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Google Penalty Recovery

First find out what actually happened

Open Search Console and look at the Manual Actions report. If there is a notice sitting there, a person reviewed your site and wrote down the reason.

An empty report points you somewhere else. It could be an algorithm update, a technical break, or a page that quietly stopped being served to anyone.

Check the boring causes before the dramatic ones. A robots file blocking the site, a bad redirect, or an expired certificate all look like a penalty from the outside.

Do this before you change a single word. Fixing the wrong thing costs weeks you cannot get back.

Fix the cause, not the symptom

Editing a title tag will not undo a spam problem. Find the pattern that Google's guidance names, then remove it from every page it appears on.

• Thin or duplicated pages — the same page repeated with one word swapped
• Scaled content — many pages made for search engines rather than for readers
• Paid or traded links meant to pass authority to your site
• Cloaking or sneaky redirects that show visitors and crawlers different things
• Hacked pages and injected spam that you may not have put there yourself

Then file the reconsideration request

Reconsideration only applies to a manual action. If your notice is algorithmic, there is nothing to file and no queue to join.

Write the request the way you would write a report to a colleague. What was wrong, what you did about it, and what stops it happening again.

Do not argue and do not pad it out. A short, honest note with real work behind it is the strongest version you can send.

Then be patient. People read these, and people take time.

One request done properly beats four sent in a fortnight. Fix everything first, then write once.

How Microsite Generator handles this

We check pages before they publish rather than afterward. Every page is checked against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards, and nothing goes live until it clears the compliance gate.

The gate is strict about the pattern that causes most of this trouble. The platform's page generator refuses pages that are a template with the town swapped, and edits that make pages too alike are refused too.

That is a check on our side, not a promise about what Google will decide — nobody outside Google can make that promise. What you get is pages individually built for your business, with the thin-copy pattern caught before publishing rather than after.

Updated September 2026