This Guide is all those bloggers and site owners who have seen huge traffic drop in recent time.

1. Step by Step Guide to Recover Your Lost Traffic
By rakesh 12 Commentsf ind us on twitterf ind us on f acebook
Have You seen huge Traf f ic Drop in your traf f ic in recent days? Did you receive an email f rom Google’s
Webmaster inf orming you that your website has been given “manual spam penalty” because your site is
seen as pure spam?
If you are not aware of the def inition of “pure spam”, based on Google’s def inition a website is viewed as
pure spam if it has done outstandingly bad spam actions. For those who have received the letter f rom
Google Webmaster, some of these letters have given the specif ic cause of the penalty and how to recover
f rom it.
When Google says that your website is spam, here are some of the possible causes and what you can do
to recover f rom the penalties:
What is Pure Spam and How to Recover your Lost Traffic
If Google determines that your site has been doing a lot of spamming techniques like content scraping
f rom other web sites, cloaking or hidden text. If you have been doing the black hat SEO practices
repeatedly and you f requently violate the guidelines of Google Webmaster.
The best thing to do once you have received the warning that some parts of your site are spam, then you
have to immediately f ix it. You should not stop unless you have f ixed the problem as specif ied in the letter
that you received f rom Google Webmaster. If you have been using black hat techniques, it will be much
better to admit it and move f orward to f ix the problem. However, there is a slim chance of recovery if
Google labeled your site as spam.
Copied Content
You checked your article with all the plagiarism tool and all of them were showing that this was your original
contents, then how Google can say this is copied contents?
Where is the problem ?
Have you ever checked your site af ter one week f or the same contents? Did you type the title of your
article on Google search bar and any thing similar appear?
if your answer is – Yes. You have been screwed
Spammer are Copying your contents f rom your site and pasting your contents word by word, sentence by
sentence. The worst situation is – when they copy the same on bloggers site. Since, blogger is Google’s
own venture, they crawl it f irst and then label your site as- Copied contents.
Quick Fix for Copied Content Problem :
Put Copytight Notice af ter every page of your website/alternatively you can put this in your website’s
f ooter area.

2. Install Wp-copy protect wordpress plugin to disable right mouse click button, so that you can
discourage the copy paste
Never Ever syndicate your f ull article, Send only summery of your latest article through RSS/Atom
Feed
Install Easy Watermark plugin to watermark your each and Every image
Still there are some idiots, who would love to copy your articles, then Give them a written warning and if
they are still adamant, File DMCA complaint against each of them
Hacked Website
Unknown to you, there could be several parts of your website that were hacked by a third party. Some
website hackers would place spam links and contents in your website without your knowledge.
To recover f rom the penalty, you have to check the security vulnerabilities of your website and make sure
that you have them f ixed. It could be a little tough on your part because the person who hacked the website
may have designed it to become completely invisible to the website owner.
However, if you are an expert, you can locate the malware and remove it f rom your website. There are
instances when you need to reinstall every piece of the website to ensure that the malware has been
removed.
Alternatively you can install Security Ninja a premium wordpress plugin that check your whole wordpress
installation f or 31 type of ssecurity holes and also recommend you how you as an average user can f ix.
Another very Good Security plugin is – Hide my wp, as we mentioned in our previous article,20 best
WordPress plugin f or every wordpress user, how this plugin can hide your wordpress inf ormation, so that
it would be more and more dif f icult f or hackers to crack your wordpress based blog/site
Keep your website secured by using security sof tware and if you are going to use any plug-ins make sure
that it came f rom trusted plug-in developers.
No Valuable Content
If your site contains nothing but low quality content, there is a bigger chance that Google would penalize it.
Thin contents and shallow pages would certainly not attract visitors to your website.
I was one of them who used to post article not larger than 500 words and was dreaming about big traf f ic
af ter every passing day, even I was little bit lucky earlier. Then suddenly Google came with his beasts –
Panda.

