Drop in search rankings – Reconsideration Request or Fixing Backlinks or scrapping the website?

by Geno Thampi - 6/14/2012 6044 Views

Google Reconsideration Request Is not the only answer for all ranking drops in 2012

Starting 2012, many websites out there have seen search engine ranking drops because of updates to the search engine algorithms. Whenever, there is a drop in rankings, people say “penalty by Google” which I don’t think is the right phrase. The reason for the majority of drops is because Google UPDATED their search engine algorithms for improving the search quality.

These updates were not targeted to specific sites or intended to put up penalties for websites. That being said, there is no point in using Google webmaster tools reconsideration request form to gain the rankings back. However, there is an exclusive form published by Google to report penguin’s mistake. If you think your website is hit by the penguin update mistakenly, you should be using this form.

I got a warning message at webmaster tools about unnatural linking. Isn’t this associated with the penguin update?
At first Google said, there would be an over optimization penalty put up soon. Then they changed the wording and called it as “webspam”. Finally this was confirmed to be an algorithm update and not a penalty. However, Google did combii-SEO

penalize some websites in the mean time for employing blackhat SEO strategies. Such penalized websites were alerted with a warning message sent through the webmaster tools console. So most of these warnings are not about the “penguin update” or simple unnatural link building but a penalty for obvious use of spammy black hat SEO. So if you have received a warning at webmaster tools, you need to stop any blackhat SEO strategies that you have been using and clear the past footprints, then submit a re-consideration request at webmaster tools. However, Matt Cutts did mention that, sometimes you may need to drop your website and start afresh.

Category :

Google

Tags :

Google Penguin update, Google Penguin recovery

About Geno Thampi

Not a born Shakespeare! But I still write articles and blogs to share my ideas and thoughts on SEO and SMO. Being a part of SEO research team of SubmitINme, I keep my ears and eyes open, and the pen ready to grab, write and share trending topics in search engine .... more info about the author