For most online businesses, search engine traffic is very important, but achieving high rankings in Google is not as easy as it used to be. Therefore, many SEOs and marketers are pushing the link-building process to the limit. As a result, many websites are being penalized for violating Google’s guidelines.

According to Matt Cutts, over 400,000 manual actions are being initiated every month by Google. That’s not all. Numerous other websites are being penalized by algorithmic updates such as Penguin and Panda. What’s interesting is that only about 20,000 webmasters are submitting a reconsideration request every month. So, this means that only 5% of the websites that have been penalized are trying to recover their rankings.

Do you own a website that has received a manual or algorithmic penalty? Don’t throw in the towel just yet because I’m going to show you how to recover your lost rankings and traffic.

Why you’ve been penalized
If you suddenly see a traffic drop, you’ll have to find out what caused it. There are two main penalties you can get. The first one is a manual action from Google’s spam team, and the second one is an algorithmic penalty.

1. Manual action – To find out if your website was penalized by a manual action, go to Google Webmaster Tools (Google Search Console) and check to see if you have any new notifications. Below you can see an example of an “unnatural links” message:

Google Webmaster Tools unnatural links message
http://techevangelistseo.com/how-to-recover-from-any-google-penalty/f you have no warning messages on GWT, dig deeper to find the read more