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Step-by-step tutorial on how to detect and fix Google penalty

The reasons for the need to fix the Google penalty

If a website is fined and penalized by Google, if you don’t act on time, all the efforts made for that website may be lost. Because the page or pages of the site will be downgraded to the final results of Google and practically no user can see it anymore. In the following, you can see the reasons for the site being penalized in Google and how to remove the Google penalty for each of them in a comprehensive and step-by-step manner. It will be possible to check the details of this incident through the manual actions section of the Google search console.

If you are the owner of a blog, forum, social network or membership site with public profiles, you may experience a site penalty based on the behavior of your website visitors and members. User-generated spam can include blog comments, forum posts, and profiles that are spammy in nature. According to the size of the website, the number of users and the amount of content posted by the user, you may have a difficult path ahead of you to resolve the Google penalty.

In order to remove the Google penalty regarding spam: you must first read the instructions of Google Webmaster regarding spam. Then follow the steps below to identify and correct your violation:

Users can usually add content to your website in forums, blog comments and profiles. Identify pages where users can post content.
Look for profiles whose usernames are advertising or posts that are made with the purpose of advertising or linking to topics outside the scope of the website.
To discover spam content, you can search for your desired keyword in Google after site:example.com to see if spam is displayed on your site with this keyword or not.
Any inappropriate content on your website should be removed in order to remove the Google penalty.
Once you have ensured that there is no more spam content on your website, it is time to submit a review request to Google through your search console.

1.The hosting service is spammed

If your website is hosted by a server that has a lot of spam sites on it, your website may also be considered as one of those sites and be penalized by Google.

In such a situation, it is better to proceed in the following way to remove the Google penalty:

You should contact your web hosting service provider and inform them about your site being penalized due to spam content placed on the hosting. Ask them to solve this problem as soon as possible. You can also transfer your website to a reliable and reliable server so that you don’t face such a problem again or even change your web hosting company.
After solving the problem, in order to remove the Google penalty, you should send your appeal to Google using your search console account and wait for it to review the issue.

2. Problems related to structured data

If Google determines that some of the structured data placed on your website violates Google’s markup guidelines, it will penalize your website. For example, misleading irrelevant markup is used or structured data created by users is not visible.

Fixing the problems of the site being penalized due to structured data: in this case, to fix the Google penalty, you should proceed as follows:

Make sure that the markup used on your website complies with the guidelines provided by Google. You may have to update or delete the used structured data along the way.
After applying the desired changes to remove the Google penalty, register a review request in your search console. If Google ensures that the problem is fixed, it will remove the penalty.

3. Unnatural links to the website

This penalty occurs when unnatural links are given to your website. Regarding these links, Google takes two procedures.

In the first case, Google’s diagnosis is that the control of unnatural links is out of your reach. And In such a case, without applying any penalty, it only asks you to remove the links that you can control.
In the second case, Google believes that you have used this link building to deceive the search engine. The result is a downgrade in Google results and a penalty.

Proceed as follows to remove the Google penalty in this regard:

After reading Google Webmaster’s instructions regarding link building, download the list of links given to your website through the Links section of the Google search console.
Then check which of them violated Google’s rules and caused the site to be penalized by Google.
Then contact the administrator of the website and ask them to remove the given links or to nofollow them. You can also use disavow links in Google Search Console to disable links that you cannot remove.
After deleting or disabling the desired links, send a review request through the Google search console and wait for Google’s review.

4. Unnatural links from the website

Another problem that can lead to a site being penalized in Google in the field of link building is wrong link building on the website itself. In this case, Google recognizes that you have used unnatural links on your website.

5. Displaying short and low-value content on the site

Google generally seeks to provide valuable content to its users. As a result, if it detects that your page or pages are producing short and low-value content, it will easily penalize them.

Low-value content usually falls into one of the following categories:

Content that is generated automatically.
Low volume affiliate pages
Content copied from other sources.

In order to remove the Google penalty in this field, you must follow the following steps:

Identify and remove copied content placed on the website, low-volume content, and automatically generated content.
As in the previous methods, send your review request and attach examples of worthless content that you have deleted to this request.

6. Cloaking and sneaky redirects

Penalization of the site in Google due to cloaking and sneaky redirects can be in two ways:

In the first case, you show content to Google, but you have limited the possibility of viewing it for users.
The second case, the indexed pages of your website redirect users to pages that are different from the page that has been viewed and indexed by Google.

In such a situation, it is recommended to follow the following path to remove the Google penalty:

Use Google search console url inspection to see the affected indexed pages.
Compare the content that is indexed with the content that is displayed to users.
If the content is different, identify and delete the different part.
Also identify and check the links that redirect to different pages of your website.
Next, send the appeal and wait for Google’s review to remove the Google penalty.

7. Pure spam

This is one of the reasons for the site being penalized in Google, including many of the problems that have been mentioned one by one. For this reason, one should be very careful in the field of problems that eventually lead to the site being penalized in Google.

To remove the Google penalty due to pure spam, proceed as follows:

The only way to remove the Google penalty is to remove spam pages and links. Update your site to make your instructions available.
Once you are sure that none of the guidelines are being violated, submit a review request and wait for the result.

8. Cloaking images

If your website images in Google results are different from what is visible on the website, Google will penalize you. Cloaking is actually trying to show search engines different content than what is displayed to users.

To remove the Google penalty, make sure that:

The images that are displayed in search engines are exactly the same images that users see.
After identifying and removing these images, file a review request and wait for Google to review the situation.

9. Hidden content and frequent keywords

If Google determines that keywords are not displayed to users or that they are used excessively to optimize the website, it will penalize the site. This can also happen when a website is hacked by malware.

To remove the Google penalty in this regard, proceed as follows:

Use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection to check which website content is visible to search engines but not to users.
Find texts that have the same or similar color.
Find any hidden content on the website that is designed with CSS.
Remove hidden content or rewrite it in a style that can be seen and read by users.
Check the lists or paragraphs in which the words are repeated without any context and in a very clear way.
Next, check and change the <title> and alt tags of the text for repeated words.
Finally, remove these or other similar keywords.

Once you are sure that the problem is fixed, submit the appeal and wait for Google to review it.

10. Mismatch between the content of the AMP version and the canonical page of the site

Google will penalize you when there is a difference between the AMP version and the canonical web page. The text of the content of the AMP version and the canonical web page do not need to be exactly the same, but they should be the same in terms of content and users should be able to do the same thing in both cases. When this problem occurs, the AMP version will no longer be displayed in the results and the canonical page will be visible instead.