Because Google drives so much online traffic, getting penalized by the search engine giant can be a major blow. A Google penalty can drop your search ranking considerably (or drop you from search results completely). 
If you have been penalized by Google, there are steps you can take to potentially get the penalty removed.
How to Know You've Been Penalized
There are two different types of Google penalties: manual and automatic (or algorithmic).
- Manual penalties are imposed by Google employees. They are generally in response to black hat SEO tactics, whether by you or by someone else. Google will alert you to any manual penalties through Webmaster Tools.
- Automatic penalties are those that arise through the normal functioning of Google's ranking algorithms. They can be caused by negative SEO attacks, but they do not generate alerts. You only find out you've been penalized when your search traffic drops.
Determining Why You've Been Penalized
If you have been penalized by Google, the first thing you have to do is determine what caused the penalty.
This is not always easy to do. Even with a manual penalty alert, Google does not tell you exactly what the problem is. You will need to do some detective work and make some educated guesses.
Items that can get your site penalized include:
- Spam backlinks. These are links back to your site that appear unnatural (they seem like an attempt to influence Google's ranking system) or that come from low-quality sites known for spam.
- Over-optimized anchor text. One of the factors used to identify spam backlinks is if the links all use the same anchor text. Though having keywords as anchor text is a good thing, too much of a good thing appears unnatural.
- Sudden increase in backlinks. If you usually get a few links per day, and then you suddenly get thousands in one day, it may look suspiciously like spam.
- All page links. If every single page on a website has links back to your site, Google may penalize that as a bad tactic.
- Duplicate content. Having duplicate content can hurt your algorithm rankings.
- Low-quality content. Having a lot of junk content on your site will hurt your rankings and may get you labeled as a low-quality or spam site.
Get Rid of the Penalty's Cause
Once you have identified the problem, you need to fix it. For bad backlinks, you will have to contact the sites and ask for the links to be removed. For duplicate or low-quality content on your own site, you can remove the offending pages yourself.
File a Reconsideration Request
After fixing the problem, you can appeal to Google to remove the penalty. You do this through a Google reconsideration request. The request can take weeks to process, and the penalty will only be removed if Google decides you have sufficiently fixed whatever it was that caused the penalty.
Using the Disavow Tool
If your reconsideration request is denied due to bad links that you could not get removed, you can use the Google Disavow Tool to request that the links not be counted against you. This is considered a last resort, and you should be very careful about using it.
By getting the penalty removed and working to improve your site's positive SEO attributes, you can eventually regain that valuable high search ranking on Google.
* Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
