One of the website my team worked on got a Google Penalty. The possible reason for the penalty might have been external site-wide links. The first thing I did was to look for the rankings of the website in other major search engines Yahoo and Bing. The keywords were still on top on both the other search engines. The next thing was to avoid the panic situation which webmasters and SEO experts face when they see one of the websites their team work upon gets a penalty for some wrong action/wrong SEO practices. The penalty for our website might have been due to some sort of spam link building tactics done on the website. I tried to handle the situation as calm as possible. Below are the steps I took to remove the effect of the penalty.

Day 1: First thing I did on the page is to change all the file names to show new page URL thus removing the spam link effect of all previous off-page submissions done. I blocked all the old pages using robots.txt. I changed all the content in newly created pages.

Day 2: Created new Title and Meta Tags for the newly created page and uploaded the same. I also removed the old RSS feed. I then re-submitted the Sitemap.

Day 3: Send a reconsideration request to Google through webmaster tools account.

Day 5: The website has got all the SERP back and some keywords got higher SERP.

The first and the formost thing is to check whether your website is having a penalty or not. There are many ways to check the same. You can read about 10 Ways to Diagnose a Google Penalty .

Share your thoughts and experiences of avoiding Google penalty. You can a share the things you have done to avoid a Google penalty. You can get in touch with me personally through my Twitter Handle @cijoaj2003