3. Some people f rom the Webspam Team of Google looked into your website and were not happy or
impressed by what they saw when the manual site action was done. To f ix the issue, do your best to come
up with valuable content f or the website. Add more relevance and substance to your post and try to create
posts that are between 700-800 words.
If it is impossible f or you to create lengthy posts, but make sure that shorter posts don’t contain the huge
chunk of the overall pages.
Quantity is nothing if the quality is poor.
Sometimes it is not possible to scan each and every post f or the length quality of your huge site. Post
admin word count is a plugin that can help you a lot to f ind out the size of such articles. Even using your
admin post dashboard – You can sort all your post.
It is also not wise to delete all these post at a time, so if it is not possible to expand all these post to
recommended level, you can join three to f our post in a new single post and redirect all that post to this
newly created post. This way you will be able to generate a new post as well as can f ight with thin content
problem.
Unnatural Links to and from a Site
Read between the line. I really mean it when Matt Cutt of Google webmasters Team admitted that Negative
SEO exist then it was very much clear. You are not responsible f or the ranking and traf f ic of your website.
Webmaster can harm your website traf f ic and rank using any black hat SEO Tricks or white hat link building
methods.
This is the main source of Google Panda Penalty. Once Google noticed patterns of unnatural outbound
links on your website, then you are more likely going to be punished f or it. These unnatural or artif icial
outbound links could be the result of link selling schemes or affiliate clocked links or advertisement Links
or people just copy pasting your articles in their own language.
If you are not sure how to f ind out f rom where you are getting traf f ic, one simple and most reliable source
is – AWSTATS. It contain all the source sending traf f ic to your site.

4. Don’t just remove the links on your site, it will be much better to perf orm link analysis to determine which of
these links are good and bad f or your website. As soon as you have identif ied the bad links, then it’s time
to take them out.
The Biggest problem is – How do you know which link is bad f or your site.?
Moz.com had already published a detailed article “How to check which link can hard your website”, the
quality of any link available on your website or incoming link to your website. Besides using this method you
can also deploy Broken Link Checker wordpress plugin to check the broken internal link
Sometimes it happens that you call the particular webmaster to remove a particular weblink and webmaster
does not respond to your request positively. In that case, you can use Google disallow tool to tell google
that do not consider all these link in ref erence to your site.
NOTE : Use Google disallow tool as your last option with utmost care, Your one bad action can harm your
website more than anyone else. Why i am telling you because due to a single minor mistake, i lost almost
50% of my traf f ic, and there is no way to recover this traf f ic
Make sure that you have exerted some ef f orts in improving your website af ter the manual site actions of
Google Webmaster, then you can request f or reconsideration using Google Disallow tool. Google might
change its perception that you are passing your websites link juices to other sites f or advertorial purposes.
User-Generated Spam
Google Webmaster manual site action may have noticed that your site’s contents are spam. It’s rather
dif f icult to pinpoint which user-generated content was considered spam because it could appear in various
portions of the websites like in user prof ile and guestbook or f orum pages.
Your website visitors may have lef t spam comments on the blog or wrote spam answers or questions in the
f orum. Google utilizes a dif f erent technique to determine if comments were spam comments or posts.
Usually the comments are gibberish and is not relevant to the post. So better start cleaning up those spam
comments and posts, it is much better to make comments moderated and f orum registration should be
verif ied as well.

5. Thoughtf ul comment wordpress plugin can help you a lot to delete all these types of comment f rom the
f ront-End of your site. Besides using this wonderf ul plugin always place a comment policy of your site and
do not allow anyone to destroy your site.
Another issue which i have seen over the last two and half year,Large website owners/f amous bloggers
start auto publishing comment of all those commentators having more than 3 approved comments. This is
a double edged sword, this way you are able to save your time, but inviting trouble. Am i right ?
Your Turn on how to recover from Google Penalties
I am sure if you read each and every word of this article very caref ully, your blog/site is bound to recover
f rom these manual Google penalties.
Updated on : Tuesday 16th of July 2013