Has your website dropped beyond page one on Google? In most cases, it’s simply a natural process and all you need to concern yourself about is retaining some reliable SEO services. In other cases, though it’s a sign of a deeper problem. Either a manual or algorithm penalty is applied by Google. We often have businesses tell us their website was on page one and then all of a sudden it dropped to page 10+ or even nowhere to be seen on Google. This is when they start looking for an SEO expert to help assist them. This sort of search position behaviour is one of the many hallmark signs of a Google Penalty. Penalties are applied to websites by Google when they are found to be violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and best practices.
Any good SEO company will be able to navigate you through the changes that are required to remove a penalty.
There are various technical reasons why Google will apply a penalty to your website, you can read about them here. The real question though is why has it happened to YOU?! In our experience, there are only two reasons why penalties happen.
This question is honestly the first question we get from businesses that have been hit by a Google penalty. The costs attached to starting again will be roughly the same as attempting to fix the website. For example, when you start again you need a new domain name, all your content needs to be re-written and everything that was on the old website needs to be forgotten about otherwise you run the risk of transferring the penalty to the new website or breaking some other Webmaster Guidelines.
It’s impossible to answer this question without knowing what type of website we are dealing with. All you have to do is look at how many rules there are that may trigger a penalty and realise that they will all have different fixes.
TIP: If you are speaking to an SEO about your website penalty and they start talking about disavowing links before auditing the website – RUN! Not every penalty is based on the links a website has. Only an audit of the website, Google Webmaster Tools account, previous data and a thorough account of what happened will tell an SEO what the penalty is and how to rectify the situation.
Unfortunately, the cost varies based on the size of your website and the type of penalty. Some penalties are quick and easy to remove and then some other will require more hands-on work to be removed. In some cases, although a penalty has been removed the website might not bounce back as high as you would like which would then require the attention of a complete SEO campaign – although this time you should give the cheap SEO services a miss!
