georgenjogu.com http://www.georgenjogu.com/google-penalty-recovery/

George N.

How I’m Dealing with a Google Penalty [Case Study]

I think you’ll agree with me when I say:

A Google penalty is one of the worst nightmares ever for any Webmaster.

Isn’t it?

Very recently, I came face to face with this nightmare. The sad part is that this penalty was on one of my bestincome earners.

In the case of my site, it was manual action due to low qualitycontent on the site.

I am ashamed to say this but that is the plain truth.

In this post, I’m going to share with you (step by step) how I’mdealing with the manual action on my site.

Read on to understand how I unwisely bought and added the lowquality content to the site.

A little background

The affected site is not a niche site by any measure. The site is on a generic domain where I review five broadcategories of products (home and garden, outdoor, baby gear and electronics).

The site was doing quite well in the SERPS and in terms of affiliate income. I monetized the site through Amazonassociates.

Since I still have a day job, I sourced most of the content for the site from oDesk (now Upwork). All was goingwell with this type of content. The rankings were good and the affiliate income from Amazon was fairly good aswell.

This was until I foolishly decided to buy a niche pack from one of the IM/black hat forums. Can’t remember if itwas on blackhatworld.com, warriorforum.com or bestblackhatforum.com.

The pack comprised of low competition keywords (the keywords were a gem) and product reviews written bynative English speakers (had to stress that since I am not a Native English speaker myself).

I bought the packs and posted the articles to the site. I sat back, grabbed my favorite beer and hoped to smile allthe way to the bank.

I was ignorant enough to believe that I was the only one who would post the articles online.

That aside. The articles were indexed. Some performed well on the SERPS; most of them remained on pagestwo and three of Google. And others didn’t see the light of day ;).

Okay, the site wasn’t slapped with the manual action because the articles were of low quality. It was because thearticles were posted by other lazy bloggers like myself on their sites.

Fast forward…

1/5

09 May 2016: Google says, “We know what you did sometimes back”

I usually take one hour every morning to make sure all my sites are doing well. This morning was no different.

I opened Semrush and all my sites looked fine in terms of rankings.

I opened statcounter, and something looked odd. One of my sites had an unusually low amount of traffic thatmorning. Out of curiosity, I decided to view the recent keyword activity for the site on statcounter.

Again, something wasn’t right here. Zero traffic from Google. The only hits the site was receiving were fromBing, duckduckgo, AOL and Yahoo.

I decided to dig further. So, I opened Search Console. Everything seemed okay. Of course, I didn’t expect muchfrom them since their data is always days late.

My guts were telling me that something wasn’t right. I searched my top performing keywords (keywords thatwere on the first page) on Google and my heart sank. Nothing on the first page, second, third and so on

Did this for another keyword and the results were the same. Now it was clear that something was completely off.

But what is this that was off?

Even the Google penalty checker tools won’t tell me what was off.

I finally got the courage to use the ‘site’ search operator – site:mydomain.com. My heart sunk further when I sawthe following.

My website had been wiped out of Google.

Now another question arose: Why?

Since I use PBN links here and there to give the posts the push they need, my first guess was “bad link profile”

So, out of panic I quickly removed all the PBN links pointing to that site and to the other sites I own.

10 May 2016: Google Communicates – It is made official2/5

An email from Google pops up and it is made official – my site had received a manual action.

Apparently, some content on the site lowers the quality of search results for users.

I immediately logged into Search Console and saw the following.

(By this time, I had accepted the fact that I had been penalized.)

Felt better to know it had nothing to do with backlinks. I wasn’t ready to lose my private blog network.

It was a moment filled with confusion. I didn’t know if I should file a reconsideration request through SearchConsole or move the good content to another domain.

3/5

11 May 2016: I owned up my mistakes and begged Google to re-list my site

After a lot of thinking and soul searching, I decided to file a reconsideration request.

This means I own up the mistakes, beg Google to re-index the site and promise to be careful next time.

I decided to go for this option for two main reasons:

1. The domain has a decent DA and I’d do anything to save it.

2. I wanted to write this case study (I’m crazy, right?)

I went through the site removing all the content I had bought with the niche pack mention earlier. The site nowhas only content I had either written myself or sourced through Upwork.

Once I was confident with the content on the site, I logged into Search Console clicked on the request reviewbutton.

In here was my chance to talk Google into re-indexing the site. I did the best I could and the following is what Isent them.

And the automated message I got from them was not so exciting.

4/5

First, there were no guarantees that the site would be re-indexed.

Second, it would take them several weeks to review the site and come up with the decision.

Several weeks? Really? I’m not that patient.

What’s next?

Even though I want to see what happens after the manual action has been lifted, time is still a factor. I’ll giveGoogle sometime to see what they’ve decided to do.

By the end of May I will have decided what direction to take.

What am I doing?

Regardless of the decision decides to make, I’ll grow this site – either on this domain or on a new one. I’mcurrently doing keyword research (using Semrush and Long Tail Pro) and preparing more content.

I am also searching for an expired domain with decent metrics (Domain Authority, Page Authority, Trust Flow andCitation Flow).

I’ll register the domain and hosting. Post content to the new site as I wait for Google’s decision.

If Google decides to not lift the manual action on the site, I’ll migrate all the good content to the new site, throw ina few PBN links here and there and move on swiftly.

If Google lifts the manual action, I’ll not move the content. I’ll just add more content to this site.

I’ll just have added another site to my portfolio.

5/5