How to Remove a Massive Google Penalty in 5 Easy Steps

It may be surprising to some business owners that a Google penalty from spammy backlinks can greatly affect their SEO and, in time, can greatly affect their business. For those who may not be familiar with what link building is, it is links on the internet that form a relationship between pages and sites that are important to both search engines and marketers. For instance, Google uses links to crawl the web, discover new pages, calculate the popularity of those pages, and also determine the relevancy of results to a searcher’s query.

So, you can only guess how important it is to link to a reputable website. Tandem Interactive is constantly checking and ensuring the quality of a perfect link.  But, for those who have been suffering from a manual Google penalty from spammy backlinks, here are 5 steps to recovery.

1. Creating a penalty removal sheet. 
The first step needed is to collect all incoming links pointing to your business’ website. When doing this, it is important to download all links from Google Search Console. The process is fairly simple and it involves supplementing with links from Majestic.com and sorting them on a simple Excel spreadsheet.

2. Identifying artificial links. 
Distinguishing artificial links is your next step. Unnatural links can include spammy keyword articles, link directories, bookmarks, blog comments, malware, guest posts, keyword footer links, and scrapers. Typically anything where content exists to influence rankings more than genuine content. Also, unreliable link directories or places where key-word stuffing is involved, or even giveaway links where users leave comments in return for a chance to win paid services are generally artificial.

3. Submission to Google. 
Once submitted, Google will start the process of revoking the penalties and will return links that are deemed artificial by Google. The Webspam Team will show you specific links that were sent, that are deemed official by Google.

4. Identifying the Returned links. 
If Google returns with links that are artificial, then it is best to go over these links and ensure that they are official and okay to link to. Distinguishing good links from bad links can be difficult, but general rule of thumb for Link Building at Tandem Interactive is: if it looks spammy then it is!

5. Second Submission. 
The last and final step is to submit the corrected links and any other explanations. In return, Google will revoke all penalties.