90% of website owners who relieved to have their manual Google penalty finally revoked after weeks of back and forth reconsideration requests, link audit and link removals were surprised when they didn’t see any improvement in the rankings.
Reason is simple.
Backlinks still make the most critical factor that determine rankings and you have already removed and disavowed those hundreds of links.
What? Those were bad and unnatural links!
Yes they were irrelevant and unnatural, but they were still strong links that had your website ranked before penalty.
They left a void when removed which led to no immediate rankings recover or improvement after your Google penalty was lifted.
Second, check your website through Fruition, a wonderful website google penalty checker tool that would scan your website history through various Google updates so far. With some great percentage insights on how your website is affected positively or negatively. You may find the other updates’ impact on your website even if the penalty from an earlier update is removed.
How to improve rankings after penalty is revoked?
First thing first! FOCUS on TRAFFIC. Work on diverse methods that bring relevant and referral traffic to your website. Organic traffic and ranking is indeed important, however, user and social signals count as one of the important factors to determine a website’s worth, authority and rankability in search results.
1- Build Editorial Links:
Use quality guest contributions. Think beyond those small average posts for a link. Contribute whitepapers and guides that can go viral on social media and earn multiple social signals and reputation for your personal and business brand.
2- Be a resource of knowldge:
Create a glossary, video page, knowledge base or a tips page on your website or blog that your industry peers would like to link back and share.
3- Mention influencers & authorities:
This would help your audience get value as well as you earn link love from the authorities you will write about.
4- Create your Google independence:
Search areas where you can focus and get direct targeted traffic. Social media and strategic content marketing is one such method that would not only help you get direct traffic, industry expertise, prospects but also powerful backlinks and rankings.
As you fill up the void created by removed links, you’d see the ranking shot up with more traffic as compared to pre-penalty. Depending upon your niche competition and other onpage factors, it may take 3-6 months to see your rankings coming back and higher.
Tip: Keep a 60:40 ratio for your brand anchors and money keywords anchor diversity.
That’s all from me as a quick morning post and I hope this would give you some homework to do.
Share your thoughts in comments and share the blog on your social channels to help others if it helped you in someway.
Cheers!
Sunita Biddu is a digital business coach and power blogging mentor helping coaches and small business owners. She helps with building a strong and profitable online presence and reputation that creates a self-sustaining business. Sunita writes on this blog once a week about easy-to-use guides and articles about business, coaching, social media and blogging. You can grab some of her free resources and ebooks from the resources section.