Think about it: you head to your computer desk in the morning and check your Google Search Console and Google Analytics as you always do. There you see that your traffic has dropped over 75% overnight. It is as dramatic as it may seem, but it has happened to many people. Chances are your website has been hit by the Penguin penalty.
Penguin is Google’s algorithm that targets toxic links. This action can result in a rank demotion or a manual penalty if the links are toxic enough.
You may wonder about the toxic links. These are the links that are against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Whether you acquire these links without knowing their impact, or someone places your website URL in shady websites in a deliberate negative SEO attempt to bring you down, you have got a problem do deal with.
That’s where you have got to work on link mediation to help your website recover from a Penguin penalty.
A Penguin penalty is easy to diagnose. This algorithmic drop results in an instant drop in traffic. Another reason for the instant drop in traffic is that you have removed a page. You will have to be sure about the reason for the drop in the traffic.
Is it an algorithmic devaluation or a manual penalty?
Here is a set of actions that you can perform on Google Analytics to know whether you are experiencing an algorithmic devaluation or manual link penalty.
Click on acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.
Then, click on Organic Search.
Click on Landing Page as the primary dimension.
It will give you a landing page as the specific driver on your site. Using this approach, you can figure what page has lost traffic. You can take steps to correct the problem.
What to do when you have been hit by a manual penalty?
To check whether you have been hit by a manual penalty you are going to have to open Google Search Console. You will see a notification there. This notification will explain manual actions taken against your site.
The good thing is Google Search Console provides instructions regarding what to do if you have been hit by a manual penalty. Work with the spam team on removing problematic links.
If there is a decent quantity of links that your website has, you may have to work a bit extensively to remove links before you can get back into Google’s good books.
The thing is, a manual penalty can be significantly troublesome. The best way is to avoid having one. You are going to have to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines anyway, so it’s better to follow them to avoid a penalty rather than having to work the recovery.