Has Your Self Storage Website Received a Manual Penalty?

In many bad situations, you often hear “make lemonade out of lemons.” Luckily, the same goes for life on the Internet. One wrong turn that can have a lasting effect online, primarily to your storage website’s organic reach, has to do with receiving a manual penalty from Google due to unnatural links that lead back to your website.

When this happens, you may be asking, “Why is this happening to me?” or “How quickly can I fix this?” While it’s possible that someone who has worked on your storage website directly could have done something malicious, it most often occurs unbeknownst to you. Fortunately, both cases have a way of being rectified through the help Google’s recommended actions. Here’s what you need to do:

Start by finding all of the harmful links. Google’s Webmaster tools have a feature that allows you or the company controlling your website to download a full list of links that point back to your site. You will then need to go through each link to find which ones are doing the damage. While this can be a tedious process, it’s the best way to get your organic reach back to normal.

Once all of the bad links have been found, remove or request the removal of all of themThis means taking them off of your own site or contacting websites that may have links back to you and requesting removal from their pages. This is a task that you need to keep good record of because Google needs to see exactly what you’ve done to take your penalty removal request into consideration. (If you can’t remove a link or someone else’s website won’t, use Google’s helpful disavow tool to take action.)

When you feel confident that you’ve completed all of the necessary steps and have taken down harmful links, submit your request for penalty removal. Even if the links weren’t placed by your facility, or if you didn’t know they were there in the first place, it doesn’t matter. Make it known that you and your team will follow all of Google’s guidelines because a second penalty won’t be as easy to remove.

If your request for the penalty removal is granted, then the job of getting people back to your storage facility website starts over. From that point on, by following positive SEO guidelines, abiding by Google’s linking practices, and creating high-quality content on your website, you should begin to see an uptick in traffic and organic reach.