been told they are penalised will sign quickly and ask fewer questions than they normally would. That is exactly the moment a supplier should be slowing things down rather than closing.
If the report is empty. You still have a problem worth solving.
It is simply a different one. The work is different too. That distinction is the whole of the next block.
Two Situations, Two Different Jobs
Recovery means two entirely different pieces of work depending on which situation you are in. Almost every wasted recovery project comes from doing one when the other was needed.
A manual action. Stated reason, defined scope, review process.
Somebody reviewed the site and applied something, you were told what and where, then there is a route to say it has been dealt with. The work is removal and evidence. Blocks three to five cover it.
An assessment change. No reason, no scope, no process.
Nothing was announced, nobody reviewed anything and there is nobody to submit to. The work is genuine improvement to the site. Block six covers it. It is not recovery in the same sense.
Why the review process only exists for one. Verified.
The request function sits inside the manual actions report, as a request review option, because requests only work for manual actions. If nothing is listed there, there is nothing to request review of.
The cost of getting this wrong. Months.
Removing things in response to an assessment change makes a site thinner rather than better. Improving a site while a manual action sits unaddressed changes nothing at all. Both are hard work in the wrong direction. The distinction is set out in what is an algorithmic penalty.
Recovering From A Manual Action
A defined sequence, each stage of which has to be finished before the next is worth starting. Rushing any of them is how attempts fail.
One. Understand exactly what was cited. The words matter.
Read the stated issue carefully rather than interpreting it. Businesses frequently begin work on what they assume was found rather than on what the report actually says. Those differ more often than you would expect.
Two. Establish how far it extends. Scope before action.
Whether the action is described against the whole site or a pattern of pages. That decides the size of the job. It is covered in what is a Google manual action.
Three. Find everything, not the obvious part. A full inventory.
Whatever was cited, establish every instance of it across the site. This stage is unglamorous, it takes longer than anybody budgets for and skipping it is the direct cause of the failure described in the next block.
Four. Remove or fix it completely. The whole of it.
Not the worst examples. Not most of them. All of them, demonstrably.
Five. Request a review. Once, properly.
Submitted with an account of what was found and what was done. A rejected request costs another cycle, so the attempt is worth making once rather than early.
Thoroughly Is The Word That Matters
The most frequent reason a reconsideration request is declined is that it was submitted before everything was fully corrected. Reviewers check the site. Where violations remain, the request fails.
What that means arithmetically. Eighty per cent scores zero.
A partial cleanup is not partially successful. Removing most of what was cited produces the same outcome as removing none of it, plus a rejected request and another cycle of waiting.
Why businesses stop early. The last part is the hardest.
The obvious instances go quickly. What remains is the awkward material: things nobody can locate, things somebody else controls, things that would be inconvenient to lose. Stopping there feels like ninety per cent done and counts as nothing.
What a reviewer is actually looking for. Evidence it is gone.
Not effort, not intention and not an explanation of how difficult it was. Whether the thing that was cited is still present.
The practical rule. Do not submit until you would bet on it.
If you would not confidently say the problem is entirely gone, it is not ready. Waiting a fortnight to finish properly is cheaper than a rejected request.
Document Everything
A review benefits from a clear account of what was found, what was done and what has changed. That documentation is a substantial part of what a recovery service actually delivers.
What the account should contain. Four things.
What you found and how you found it. How much of it there was. What you did about each part. And what has been put in place to prevent it recurring.
Why specifics beat assurances. They can be checked.
An account naming what was found, in what quantity and what happened to it, gives a reviewer something to verify. A statement that the site has been cleaned up gives them nothing and reads exactly like every declined request.
Where a previous supplier is involved. Say so, without making it the point.
It is legitimate to explain that a practice predates your involvement. It does not remove your responsibility for the site. A request spending more time assigning blame than describing remediation weakens itself.
What the documentation is worth afterwards. More than the review.
You end up with an account of what was in your site and what was done about it, which is exactly what the next owner, the next agency or the next audit will need.
Recovering From An Assessment Change
There is nothing to submit and nobody to ask. Google's position on a normal ranking drop following an update is that no reconsideration request is needed, since there is no manual action to revoke. The route is to improve the site and allow it to be reassessed.
Why the word recovery misleads here. Nothing is being restored.
You are not undoing a decision. You are making the site better than it was and better than the alternatives, so that the next assessment reaches a different conclusion. That is ordinary improvement work with an unusual amount of anxiety attached.
What improvement actually means. Not tidying.
Answering what people came for more completely than the alternatives do. Removing pages that serve nobody. Making the site faster and easier to use. None of it is a trick and all of it is worth doing regardless of the fall.
