What is the google penalty
Google penalty tends to affect a site’s search ranks where google penalizes sites that have engaged in practices that are against webmaster guidelines that result in drop of ranking and also drop in traffic for the site.
Penalties are caused by backlinks that are manipulative that intends to favour some companies in the search results on other companies , so when such links are added google impose penalties to discourage other companies from following this type of practices, some people believe that but we have another opinion that Google can not penalize the website unless it’s 100% sure that the website owner is the one who has done that so they just assume that those links were purchased by the site owner and then they decide to penalize that site but we strongly disagree with that -
Example
Google has a long history of famous algorithm updates
1- google hummingbird: which Google started using in 2013 and designed to focus on the meaning behind words and paying more attention to each word and ensuring that the whole conversation, sentence or meaning is taken into account rather than specific words
2- in 2015 google released a significant new ranking algorithm that is used to provide mobile-friendly pages google mobile search results it’s being called mobilegeddon and it’s also referred as mobilepocalyse
3- google panda update that was developed in 2011 to keep sites with poor quality content from being in google top search results and it’s being updated from time to time and some sites previously banned may escape if they have made the right changes
4- google then launched google penguin update in 2012 to catch sites that are spanning their search results by buying or obtaining them through links which are designed to boost Google ranking
5- launched in 2014 google pigeon update to provide more useful and accurate local search, the new algorithm improves the distance and location of the ranking
6- developed in 2013 google payday update that its main aim is to clean up search results for traditional spam queries
7- google pirate update introduced in 2012 designed to prevent sites with many copyright infringement reports
8- google exact match domain is a filter google used back in 2012 to prevent poor sites from ranking well just because they have words that match search terms in their domain names when an update occurs sites that have improved their content may regain good ranking
9- launched in 2012 top heavy update is mean to prevent sites with top heavy ads. From ranking well, it’s periodically updated and when an update occurs sites that have removed excessive ads may regain lost ranking.
So if your ranking and web traffic suddenly drops this means that Google has penalized your website but there are several ways for recovering from this penalty like
1- if you have been hit by Penguin then you must analyze your backlink profile and anchor text distribution
2- if your penalty is caused by panda then you must perform a full site audit to look for site structure problems
Once you have performed and completed your recovery plan file a reconsideration request from google and remember to be patient because these requests can be rejected several times before it is granted.