A Google penalty could wipe out your online organic sales in the blink of an eye. But you can recover. Here’s how.
- First, be proactive. Avoid a penalty to begin with. Don’t cut corners and go with cheap SEO. Cheap is expensive.
- If penalized, you need to figure out which type of algorithms caused the hit.
Some of the most common ones are usually based around content quality or external credibility, in the simplest terms, that would be backlinks.
If you ran into a content penalty, which seems to be more common these days because of the introduction of AI content for SEO. But in this context about AI content penalties from Google, the issue that you run into with AI based content is it’s not unique.
There is going to be a bunch of people to argue with me about this. AI certainly has its advantages in some capacity, but purely from content creation, I highly recommend you look at the advantages of doing human edited and created content.
A great example of how to illustrate this because they have all sorts of people that will come at me or probably drop comments that say, well, if a search engine can detect that your content was AI created, then you’re not doing your prompts correctly.
Maybe.
But the problem you run into, if even that is all AI is, is a giant database on pre-existing content.
Let’s not necessarily rag on AI, but let’s look at the overlooked opportunity on the other side. Because AI is a learning model and it’s based on existing content, it doesn’t know your unique stories. And that’s your value proposition to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Let me give you an example.
I have a client that sells home-baked goods. We’ll talk about cookies and bakery items and things like that in their content. When you’re talking about those kind of things, AI doesn’t know the story that you do when you were a kid and you went to your grandma’s house, and you walked in for the holidays to smell those homemade cookies. That’s a great opportunity for us on the SEO side to write about that.
The reason why that works so well is because people resonate with human related content. People might follow you for the product or service or business advice that you offer, but they’re gonna convert when they trust or relate to you.
When you can come in and share these really unique stories, they go, “Oh, I remember that too. I had my own version of a smell at a family member’s house on the holidays.”
Then you get right into their mindset, and they now relate to your product and service.
What you want to focus on cleaning up if your Google penalty if it’s related to content is go through and audit your content.
Maybe you didn’t use AI, but if it’s not AI generated content, you still got a penalty. It’s probably because it’s thin content.
A really simple way to think about SEO is Google’s going to position the website higher that makes Google look good. Google’s not going to send a visitor to a website that’s hard to read, the content’s not relatable, it’s not value added, or it’s really thin or invaluable.
Google wants to send people to websites that trust your content, relate to your content, and think about this…
Google has all these quote products for free. It’s not because they’re a good guy, they don’t care about you. They offer products like analytics and Gmail because they want to read your data.
What does that have to do with Google penalties?
When you have Google Analytics on your website, they’re going to pay attention to how far people scroll down, how long they stay on the website. Do they click around? And if people come to your website and they exit quickly because the content is not value added or relatable, then Google’s going to think, “that’s not the right answer, let’s show that website less.”
However, if people really relate to your content and they’re scrolling down and they’re sticking on and they’re bouncing around, they’re checking out your product, they’re completing a transaction, then Google says, “That solved the problem for that original query. Let’s show that website higher.”
Let’s look at the other major Google algorithm that usually impacts sites, and it’s related to external credibility.
Google came out with an algorithm update way back in 2011 called Google Penguin. What Google Penguin focused on was backlinks.
A backlink has one another website, hyperlinks to yours. Each of those backlinks counts as a vote in the search engine popularity contest to say, “Hey, that’s a good website. Show it higher.”
Back in 2011 and prior, you used to be able to manipulate search results based on quantity backlinks over quality. Search engines started to catch on and went, “all right, we need to put that in check.” That immediately flipped the value of backlinks from quantity to quality.
Back in the day, you used to be able to do thousands of backlinks from low quality directories and just crush it. Nowadays, directories can do more harm than good.
If you find yourself in a Google penalty, what you want do is go through and scrub your backlinks. There are a lot of tools out there that you can use to qualify the quality of your backlinks.
So just search something like “backlink quality checker” or “backlink disavow tools.”
A software that my team uses to audit backlinks is called SEO SpyGlass (referral link).
Use these tools to go through and manually review your backlinks.
Any that are automated forums, signature backlinks, link directories, social media bookmarks, just automatically disavow those.
What I mean by disavow is if you just search Google Disavow, they came out with a tool that says, “Hey Google, I know these links exist, but I don’t wanna associate myself with them. So can you distance my website from them?”
Why did Google come out with this tool?
Google inadvertently created what’s called negative SEO when they rolled out their Google Penguin algorithm update back in 2011.
What happened is when they rolled out this tool, all of a sudden a bunch of people got crushed and then other guys went, “Oh, well if I can’t beat the competition fairly, let’s cheat.” Then they started throwing a bunch of bad backlinks at the competition. And so they started showing up higher.
There’s a quote, I’m gonna totally butcher it, but it’s like “There are two ways to have the tallest building in a city. One is to build the tallest building and the other is to knock down all the other ones.”
People just started knocking down all the other buildings, websites, by sending a bunch of bad backlinks to them.
And a ton of websites got crushed and a bunch of SEOs went out of business because they didn’t know how to solve the problem.
What Google came out with is they went, “Oh crap, We kind of inadvertently created this other issue now.”
And in the meantime there was no way to resolve it. There was a good nine to 12 months where if you got penalized, there was nothing to do.
Then Google came out this tool basically saying, “Okay, okay, okay, if you are being negatively SEO attacked, or if you just wanna clean up your own portfolio, here’s a tool now.”
What you do is you create a list of all the links that you no longer want to be associated with. You upload the disavow to Google Search Console and you say, please distance myself from these, and you acknowledge them.
Google will factor that in, and then it’ll kind of devalue any negative impact from any old school, low-quality links.
Some people will say, don’t even bother with those because Google takes care of itself and no longer looks at negative links and only rewards positive ones.
I don’t know about that. I get the argument, but my mindset is, so long as Google has a tool available, you should use it. If you can send those signals to Google and say, “Hey, these links are old, they’re no longer value added.” Then I don’t think it will do any harm in acknowledging those links.
There you have it, two ways, two of the most common Google penalties, and that’s how you recover from them.
