Penalty Recovery

To prevent intentional or incidental gaming or abuse of search algorithms, search engines impose penalties on websites that attempt to manipulate search results using black hat search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques. Websites infracted with search engine penalties typically face massive demotions in their search ranking, and in extreme cases, whole websites may even be deindexed from search engines. The length of the penalty can also vary from a few months to permanently. Either way, the result is a drastic drop in visitors to the affected websites, which could sound the death knell for businesses.

Penalties are imposed for a reason, and at Highlanderweb.co.uk, we conduct comprehensive forensic analyses of infracted websites to determine the cause. These analyses include, but are not limited to:

• Unnatural Backlinks: In their eagerness to acquire backlinks, many webmasters engaged the services of link spammers who create backlinks from low-quality websites. In some instances, even links from high authority sites are penalised owing to the velocity of link accumulation (the acquisition of a massive number of backlinks over a short period of time).

• Anchor Link Abuse: Anchor links, i.e., phrases that are hyperlinked from referring websites, are one of the most important signals for search algorithms. When used indiscriminately, however, they trigger penalties from search engines as they devalue genuine, organic anchor links.

• Thin or Duplicate Content: Websites which predominantly uses plagiarised content will be penalised once they cross a certain threshold (which is determined by Google). On rare occasions, websites whose thin contents provide little added value and weighed with keyword spam are also infracted.

• Hidden Texts: Using hidden text (invisible to human eyes) using colours or codes to trick search engines.

• Cloaking/Redirects: Deceptive content that tricks search engines to direct human visitors which are then redirected to another site or served a different content.

Give us a call today to find out more about our penalty recovery services.