Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/first-3-steps-receiving-manual-penalty/142105/
There are lot of listed ways to resolve the problem of having a manual penalty but only a few discuss the mindset and techniques to recover from it. Most users respond rapidly without even understanding the reason for the penalty given.
Yes, manual penalties can really hurt your rankings but it can be more practical and reasonable if you follow these three steps to help you recover from it:
1. Do not overthink. Relax and cool down your frustration.
Take note that manual penalties are handed down by real humans that are monitoring web activities online. Google has a team of specialized people that are put specifically on your niche. Rather than responding rapidly to the penalty, you should stay calm. Remember that manual penalty takes to time to recover. This may take a couple of weeks or even months. These penalties can be lifted and may also expire. Take your time to assess what happened and patch things up slowly but surely.
2. Know what exactly happened.
There could be a lot of reasons why you received this penalty. Penalties are not just being given, there’s a reason behind this. Understand this reason and it will bring you a step closer to finding the solution. Penalties are done algorithmically but remember that there’s a team of humans pressing that “penalty” button. There are 11 manual action penalties that come from Google and three of the most common are unnatural links to your site (impacts links), thin or invaluable content and unnatural links to your site. Once you find out why you have been penalized, it will give you the opportunity to further understand what to do next. These three most common penalties have different ways to resolve them.
3. Evaluate your links.
Since link penalties are considered to be the most common manual penalty, you have to download all your links and start analyzing them. It’s not easy to do analytics but there are online tools that can help you do the trick. Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz are just three of the widely used tools when link analysis is concered. Each of them have different crawling capabilities and use them to compare results.
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