Traffic is the most important factor for online businesses. But what happens if your traffic is being limited due to a penalty. First of all, let us see what causes a penalty. A penalty occurs when your website is negatively affected by an algorithm update or by a manual review team. Accordingly, there are two types of penalties; manual penalty and algorithmic penalty.

A manual penalty occurs when the Google spam team flags your website when you aren’t following the Google webmaster guidelines. Algorithmic penalties are ones those that occur automatically due to the update of a new algorithm. The algorithmic updates like Panda, Penguin, and Mobile-friendliness by Google had a huge impact on the traffic. However algorithmic penalties are harder to identify than manual penalties.

Let us see how can you recover from manual penalties. The main reason for manual penalties is unnatural links. You have to analyze your website and identify backlinks which reduce your traffic. Then you have to take steps to remove them. You can also use Google’s disavow tool in Google console to disavow those links.

Now how can you recover from algorithmic penalties? To identify which algorithmic penalty has affected your website you can check Google algorithm change history. If you are penalized under the panda update, it is better to do a full site search and fix the problem. And if the penalty is due to penguin update, you have to identify the harmful links and remove them or disavow them. If you are penalized by mobile friendliness update then you can test your website with Google mobile testing service, and go ahead with steps to remove the penalty.

The biggest issue of an algorithmic penalty is that the Google runs data refreshers for only once in a few months. And you will get recovered from the penalty when the data refreshers decide that you no longer deserve a penalty.