For those who were hit over the years, what is some step by step guide that can get you back ranking again?
I think it all depends on how bad or 'blackhat' your site strategy was. I cannot provide a guide or even say that one exists with step by step guidance, but a few pointers are to look at what exactly caused you to get penalized. If you added too many poor quality backlinks and guests posts, remove those. If there is a saturation of keywords on your pages, fix that. In my humble opinion, if your site is too far damaged, it is usually best to de-index all the pages, re-edit and update the content or reviews and start a new site. This of course is just my opinion but I am sure there are many other ways to go about it that I don't know much on. Also, nowadays I suggest everyone around me to stick with the policies for one reason. All of my websites that have stood the test of time and are still making profit for me, have all been straight forward, slow to grow but without extensive or questionable SEO work, so if you have some really good content, it may be a good idea to start a new website altogether. Hope this helps
I will sum up all the work and tell the basic which is the most important. 1. Check out webmaster tool for any message. There you will see if they warned for any unnatural backlinks activity. 2. Start checking all backlinks and save them into a xls file.. 3. Start disavow them. 4. Wait 1-2 updates to recover the lost traffic which can be 1-2 (6-12 months) 5. Meanwhile don't stop the good work (creating good content - sharing etc) 6. Similar when you got de-indexed - this is the case when you violated Google policy. Either you can lose all traffic or partial traffic. Depends. 7. Don't stop the work if you want to recover! Hope it helps, Matt
The process that you have explained is perfect! Also make a note of the sources of the irrelevant backlinks. This will help you to avoid getting links from those websites again.
Check webmaster tool for manual penalties. If no manual penalties are recorder --> there must be an alghoritmic penalty. Either the backlink profile is screwed - in which case you can disavow them, but that will take months, better and more reliable is to try to remove them manually by contacting webmasters and etc.. - or perhaps your on page is a little bit off and you have an overoptimisation penalty.
This is how I fix penalties. 1. Check and see what kind of penalty, if link penalty keep reading. You can check link penalties by using Webmaster Tools for manual penalty or the Panguin tool to check for algorithm. 2. I check links with http://linkdelete.com tool. If I have more than 30% bad links ratio I then use service to reduce my bad link ratio below 30%. 3. After removing the links I then disavow the ones that won't be removed after 2 tries. I only disavow the ones where site owners don't remove links. I tried disavow links that I didn't try and remove and disaovw didn't work. I think Google knows which sites remove links and which don't. 4. I then wait a bit and start building unoptimized links.
Depends on what you've been slapp with. Best way is to check the PR of your site. If the page is showing a PR of ?, then kiss it goodbye. I've seen people recommend deleting the page/post and also just going to a new domain. If your main domain has been slapped, then I'd personally just ditch the domain and start again. However, if you still have a page rank, then copy and paste some of the text from your content and run it through Google. If you show up on the first page near the top, then nothing wrong with your content. However, if you aren't on the first page, then you need to either rewrite the content and/or delete the content and try again. I've seen people now recommending that content needs to be written from a "perspective". So, if you run a site related to cars, then what sort of perspective are you writing from? My understanding of this is basically putting yourself in the shoes of your target demographic and writing from their point of view.
@moneykrap. Great piece of information regarding recovery from Google Penguin. Coming to Google Panda, you need to check that you have quality content on your site. Remove thin content pages. Make content that is share able and unique. Also, you need to address duplicate content issues both internal and external. You need to ensure that you content is not copied. If you feel that someone has copied your content, then you should file a Google DMCA against that site.
Depents on the penalty I guess because in some cases there are no steps to follow. Don't have a lot of experience with this, never have been banned or received penalties.