The majority of traffic and rankings drops websites experience are due to algorithm changes but these changes, in many cases, are not due to penalties.
Google penalties are real events which can negatively impact your website’s traffic and/or ability to rank well in search for certain key phrases.
Penalties range from manual actions to algorithmic penalties to losses in traffic from quality updates.
Unfortunately, there are many people in the world of SEO who sell link removal services knowing that their clients do not need them, or offer these services out of their own ignorance.
Who is familiar with penalties?
I’ve been online since 1988 and I can count on one hand the people in the SEO world who I would trust to evaluate a website’s traffic and analyze traffic losses.
There are many updates which go unnamed such as the February 8, March 9 or May 23, 2017 updates. Not all of the updates run are necessarily a Panda, Penguin Pidgeon or Fred update. These are very easy for me to spot once I’ve looked at someone’s analytics. I have access to hundreds of websites and can look at a variety of niches and verticals and see trends.
Most people in the SEO world do not have these resources at their disposal and when they see a sudden drop in traffic they immediately begin pulling links. This is usually a huge mistake.
Solutions for SMBs to Fortune 500s
In the event someone came to me with a penalized page I couldn’t immediately diagnose I’d simply refer them to one of the other few great SEO gurus who understand analytics. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Some of us focus on interstitial and pagination issues while others know more about International SEO or multilingual sites.
If you are a small business owner who gets 20 hits a day or a major international corporation who receives millions of hits every day, I am able to assist.
NDAs are required for this particular service as I have no desire to interact with your other SEO agency.
