Are you experiencing traffic losses or a decrease in rankings? You may have suffered a manual penalty. Here’s what to do and how to recover.

With up to 5,000 reconsideration requests per week, you can imagine that Google isn’t being too frugal with their manual penalties. Even if you have managed to escape the algorithm updates, your site still may receive a manual penalty if it doesn’t adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Suspect your site has been hit? Here’s how to know for sure and more importantly, how to recover.

Have you been hit?

If you see a drop in traffic, a decrease in your website’s performance, or notice that your website isn’t coming up in the search results at all, it indicates that you may have been slapped with a manual penalty. Unless you’ve received a notice from Google itself, the next step is to check the Manual Action page in your Webmaster Tools account to confirm a penalty.

If you do have a penalty, Google will list whether the penalty affects the entire site (site-wide matches) or just specific URLs (partial matches), along with reasons that you may have received the penalty.

Identifying the issue

If the manual action is listed, you have a pretty good idea of where to dive in and begin fixing. If not, you’ll have to do a site audit and look for anything that doesn’t follow Google’s quality standards. Some of the most common things to look for are:

Unnatural links to your website

What to look for: If you’ve engaged in buying links or exchanging links, it’s very likely this could be the reason you’ve been penalized. Use Webmaster Tools to download a list of links that point to your website and review them for quality. You’ll want to look for spam sites that are linking to yours and also look at the anchor text of the backlink to see if it is natural.

How to fix it: Make a list of the links that violate Google’s guidelines and contact the webmaster asking to have the link removed, or a rel=”nofollow” tag added to the link so that it does not pass PageRank. For any spam links that you cannot get removed, you can use the Disavow Tool in Webmaster Tools. However, use the Disavow Tool only as your last resort and be careful when disavowing links to be sure you don’t accidentally disavow quality links that are actually helping your rankings.

Unnatural links from your website

What to look for: Unnatural links from your website can also result from link purchasing, link exchanges or distributing content containing backlinks at mass scales. Comb through your website for links that have been purchased, are involved in a link exchange or have been distributed at large scales in articles or press releases.

How to fix it: Once you’ve identified links that violate quality guidelines, you can either remove the links from your website completely or use the rel=”nofollow” tag to the links.

Hidden text or keyword stuffing

What to look for: To look for hidden text, you can select all text on each page to look for any text that is the same color as the background. You can also Fetch as Google to look for any content that is visible to the search engines, but not to users. To identify keyword stuffing, check your title tags, meta descriptions and content for excessive use of repetitive keyword phrases.

How to fix it: If you find any hidden text within your website, remove it, or make sure that is visible so that users can see it as well. Remove any excessive keyword phrases and aim to create content that sounds and is visible for users who view your website.

Thin content

What to look for: If you have very minimal content on a page, or content that is not valuable to users (like duplicate or automatically generated content) this could be grounds for a penalty. You can look for duplicate content across the web with a tool like Copyscape.

How to fix it: Every page on your website should have valuable and original content that is useful to users. Any pages that have very little to offer, should have the rel=”noindex” tag added to them, so that they will not be indexed in the search results. Sometimes you can’t avoid having very similar pages. Say for instance, you sell a certain T-shirt and it comes in several colors, each color having a separate page. If that’s the case, you should use the rel=”canonical” tag to identify the authoritative page.

The road to resubmission

Once you have identified the issue, make a detailed account of all of the actions you’re taking to resolve it. Show Google exactly which links you’ve removed, what content you’ve added or which tags you’ve implemented. The more detailed you can be, the better. Once you’ve thoroughly looked through your website and taken care of any issues that violate the guidelines, you can request reconsideration for your website.

After Google has reviewed your website, you will receive a message in your Webmaster Tools account. If you have resolved the issue and your site is no longer in violation of the guidelines, the penalty will be revoked. If they’re still seeing an issue, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and conduct a deeper analysis of your website. The road to resubmission can be a rocky one, but cleaning up your site will benefit you in the long run, creating a better experience for you, your users and the search engines.

If you believe your site has a manual penalty and aren’t sure which steps to take, contact us for a free evaluation of your website.

Submitted by Erica Machin, Titan Growth

Questions about SEO? Get them answered here:

So, you are considering SEO or are doing it currently, but have some burning SEO questions about the hows and whys of this digital strategy. Here are the answers to some of the most frequently asked SEO questions.

1. How much does SEO cost?

SEO can vary greatly in price depending on who is offering the service, and there is a large price disparity for a reason. Companies who offer SEO at very low prices usually tend to cut corners, use ‘black-hat’ techniques or use improper SEO strategy, resulting in penalties, decreases in traffic and spam for unsuspecting business owners. Agency prices tend to run higher, but you are paying for their experience, ethics, and effectiveness.

