How to get rid of the Google Penalty – There and Back Again

If you are an owner of an online business or have any association in this field, you must have heard that Google Penalizes websites that are caught doing Black Hat SEO practices or in other words spamming.

I’m going to tell you an interesting story about how our website which got penalized and how we managed to revive it back.

Hitting the Ice Berg!

Remember the Movie Titanic? How it was all cozy and beautiful in the beginning until it hits that Ice Berg and the whole ships sinks to the bottom of the ocean in the end. Well that’s not what happened to us!

We did get hit by an ice berg in the beginning of January 2013. When Google dropped the bomb on us telling us that we have been penalized! Trust me when I say this, getting that email was just as painful as how Titanic must have felt when it hit that Ice Berg!

But the question arises; did we break apart and sunk to the bottom of the ocean? No sir! not us!

Fortunately we had the best team a project could ask for, we had the undying backing and faith of our directors, the never say never attitude of our project lead, the thinking out of the box Analytical ability of our SEO lead and the endless support from our content, affiliate and referral marketing team.

All of these people played an integral role of bringing back our website from the depths of the ocean itself!

The Road To Salvation

After we were handed the bomb the Jedi’s set out to save the galaxy from the Dark Side of the Force (Star Wars Reference in case you are wondering).

The think tanks of our project came up with an immediate action plan and that was to scrutinize the practices of our website so that the reason of the downfall can be identified.

After we sent Google the Re-Consideration request we took out our Light Sabers and looked for and eliminated the Malpractices by implementing the pointers which will be discussed below.

After we started working on providing quality we got an email from Google highlighting the links which were marked as Spam.

Google advised us to remove all of these back links if we want the penalty to be removed.

We shot several emails to the website owner’s, asking them to remove these links and 75% of the came back with a positive response.

But we weren’t done here! We redesigned the whole website and brought it up to higher standards for our users. The rest of the details are mentioned below.

Changes in Content Strategy

1. Analyzed Duplicate Content: Sounds easy eh? But it isn’t, you will be amazed that the amount of content redos we had to do just to remove the plagiarism which existed! We have more than 25,000 pages and we had to redo each and every one just to be sure. Impressed yet?!?
2. Keyword-Stuffed Content: Remember the dark ages? When Black Hat SEO was running rampant? Back in the days SEOs used to stuff Keywords in their content to get ranked which also worked but then Google came wearing is shining ‘Anti-Spam’ armor and wiped clean these practices once and for all. We had this problem in some of our pages but we had to go through each and every page just to be sure that we are not spamming and the users are getting exactly what they want.

Links Removal

1. Removal of links from low PR websites and irrelevant forums: This was the also one of the phases which sucked the life out of us! We had some associates which spammed our links across the internet and once we found out about this we had cut off all times from them. But unfortunately the damage had already been done and Google had already smacked our faces with a penalty. What followed was that we had to evaluate 19,767 links and we emailed the owners of these websites to remove our links (even though we were getting traffic) and edited some by ourselves. This greatly helped in our cause but took us 6 months to complete this task! But it was worth every minute spent!

User Experince

1. Revamp our whole website to give best user experience: This process took us a total of 7 months. Revamping the whole website may sound easy but in reality it’s a mammoth of a task! It took us a total of 2 months to come up with a design on which everyone would agree and was the best in terms of user experience. When you are designing website you should make sure that SEO and Development guys have their share of contribution. Otherwise you will be visiting the drawing board quite often and trust me when I say this…. It’s frustrating. After we were done with the design we went on to HTMLization of the website and then finally the development and implementation of the new design. *Phew* that was some hard work!

Technical Stuff!

1. Excessive Website Downtime
2. Slow Page Load Time

Ever since we got penalized we worked hard on providing the best user experience for our visitors. We stayed true to our words and did exactly what we intended.

After we got rid of these obstacles we sent Google another Re-Consideration request this time we used a different approach which was more visually appealing.

We made an infographic which highlighted the hard work we had done and how we were falling in the domain of Google guidelines.

I wish I could share the Infographics but company policy states that I can’t…Boo Hooooo

After almost a year of sleepless nights and hard work we finally got the email from Google on January 2014 that the penalty was removed.

We gave in our Heart and soul to this project and it paid off! We triumphed against all odds and stood victorious were others had failed.

Concluding Remarks

Google has come a long way from starting off from a garage to becoming a multinational corporation.

Google will never compromise on quality and when it sees that a business is involved in spamming it will penalize it and take it off from the rankings.

There are many websites which get penalized every now and then and most of them never get to see the light of the day and are forced to move on to a new domain.

You must be wondering what separates us from them, well for starters we have been blessed with the best team a project could ask for and we never ever give up.

I’m going to sum this Blog Post with a quote by the legendary Michael Jordan.

Talent wins games, Teamwork wins championships

Honorable Mentions

The A-Team