Perhaps, this is a question bothering a large number of website owners recently. While you’re busy brainstorming ideas to recover your website from the “Penguin 2.1” hit, we have analysed some points that might help you in your attempt.

Steps to undo Google’s penalty

• Identify Toxic Links: – Assess the quality of your back links. This can be done either using Google’s back link analysis tool or performing a manual check for each site. Use Google Webmaster is the fundamental tool to check the quality of back links.

Download the back links from Google webmaster as shown in the screenshot below.

How to recognize bad links?

The following type of back links could be harmful for your website.

• Paid links
• Site wide links (Multiple links from same domain)
• Large number of optimized anchor text links (Exact match anchor text)
• Irrelevant theme links
• Links from adult websites
• Spam comments

• Send Requests for Bad Links Removal: – Send link removal requests to webmasters and get offending links removed from your website. Find and contact the webmasters of the spam sites, requesting removal of the links. Recording every contact for future webmaster disavows submission (if needed) is also recommended.

Time for some smart work! Make a spreadsheet containing the following data before disavow submissions.

• Website Name/URL
• Link URL (Unnatural Link)
• Anchor Text
• Contact Mail ID/Owner Name

The above data will prove that you have taken some serious measures to cleanup your website when checked manually for spam actions.

• Disavow the Remaining Links: – Check if, all unnatural links are removed from the site. Try to remove as many bad links as possible through the reconsideration requests as Google likes to see what you’ve done to free your website from spam links. If some of the bad links are still existing, submit them via the disavow tool.

Here’s the snapshot showing how to submit text file in disavow tool. 

Click here for Disavow Tool. Select the website for which you want to submit disavow text file from the drop down menu.

• Keep an Eye on Website’s Performance: – Track your website’s ranking. Google will take some time to a) process Disavow and reconsideration requests, and b) index all your back links. This may take several weeks to months for Google to lift the penalties. Meanwhile, keep checking keyword ranking, traffic and impressions (in webmaster tool under search queries section as shown in the screenshot below).

• Replace the Bad with the Good: – Now that all bad links are removed or disavowed, you will see a decline in your link count. So, prepare yourself for some research and find better quality links from a variety of sources using varied anchor text.

If you are still confused about how to recover your website from the “Penguin” then, contact us and get started now.