If you are a blogger or have your own business, then you know that receiving a Google penalty on your website is one of the biggest setbacks you can suffer. It can significantly reduce your traffic, and today many websites are penalized for violating Google’s guidelines.

Matt Cutts reports that Google performs more than 400,000 manual actions each month. Google penalizes many websites with the use of algorithmic updates such as Penguin and Panda. It is a known fact that only 20,000 webmasters submit a reconsideration request.

Why did they penalize you?

Before finding the solution, you must find out why you were penalized. There can be several reasons for this, and if you see a sudden drop in traffic, you should check if Google is following all the guidelines.

Some of the reasons you could have been penalized are listed below:

• You may have used low-quality backlinks or links. Website backlinks that violate Google guidelines may be liable for your penalty.

• You may have hidden some text from users using CSS.

• You may have used links from adult or gambling websites.

• You may have used duplicate content.

You also need to identify what type of algorithmic penalty you have. You can do this by writing down the periods. You should note the time that your website lost traffic and the time that Google updated its search algorithm.

How to recover from the penalty?

Now, there are many ways to recover from this penalty. It is reported that 95% of all Google penalties are linked to the backlinking profile of the website. Therefore, you must first remove all the bad and cheap backlinks that you have been using on your website.

Now you may need to see if your website has had a Google Penguin update. As if you had a Google Penguin update, you may need to take a look at your anchor text layout. This update often penalizes websites that over-optimize their money keywords.

Another important issue is related to promoting your business and your website. Google is seriously against sponsored content that quickly passes PageRank. If you want to promote your business services on a blog, you must use a nofollow attribute to make your ranking secure.

If you have a website that is entirely content-driven, you may have enabled comments for your content. You know that not all comments are genuine comments, so you need to get rid of those spam comments. Everyone hates spammers and Google knows it. If your website has a lot of spam comments, then your website could be penalized.

Another critical factor is the “niche”. Google places a lot of importance on relevancy. So if you have links from other websites that are not related to your niche, then this is a lousy indication about your website for Google. This will quickly penalize your website.

Well, these were some of the main reasons, as well as the remedies for the penalty. These solutions can help you get your website ranking back.