Consider the yearly price it would cost to do SEO yourself:

SEO strategist:                   $100,000 +
Coder/Developer:                $55,000 +
Technologist:                       $50,000 +
Coordinator/Reports:       $40,000 +
Salaries/Fees:             $245,000 +

Pricing for a comprehensive in-house SEO strategy can easily run upwards of $245K per year for small or medium-sized businesses. Agencies can offer their resources, expertise, and team for a lower cost than it would take to maintain an in-house team and involves less risk than outsourcing to a cheaper company.

2. Once I start SEO, how long will it take to get rankings?

SEO isn’t an overnight strategy. The first few months are dedicated to making updates to your site and waiting for the search engine spiders to crawl and index the changes. Depending on your website, the amount of work it requires, and the crawl frequency of the search engine spiders, it typically takes 3-9 months to begin seeing new rankings.

3. How long will it take to see increases in traffic with SEO?

Traffic is typically a direct result of an increase in rankings. Once your rankings begin to increase, you will also begin to see gradual increases in traffic to your website. Keep in mind that new rankings and traffic are not instantaneous, it takes a few months to complete the necessary updates and get them indexed before you will begin to see these increases.

4. Should I also do PPC?

Pay Per Click is a great additional strategy to supplement your SEO efforts and can help enhance relevant traffic. Depending on your particular website, industry and the competitiveness of the keywords you want to go after, a good agency will recommend PPC on a case-per-case basis.

5. Why should I continue SEO once I’ve gotten good rankings?

Achieving the rankings is only half the battle. Since the search engines are constantly evolving and updating their algorithms, your rankings can fluctuate from one day to the next. Maintaining current rankings is just as involved as getting new ones; it takes constant research, updates, and testing to keep your URL ranking in the top positions. Discontinuing SEO after you’ve achieved rankings will result in a loss of rankings fairly quickly.

6. Can’t we just buy links?

Although link building can be an important aspect of SEO, purchased links and links from spammy websites or ‘bad neighborhood’ sites can actually hurt your rankings rather than help. Search engines are constantly looking out for links like these. In fact, Google’s ‘Penguin’ series of algorithm updates is geared primarily towards penalizing sites who obtain links unnaturally through link exchange schemes and purchasing links or have links from spam sites. A recovery from a link penalty is not an easy one and can result in significant traffic losses.

7. Can you guarantee my rankings with SEO?

Ethical SEO agencies cannot guarantee something they can’t control and beware of any company that claims they can. There is no way to know 100% how a site will rank because of the search engine’s constantly evolving nature and to guarantee rankings would be unethical. Also, beware of companies claiming they have a special relationship with Google or can ‘priority submit’ to Google to guarantee ranking positions. This is completely false and untrue, and Google itself warns against companies that make these claims.

8. Can you get me ranked for general terms like ‘lawyer’?

General terms are highly competitive and would be extremely costly to rank for based on the time and resources it would take to achieve rankings for a term that broad. Another reason we advise against going after terms that broad is relevancy. If you are a lawyer in Wisconsin, traffic from Arizona probably isn’t that relevant to your business. It is more cost effective and pragmatic to go after terms that relate to the location of your business.

9.  Which Search Engines receive the majority of searches?

Google obtains the majority of search traffic, with about 67% total searches. Bing comes in second with about 17%, then Yahoo with roughly 12% and the remaining Search Engines all total about 4%.

10. How often do the Search Engines update their algorithm or search equation?

Only the techs behind the search engines know this answer for sure, but Google’s head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, has been quoted saying that more than 500 updates are made each year. Since the search engines are constantly evolving and changing, it is crucial to stay on top of the changes, make constant updates on our end, and only use strategies that are ethical and sustainable.

Keep these common SEO questions and answers in mind as you build your digital strategy. If you have any additional questions about SEO that we did not answer in this article, or would like a free SEO consultation for your website, please contact us.

Submitted by Erica Machin, Titan Growth

Titan Growth is proud to announce that President Danny Shepherd has been chosen as one of the Metro Movers to watch in 2014 by San Diego Metro Magazine, and is featured in the publication’s February issue. For the past nine years, the Metro Mover annual award has recognized San Diego’s finest movers and shakers through a highly competitive selection process. The sixteen men and women who were named were chosen because of their “outstanding contributions to their professions and are poised to add to their achievements in 2014”, as described in the publication. Titan Growth is honored to have one of our own selected be among those named this year.

Danny Shepherd, a graduate of SDSU, actively invests in and helps to fund early-stage companies as an Angel Investor with Tech Coast Angels. In 2004 Danny founded Titan Growth, which was recently recognized as an Inc. 5000 Company for the fourth year in a row. Titan Growth has been selected to be among the trusted Google Agency Partners and ensures that every employee achieves certification for Google Adwords Fundamentals, Google Adwords Advanced, and Google Analytics. In addition, Danny donates funding and SEO support for Fresh Start Surgical Gifts. Fresh Start is an organization that transforms the lives of disadvantaged youth with physical deformities through the gift of reconstructive surgery and related healthcare services. Danny, described by many as focused and enthusiastic, is committed to supporting the San Diego community both personally and professionally.