Google Penalty Recovery — Find Out What Actually Happened to Your Rankings

This is the most common one. The site used to rank, then the rankings started sliding, and the owner has no idea why. The content is perfectly fine. But when you go through the backlink profile there are dozens or hundreds of spammy links, bought from sites whose only purpose is selling domain authority.

Under the current Google updates, that kind of profile pulls your rankings down. Read our take on understanding Google penalties.

A lot of ranking drops are technical, and nobody realises. Here is a real one we have seen more than once. A dev team builds the new site on a subdomain and puts a noindex tag on it so Google doesn't crawl it while it's being built. Perfectly sensible. Then they migrate it to the live domain and forget to take the noindex off. It ends up on the homepage, and Google is now blocked from crawling and indexing the entire site.

No penalty. No warning in Search Console. Just a site quietly invisible to Google.

Clients often come to us convinced their keywords are well placed, and then we find heavy keyword stuffing done by whoever had the site before. That sort of thing ranks for a few weeks, maybe a few months, and then it drops, because it goes against Google's guidelines.

This one hits local businesses. Agencies buy reviews, or pay people on Freelancer and Upwork to leave them. Google has been removing those at scale. We have had people come to us after their Google Business Profile reviews were taken down, thousands of them, all at once.

And sometimes it genuinely is a penalty. A manual action shows up as a notification in Google Search Console, telling you what Google flagged. An algorithmic drop doesn't notify you at all, you just watch the rankings go after an update rolls out.

We go through your links one at a time. We check the spam score of each site, and why it has one, and how relevant that link actually is to your business. There are a lot of sites out there whose entire purpose is to manipulate the web, and you don't want links from them.

Where we can, we go to the webmaster and ask for the link to be removed, because a removed link is better than a disavowed one. Where we can't, we build the disavow file and submit it through Google Search Console so Google ignores those links when it judges your site.

We don't over-disavow. Throwing your legitimate links into the disavow file will slow your recovery down, so we only disavow what is genuinely toxic.

If the content is thin, duplicated, stuffed with keywords, or churned out by AI, that has to be dealt with. We rewrite it properly, with a human writer, and we run it through Originality.ai so we know it reads as human. Google's recent core updates have been demoting mass-produced AI content, so this matters more than it used to.

Crawl errors, noindex tags where they shouldn't be, broken canonicals, redirect loops. Our own dev team handles it. See our technical SEO work.

If there is a genuine manual action, once everything is fixed we put together the reconsideration request for Google: what was wrong, what we did about each thing, and the evidence. Google doesn't always approve it first time, and we'll tell you that upfront rather than pretend otherwise.