Google has recently provided valuable insights into a crucial update, shedding light on essential strategies to navigate through potential penalties. This article aims to delve deeper into the actions you can take to recover effectively from such penalties, particularly focusing on SEO considerations. To understand what the penalty was all about – Google has written an in-depth writeup which you can find here.
How to Know if You are Impacted Due to March 2024 Penalty
Before delving into recovery strategies, it’s crucial to recognize the signs indicating that your website has been penalised:
- Absent from Search Results: Your website fails to appear in search results for most non-brand keywords, signalling a significant drop in visibility.
- Decrease in Impressions: A substantial decline in impressions, often exceeding 90%, is another indicator of a penalty affecting your website.
Impact Assessment
Understanding the scope of the penalty is vital for formulating an effective recovery plan:
- Comprehensive Impact: The penalty affects all aspects of your website, except for brand-related terms and exceptionally high click-through rate (CTR) terms.
- Site-Wide Effect: It’s essential to realize that the penalty doesn’t discriminate; it impacts the entire website, including pages generated programmatically.
Recovery Strategy
Recovering from a Google penalty requires a systematic approach and diligent execution of remedial measures:
- De-index Programmatically Generated Pages: Identify and de-index pages that are created programmatically and lack substantial value to users.
- Utilize De-indexing API: Leverage de-indexing APIs to swiftly remove flagged URLs from the sitemap, aiding in the restoration process.
Timeline of Recovery
Yes, you can recover. The duration for recuperation post-implementation of corrective measures varies based on several factors – the biggest of which is crawl budget.
The speed of recovery hinges on the crawl budget allocated to your website by search engine crawlers. Larger websites may witness a faster recovery, typically within 3-4 days post-implementation of fixes. Conversely, smaller websites might experience a longer recovery period, extending up to a month.
