If your website has been hit with a Google penalty it can seem disastrous at first. Traffic can drop off a cliff. Orders can dry up. Your hard won presence lost seemingly overnight. The good news is that we’ve been helping websites recover from such circumstances for twenty years now, and there’s no need to panic. You’re in the right place.
You might not be intimately familiar with Google penalties, but we are. Our experts will draw on years of experience to diagnose what’s gone wrong, and formulate an actionable plan to recover the traffic you’ve lost.
Our methodical and scrupulous approach have brought a 100% success rate. We’ve recovered long-standing penalties for new clients in as little as 2 months, even after months of failed attempts.
Always manual – never automated
We gather link data from many sources and manually review each and every link. Our experienced experts build a detailed database of your site's link profile to make the best, informed decisions.
Post-recovery support
Once a penalty is removed, we provide support and guidance on how to avoid penalties in the future as well as on-going monitoring to keep a close eye on a website's performance.
How do you know if you’ve been penalised?
Google’s algorithm is updated constantly so it’s not unusual to see your site traffic fluctuating. Any serious and sudden drop in traffic or rankings though can mean that your site has been penalised. Our experts are always up to date with the latest from Google and will quickly identify if your site has been penalised.
Each case is different to the last, but really there are three core potential problems: technical faults with the site, bad (or ‘spammy links’), or problems with your content. The good news is that we’re experts at identifying and fixing all of these problems.
Why Choose Bronco to Manage Your Recovery?
Unlike many mainstream Google recovery tools and services, our processes are manually completed, giving us the chance to review each and every issue with an experienced and informed decision being made by a team of experts.
Because we remove the automated decision making, we boast a very successful Google penalty recovery rate. We have accomplished everything from the recovery of sites from undiagnosed technical problems or poor-quality content, right through to getting manual actions caused by a link penalty, lifted by doing a thorough link clean up and reconsideration request.
Our manually reviewed link data comes from multiple sources that paint a comprehensive picture and our processes have enabled us to have a 100% success rate when dealing with penalties. Even when a penalty is removed, we provide full post-recovery support to help ensure the long-term health of your website.
What is a Google Penalty?
A Google penalty is an algorithmic or manual action against a website's ability to rank organically, or how it's displayed within Google's search results.
Penalties against a domain or its pages are brought on by sites not following, or actively going against the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Google are constantly changing and updating their policies as well as their algorithms, so it's important to keep up to date with what Google's up to, to ensure you're not putting your website in harm's way.
What is a Manual Action?
Google is more than just a computer program. Because Google knows their algorithm can never be perfect, thousands of people manually assess sites where the company thinks there could be a problem. If your site fails such an assessment, this can result in a manual action.
If your site has been picked up for a manually applied penalty it can result in the most severe side effects – including having your site removed from Google altogether.
While fixing an automatic penalty can be a matter of trialling various things on the website, a manual penalty often requires immediate, rigorous and comprehensive action, and direct communication with Google's webspam team.
What are Google Core Updates?
Google used to release major updates and would give them names such as ‘Penguin’ or ‘Panda’ but in recent years have dropped this in favour of ‘core updates’ – which are general updates to their entire ranking formula. These happen several times a year, and with each iteration become better at penalising sites which do not follow Google’s guidelines.
This broadly speaking covers three main aspects: the technical quality of your site, the relevancy of your content, and the types of site that link to yours.
A healthy long term strategy will always look at these three elements as one – but each core update can tweak the importance of any one of them. It’s our job to understand these updates and make sure your site meets all the right guidelines.
What is the Google Algorithm?
Google’s algorithm is simply their method of choosing which sites to show at the top of the rankings for any search query. To put the job into perspective, when you search for anything, Google has to identify just 10 pages from the entire internet as having the ‘best’ answers for your question – and do it in a fraction of a second.
To do so requires thousands of calculations taking thousands of things into account – such as the design, speed and layout of a website, whether its content is up to date, and how reputable a source it is.
So, if you have been hit by a penalty, the first thing to ask yourself is: does my site fulfil all of those criteria? Is it really one of the ten best websites in the country (or even the world!) to answer a specific question?
Helping you grow in the long term
Once a penalty is lifted, the work only just begins, not only do you have to regain lost traction, but past strategies, which led to the penalty will need to be addressed, often with major changes and overhauls.
We provide ongoing support to our clients, monitoring performance as well as marketing and development decisions, which can lead to issues; from technical duplications causing Panda issues through to link building strategies which may lead to Penguin issues or even manual penalties.
Alongside monitoring, we provide guidance and support to our clients to help educate internal departments to safeguard against future problems.
Is something holding you back?
If you think you're being held back but you're not sure by what, we can provide a free assessment of the site. Our team looks at a number of factors including information from Google Analytics and Search Console to determine what issues might exist and what solutions are available.
We're always happy to help so get in touch for some advice.
A complex puzzle designed to feel simple
Understanding what we're up against
Investigative analysis is always a starting point, we mix a number of variables to gain an understanding of a site's issues, and this includes talking with the client (yes, we talk to our clients), reviewing analytics data and historical ranking performance.
Ranking history
Penalty date
Penalty type
Recent changes
Visibility
Search console errors
Uncovering all the data
Once we understand the issues the site faces, we do data gathering, this could be backlinks or information about the websites structure, use of technologies or content usage. We always seek to gain as much data and insight as possible, to gain a complete picture.
Data gathering
Link databases
Site review
Content analysis
External exploration
Site crawls
Analysis and manual review
With data in hand we both manually and programmatically review the website and link data to provide an insightful overview of penalty causing issues and how to fix them.
On-page analysis
Manual review
Programmatic review
Technical audits
Recommendations
Executing the plan
All penalties are different and require a tailored approach and thought process. We base a plan of action on all the information we have gathered to create a clear and prioritised list of actions.
Planning
Prioritisation
Execution
Strategy
Support
Rebuilding
Penguin and Panda are algorithmic signals which dictate the rankings ability of a website; think of these as rankings boosts for playing within the guidelines, not penalties for not following them.
A penalty is when someone at Google has manually reviewed the site and placed a restriction upon it. To get the best from your organic channel strategy, it’s best to work with Google, not against Google; at least for long-term growth.
