Google search penalty recovery.
Have you ever been approached, likely in an email, offering to write articles for your business, articles with backlinks that would help your search rankings?
“Don’t listen to people selling you article services for SEO.”
The problem with such “spun content” is that Google is pretty good at detecting it and they consider the backlinks from it as unnatural. Initially this will lead to an increase in visibility from better search rankings. Ultimately it might however, leave to a harsh penalty – a total ban from Google for 3 months –that you will never really recover from unless you take the right corrective steps.
This is what it looks like when you get banned from Google for 3 months … severe drop in visibility and revenue.
In a real life example above you can see the anatomy of such a penalty.
The company was paying for “articles“ (usually low quality) with links to their website. Initially this lead to a strong boost in search rankings
Google issues a 3 month penalty for “unnatural links”. After the 3 months most of the site was restored back to its original search rankings, however a couple of main keywords were essentially still affected by individual penalties by Google.
The ultimate result was a 50% drop in search visibility … but that is not even the end of it.
The company went bust.
While this company hired various SEO experts/SEO companies and tools to help them resolve the issue, management ultimately wanted a lazy quick fix, the same motivation that got them in trouble in the first place. When it came to the ultimate effort that would have fixed the problem they didn’t want to take that step, but rather still try and find a way to “get around it” or “trick Google”.
“If you keep telling your SEO what to do, find a different SEO.”
It did not help that the managing director considered himself an SEO expert and often refused to accept good advice. He also always preferred the try the cheapest offer at hand first, which did not help, in fact it likely contributed to the problem.
In 2019 the company went into administration after going through 8 years of dropping revenues (from £5.5 million in 2011). The penalty happened in 2012, visibility had dropped to less than 20% of it's peak before the penalty. As a large online store with great margins this company was a virtually unsinkable business had sunk itself.
You might not like it, but if you rely on Google for revenue, you have to play nice by their rules. And if you made a mistake it can be fixed, but the measures needed might be harsh. Ask a surgeon how to stop a rapidly expanding staph infection. Sometimes amputating a limb is required to save the whole body.
If you have been affected by such a Google penalty, I can help.