The trap to avoid. Treating it as removal.
Businesses in this situation frequently strip things out, on the theory that something must have offended. A thinner site is not a better site. Our algorithm updates material covers what genuinely helps.
How to keep going without confirmation. Choose work that stands alone.
Do things that would have been right anyway. Then the waiting costs you nothing, because the work was worth doing on its own terms.
How Long It Takes
We do not state a period. Anybody who does is describing other people's sites rather than yours. What can be described is the shape of each situation and what governs it.
A manual action review. As long as it takes.
A person has to look at your site again. That is a queue and a judgement rather than a process with a service level. It depends on how much there is to check.
An assessment change. Longer, less predictable.
Improvement is recognised when the site is reassessed rather than when the work is finished. Those are different moments and the gap between them is where most people give up.
What actually governs both. Thoroughness, then patience.
Work done properly the first time avoids the largest delay available, which is a rejected request. After that, the timing is not yours to control.
Why we will not give you a figure. It would be invented.
No published source supports one. A supplier quoting weeks is either guessing or describing an unrelated case. It is worth asking which.
What to do with the uncertainty. Plan around it.
Assume the revenue does not return this quarter and make the business work without it. If it returns sooner, that is a good surprise rather than a plan that failed.
You May Not Get Back To Where You Were
Recovery restores a site to what it now deserves rather than to a position built on something that has been removed. That is frequently lower. It is worth knowing before the work starts rather than after it.
Why the previous position was not entirely yours. Something was holding it up.
If a site was ranking partly because of whatever has just been taken out, then taking it out removes part of what produced the ranking. The position was borrowed. The loan has been called in.
Why this is not a failure of the work. The opposite.
A successful recovery returns a site to its genuine level. That is the correct outcome even where it is a disappointing number. A site returning to exactly its previous position would suggest the thing removed was never load bearing.
What this means commercially. Plan from the new level.
The useful response is to treat the recovered position as the starting point for ordinary work rather than as a deficit still waiting to close. That is a different set of decisions and it can be made immediately.
Why we say this before taking the work. It is the whole point.
A firm promising the previous position is promising something it cannot deliver. The disappointment arrives later at your expense rather than theirs.
Beware Anybody Who Guarantees Recovery
Nobody controls the outcome, so a guarantee is not a real commitment. It is a sales device with a refund attached at best, else a form of words at worst.
What is actually being promised. Somebody else's decision.
A guarantee of recovery is a promise about what a reviewer or a system will conclude. No agency has any influence over either, which makes the promise unbacked regardless of how confidently it is made.
What a refund does not restore. The time.
Money back does not return the months of trading, the enquiries or the position. The guarantee compensates for the smallest part of what was lost.
What can legitimately be committed to. The work.
A supplier can commit to what they will do, how thoroughly, what they will document and what they will tell you. Those are within their control and they are the useful commitments.
Two other warning signs. Both common.
Anybody quoting for recovery before establishing there is anything to recover from. And anybody using urgency, since nothing here gets worse for taking a week to decide properly. What to look for in a supplier sits in our material on hiring an SEO agency.
What We Would Actually Do
Five stages, the first of which frequently ends the engagement. We would rather tell you there is nothing wrong than take the work.
First, establish whether there is a problem. Before anything is quoted.
Whether anything was reported, whether the drop is real and what the timing suggests. If nothing is wrong with your site, we will say so and there is nothing further to pay for.
Second, work out which situation you are in. Manual action or assessment change.
Because the answer decides everything that follows and doing the wrong one wastes a quarter.
Third, find the full extent of it. Rather than the obvious part.
This is where most of the time goes and it is what makes the difference between a review that succeeds and one that does not.
Fourth, put it right and record what was done. Completely.
With the account described in block five, which is yours to keep regardless of outcome.
Fifth, tell you what to expect. Including the uncomfortable part.
What we think will happen, what we cannot control and whether we think the previous position is realistic. The full series is on the dangerous SEO practices guide.
We will tell you
if there is
nothing wrong.
The first stage is establishing whether there is a problem at all. It frequently ends the engagement. If nothing is wrong with your site we will say so and there is nothing further to pay for. No guarantee, no promised position and no reason to decide this week.
What a recovery engagement covers:
Recovery is a one-off piece of work rather than a monthly service, so it is scoped against what was found and how far it extends.
Every guide.
One practice.
Black hat, grey hat, link risk, thin content, the spam policies, negative SEO, manual actions, algorithmic penalties, how to check for one and how to recover from one.
