Using Link Building to Overcome a Google Penalty and Restore Rankings

No website owner wants to experience a Google penalty and this is what we experienced with our latest client. Her yoga and massage website saw a drop in traffic, it was pushed out of rankings, and her leads and bookings had ll come to a sudden halt. It was identified as one penalty. She had used a large SEO agency to handle her campaign in the past, not knowing they used black hat techniques, unnatural link building techniques, and created duplicate content. Her website included broken links, all contributed to the penalty she received. As a result, she was relying on mouth to mouth referrals to attract new clients.

Our client approached us when she noticed that her site was losing organic traffic and she wasn't ranking on search engine pages for her targeted keywords. A quick investigation identified she had received a manual penalty for unnatural backlinks. These links had been acquired and building up over time, and they included paid links, and irrelevant blog comments. While hesitant to use another digital marketing agency after receiving a penalty, due to the last agency she used, we explained the importance of overcoming the Google penalty and restoring her rankings. Her brief was clear that we were to use white hat techniques, aligning with SEO best practices, to improve her ranking and overcome the penalty as quickly as possible.

We knew this was not going to be an easy task, as recovery cannot happen overnight. Our talented team conducted a thorough backlink audit, identifying the low quality and spammy links that were responsible for the penalty in the first place. They then reached out to web masters asking for the link to be removed, or created a disavow file, submitting it to Google, for the links we couldn't remove. Next was to improve the clients’ credibility and trust. This involves optimising all content and removing low quality content, along with duplicate content. We created high quality and informative content that provided visitors with value. We also optimised all content with compelling meta descriptions, alt text, compelling headings, and on-page SEO. Our team went to work, improving the site internal linking structure, while ensuring the site was mobile-friendly, ensuring search engine crawlers could crawl and index the relevant pages effectively. We then focused on a strategic back linking campaign that focuses on guest blogging on reputable industry sites, earning editorial backlinks, and building influencer relationships.

Even though our client and team knew this was going to be a long-term challenge to improve the clients ranking, we were delighted that Google lifted the manual penalty within thirty days of submitting our reconsideration request. This showed our efforts were paying off. As a result, organic traffic started to increase, rising to just shy of 45% within a few months, while their rankings started to rise, especially for those highly-targeted keywords. While this recovery did take time, by following SEO best practices, the website not only recovered from the manual penalty, but organic traffic was increased, along with conversions. This case study proves that by using effective link building techniques, the Genie Crawl team were not only able to overcome a Google penalty, they also restored the clients rankings.