What to do when things go wrong in SEO
In the world of search engine optimisation (SEO), sometimes things go wrong. If you have experienced in disbelief the dread of your site going offline, a drop in search engine rankings or other SEO disasters, don’t panic. Some of these things happen even when you are using the right SEO methods. Panicking is the wrong thing to do when things go wrong in SEO. In this article, we have highlighted some of the things you can do to get your site back on track.
1. Perform a thorough diagnosis
If your site is not receiving targeted traffic or experiencing a significant drop in search engine rankings, it could be a sign of a sick website. You, therefore, need to diagnose what the problems are. There are several website diagnostic tools you can use to test your website performance and find possible problems. For instance, Google Search Console can help you find crawling problems, security issues or penalties your website may have.
2. Recover from manual penalties
A manual penalty is when a human reviewer has determined that some of your website pages or content is not compliant with Google’s webmaster quality. Some of the typical manual penalties reported include unnatural links, user-generated spam, sneaky redirects, thin content, and many others. Once you have received a message within the Google Search Console informing you about a manual penalty, you need to determine the cause and attempt to solve the problem.
3. Recover from algorithmic penalties
Google uses algorithms such as Panda and Penguin to determine websites with poor quality and then slaps them with a penalty. Algorithmic penalties bring practical impacts such as a drop in your traffic. Since you are not notified about an algorithm penalty within Search Console, you need first to figure out what the problem is and then look for ways to remedy the problem. For instance, you can clean up link related problems, remove duplicate content or remove content Google doesn’t like.
4. Deal with other types of penalties
Many other penalties can make things go wrong in SEO. Some of these penalties arise from deceiving search engines to more advanced forms of black hat SEO. They include the use of sneaky redirects, keyword stuffing, user-generated spam, unnatural links from your site, and much more.
Get in touch
If you find these practices are a challenge for you, Epic New Media is a full-service digital marketing agency in Liverpool and Manchester that can help you out. We have helped many marketing managers and business owners bridge a large search engine optimisation gap between them and their target audience. Feel free to contact us for more information.