E-commerce: From Penalty to Sector Benchmark – iSocialweb Success Story

When you get a project penalized in Google

In this success case we bring you an e-commerce that came to us 4 years ago. First of all we have to take into account that SEO back the was not the same as now and there are actions and solutions that made sense at the time and that today we work differently or it doesn’t have any sense.

Let’s face it, this project had gone through several “SEO companies” that didn’t perform correctly, resulting in a free fall since mid 2012:

Among the different problems we encountered when we took it there was:

• Bad implementation of URL blocking by robots
• Little purified implementation of headings
• Lack of strategy for the internal links
• Lack of unique quality content in categories
• Products with repeated contents
• Extremely aggressive Linkbuilding strategy (there were even packs of purchased links)
• …

In conclusion, that the project was in really bad shape and at this point the client was clear:

“We are at a point that either we find a solution or we close the project because month by month it costs us money and we are desperate.”

To all of us who work in the world of online marketing and especially in SEO, at some point we have received customers like that. It’s bad to see how time goes against you and you have more to lose than to win since the client is nervous, distrustful of the SEO, has urgency and so on. And we all know that fast and SEO are not good friends.

But in the end the work is much more than making money and having the satisfaction of being able to help someone and face a challenge like this, we felt like it especially after empathizing with the client’s situation.

How to face a project penalized by Google?

First of all when you get a client who claims to be penalized you have to analyze the situation and get real data that are not based on guesswork. On several occasions we have come across clients who say that they are penalized because they have read it on a blog, are badly advised or simply do not rank as they would like. The reality is that not only are their guesses but when you start reviewing you find from migrations badly done domain, changes of environment or a developer without SEO knowledge, SEO strategies without any sense, and so on.

For the project in question we started by removing the main deficiencies of the project and we did it as we do today: Performing a complete audit of the project. Nowadays and thanks to the evolution of tools such as Ahrefs, Safecont, Screaming Frog, Fandango SEO, etc. to do complete analysis of projects is much faster than before.

According to our experience, the great majority of penalization cases are determined by two factors: by Contents or by Links. The analysis project had a bit of both sides, but the bulk of the problem came from a bad linkbuilding strategy.

How did we deal with the penalty for links?

It was more than clear that he had a linkage problem since he observed una abrupt drop in traffic (seen in the graph above, but in Analytics it was much clearer) coupled with a fairly high linkage profile SPAM. All this denotes a serious problem in the strategy of external linking.

What actions did we take to reverse the penalty?

1. 1. We design a naturalization strategy for links and anchors
   2. Through all possible tools we get a list of each and every one of the links pointing to the web.
   3. We organized and classified the links according to their dangerousness, naturalness, SEO value they brought to the project and other factors
   4. We separate the most dangerous links from the rest
   5. We contacted the owners of the sites where the links were to remove them. At this point we even had to pay money to directories to stop them from sending us their beautiful toxic links.
   6. In the meantime we supported the strategy with more quality and contextualized links that were reducing the percentage of junk links and improving the profile of links.

How do we face a content penalty?

In this case the content strategy was very poor, it was not a reason for penalization, but it still needed to be improved. It is important to understand that when you have a content penalty, the first thing you have to do is to identify what is generating this problem, what pattern or patterns it has and with it how to solve it . To do this we rely on some tools that greatly facilitate the work and our own models.

In the case of the project in question, it had an absolute absence of quality content, so we started generating content in the main sections, we made them change the protocol for publishing articles and thus reduce the thin content on the web.

The lack of confidence and the rush

After working with the project for a year and going from a freefall to a considerable reversal of the project trend, the client decided to stop working with us. Recovering the project and taking them to the point where they had been best was not enough for them and they decided to change company.

Here the disappointment will not deny you that it was enormous. When we take charge of a project we make it our own and we get involved as if the project was ours, so when you’ve been giving all for a year and recovering something that was dead and you position it until you reach its best moment and they take it away from you…. fuck and a lot..

But life is like that and we had the personal satisfaction of a job well done and we were very clear that it was not our responsibility. With all this the project returned to its previous trend.

And why did it happen again?

Well, because it was not an easy project and there were actions that were half-hearted. It’s not that in iSocialWeb we do magic, it’s that when you’ve been working with a project for a year, with a strong involvement and you’re interested in the project, you end up knowing a lot about how to work with it. You know its strengths and weaknesses, both the project and the team behind it and you end up knowing what is better and worse for that project, since SEO is not an exact science and depends a lot on the niche. In this case also, they left with our strategy half implemented and from what we understand, the new agency that took it started from scratch.

What if we come back?

Well, the result was that less than a year was spent with the other agency they came back saying that they were wrong and that they trusted us . In iSocialWeb we seek to work with people who believe and are willing to fight with us to grow their projects and that’s why we decided to pick up where we left off (honestly, something worse). Finally, we modified some of the things that we didn’t share from the work of the previous agency and we continue working to grow.

What did we get after working on this project?

Well, the title of the article is quite spoiler so we’ll put it in image:

It is a project that was not easy to recover since they had few resources at the beginning, dragged a penalty and were very rushed in the results. However, after all these actions we have achieved that the project ranked in top 3 for 80% of its main transactional keywords.